Huberman LabThe Biology of Social Interactions & Emotions | Dr. Kay Tye
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,082 words- 0:00 – 2:39
Dr. Kay Tye
- AHAndrew Huberman
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Kay Tye. Dr. Kay Tye is a professor of neuroscience at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. She did her training at MIT and at Stanford and is currently an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which is a highly curated group of individuals who are incentivized to do high-risk, high-reward work and pioneer new areas of biological study. Throughout her career, Dr. Kay Tye has made fundamental breakthroughs into our understanding of the brain, including demonstrating that a brain area called the amygdala, which most people associate with fear and threat detection, is actually involved in reinforcement of behaviors and experiences that are positive and involve reward. Her current work focuses on various aspects of social interaction, including what happens when we feel lonely or isolated. Indeed, today, Kay Tye will tell us about her discovery of so-called loneliness neurons, neurons that give us that sense that we are not being fulfilled from our social interactions. She also describes a phenomenon she discovered called social homeostasis, which is our sense that we are experiencing enough, not enough, or just enough social interaction, irrespective of whether or not we are an introvert or an extrovert. We also talk about social hierarchies and social rank, how people and animals tier out into so-called alphas and betas, subordinates and dominants, et cetera, in all sorts sorts of social interactions. I think everyone will find that discussion especially interesting. And we talk about the role of social media and online interactions and why, despite extensive interaction with many, many individuals, those social media and online interactions can often leave us feeling deprived in specific ways. We talk about the neurochemical, the neural circuit, and some of the hormonal aspects of social interactions. It's a discussion that, by the end, will have you thinking far more deeply about what is a social interaction and why certain social interactions leave us feeling so good, others feeling sort of meh, and why other social interactions or lack of social interactions can often leave us feeling quite depleted, even depressed. It's a conversation central to mental illness and the understanding of things like depression and anxiety, PTSD, and isolation, and it's a conversation central to mental health and in order to build healthy social interactions.
- 2:39 – 6:40
Sponsors: Eight Sleep, Levels & LMNT
- AHAndrew Huberman
Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost-to-consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity. Now, I've spoken many times before on this and other podcasts about the fact that sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health, and performance, and one of the key aspects to getting a great night's sleep is to control the temperature of your sleeping environment. And that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature actually has to drop by about one to three degrees, and in order to wake up in the morning feeling refreshed, your body temperature actually has to increase by about one to three degrees. Eight Sleep makes it extremely easy to control the temperature of your sleeping environment at the beginning, middle, and throughout the night and when you wake up in the morning. I've been sleeping on an Eight Sleep mattress cover for nearly three years now, and it has dramatically improved my sleep. If you'd like to try Eight Sleep, you can go to eightsleep.com/huberman to save $150 off their Pod 3 cover. Eight Sleep currently ships to the USA, Canada, UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia. Again, that's eightsleep.com/huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by Levels. Levels is a program that lets you see how different foods and different activities and your sleep patterns impact your health by giving you real-time feedback on your diet using a continuous glucose monitor. Now, blood glucose, sometimes referred to as blood sugar, has an immediate and long-term impact on your energy levels and your overall health. One of the best ways to maintain focus and energy throughout your day as well as to keep your so-called metabolic health in best order is to make sure that your blood glucose never spikes too much nor does it get too low. With Levels, you can monitor how different foods and food combinations impact your blood glucose levels on a moment-to-moment basis. I've been using Levels for some time now, and it's really helped me understand which foods and food combinations, exercise schedules, and sleep schedules are optimal for my blood glucose levels and how that translates to energy levels and other metrics of health. If you're interested in learning more about Levels and trying a continuous glucose monitor, you can go to levels.link/huberman. Levels has just launched a new CGM sensor that is smaller and has even better tracking than before. Right now, they're also offering two free months of membership. Again, that's levels.link, L-I-N-K, /huberman to try the new sensor and two free months of membership. Today's episode is also brought to us by LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means zero sugar and the appropriate ratios of the electrolytes sodium, magnesium, and potassium. And that correct ratio of electrolytes is extremely important because every cell in your body, but especially your nerve cells, your neurons, relies on electrolytes in order to function properly. So when you're well hydrated and your hydration also includes the appropriate ratios of electrolytes, your mental functioning and your physical functioning is improved. I drink one packet of LMNT dissolved in about 16 to 32 ounces of water when I wake up in the morning, as well as while I exercise. And if I've sweat a lot during that exercise, I often will drink a third LMNT packet dissolved in about 32 ounces of water after I exercise. LMNT comes in a variety of different flavors. Personally, I like all the fruit flavors, so raspberry and watermelon are my favorite. I also like the citrus-flavored one. Frankly, I can't really pick just one of the fruit flavors, I like them all so much. And it also comes in chocolate and chocolate mint flavors, which I find are best in the winter months because, of course, you don't just need hydration on hot days and in the summer and spring months, but also in the winter when the temperatures are cold and the environment tends to be dry. If you'd like to try LMNT, you can go to DrinkLMNT, spelled L-M-N-T, .com/huberman to try a free sample pack. Again, that's DrinkLMNT.com/huberman.And now for my conversation with Dr. Kay
- 6:40 – 12:43
Amygdala; “Valence”
- AHAndrew Huberman
Tye. Dr. Kay Tye, welcome.
- KTKay Tye
Andy Huberman. What a treat.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Folks are gonna hear you call me Andy and wonder if my name is Andy. I always know who I'm speaking to-
- KTKay Tye
(laughs)
- AHAndrew Huberman
... according to whether or not they call me Andrew-
- KTKay Tye
Ah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
... which is my family and people that I know after a certain period of my life, Drew, which are people that know me through my very brief and non-illustrious career in boxing, and Andy, which are people that met me as I was coming up through science. Uh, let's just put it this way. There was another Andrew. We did a coin flip, and I lost. So Andy is fine.
- KTKay Tye
(laughs)
- AHAndrew Huberman
Andrew's fine. Whatever makes you comfortable. What's important-
- KTKay Tye
(laughs)
- AHAndrew Huberman
... today is not how anyone refers to me, but rather the discussion about your work, which is spectacular. I've known you a long time, and I've been following your career, and it's just been amazing and wonderful to see the contributions you've made to science and also to the culture of science. So we're gonna talk about both of those things. To kick things off, let's talk about a brain structure that most people, I think, have heard of, but that is badly misunderstood, and that's the amygdala.
- KTKay Tye
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Most people hear "amygdala" and they think, "Oh, fear." That's what the amygdala is all about. But you know, and I'm hoping you'll educate us on the fact that, that the amygdala is actually far more complex than that-
- KTKay Tye
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
... and far more interesting than that. So when you hear the word "amygdala," where does your mind go?
- KTKay Tye
I agree that a lot of the, the bandwidth on the amygdala has been occupied by fear studies, but we've known actually for a really long time that the amygdala's important for all sorts of emotional processing, since Kluver and Bucy performed lesions on, on monkeys and found that monkeys would then have flat affective responses to all sorts of different stimuli. Poop, food, inanimate object, whatever it was, just n- nothing. And-
- AHAndrew Huberman
No emotion.
- KTKay Tye
No emotional response, no motivational significance, however you wanna phrase it, to things that usually would make you either, you know, disgusted or excited or neutral. And so, um, I think that, that knowledge about the amygdala was there from the beginning. It's not something I came up with. Um, but then, it's interesting. It's almost a... It's a meta statement or a meta observation about how r- scientific research progresses. Sometimes you make a lot of progress in one particular vein because it's easy to press forward there, but it's important to also think about all the other parts and filling in the space in between to make sure you haven't missed anything. So, the narrative about the amygdala became about fear, and I think also just when we think about survival, when you are an animal in the natural world, especially if you're a prey animal, which is the majority, you know, that's a lot of animals, um, then you need to prioritize escaping a predator. It's immediate threat on your survival, versus reward. Se- mating, drinking water, getting food, these things can be done later. Escaping this predator is paramount. And so there should be some natural asymmetry in how we process emotion at baseline.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- KTKay Tye
And so, that's something that we've looked into a lot as well. But, um, I think the, the big picture discovery that m- uh, my team has contributed to our understanding of the amygdala is that it represents a fork in the road, uh, for processing emotional valence, and thinking about all these old psychological theories about, how do you emotionally evaluate the world around you? What's, what's the, what's the chain of events? Is there a chain of events? What's happening in a certain order, um, versus what's happening in parallel? For example, one model is, you know, it... There's all this information that comes in, and then we have to filter out what's important. Um, what's gonna be something that I need to pay attention to versus what do I need to ignore? If I'm driving, I need to pay attention to the road, this, this light, this pedestrian just started walking, versus, you know, what it feels like for my sock to be touching my foot. Not super relevant right now. Or the, my butt against the seat. N- not, nothing I need to pay attention to. I need to focus on, you know, the dynamic information. Then you have to select... You know, the second step would be selecting whether it's good or bad, and what you wanna do with it. And so that process, I think the selection of whether you're, um, assigning it a positive or negative valence happens in the amygdala.
- AHAndrew Huberman
So glad you brought up this word "valence." I think it's a word that some scientists, but most of the general public, are probably not familiar with. So let's, um, talk about valence.
- KTKay Tye
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Um, and then I wanna go back to the amygdala and, um, kind of explore some of its diversity of function a little bit more. So when I hear the word "valence," I think goodness versus badness-
- KTKay Tye
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
... uh, of something. Is that-
- KTKay Tye
Basically. Basically. It's been used in a lot of different fields. I think of it, you know, negative and positive numbers or, or, um, but I... It's an analogy that we take to just mean, yeah, po- po- net positive, net, net negative, and it's, it's a s- intentional departure from the word "value." Um, value becomes very scaler. Everything's on a... You know, it can be in the same direction with different magnitudes, is often how we think about value. It, it could be representing both valences. But, um, often, it's a small reward and a big reward or a small punishment and a big punishment is how experimentally we parse, um, value. And so valence is just asking about, um, how your brain responds to things that are good or bad. What are neurons that might respond similarly to things that are good and bad? Y- you know, those might be importance neurons rather than, um, positive or negative valence neurons. So yeah. I, I think it's a... It's just a term that, that signifies that next step.
- 12:43 – 20:06
Novelty; Reward & Punishment Response
- KTKay Tye
- AHAndrew Huberman
So when we walk into, say, a novel environment, um-Do you think that our amygdalas are active and really trying to figure out whether or not an environment, a set of people, or a person is safe, and really just check that box first in order-
- KTKay Tye
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
... to be able to do other things? Is, you know, is this business of, um, determining valence and the role of the amygdala in that kind of the first gate that we have to walk through any time we're in a new environment? For instance, you showed up here today-
- KTKay Tye
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
... and you mentioned, "You know, I think I locked my car."
- KTKay Tye
(laughs) .
- AHAndrew Huberman
And, um, and I said, "You'll be fine in this neighborhood either way." And then you walked in and presumably you were taking in the new environment, meeting some new people.
- KTKay Tye
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Um, we had a little discussion about caffeine.
- KTKay Tye
(laughs) .
- AHAndrew Huberman
A little discussion about alcohol, and presumably because w- you and I know one another, you felt safe. I would hope so.
- KTKay Tye
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
But presumably, the amygdala is always performing this role even if we have some prior knowledge about something. Just figuring out am I-
- KTKay Tye
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
... safe here? Where are the exits? Where are the entrances?
- KTKay Tye
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Uh, who's here? What's their story? Um, do you think all of that is, is operating and do you think it's always conscious or is it largely unconscious to us?
- KTKay Tye
Okay, so there's a few different questions there. Um, first, I wanna address the, the question about novelty, and then I wanna come back to this, the other issue of conscious. But, um, the way the amygdala works is its job is, is to assign meaning to anything that could have motivational significance. And so if it's a brand new thing, we're paying attention. We're seeing if, if it, if it mattered. Did it matter? And so, I think anything that's novel, even if we don't know what it means, a loud sound you've never heard before, um, even if it signifies nothing of motivational significance, the first few times that you're presented with it, you'll get a, an amygdala response. So you see this in the lab, play the tone for the first time, and then there's a response that rapidly decays when the tone doesn't end up predicting anything that the, the animal can s- can detect.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Or human? Is this also true in humans?
- KTKay Tye
Yeah, this is true in humans.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- KTKay Tye
Um, if you're the type of person that puts your phone on do not disturb versus has it on vibrate, and, you know, sometimes it's always vibrating and it's just... It vibrates all the time, whereas, uh, I put my phone on do not disturb and so when someone else's phone rings, it's very startling to me, but they're, they don't even notice because th- their phone... That's just the sound their phone makes. It makes it all the time. So I think it has to do with how many times you're presented with it, and it's this startle response. So, the first few times that you are presented with a stimulus, uh, the amygdala will respond and then it decays very quickly, and then only if that stimulus predicts something important or r- something rewarding or, or punishing, then, uh, will, will it begin to respond again. So it's, it's like you're giving everything novel a chance to, to tell you in one trial, in single trial learning, um, if something's gonna happen. And so, um, I think a fire alarm is a great example. You know, fire alarm goes off, you're, you're instantly, y- you know, you're looking around, is there anything happening? Even, even just people rushing out. You know, there's, there's this, this salient thing that you're gonna respond to and, you know, if you have a lot of fire drills then you might respond differently after a while. So I think that's the habituation component.
- AHAndrew Huberman
You mentioned that the amygdala will respond to a novel stimulus, um, and if it predicts something interesting, then other things happen. We'll talk about those. Um, if not, the amygdala stops responding. And you said something really important which is that the amygdala will respond to something that is predicting reward or punishment, and I think most people don't realize that. In fact, I think a lot of early career neurobiologists don't realize that, that the amygdala is not just involved in fear and punishment. Um, so when we talk about the amygdala, presumably we're talking about the amygdala complex, a bunch of other things. So is it true that there are neurons in the amygdala complex that predict reward and others that predict fear and punishment?
- KTKay Tye
Yeah. So, um, as a graduate student, I worked on a part of the amygdala called the basolateral amygdala. It's still a complex within the broader amygdala. Um, this brain region is cortical-like in that it's mostly glutamatergic neurons with some GABAergic neurons mixed in, but without the same structure that the cortex has. Um, and I studied the co- the amygdala in the context of reward. I found essentially that when you induce plasticity, you get an, a synaptic strengthening. When you, uh... When animals learn things, amygdala neurons fire in response to cues that predict rewards. And this was in coming into the context of a field that had shown that this happens with fear. And so, this became... I, I remember m- may- the very first time I gave, um, a sci- a presentation at a scientific conference. I was a junior graduate student. I was giving a 10-minute talk at the, you know, inaugural Amygdala Gordon Research Conference. Many famous professors were speaking and there were two talks about the amygdala and reward, and I was one of them. And the response to the talk was just, "How is this possible? How can, how could the amygdala... How can, how can you get the same readout for reward and fear?" And really, it came to be there's two, two possibilities. I mean, maybe there's more possibilities, but the main two possibilities are, number one, that the amygdala wasn't specific for fear at all. It just responds to anything important. If it's important, it responds, period. The other possibility is that the amygdala is sending... has different neurons that respond to positive and negative predicte- stimuli and sends this information to different downstream targets to respond differently. Obviously, I respond differently to a reward. I walk towards it. I, I consume it. Uh, a punishment, I'm avoiding it. And so clearly-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- KTKay Tye
... the behaviors are diametrically opposed, and so to me, it seemed very-... possible, at least, that, that there was a divergence point and maybe this could be it. And so we just did some very simple experiments when I first started my lab, to trace the projection targets of amygdala neurons and record. And so everything's all mixed up together, so it's not obvious that they would, that, that, that, that this would be a f- a, a fork in the road. But when you look at them, you do see that there are projections that come from the amygdala that are predominantly encoding either reward or fear, and there's many different projections. And, um, you know, this is just the beginning. But this was a time when it was a novel concept to even think that neurons from one region could have completely different functions going to different downstream targets, which now seems totally obvious. Um, and it, uh, there's hundreds and hundreds of papers showing it now. But at the time, it was difficult to get this work published, because that's just not how people thought about information moving through the brain, I guess.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Well, I think, um, first of all, such important work and so wonderful to be, uh, early in the, the, uh, phase of recasting, uh, how the brain works, which is what you did.
- 20:06 – 26:21
Amygdala & Hunger; Social Interaction
- AHAndrew Huberman
Um, I think most people in the general public still think amygdala fear. And, uh, clearly, it's, uh, able to signal reward and punishment as you discovered and are now pointing out. Um, I'm curious, does the amygdala have a direct line to some of the organs of the body that can change our bodily activation state, heart rate-
- KTKay Tye
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
... breathing rate-
- KTKay Tye
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
... um, muscle tension? Because I think most of us experience fear and reward as both in our head, in our brains-
- KTKay Tye
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
... but also of the body.
- KTKay Tye
Great question, great question. So, um, I'll tell you the clues that lead me to my current working model, which may, you know, it is not necessarily the final word. But I would say that I think the amygdala complex as we're discussing it, these 13 subnuclei that reside, you know, in the temporal lobe, they are important for assigning importance, but they're not important for producing the actual autonomic arousal that we associate with panic or fear. The reason I say this is there's a famous case study, Patient SM, who have, has bilateral damage to her amygdalae and, um, in, n- you know, no responses to emotional faces, no responses to fearful stimuli. Um, but if you, if, capable of having the panic response due to low, to, to suffocation, associated with, with suffocation. And so there's still the ability to produce that panic and arousal response. Um, it's just not the cognitive evaluation of it. I think that's what we think the amygdala is doing, is assigning that. It, it does receive information from the rest of the body. Um, there are, for example, ghrelin receptors in the amygdala, things that can sense hunger. And, um, we've done some, some work looking at this, kind of inspired by, I'm, I'm not sure if, uh, this, you're familiar with this study, um, it's a controversial study, Danziger 2011. But where the Supreme Court judges, they, they looked at Supreme Court judge rulings on, on parole decisions, um, across the day relative to meal breaks. And you could see, right after, it's like, it's like breakfast, you know, 90% e- "Everybody's getting paroled, everybody's getting out, yeah" and then it just drops to 10%. Then there's lunch, then we're back to 80%, and then it just-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Wow.
- KTKay Tye
... precipitously drops to single digits again.
- AHAndrew Huberman
So the judges are changing the leniency of their rulings depending on how well-fed they are?
- KTKay Tye
You know, there, there are counterarguments to this, but that is strongly what the data suggest. You know, it is not a controlled study. It is just a striking correlation. Um, but it's the, it's, it's not an, a completely novel concept, the hangry phenomenon. I'm sure, I don't know, everybody's different. I certainly experience it. Um, but we, we think that when you are getting strong signals from the body, for example, you know, I think, I think the amygdala's gonna be able to detect a lot of different homeostatic inputs, even though we haven't, we don't have evidence for that yet. But for specifically energy balance, when you're hungry, um, your amygdala can detect it perhaps through ghrelin receptors or other, other m- you know, mechanisms. Um, and then y- what we see is that in that food depri- after f- one day of food depr- deprivation for mice, um, you can see this shift in the balance between the positive valence, uh, encoding projection neurons and the negative valence encoding projection neurons. In a n- at baseline, fear trumps all. The negative projection neurons, you know, can silence the reward projection ones, which makes sense. If I need to run away from this predator, you know, I can't, I can't worry about eating this food right now. But if I'm in a near starvation like state, which for mice, f- they have v- very high metabolisms, so one day without food is a really big deal. Um, they'll only last a few days. So, um, at this point, they are kicking into survival mode where actually getting food becomes the, the greater need. And you'll see animals, you know, hunting in ways they normally wouldn't hunt when, when they're really desperate. And so this mode of, of food deprivation shifts things so that the reward, um, pathway actually be, has stronger power to-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- KTKay Tye
... to influence and silence the, uh, fear pathway than before. So.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Wow, the brain is so smart. Right?
- KTKay Tye
It really is.
- AHAndrew Huberman
It can take what we normally think of as a priority list, like fear and staying safe is more important than food reward. And then if food and acquiring food is critical to survival, it can invert all that, is what you're saying.
- KTKay Tye
Exactly.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Amazing.
- KTKay Tye
And it happens, you know, in a day, it seems reversible, so that's something that we're looking at right now and thinking about, um, how specific is this, this to food? Is this true for...... lots of different things. What about exercise? Other, other stressors that are, you know, d- potentially more positive. The amygdala is able to detect a lot of different signals from the environment, and we're not sure how all of that gets in there. Um, so I think one of the, the detection of the environment has been, you know, really well worked out in terms of our basic sensory modalities. But think about the things that really affect your emotions day to day. At least for me, as a human in this society, the things that affect my emotions mostly today are almost entirely social interactions. Very subtle ones, ones that don't seem to threaten my life or safety. You know, very small, subtle, um, social interactions are, are what, you know, have the greatest bearing, I think, on, um, my emotional evaluation and my emotional bandwidth. And what is that? How do we detect that? How do we assemble this information, apply all the nuance, you know, p- put on o- onion layers of social programming to come out with whatever, you know, I interpret this gesture to mean? It's, it's pretty incredible. And so that's kind of where, uh, my research program has, has been sliding.
- 26:21 – 35:03
Social Media & Social Connection; Tool: Email & Time Management
- KTKay Tye
- AHAndrew Huberman
It's such an interesting area. Let's drill into it a bit. Um, and to put it in context, maybe, um, we talk about social media. Um, so on social media, um, whether or not it's Instagram or X, those would seem to be the two major platforms. I'm not on TikTok. Um, people say stuff. Sometimes they say positive things.
- KTKay Tye
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Sometimes they say negative things. Sometimes they say things that are sort of neutral.
- KTKay Tye
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Um, so it seems to me that nowadays if one is on these social media platforms, that we are, um, we've sort of crowdsourced this phenomenon of social interaction in a way that we hadn't before. Because I, I grew up prior to the advent of social media, and it, I could bring my physical body into certain environments and not others.
- KTKay Tye
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Even at high school, I could hang out, we had an area called the bat cave where, you know, skateboarders and some other, at that time, misfits hung out.
- KTKay Tye
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
We had the quad where the cool kids hung out.
- KTKay Tye
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Um, et cetera. You could, you could pick your niche.
- KTKay Tye
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Okay? Social media is not like that. Uh, you can pick followers, they can pick you, et cetera, but I think since most people have social media nowadays it seems, or are on there in some ways, that we've placed ourselves in the center of an arena which we have a ton of incoming input. We all, m- most of us have amygdalas. Two of them, amygdalas, you pointed out, one on each side of the brain. And presumably we're on these platforms to receive positive feedback and avoid negative feedback. However, there does seem to be a cohort of people who seem to like the friction of com- combat or kind of, let's just call it high friction interactions or moderate friction interactions. They like to argue. They like to parse ideas. It's not all bad necessarily. Um, so have you ever looked at social media, in your, in your own mind, looked at social media through the lens of, of amygdala filtering or through the lens of, of neural circuit filtering, and kind of wondered, um, what's going on there that someone with, without your in-depth knowledge of these brain circuitries would not think to, uh, look at that landscape through?
- KTKay Tye
Hm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Or maybe we could just do that now as a, as a...
- KTKay Tye
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
... as a, as a kind of playful experiment.
- KTKay Tye
No, I, I like that. Um, so I, a, a lot of people ask me about social media from the context of is this of, is this social contact meaningful? Is this positive? Does this count? Does this help you not feel lonely? Um, and of course, I don't know the answer. We haven't done that particular study yet, and I don't n- I don't know of that specific study having been performed. But my prediction, um, is that it's not gonna do much because I, I believe that a key component of what I would consider social contact heavily depends on having some inter-brain synchrony, some interaction and in, that is synchronous. And I think with social media, sometimes there can be an engaging dialogue that h- plays out in near real time. But generally speaking, it's asynchronous. You're looking at things that are happening that you're not a part of. You're excluded from all these things.
- AHAndrew Huberman
It happened in Australia yesterday...
- KTKay Tye
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
... and I'm on there saying, "Cool, love it."
- KTKay Tye
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
And then the person's already asleep.
- KTKay Tye
Yes. Exactly.
- AHAndrew Huberman
So that's what you mean by asynchronous.
- KTKay Tye
Things, think, and- asynchronous like that.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Okay. Got it. Yeah.
- KTKay Tye
We're not experiencing things at the same time. It's not a shared experience, you know, that, in, in terms of that, having that bond necessarily. And so I've never actually been asked about how the amygdala processes social media. Um, I guess I think what happens is, you know, the amygdala is just responding to stimuli. It's sending up bottom-up signals. You know, it's a caricature of, of, um, bottom-up and top-down processing. Let's give an example that I'm, I'm walking down the street and all of a sudden I hear like a really ferocious dog barking at me, "Rah rah rah," I'm all going crazy, and then I get super scared and then I realize, okay, there's a fence. So the amygdala detect, you know, heard the dog barking, "Hey, there's a dog barking." And you know, I'm, I'm freaking out. Then my prefrontal cortex realizes there's the fence and it looks very sturdy. This fence looks stable. And then I'm relaxing and I'm resuming my walking normally. You know, I think that's sort of the dance that our brain is doing when we have top-down and bottom-up, uh, information that we're trying to stay focused. So for me, I think when I'm on social media, there's so many stimuli that, that are evoking responses. And, um, to be completely transparent, and I know this is not something that everybody else does or can do or is necessarily what's best for them, but I work very hard to control input from the top down. Um, in terms of I really, really limit the amount, I, I basically...... don't check email or go on social media. I would say I'm on social media or email less than one hour per week, basically-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Per week?
- 35:03 – 36:30
Sponsor: AG1
- AHAndrew Huberman
I'd like to take a brief moment and thank one of our sponsors and that's AG1. AG1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also contains adaptogens. I started taking AG1 way back in 2012 and the reason I started taking it and the reason I still take it every day is that it ensures that I meet all of my quotas for vitamins and minerals and it ensures that I get enough prebiotic and probiotic to support gut health. Now, gut health is something that over the last 10 years we realized is not just important for the health of our gut, but also for our immune system and for the production of neurotransmitters and neuromodulators, things like dopamine and serotonin. In other words, gut health is critical for proper brain functioning. Now, of course I strive to consume healthy whole foods for the majority of my nutritional intake every single day, but there are a number of things in AG1 including specific micronutrients that are hard to get from whole foods or at least insufficient quantities. So AG1 allows me to get the vitamins and minerals that I need, probiotics, prebiotics, the adaptogens and critical micronutrients. So anytime somebody asks me if they were to take just one supplement what that supplement should be, I tell them AG1 because AG1 supports so many different systems within the body that are involved in mental health, physical health and performance. To try AG1 go to drinkag1.com/huberman and you'll get a year's supply of vitamin D3 K2 and five free travel packs of AG1. Again, that's drinkag1.com/huberman.
- 36:30 – 43:44
Social Media; Friction & Feedback, Leadership
- AHAndrew Huberman
I think this is wonderful advice for people to hear. Um, we have a future guest on this podcast named Cal Newport. He wrote the book Deep Work and he has another book called A World Without Email. He's a computer-
- KTKay Tye
Mm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
... science professor at Georgetown where he talks extensively about the tremendous career, but also relationship and life value of doing essentially what you're describing. Although I do think, Kay, that you represent kind of the extreme of what I've, um, become aware of in terms of people that can limit the amount of time on, uh, social media platforms and email. Anyway, I just want to say, um, congratulations. I just wanna say that again.
- KTKay Tye
(laughs)
- AHAndrew Huberman
And I think it, even if people don't reduce to one hour per week-I think that making some effort toward reducing the amount of incoming, as you said, controlling the top-down inputs-
- KTKay Tye
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
... to the amygdala, but also to the rest of the brain involved in creative processing, et cetera, is so key and we actually do have agency, it just is, it's- it's tough, um, sometimes to build up that discipline. So, uh, you're doing a tremendous service by sharing that somebody as successful as you does this, presumably is successful in part because you do this. Could we, by extension, say that many people, since billions of people are on social media, are likely, um, triggering the activation of their amygdala, clouding out other more potentially productive activation of their neural circuits by, sort of, just making themselves freely available to the- to the, uh, thoughts and words and impulses of others? I mean, to me, it seems the answer would be yes, but I'd like to know what you think.
- KTKay Tye
I mean, I think, um, and there's something to be said, there's definitely been moments where I've- I've, you know, gone a l- deep into social media and spent more time at- in a certain burst, right, that is isolated and I think that there's a lot to be learned from social media. Y- so, to actually to bring it back to one of- point you mentioned earlier, um, on social media sometimes people pro- just want accolades and sometimes there's a lot of- of friction. One of the reasons I stay on social media even though I'm making this big e- effort to, sort of, de-clutter my consciousness is because of that feedback. Especially when, you know, for- for someone like you, I- I imagine this has gotta be super true, and even for me at- at a certain point in my career, it just felt like people don't wanna tell me bad news to my face as much anymore. Everybody's so positive all the time and, you know, what they, what are they really thinking?
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- KTKay Tye
And social media allows you the protection of anonymity to say what you really think without, um, consequence essentially. And so, on the one hand, the consequence-free, um, nature of being able to just say things can be very dangerous, but at the same time, for me, I really value just being able to receive it. I- I'm, you know, I'm a big girl, I can filter out what I want when I get the- all the inputs, but if I don't receive the inputs, sometimes it's hard to learn from the feedback I'm not getting. So, even sometimes feedbacks given in a not very nice way, I can still create a model for someone else that has this perspective that I can take with me and that can be another perspective I can honor easily in the future because I have this theory of mind for someone- some- oh, someone would get upset about that. Uh, you know, that's something that could be harmful to people who are th- you know, have this theory of mine. So, I think it's super valuable from that perspective and that's why I continue to use it.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Great. Yeah, I- I really applaud that as well. I- I always read my teaching evals because they're anonymous and yes, I do wonder, you know, what grade the different, uh, people who gave different evals (laughs) , you know, got. I don't know that information.
- KTKay Tye
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
I sometimes wonder, did they attend the class or are they just angry they didn't do well on the exam? But that really represents the small fraction of feedback that I'm, um, that I wonder about. Most of it, um, that's valuable to me is the, "Hey, you know, liked the course, but these parts really sucked-
- KTKay Tye
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
... Professor Huberman." Or-
- KTKay Tye
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
... "This part was completely unclear," or, "Completely hated the way you blank, blank and blanked."
- KTKay Tye
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Because that feedback is something I can really work with to improve. So I think-
- KTKay Tye
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
... um, course evals are- are similar to what you're describing. I think there's value there. If I were to just look at the- the positive feedback and then ignore the negative feedback and write those people off, then I don't think I could improve as a teacher. A- actually, I always encourage comments and feedback and suggestions in the YouTube comments for this podcast for that reason, and I do read the comments. I go through and I read and, um, a few of them sting. Um-
- KTKay Tye
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
But, you know, the positive feedback is great too. Sometimes it's more of this please.
- KTKay Tye
Yep.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Or less of that please.
- KTKay Tye
Yep.
- AHAndrew Huberman
I think there- there's information in that.
- KTKay Tye
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Um, so I think, it sounds like you've been doing all of these things naturally. I-
- KTKay Tye
So- so actually, I- i- and, uh, since I've had my research group, my- my lab, um, we do an anonymous lab survey every, it's supposed to be o- about every 18 months and then it's a whole long process of going through it and it's just evolved. It's, I think it's the fourth or fifth time we've done it, and so it's now, uh, I think it's, like, 70 questions. It's 70 ques- we got, maybe we should, we should trim it down, but it- it ends up being hundreds of pages of- of text, you know, short answer, l- sometimes long answer feedback from anonymously from people in my lab. My lab is pretty big, so it's- it's, you know, I'm- I'm not even trying to really guess who is saying it, it's just feedback and it takes me months to go through with it and- and f- get all the feedback and it is so useful. I mean, in a class, the- the- the amount of content that you have is, it's- it's restricted to this very specific time and space whereas when you're mentoring someone over the cross- course of years, there's a lot of different- there's a lot of different points of- of contact and interaction and, you know, you're in the lab all, 40 hours a week or whatever and, you know, c- going tr- meeting here, there's just a lot of different- different ways to improve and ways that we've never, you know, I haven't had any training in how to be a really great mentor and so I'm getting that training now. I'm making my own course and my mentees are my teachers and, um, I really am grateful for the- the tutelage that they provide for free in this anonymat- most lab survey. Sometimes it makes me cry, but sometimes it makes me feel really good about something that I'm doing that's working and in any case, it makes me feel that I have ground truth. I guess I still don't know, but when people say things that sting, um, it makes me feel like they're saying what they really think and they're not holding back. It doesn't, you know? And, um, bad news feels...... like reality. And so, that is very, something about that is rewarding. Um, just to feel like I have reality rather than I'm getting something else, you know? The, the model doesn't quite fit. It's very unsatisfying when the model doesn't quite fit. So.
- 43:44 – 51:47
Social Isolation, Harlow Experiments, “Loneliness Neurons”
- AHAndrew Huberman
Let's go back to social interaction-
- KTKay Tye
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
... something that your lab is doing, um, lots of work on nowadays.
- KTKay Tye
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
And maybe we could shift to the sorts of s- social interaction that most of us are familiar with, the, um, sitting across the table having a coffee with somebody, the taking a walk with somebody.
- KTKay Tye
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Maybe a phone call.
- KTKay Tye
Yep.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Um, maybe a tough conversation, um, maybe a playful, you know, um, you know, unscripted conversation. Um, maybe a meal at a holiday dinner. You know, there's a h- huge range there. What, what do we know about the value of social interaction at the level of sort of core biological needs? Like, at the level of neural circuits and maybe even hormones. I mean, you know, most people have heard of oxytocin, I think the love hormone, but it's, there's so much more there for people to understand and know about. You know, how important is this thing that we call social interaction? And how bad do things get when we're not getting the right kinds of social interaction?
- KTKay Tye
You know, I think this is, this is a great question and I'm glad that it's become something that has been recognized at a more global and national scale, just the importance of, of having social support in our lives for he- for our wellbeing. Um, but social isolation or even just perceived loneliness has immense health consequences for all social species. So, um, shortened lifespan, increased mood disorders. Um, increased, actually, morbidity and mortality for diseases like cancer or heart disease that, you know, um, might not be what we would normally think. And so, I think understanding how each of those processes is happening, those mechanisms are far from being worked out. But the, the correlational evidence is undeniable. We're now taking this into the lab really for the first time. And so, something so simple as social isolation, how come we don't know way more about it? And, um, I'm someone who stumbled into the field of social isolation by accident prior to the pandemic. And so, I'll just say, l- you know, the whole story on why there's such a gaping hole in our knowledge as a neuroscience community about social isolation really comes from Harry Harlow's work. This original work of maternal separation that was undeniably cruel. It, it caused irreparable damage to these baby monkeys and they never recovered. And-
- AHAndrew Huberman
Uh, sorry to interrupt.
- KTKay Tye
Sorry. Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
I apologize. I'm striving to not interrupt in my life. But I-
- KTKay Tye
No, please.
- AHAndrew Huberman
But so that people are on, on board, um, could you just briefly describe the Harlow experiments?
- KTKay Tye
Yes. So, they're very famous experiments where they separated, uh, baby monkeys from their moms and then had either a wire sort of thing holding a bottle. So okay, what d- what do you miss most about the mom? Is it the wire? Is it the food or is it the, the, the comfort? And then they had, th- so they had a wire thing with, with a milk bottle versus, you know, blankets and cu- cuddly soft things. And, and the, the baby monkeys would go to the cuddly soft thing. But you know, a blanket is not a replacement for a mother. Nobody's saying that it is and, and through these experiments, there was extended maternal separation and it's, it, it was deemed cruel. Um, there was permanent irreparable damage when you, when you rehouse these monkeys. They never resocialized normally. They had lots of different mental and physical health problems. Um, and I think in humans, we know that s- you know, solitary confinement is considered torture. Um, you know, social isolation's a difficult thing to study in, in a lot of conditions. And we stumbled onto it by complete accident through working with a postdoc, a former postdoc in my lab, Gillian Matthews, who was a graduate student, um, doing an experiment on, on... It was just trying to figure out if these dopamine neurons, um, would also respond to cocaine the way VTA, these... Sorry, these ventral tegmental area dopamine neurons were known to respond to cocaine. Wanted to see if these other dopamine neurons respond to cocaine. So sort of a incremental study. So when you do these cocaine studies, you, you inject the animal with cocaine or saline and then leave the naive animal in the cage and then you take brain slices, record from the neurons and look at the synaptic strengths. And so, you know, the expected outcome sort of was that these dopamine neurons would, would be similar to other dopamine neurons that showed in-, you know, long-lasting potentiation after a single dose of cocaine. But what happened instead was that yes, there was potentiation in the cocaine animals, there's also potentiation in the saline animals relative to the naive group and this was a huge puzzle.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Mm-hmm.
- KTKay Tye
What was this? And it turned out through many, many different experiments, um, that it's actually because when you inject animals with cocaine, you're separating them from the group 'cause they have, and I, and that felt crazy. And this is what, the way people did the experiment. So you inject them with saline, you separate them. The naive animals just stay there. So-
- AHAndrew Huberman
With their other litter mates?
- KTKay Tye
With their other litter mates.
- AHAndrew Huberman
I see. So the control group, the saline-
- KTKay Tye
That's right.
- AHAndrew Huberman
... control group is actually a social isolation condition.
- KTKay Tye
So by accident, this control group that didn't make sense was how we stumbled onto... So then we tried, is it novel cage? It's not the novel cage. It's the, it's the social isolation and so, um-That is how we became a lab that studied social isolation. It was a complete accident. We weren't sure what, what we were looking at. And then, um, we mani- we found these neurons and we manipulate these neurons and they produced, um, something very different than other dopamine neurons. Which normally if you stimulate dopamine neurons, these ventral tegmental area, mid-brain dopa- neurons, like 90% of the time when you p- you hear people talk about dopamine neurons, they mean these ones. And they're the ones where you press the lever, stimulate the neurons, they'll press the lever thousands of times, you know? And if you-
- AHAndrew Huberman
They love to be stimulated.
- KTKay Tye
Yes.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Yeah.
- KTKay Tye
And if, if you're a human and you do cocaine, you, you, most people love cocaine. They, they want, they're very pro-social when they're o- on cocaine. And so that's what dopamine neurons were thought to be do- doing. But these other dopamine neurons in the dorsal raphe, that I will also say is in the brain stem near to an aqueduct where you could detect signals from the body. Um, but these other dopamine neurons in the raphe, they, when you stimulate them, animals don't like it, they will not work for reward. They actually will move away from a space that's where they're being stimulated. You know, conditioned place and real-time place aversion. I don't like the feeling of these neurons being activated, please stop it. And yet they would be pro-social. And so for a long time, this was super confusing. We couldn't understand it. And then just because at the same time we had a, um, a hunger study going on in the lab, we just thought about it like, "I can eat food because it's delicious and I, I want to eat this yummy treat, or I can eat because I'm super hungry, I feel shaky, I'm just gonna eat this nasty fiber bar that's out of my backpack 'cause I'm so desperate and I need like, I need my, my blood sugar is dangerously low." You know? And so there's two reasons that you can eat and one of them is uncomfortable. Hunger is not comfortable. You don't... It's not a good feeling to be hungry. And so we thought about this and that's kind of how we circularly came around to thinking, "I think we've discovered the loneliness ner- neurons essentially." And so what is loneliness? And loneliness is this unpleasant need state of wanting social contact that would have this pro-social effect as well. And so, um, that's basically the very serendipitous loopty-loop way that I came to be, um, uh, studying how loneliness is represented in the brain.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Amazing.
- 51:47 – 1:01:29
Social Homeostasis, COVID-19 Pandemic & Loneliness
- AHAndrew Huberman
Before we talk a bit more about these loneliness neurons and some of their inputs and outputs in the brain, um, how has the discovery of these neurons, um, perhaps changed the way that you organize your day and week and life, right? Um, if at all. Um, for instance, are you more aware of how much time you spend alone versus with others? Are you, um, more careful or discerning about who you spend your time with? Um, you know, I, I ask this, um, because, you know, there's so many examples for me in the neuroscience literature where, you know, I learn something new about how the brain works and I think, "Oh yeah, you know, it makes a lot of sense why my sleep isn't great." You know, it turns out that light exposure to the eyes at particular times of day really sets the whole body and brain into particular rhythms that, you know, explain why I was a little depressed when I was in graduate school staying up all night doing experiments and I'd sleep much of the day and feel f- like I was getting eight, nine hours. I don't get eight to nine hours now, but, um, you know, and when I wake up early, for me personally, there's a bit of an antidepressant effect.
- KTKay Tye
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
As long as I slept the night before.
- KTKay Tye
Seasonal affect disorder is real.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Right. So, you know, I think as new information comes online, um, at least for me, it's, it's changed the way that I organize my life to, to su- in subtle or in not so subtle ways. So the idea that there are neurons in the brain that encode loneliness, the absence of social contact, does that have you thinking, you know, after a few days of managing the lab, uh, with which as you point out, you have a very large lab, lots of social interaction, but it's work context social interaction. Does that, um, has that led you to think, "Hey, you know, we should go out to dinner as a lab," or, "I should spend time with somebody who's not in science (laughs) ," or, "I should spend time by myself 'cause I've had too much social interaction"? I'm not asking for strict protocols here. I'm just wondering if you're willing to get, um, like play in the sandbox of this with me a bit.
- KTKay Tye
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Um, how this information perhaps has shaped some of your choices. You personally.
- KTKay Tye
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
And, and to be very clear, I'm not asking you to dictate what other people do.
- KTKay Tye
Mm-hmm. No, of course.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Um, has it changed your social life?
- KTKay Tye
So it's really interesting that you ask this question and now that you, you know, now that you're asking it this way, um, I, I mean, of course when I learn new things, I, I, I, um, take them and implement them into my life. But to be honest, in, in the cycle of, of, you know, learning and studying and being curious, and I actually think where I reside more is when something's going on with me, my research program, you know, research is me-search. I, it becomes what the re- it dictates what the research program evolves into. And so for ex- for example, so I was just had started studying loneliness, um, a few years before the pandemic hit, and then the pandemic hit and it was just a step function like change. I went from I'm never alone, unless you call being in an Uber alone, um, or being on a plane and, and, and just, you know, constantly people in my office, even when I'm going to the bathroom, someone's waiting for me outside. Like, you know, I'm not, it's like I'm hurrying in the bathroom. I'm never alone. There's like four people in my bed kicking me in the face. I'm just, you know, there's just so much social contact. And then boom, you know, there would be a day I wouldn't see another, like, you know, just the, a, not zero, but just extremely sudden drop of social contact when there's no more work. And, you know, it was just that, that period of time. And...It was, it was very depressing. It was just this huge... I felt like I was in free fall, and it made me... You know, at first, it was really disruptive and I was worried about myself, you know? And then at some point, I adjusted to it, and then I got used to working from home. I got, started a garden. Like, I got all these, you know, I, I got m- you know, I just started a different life pattern that involved a lot of alone time and, you know, something... A, a, an alone time personal life, uh, grew where there wasn't any space for anything to grow before, and then I became comfortable with it. And so then I started thinking about that that's really where the idea of social homeostasis was born. This idea that, okay, why is it with acute social isolation, humans, monkeys, mice, you know, you acutely isolate the individual from the social group, you reintroduce them to the social group, rebound of pro-social interaction. "Oh, so happy to see you." There's, like, uh, all these affiliative interactions, this hu- a burst of affiliative interactions, whereas with chronic social isolation in humans, monkeys, mice, even flies, you reintroduce them to the social group and you get territorial behavior, aggression, avoidance, antisocial behavior, um, or just, you know, sort of a very different negative valence response to the exposure to the group. And so this, maybe people brushed it off for a long time as just, "Oh, it's confusing. This literature's inconsistent," or maybe there's one model that makes it all make sense, that is social homeo- homeostasis where, you know, you're used to getting this at a certain point and so my effector system gets activated. I, I detect that I'm alone. It's, I want more. The deficit's detected. Then my effector systems gets activated, this, and then I start spinning all the systems that try to get me back into contact. I'm calling my friends. I'm texting my fri- I'm, I'm, if I'm a mouse, I'm making ultrasonic vocalizations. I'm exploring outside of the burrow. And then, you know, if my friends don't call me back, they're like, "Sorry, we don't wanna see anyone 'til end of COVID. Bye." You know, whatever it is, you know, you, the, th- it's, it's not working. My correction efforts are failing, or maybe a certain amount of time, we don't know. Then I give up. I stop, I stop calling. I stop going out. I just make a different life, you know? You, you, the, the, the, you guys don't, you don't leave the burrow, whatever it is, and there's in, in animals and humans, at least behaviorally, there's a near step function, like drop-off of attempts to... You know, you could see a s- sort of date, oh, then they just give up on dating after this one, you know, whatever happens. There's some, some straw that breaks the camel's back and then this person doesn't wanna date anymore or doesn't wanna go out anymore, whatever. And, and what is that? So that adaptation, then you're at a new baseline. You're, you're expecting now your new normal. I'm, I'm expecting to have a gardening day at home alone, not see anyone, and then, and then bunch of people come over. It feels like a surplus. So my previous optimum re- re- you know, reintroduction to the social group is now feeling like a surplus, an overload, overstimulated, and that's, I think, something that a lot of people experience this whiplash of going into the, the pandemic and coming out of it. Different people to different levels. It depends on how much you, you know, isolated while you were o- o- in the pandemic. But I think thinking about, um, your social set point as being flexible and dynamic was a new concept to me, and then in my mind, the question is what is the part of this process that is causing all these harmful health consequences like shortened lifespan, mood disorders, et cetera? Is it the initial detection that I'm missing something and effector system activation? Because if that was the case, maybe I wanna Band-Aid that. You know, maybe I wanna, again, get a pet, get a, get a, get a Zoom buddy. I don't know. What, you know, you would have different prescriptions and ad- advice to give people if that were the case. Versus you would give almost opposite advice if the thing that's causing it is the, the set point adaptation. Then you wanna, you wanna stave it off, versus if you wanted to accelerate getting into the set point. Which is better? You know, is it the adaptation or is it, you know, kind of trying to fix it? And so in one case, you would wanna ease off the, the having the set point happen, the set point transition happen, and the other case, rip it off like a Band-Aid, cold turkey, just adjust, and then you'll be fine. You know, then you won't worry about it. Then you won't be lonely anymore 'cause you'll just be comfortable being alone. You know, people talk about cognitive flexibility, um, and I think it's, it's sort of like that, but it's social flexibility. I want to be able to be alone. I also wanna be able to be in a large group and be comfortable. And so I think what I've done, if anything, to change my lifestyle, um, to accommodate these new insights I've had is, is to consciously create dynamic social experiences. Lots of social experiences, yes, but also protecting alone time, which I never did before. I just, I just, just d- just gave it all away. And, you know, I realized that having that just made my social homeostatic system feel more elastic and flexible and resilient and less like a crisis if something... You know, I'm, I'm very comfortable being alone. I'm super comfortable in my own skin now, and it requires investing in that relationship. I like how you framed, uh, earlier, I th- I think we were not, not recording yet, but the relationship with yourself as being a very important relationship, and, um, when I think about brain states, you know, we don't know this yet, but my working model would be that different individuals, we represent their identities and whenever they're present, it creates a unique ensemble of that combination of people being present, and being alone is also a unique state that cannot be achieved. I have the brain state of being alone. I cannot achieve it if anyone else is around, and that's just what, you know, that's kind of the working model I have.
- 1:01:29 – 1:08:40
Quality of Social Contact, Social Homeostasis, Social Media
- KTKay Tye
- AHAndrew Huberman
I think what you're saying is, uh, essential for people to hear because, um, it makes sense that loneliness would hurt.Um, it makes sense that some people are more extroverted, which I think is defined as, uh, getting energy from social interactions and resetting energy through social interactions, as opposed to introverted, which by the way, folks, introverts like myself do enjoy social interaction. It's just that we reset through more, um, solo or one-on-one time than we do in larger groups. That's my understanding of the introversion-extroversion literature. We can revisit that. But this notion of social homeostasis is, I think, so key. Uh, important enough that I think we probably wanna r- redefine it, um, as many times, or restate it rather, as many times as is necessary, th- 'cause I believe what you're describing is the same thing that one would experience with food. If we eat a lot, we're consuming, I don't know, 3,500 calories a day, and then, um, suddenly we only have access to 1,800 calories a day, there's, it feels like a deficit because indeed it is. Whereas after some period of time at 1,800 calories a day, 2,200 calories a day feels like relative abundance, relative abundance. Um, when the pandemic hit, I certainly, um, was unhappy about the state of affairs in the world, of course. Um, but I recall feeling like, "Oh my goodness, I finally don't have to commute 90 minutes in each direction (laughs) to Stanford," 'cause I lived in the East Bay at that time. Um, I felt like I had time to do things I hadn't done in a long time, and, uh, thanks to Zoom, I was able to get certain things done, not others. Th- then after about six to eight months when I realized this is gonna carry on for a while, I remember feeling quite lonely and making some efforts to repair that. I, I think social media, not to harp on social media, um, could do either one of two things, and I don't know which in the context of, uh, social homeostasis. Either going on Instagram and seeing a lot of familiar faces and comments and accounts could make me feel like I'm getting some social interaction such that then when I close that app and move to my work at my desk or something, uh, which these days is mostly done, um, solo, um, that I would feel like I had social interaction. Or perhaps it's the equivalent of, um, calories that, um, then makes me feel more isolated when I'm not in the app, perhaps. I find it to be distinctly different than, like, the experience I had last night of going to dinner with someone I know quite well, sitting down and having a open-ended conversation, and deciding to close out the night only when we realized, you know, we gotta get up tomorrow for work, so went our separate ways. Um, there's something that felt very sating about it. So I wonder in this context of social homeostasis whether or not the analogy of social interaction to cal- caloric intake, if we could, is there another dimension to it where it's not just the total number of calories or the total amount of social interaction, but the quality of social interaction, the type of social interaction that actually feels like nourishment as opposed to just calories?
- KTKay Tye
I love where you're going with this. And, and so, um, when we wrote this review the first time, we, you know, we're, we're conceptually this idea of, of how your social set point can change based on if, if you're acutely isolated or, or chronically isolated. And, um, the Y axis is the quality/quantity of detected social contact, which is so fuzzy, and, you know, there's... it's, it's, again, one of the most challenging frontiers of this field because how even if we measured every single c- component that the brain can detect of the social, the social contact, so much of it is about expectation, you know. Like, if I think I got a gesture, if, if I get a nod from the president, I'm like, "Oh my God, did the president just nod at me? That's so exciting." Versus if I get a nod from my partner, I'm like, "Oh my God, are they mad at me? What's going on? Why, why did I just get a nod," right? It totally matters, the gesture. You need the identity. There's many different cognitive systems that need to all plug into this wheel, um, to make it spin, and so I think that, uh, that is one of the, the... I, I think that's gonna keep us busy for a while. But in terms of your question about social media and when you switch from, you know, getting social media feedback and then doing work, um, I think, I think it really depends. I mean, social media is such a large category. You can have many different types of responses. Generally, I think the bounds, so, you know, when you say social media versus a real life interaction where you're with someone, maybe you're touching, maybe you're not touching, but even if you're just having conversation, um, you have inter-brain synchrony. You are, um, having a lot of inter-brain synchrony if you're in the same place. E- if, e- but you can have inter-brain synchrony even on the phone, right? Just a voice call is actually a lot more inter-brain synchrony than, than messages. I think, I think text messages can bring a lot of anxiety, and there's been a lot of commentary about that. Um, and same thing with s- with, with social media. I think the, the thing about social media that is perhaps, um, the most, n- harmful or net negative, I think, t- in terms of I- when I'm thinking about social nourishment, if I, you know, sort of making that term up on the fly here, but, um, it's, it's almost a withdrawal. When social media is posted, it's not to you. It's to everyone, and you could be one of the people that receives this message, but it's not even really to you. I'm, like, not even talking to you, and I'm doing something that's without you. Otherwise, you'd be in this picture and not reading on social media, listening to whatever. So it's like by almost exclusively you're, you're posting about activities that you're being excluded from, and someone's not even really talking to you unless they're DM, like th- you know, direct messaging you, but then I c- I kind of consider that a different category if it's, like, a one-to-one communication. Social media to me is, is a blast, right? It's not... it's just, you know, catching up with someone on social media, I, I don't really see the merit of it because...I'll, I'll just catch up with them when I catch up with them and their kids will just be, like, way older, but, you know-
- AHAndrew Huberman
(laughs)
- KTKay Tye
... I don't know, I'll actually really catch up with them than just see pictures of, you know... I do- I don't know. I, I, I feel mixed about it because it's not a real connection and it doesn't, for me, sate my social appetite to catch up what's u- to, to look at someone else's profile on, on social media, um, that doesn't actually do anything for the, the connection. I, I don't know, but I seriously doubt tons of oxytocin is released when I, you know, follow someone's feed about their vacation, so I don't know. I would, I think that it definitely matters, the quality, and social media is, is different than real life interactions for many reasons.
- 1:08:40 – 1:09:42
Sponsor: InsideTracker
- KTKay Tye
- AHAndrew Huberman
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- 1:09:42 – 1:18:26
Social Media, Relationships; Social Isolation & Exclusion
- AHAndrew Huberman
I really appreciate your willingness to, uh, explore in this, uh, in this context. I think your mention of the fact that, um, real life interaction involves inter-brain synchrony, it could be by text, scaling up from that by phone, um, FaceTime or something akin to that, video, video chat. Um, on social media, there is comments back and forth, um, although that's time-consuming and it's difficult because there's anonymity.
- KTKay Tye
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
People are in different places, different time zones.
- KTKay Tye
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
If you don't know someone, it's different context.
- KTKay Tye
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Um, so I'm really... Thanks to what you're describing, I'm really starting to think about social media as so different than in-person social interactions or by phone or video chat social interactions-
- KTKay Tye
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
... and how those would differentially impact social homeostasis. And it's leading me at least to conclude that, at least for me, that most social media interactions would create more hunger-
- KTKay Tye
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
... as opposed to a, um, sating of, of the need for social interaction. It's, um... I have to be careful with the analogies here, but since-
- KTKay Tye
Yes. (laughs)
- AHAndrew Huberman
... I can do this, I, I was almost gonna make an analogy between, um, porn- pornography-
- KTKay Tye
Uh-huh.
- AHAndrew Huberman
... in-person sexual intimacy.
- KTKay Tye
Uh-huh.
- AHAndrew Huberman
I suppose there's something in between where people could talk by phone, but-
- KTKay Tye
Uh-huh.
- AHAndrew Huberman
... w- we don't wanna explore this in any kind of salacious way.
- KTKay Tye
(laughs)
- AHAndrew Huberman
And then, um, sexual intimacy with, with, uh, with emotion, with-
- KTKay Tye
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
... positive emotion.
- KTKay Tye
Mm-hmm.
- AHAndrew Huberman
Right? There's a, there's a scaling factor there.
- KTKay Tye
Yeah.
- AHAndrew Huberman
And I'm not pa- I'm not putting, um, judgment or valence.
- KTKay Tye
Uh-huh.
- AHAndrew Huberman
I'm, I'm certainly not. That's not my place. As a good friend of mine says, "I'm not a cop." You know? I'm not telling people-
- KTKay Tye
(laughs)
- 1:18:26 – 1:28:40
Empathy: Friend vs. Foe
- KTKay Tye
- AHAndrew Huberman
I love where your lab is headed, which just means we're gonna have to have you back on here again at some point in the future to get the answers to those questions that you're now addressing. I, I've long thought that, uh, we really know how we feel about somebody when something good happens to them or for them. And I never quite understood this at the level of mechanisms. How could I? M- it's not one of my lab studies. But, you know, I think that there's a natural sort of empathy, if one is a healthy, uh, empathic person, to seeing a member of our own species, and hopefully, uh, also to observing the members of other species, um, you know, experiencing some discomfort. W- we don't like that, nor should we. So, another human is in emotional pain, right? Um, you know, the wail or the cry of loss is, like, one that just, I think, for any person who's empathically attuned is just like, "Ugh." Or an animal. You hear an animal in pain, like, goodness. I mean, I'm not here to diagnose sociopathy, but if, if that doesn't evoke a, uh, at least some sort of response of, like, "Oh, gosh," like, what I wouldn't do to remove that pain, that their pain is your pain, empathy. Um, that seems like a very reflexive circuit, or at least I would hope so. (laughs) Um, but when somebody experiences something positive, I think it's normal and healthy to have a, um, a graded set of responses. If it's somebody that we really love, um, we may not even know them, and we think, "Yeah!" Like, you're s- you're just reflexively happy for them. Um, somebody that we dislike-I think there's a more natural tendency to be like, "Oh." You know? Right? That, you know, as, as opposed to if that person were in pain, I would like to think that even if you, you, one didn't like them, that you would think, like, "Oh, that, that sucks. I'm really sorry to hear that." Um, so I feel like there's some asymmetry in these empathic interactions. They're both empathy. One has a negative valence, pain, the other one has positive valence, another member of our species or other species receiving reward, and we can delight in that. I mean, I, I'm almost embarrassed to admit how many ferret and otter and raccoon accounts I follow-
- KTKay Tye
(laughs)
- AHAndrew Huberman
... because I love seeing them eat.
- KTKay Tye
(laughs)
- AHAndrew Huberman
I love seeing that little hands of the raccoons. There's some great raccoon accounts, by the way. Um, and I delight in it.
- KTKay Tye
(laughs)
- AHAndrew Huberman
I, like, delight in it. I wanna see the raccoons win. I don't know why, I just, I love animals, and so I suppose that's why. Um, so do you think that there, that we are asymmetrically wired for this empathic attunement? Um, can we observe that in other animals? I realize this might not be squarely in the wheelhouse of what your lab is focusing on, but I think it, it relates enough to the topics that we're covering today that I'm just, you know, if you'd like to speculate, um, uh, on what might be going on there.
- KTKay Tye
Yeah. I, I, I can definitely speculate. Something that we think about a lot, but again, you know, I, there's some, there's some level of this, which is semantics. Um, I think of empathy as being defined as being able to understand another animal's emotion and also taking it on. So, I think, um, something that's a little bit different than emotional contagion, right? I see a panic, I'm in a group of pan- It's not the same thing as, uh, as, as empathy. Um, empathy's often used in, in sort of certain contexts, like feeling sorry for someone, and it's maybe different if y- for feeling happy for someone. And this is something I was just talking about with one of my graduate students the other day. Why is there ... Is, is there an asymmetry in, in empathy for positive and negative, or is it just what we've studied? It's easier to study this.
Episode duration: 2:31:05
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