Joe Rogan Experience #1513 - Andrew Huberman

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   Andrew, how are you?…

   1. JRJoe Rogan0:00

      Andrew, how are you? What's happening, man?

   2. AHAndrew Huberman0:02

      Doing great.

   3. JRJoe Rogan0:03

      Nice to meet you.

   4. AHAndrew Huberman0:04

      Nice to meet you too.

   5. JRJoe Rogan0:04

      R- really excited to talk to you about this. Um, just sort of f- for an introduction, tell people what you do.

   6. AHAndrew Huberman0:09

      So I'm a neuroscientist, uh, meaning I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology, Stanford School of Medicine. So I run a laboratory. I teach a little bit. I teach neuroanatomy to medical students. But mainly, my lab does research, so I've got students and post-docs, and we're trying to figure out the answers to two problems. The first problem is how to regenerate the damaged nervous system, in particular, the connections between the eye and the brain, to restore vision to the blind, so that's a big mission of ours, and to prevent vision loss in people that are losing their vision. And the other thing that we're doing is we're focusing a lot on stress and other states of mind. So I'm obsessed with the idea that all our states of mind come from the brain and the body, and we're trying to figure out what happens in the brain and body when we're stressed and how to control it, what happens in the brain and body when we are creative and how to control it, and essentially, for all states of mind. But rather than try and tackle the really high level stuff like flow and states of awe, we're really focused on these states of stress and things like focus and the ability to think clearly and do certain things athletically or cognitively because, first of all, there's a lot of suffering. There are a lot of people out there that are suffering from an inability to control their states of mind. And also, there's great potential for people who aren't suffering to be able to create and perform and do better things once we can understand how those states come about.

   7. JRJoe Rogan1:31

      That's an interesting way of putting it, suffering 'cause they can't control their states of mind. Um, that- that is the case, but that's not, like, a politically correct way of, uh, describing it.

   8. AHAndrew Huberman1:43

      I guess I never thought about that.

   9. JRJoe Rogan1:44

      Would that be accurate?

   10. AHAndrew Huberman1:45

       Well, I think that it's fair to say that all our states of mind and body, and I say mind and body 'cause the nervous system, which is the brain, the spinal cord, and all that stuff, it connects to our body-

   11. JRJoe Rogan1:53

       Mm-hmm.

   12. AHAndrew Huberman1:53

       ... and our bo- body connects to our brains, so we can't really separate those. But states of mind, which include the stuff in our skull and the body, those essentially dictate our whole life experience, right? So whether or not we're feeling calm when we wanna be calm, whether or not we're feeling stressed when we'd rather be calm, whether or not we are feeling focused when we need to do work, or whether or not we're feeling creative when we wanna be creative, all of that stems from the nervous system. The other organs are, of the body are involved, but the nervous system, the brain and those connections is really what it's about. So if you see somebody who's in a state of depression, or you see somebody who's in a state of flow and creativity, you can be pretty sure that that's reflecting the activity of neurons in the brain.

   13. JRJoe Rogan2:31

       D- it's, um, the- the idea that the body and the brain are inseparable, um, most people who are physically active accept that and- and appreciate that and- and they know that this is probably true. But there's a lot of people that kind of wanna deny that and concentrate only on the brain. And particularly, like, there's psychiatrists that will prescribe medication before they'll prescribe exercise. And this is, uh, it's- it's a controversial subject. That's what I meant by saying, like, that you're, you are unable to control aspects of- of- of your brain, or aspects of th- the way you're viewing things or the way you feel about things. But...

   14. AHAndrew Huberman3:13

       Yeah, so I think, um, if we take a step back and we just kinda think about what the brain and nervous system does, and again, nervous system includes all of it, we can say the brain is special, right? This brain, there is something fundamentally important about the brain part because if somebody who, let's say, has a limb amputated, it doesn't fundamentally change who they are. It can change what they can do, but their, and there will be aspects of their personality and temperament that might shift, but who they are hasn't changed. Whereas if someone has a brain lesion or their brain is degenerating, that person is fundamentally different. So there is something special about the real estate in our skulls. But that said, the job of the brain is really to combine our experience of what's going on in our body with what's going on in our mind and to react and behave to things in an adaptive way. So, um, if I may, there's just sort of, like, if we take a step back and just think, there are basically five things that the nervous system's responsible for doing. First is sensation. Sensation is nonnegotiable. It's happening all the time. Sound waves are coming in. Your feet are in contact with your shoes or the floor. That's all happening, and you can't control it because we have sensors, things in our eye, our tongue, our nose, our skin, our ears, that take physical events in the universe, photons of light, sound waves, touch res-, you know, physical pressure on the skin, and it transforms that into one language, and the language is the language of electricity, of neurons. Now, perception is the next thing that the brain does, and perception is all about which sensations we are conscious of. So if I say, you know, the contact of your hands with the table, now you're conscious of it, that's just your perceptual window. It's like a spotlight, vtt, it just goes straight to your hands. So there's sensation, perception, and then there are these things we call emotions, which are brain/body states. They tend to make us either wanna get up and move or stay still. They tend to make us think, "This is a good p- place for me to be at mentally and physically," or, "I wanna shift this." And then there are thoughts, which we could discuss in detail if you want, which kind of arise spontaneously. They're kinda running in the background all the time like pop-up windows on a badly filtered internet connection. But we can also deliberately have a thought. Like, I can say, "That pad of paper to my right is yellow." I can decide that. In the same way, I can do the fifth thing, which is an action. So you've got sensations, perceptions, feelings/emotions, thoughts, and actions, and all five of those include the brain and the body. But how much brain and how much body-

   15. JRJoe Rogan5:38

       Mm-hmm.

   16. AHAndrew Huberman5:39

       ... is shifted by a kind of underlying, let's just think of it as a tide, like the level of the tide, and that's the autonomic nervous system. So if I'm suddenly stressed for whatever reason, my perceptual window is gonna shift. My eyes are literally gonna change their focus. My world will become more like portrait mode. I'll see you and everything else will become blurry. When I'm calm, I actually have panoramic vision. I can see everything around me. So I better... So...... my state, my internal state of alertness or sleepiness impacts all this. And in sleep, which is kinda the opposite extreme of stress, I'm not in relation to anything outside me. I'm not perceiving anything. I'm sensing things, it's non-negotiable. I'm not having real thoughts, but the thoughts are kind of disoriented in space and time. And behavior is done. You're lying down. You're sometimes paralyzed in sleep. So when I say states, it's really about this dynamic shift between what we're perceiving and how we're perceiving it. And we could go really in depth in this or not, but states of mind are fundamentally, I think, the m- to me anyway, are the most important aspect of trying to understand how the brain works. Because ultimately, if you wanna understand mental illness and mental health, if you want us to understand high performance, which is something my lab is really interested in, if you wanna understand any of that, you have to understand how these states of mind and body relate. Because the autonomic nervous system, which is strongly impacting these states, is in the body. It in- it is, the basis of it is connections between the brain and body.

   17. JRJoe Rogan7:05

       So you're analyzing people in stress states, and are you doing cognitive function tests on these people in stress states versus people in calm, placid states? Like, how are you, how are, how are you doing? Are you doing, like, similar tests or like-

   18. AHAndrew Huberman7:21

       Yeah, so there are two states that ... Like, we can take that whole, um, tangle of mess that I just, you know, uh, threw out on the table and, and simplify it and say, look, there are two states that I think if we could really crack, we could really understand the underlying neural mechanisms, and we could understand how people could get themselves into these two states, we would greatly improve human health and human performance, cognitively and physically.

   19. JRJoe Rogan7:42

       Okay.

   20. AHAndrew Huberman7:43

       And those two states are the, the state of sleep, so not just the importance of sleep, I know you had Matt on here, so, uh, you know, great sleep researcher. Not just that sleep is important, but how to get better at sleeping, how to access sleep. So if you ... A lot of people struggle with that. And the other state is clear, calm, focused. Those two states for my lab right now are the target states. W- you know, there's so many states, but if we can figure out how those work and how to put, allow people to put themselves into those states, I think w- it's my belief that we'll do humankind a great service.

   21. JRJoe Rogan8:17

       Okay, so when you say sleep, the state of sleep, like, what techniques are you talking about to achieve the state of sleep or, or do a, a better job of, of sleeping?

   22. AHAndrew Huberman8:27

       Yeah, so when people come into my laboratory, we essentially start pressure testing them from the moment they walk in the door. So we have a laboratory, we do some animal work, we work on mice, and we study states like fear and courage, and, um, we're interested in what leads to c- uh, winning in certain forms of competition between animals and these kinds of things, aggression, those kind of very primal states. We also have a human lab. So people come into the laboratory. We have an equivalent lab, essentially, to our mouse lab. People put on VR goggles. We wire them into a lot of gear that allows us to measure things like heart rate, breathing. We're measuring pupil size, eye tracking, and in some people, because they are neurosurgery patients, we have access to the brain. We drop electrodes down into the brain-

   23. JRJoe Rogan9:09

       Whoa.

   24. AHAndrew Huberman9:09

       ... record from the human amygdala.

   25. JRJoe Rogan9:11

       So you have a hole in their head?

   26. AHAndrew Huberman9:12

       They have a hole in their skull.

   27. JRJoe Rogan9:13

       Ooh.

   28. AHAndrew Huberman9:14

       The neurosurgeons actually, uh, which I am not, uh, tell us that, you know, it's no big deal, right, that, that, um, you know, that basically they look at the skull as kind of a, a poorly evolved device. They, they always tell me, you know, "You're much better off with a titanium plate there anyway. It's much stronger." So they don't have a problem putting a little hole in the skull. These are surg- these are patients that have other issues, right? So th-

   29. JRJoe Rogan9:34

       They, they're saying you're, you're better off with a titanium plate than skull bone?

   30. AHAndrew Huberman9:37

       Well, if you're concerned about concussion or anything-
2. 15:00 – 30:00

   Oh, I hate that…

   1. AHAndrew Huberman15:00

      the really annoying kinda-

   2. JRJoe Rogan15:01

      Oh, I hate that shit.

   3. AHAndrew Huberman15:02

      Yeah.

   4. JRJoe Rogan15:03

      That's a lot near where you live.

   5. AHAndrew Huberman15:05

      Yeah. Yeah. (laughs)

   6. JRJoe Rogan15:05

      That's a San Francisco tech thing.

   7. AHAndrew Huberman15:07

      I- is it?

   8. JRJoe Rogan15:08

      Yeah. It's like, what they're doing is letting you know that they're one of the tribe, okay, and, uh, we're all in this together-

   9. AHAndrew Huberman15:15

      Okay. (laughs)

   10. JRJoe Rogan15:15

       ... and I think like you do, and you can trust me 'cause I'm unoriginal.

   11. AHAndrew Huberman15:20

       Well, it might reflect a subtle brain damage. Um-

   12. JRJoe Rogan15:22

       You think?

   13. AHAndrew Huberman15:23

       I think the data show that it's a distortion of the, of the regular map.

   14. JRJoe Rogan15:27

       I think it's the same thing as a Southern accent.

   15. AHAndrew Huberman15:30

       Hmm.

   16. JRJoe Rogan15:30

       I think you're just fitting in with your environment 'cause I know people that have adopted that shit once they've gotten into the tech world. I'm like, "Hey, fuckface, you didn't used to talk like that."

   17. AHAndrew Huberman15:39

       Or the people that go to, to, you know, England and start speaking with a British accent.

   18. JRJoe Rogan15:42

       Oh, like Madonna.

   19. AHAndrew Huberman15:44

       Oh, did she do that?

   20. JRJoe Rogan15:44

       Yes, she did.

   21. AHAndrew Huberman15:45

       I don't follow pop culture carefully enough.

   22. JRJoe Rogan15:46

       Yes, she did.

   23. AHAndrew Huberman15:47

       Mm-hmm.

   24. JRJoe Rogan15:48

       Yeah, I'm moving to Texas. I'm gonna start saying y'all two weeks in. I'm giving myself two weeks.

   25. AHAndrew Huberman15:52

       Interesting.

   26. JRJoe Rogan15:52

       I'm gonna try out y'all.

   27. AHAndrew Huberman15:53

       Interesting. Well, some of this stuff is learned...

   28. JRJoe Rogan15:55

       (laughs)

   29. AHAndrew Huberman15:55

       Are you moving?

   30. JRJoe Rogan15:56

       Yes, yes.
3. 30:00 – 45:00

   Mm-hmm. …

   1. AHAndrew Huberman30:00

      do a cognitive task, which is a duration-path-outcome task. And then we put them into these states of pseudo sleep, and then we evaluate their ability to perform in these tasks again, and we, what we found is interesting. What we found is that they're, first of all, these sleep-like states can be very restorative. I imagine that, um, uh, you mentioned the float tank earlier-

   2. JRJoe Rogan30:20

      Mm-hmm.

   3. AHAndrew Huberman30:20

      ... like maybe float tanks, and we can talk about why the float tank would put you into a s- pseudo sleep-like state. Certain substances put us into sleep-like states. Naps and just letting the mind drift can put us into sleep-like states, and those sleep-like states do two things that are very powerful. One is they reset our ability to do these very taxing, demanding duration-path-outcome kinda brain functions. As well, they allow people to access sleep more easily. You know, so we want people to be able to get into deep sleep because nothing is a, as restorative as deep sleep because in deep sleep, and in the states that I'm talking about, these rela- deeply relaxed states, duration-path-outcome analyses are impossible.And I think being able to toggle back and forth between these states is really where high performance emerges. So, for the very stressed human being who's suffering from generalized anxiety, we study those types of patients. But, in addition, for people who are doing well in life but are high performers, so we do some work with elite military, with some athletes. We've had David Goggins out to the lab. Um, we'll talk about it.

   4. JRJoe Rogan31:25

      You can't use him.

   5. AHAndrew Huberman31:26

      You can't use him.

   6. JRJoe Rogan31:27

      Just, just to break-

   7. AHAndrew Huberman31:27

      So he's a, he's an extreme outlier, right?

   8. JRJoe Rogan31:29

      It's too... He's too far on the outside.

   9. AHAndrew Huberman31:31

      So, what's remarkable about him is he has figured out how to tap into dura-... He can force himself into duration path outcome.

   10. JRJoe Rogan31:38

       Mm-hmm.

   11. AHAndrew Huberman31:39

       Now, I don't know his state while he's running, if he's relaxed, if he's aggro the whole time. I don't know. But he is a bit of a mutant in the sense that... But he's created, in his words-

   12. JRJoe Rogan31:48

       Yes.

   13. AHAndrew Huberman31:48

       ... he's crea-

   14. JRJoe Rogan31:48

       He's turned himself into that mutant.

   15. AHAndrew Huberman31:49

       He's figured it out.

   16. JRJoe Rogan31:50

       Yeah.

   17. AHAndrew Huberman31:50

       He's figured it out. He was not born that way.

   18. JRJoe Rogan31:52

       No.

   19. AHAndrew Huberman31:52

       We know that. And-

   20. JRJoe Rogan31:53

       Well, that's the most special thing about him, really, is that... And also, that he's willing to share that he was, at one point in time, a large, fat, lazy guy, you know, and then he became this savage that you see.

   21. AHAndrew Huberman32:06

       Yeah.

   22. JRJoe Rogan32:06

       He d- he forced his mind into that particular state.

   23. AHAndrew Huberman32:09

       Well, and the states that will allow people to go there often are fear states, anxiety states, things that are extremely high pressure because the, the adult brain especially doesn't wanna change. You know, we're basically born, we get wired up by our experience, we get wired up by what we're exposed to. Brain plasticity is very passive for the first 25 years of life. You know, I, um... If you're a child, y- the things you hear and see and do are shaping you, right?

   24. JRJoe Rogan32:36

       Mm-hmm.

   25. AHAndrew Huberman32:36

       Kids come home saying things they've never even heard before. It's amazing.

   26. JRJoe Rogan32:39

       Right.

   27. AHAndrew Huberman32:40

       There's... And as an adult, you have to crack into that neural circuitry and reshape it. And-

   28. JRJoe Rogan32:44

       Yeah, but why is that? What, what is it about adults? Because I have my own theory, and this is, uh, just a, a martial arts-based theory. Young kids learn so fast. They learn so fast. But I always feel like it's 'cause they don't have jobs. They don't have a family to take care of. They don't have a girlfriend who's on their back. They don't have bills and the IRS breathing down their neck. They don't have anything, so they can just think about it and their mind... Like, if, if they have a hard drive, right, and they're, they have a one-terabyte hard drive, they got, like, 100 gigs full. They have all this space. You could fill that space up with technique and movement and, and it becomes their whole life 'cause it's thrilling, and it's exciting to learn, and their body heals quicker so they can, they can force themselves into situations. With adults, it's extremely difficult to find the bandwidth, to find the amount of time to really completely focus on something because you have so many distractions.

   29. AHAndrew Huberman33:40

       Yeah. Well, the-

   30. JRJoe Rogan33:40

       Does that make sense, that...
4. 45:00 – 1:00:00

   He is every bit…

   1. JRJoe Rogan45:00

   2. AHAndrew Huberman45:00

      He is every bit as intense as that public persona.

   3. JRJoe Rogan45:02

      Yeah.

   4. AHAndrew Huberman45:03

      He, when, when he came out to the lab, it was kind of interesting 'cause we had just built this great white shark experience, and I'd gone down to Mexico. We had dealt with these sharks, and my friend, Michael Muller, he's got this whole thing where we could leave the cages, and we did all this, and it was, it was fun and crazy and probably a little stupid, frankly. But we bring it back, we build this VR stimulus, and he and a couple other team guys came in and, you know, so I'm explaining what we're doing, and we show the shark thing on the screen, and, and he goes, "I don't like sharks." And I'm thinking-

   5. JRJoe Rogan45:31

      (laughs)

   6. AHAndrew Huberman45:31

      ... "Okay, well..." So we'll give him something else. And then we go through the whole thing, and I'm explaining how we wire people in, and we record from the brain, and I said, "All right, so, um, who would like to try the sharks?" David. "I'll go." Like, just he, he just-

   7. JRJoe Rogan45:43

      (laughs)

   8. AHAndrew Huberman45:43

      ... wanted to be first. And I realized, I was like, "Okay." And he wasn't showboating. That's just the way he is.

   9. JRJoe Rogan45:48

      Yeah.

   10. AHAndrew Huberman45:48

       It's just if there's something that creates that sense of agitation, that's a signal for him to go forward.

   11. JRJoe Rogan45:53

       Do you know what he does in the summers?

   12. AHAndrew Huberman45:54

       I don't.

   13. JRJoe Rogan45:55

       He goes to Montana to fight forest fires.

   14. AHAndrew Huberman45:57

       Does he really?

   15. JRJoe Rogan45:58

       Yeah, he doesn't even make any money.

   16. AHAndrew Huberman45:59

       Amazing.

   17. JRJoe Rogan46:00

       He just goes there. He's rich, and he gets fucking dropped off in Montana in the woods, camps out there, and fights forest fires with a bunch of other savages, and he does it to keep his brain hard.

   18. AHAndrew Huberman46:13

       That's fantastic.

   19. JRJoe Rogan46:14

       That's, he's the real deal. (laughs)

   20. AHAndrew Huberman46:15

       He is the real deal.

   21. JRJoe Rogan46:16

       Can you imagine? You got millions of dollars in the bank, and you're like, "I'm gonna go fight forest fires all summer-

   22. AHAndrew Huberman46:21

       Yeah.

   23. JRJoe Rogan46:22

       ... just to stay hard." (laughs)

   24. AHAndrew Huberman46:24

       (laughs) Yeah. Maybe I woulda done that when I was-

   25. JRJoe Rogan46:26

       (laughs)

   26. AHAndrew Huberman46:26

       ... a teenager to impress girls, but I don't, I don't think-

   27. JRJoe Rogan46:28

       Bro, he's 40.

   28. AHAndrew Huberman46:29

       He's doing it for him.

   29. JRJoe Rogan46:30

       He doesn't give a fuck.

   30. AHAndrew Huberman46:31

       Well, that's the thing is I think-
5. 1:00:00 – 1:12:34

   Mm-hmm. …

   1. AHAndrew Huberman1:00:00

      what's going on in the body-

   2. JRJoe Rogan1:00:01

      Mm-hmm.

   3. AHAndrew Huberman1:00:01

      ... it's the command center, except what signals it receives back from the body. And so if the visualization is intense, the brain isn't completely convinced, but it's pretty convinced that you're actually experiencing that thing and rehearsing it. It's a little bit of your own internally driven virtual reality-

   4. JRJoe Rogan1:00:17

      Mm.

   5. AHAndrew Huberman1:00:17

      ... is what you're doing.

   6. JRJoe Rogan1:00:17

      Right.

   7. AHAndrew Huberman1:00:18

      And so you're cre- and so I think mental training is powerful, but there's no replacement for repetition.

   8. JRJoe Rogan1:00:25

      So, what about y- obviously, physical training has its limitations in your, your body's ability to keep doing the movements. You're gonna get tired-

   9. AHAndrew Huberman1:00:34

      Sure.

   10. JRJoe Rogan1:00:35

       ... and, and you're gonna break down. Would it be more beneficial to get more rest or would it be more beneficial to get rest but also spend a significant amount of time visualizing?

   11. AHAndrew Huberman1:00:51

       We haven't looked at visualization specifically. The one thing that is very close to visualization which is very powerful based on neuroimaging studies, so legitimate science I should m- say, is hypnosis.

   12. JRJoe Rogan1:01:03

       Mm.

   13. AHAndrew Huberman1:01:03

       Hypnosis is real- a really unique state, and this is of mind and body. The-

   14. JRJoe Rogan1:01:08

       Have you been hypnotized?

   15. AHAndrew Huberman1:01:09

       Many times.

   16. JRJoe Rogan1:01:10

       Oh.

   17. AHAndrew Huberman1:01:10

       Yeah. And I'm very interested in hypnosis because of the work with Spiegel and the incredible, you know, success that he's had with pain management, smoking cessation, these kinds of things. Hypnosis is a state of deep relaxation not unlike sleep, but also deep focus. So it's very unlike any other state of mind. You're either usually asleep or you're focused, or somewhere in between, kinda drifting back and forth in between. But hypnosis is a deliberate...... narrowing of context, so the person or the audio script is bringing you into a state of mind that's centered around particular types of events, but you're in deep rest. And the idea is that you're taking that plasticity process of focus and urgency and then rest, and you're combining them into a single session. And so hypnosis and deep hypnotic states are the, are the place where neuroplasticity can be accelerated.

   18. JRJoe Rogan1:02:01

       Mm. So when you say hypnosis, what kind of sessions are you talking about and how often? Like, say if you're an athlete, like let's, let's say maybe you're a basketball player and you wanna get better at basketball. You train as much as you possibly can, but there's limitations to that. You sleep as much as you possibly can. How often would you recommend someone doing some sort of a hypnosis session to try to improve their skills?

   19. AHAndrew Huberman1:02:27

       Probably one, well, it depends on how intense their training is. For some of the people I'm doing work with in, in athletics and in the military community, uh, you might, they have extremely demanding lives, right?

   20. JRJoe Rogan1:02:39

       Mm-hmm.

   21. AHAndrew Huberman1:02:39

       And certainly for the military folks, it's, you know, high risk, high consequence, you know, even when they're in tr- non-de- non-deployment. So under those conditions, maybe every day, 30.

   22. JRJoe Rogan1:02:49

       Hypnosis every day?

   23. AHAndrew Huberman1:02:50

       Yeah, 30 to 45 minutes.

   24. JRJoe Rogan1:02:51

       Wow.

   25. AHAndrew Huberman1:02:51

       As a replacement for some other standard form of nap or meditation. I mean, not necessarily lumped on top of that.

   26. JRJoe Rogan1:02:57

       So the standard eight-hour sleep, and then on top of that some sort of meditation for like 30 minutes? Like, what would-

   27. AHAndrew Huberman1:03:05

       Yeah. There's a, um, a process of doing this. We have a script, uh, that we use in our lab, I'd be happy to send it to you, that takes you into these deep, uh, medi- sort of relaxation states. They're sort of meditative. Some people can self-hypnose by induce- you know, some people call them intentions, but I don't like that 'cause it sounds a little bit too much like a uncomfortable set of yoga classes I've taken-

   28. JRJoe Rogan1:03:24

       (laughs)

   29. AHAndrew Huberman1:03:24

       ... where they start with the whole-

   30. JRJoe Rogan1:03:25

       Yeah.

Episode duration: 2:44:45