Joe Rogan Experience #1513 - Andrew Huberman

1. 0:00 – 3:13

   Huberman’s neuroscience mission: vision repair and controlling mental states

   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...

2. 3:13 – 7:05

   A practical model of the nervous system: sensation → perception → emotion → thought → action

   1. 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-

   2. JRJoe Rogan5:38

      Mm-hmm.

   3. 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.

3. 7:05 – 10:27

   Inside Huberman’s lab: VR stress tests, physiological tracking, and human amygdala recordings

   1. 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-

   2. 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.

   3. JRJoe Rogan7:42

      Okay.

   4. 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.

   5. 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?

   6. 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-

   7. JRJoe Rogan9:09

      Whoa.

   8. AHAndrew Huberman9:09

      ... record from the human amygdala.

   9. JRJoe Rogan9:11

      So you have a hole in their head?

   10. AHAndrew Huberman9:12

       They have a hole in their skull.

   11. JRJoe Rogan9:13

       Ooh.

   12. 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-

   13. JRJoe Rogan9:34

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

   14. AHAndrew Huberman9:37

       Well, if you're concerned about concussion or anything-

   15. JRJoe Rogan9:39

       Mm-hmm.

   16. AHAndrew Huberman9:39

       ... you know, if you really wanna protect the brain, you would, you know, you could build a better device to protect the brain.

   17. JRJoe Rogan9:44

       But isn't ... but isn't the real brain damage comes from the brain slamming against the inside wall of the skull?

   18. AHAndrew Huberman9:52

       Yeah, and they-

   19. JRJoe Rogan9:52

       How is that gonna be better with titanium?

   20. AHAndrew Huberman9:54

       Yeah, I mean, this is neurosurgeons, and they're, you know, they're in a-

   21. JRJoe Rogan9:56

       Well, if there's some foam inside the ...

   22. AHAndrew Huberman9:58

       Yeah, there are, um, synthetic materials that, you know, they use to protect against sloshing around.

   23. JRJoe Rogan10:03

       Do they ... How much, how far do they go with this? Do they ever, like, remove the top of someone's head and replace it with titanium?

   24. AHAndrew Huberman10:09

       Yeah, large portions, large windows.

   25. JRJoe Rogan10:11

       How much?

   26. AHAndrew Huberman10:11

       Um, I've seen windows in the skull that are, you know, the size of a, of an iPhone.

   27. JRJoe Rogan10:15

       What?

   28. AHAndrew Huberman10:15

       Yeah, sure. You don't flip it open?

   29. JRJoe Rogan10:17

       Oh, no.

   30. AHAndrew Huberman10:17

       No, they ... No, but now, keep in mind that these are-
4. 10:27 – 13:36

   Neuralink, brain–machine interfaces, and “silent” communication

   1. AHAndrew Huberman10:27

      Well, you know, a, a guy who used to work in my lab, who's now at Ner- mm, who's now at Neuralink, a neurosurgeon-

   2. JRJoe Rogan10:31

      Oh, one of those guys.

   3. AHAndrew Huberman10:33

      ... um, one of those guys.

   4. JRJoe Rogan10:33

      Ready to fucking bring on the AI hyper world.

   5. AHAndrew Huberman10:35

      They, uh-

   6. JRJoe Rogan10:36

      I'm scared.

   7. AHAndrew Huberman10:37

      Uh, among other things, I mean, I think that, well, I always say, you know, all of human evolution is based on human neuroplasticity, the ability to learn and acquire new functions in the nervous system or where our biology kinda cliffs off and can't support us in what we wanna do, we build technology.

   8. JRJoe Rogan10:52

      Right, and this is the idea that innovation steps in and says, "I've got an idea to accelerate this process." And then you get Captain Super Genius, who thinks it's no big deal to cut giant holes in the top of your head and stick these wires in there.

   9. AHAndrew Huberman11:06

      I mean, I think there's that version of it. Um, and I think what ... I haven't spoken to them directly, but, um, except this one individual there, but, you know, first of all, they're not ... I don't think they're thinking about large windows in the skull unless there's a clinical need.

   10. JRJoe Rogan11:18

       No. Elon said it's about a quarter.

   11. AHAndrew Huberman11:20

       They're talking about behind the ear. Behind the ear with a route-

   12. JRJoe Rogan11:22

       Yeah.

   13. AHAndrew Huberman11:22

       ... in through the bone there. And the other thing is that I think it's very likely that the first 10 years of that work will be clinical in nature, movement disorders, Parkinson's-

   14. JRJoe Rogan11:32

       Yes. Yeah.

   15. AHAndrew Huberman11:32

       ... you know. And of course, because I said that, they'll probably beat that by, you know, five years.

   16. JRJoe Rogan11:36

       Well, the quote that made me uncomfortable was when Elon told me, "You're not gonna have to talk to communicate anymore."

   17. AHAndrew Huberman11:42

       Mm-hmm.

   18. JRJoe Rogan11:42

       I was like, "Oh, Jesus Christ, where are we going with this?"

   19. AHAndrew Huberman11:45

       Well, this is interesting because, um ... So I have a good friend who's a neurosurgeon at UCSF. We've known each other, each other since we were little kids, since we were nine. His name is Eddie Chang, and he's kind of the world expert. He's a neurosurgeon, but he's also the world expert in speech and language. And what he's been doing is decoding, essentially figuring out what neural signals come out of the brain that allow us to speak in a certain way. So let's say I, I wanted to build a device that would allow you to speak eight languages tomorrow that you don't know today.

   20. JRJoe Rogan12:11

       Mm-hmm.

   21. AHAndrew Huberman12:12

       The reflexive idea is, or, that people like Eddie and people like me and maybe the, the Neuralink folks are gonna go in and build chips that are gonna stimulate the hippocampus, and you're gonna learn faster and do all that. But there's a whole other version of this, and it gets right back to this issue of brain and body that we were talking about before.Now, speech is a brain thing. You think about what you wanna say, maybe for a joke or here, and it- and it's in your head, but it's transformed, meaning those nerve signals go in the form of electricity to the pharynx and larynx, and you say things like, "Hello, my name is," you know-

   22. JRJoe Rogan12:44

       Right.

   23. AHAndrew Huberman12:44

       ... in my case, Andrew, right? That transformation is happening at the muscle. So in theory, if I know that in English, right, and I know the nerve signals that come out of that area of, of cortex, that speech area, that say, "Hello, my name is Andrew," well, I can take those, look at how it controls the pharynx and larynx, and insert maybe a little box. Maybe I don't even have to put it under the skin. Maybe it's a device that I hold. So that when I say, "Hello, my name is Andrew," but I dial it to Mandarin or French, I'll just say, and I can't do this 'cause I don't speak Mandarin or French-

   24. JRJoe Rogan13:16

       Mm-hmm.

   25. AHAndrew Huberman13:16

       ... "Hello, my name is Andrew," I'll think that, say it in English in my head, but my pharynx and larynx will say it in Mandarin or French.

   26. JRJoe Rogan13:22

       But isn't the problem with the way language is structured in, in different languages? Like, the- just, it wouldn't, and you've, I'm sure you've read translations from, like, Russian to English-

   27. AHAndrew Huberman13:32

       Sure.

   28. JRJoe Rogan13:33

       ... and it's really weird.

   29. AHAndrew Huberman13:34

       Very different.

   30. JRJoe Rogan13:34

       Or English to Russian is even weirder sometimes.

5. 13:36 – 24:58

   Speech maps, intonation, and the upspeak detour (plus what plasticity really means)

   1. AHAndrew Huberman13:36

      Right. So this is really Eddie's work, but, um, because we're such good friends, we talk about this a lot. One of the fundamental discoveries that he's made, and I should just mention, all these neurosurgery patients, they have epilepsy or something else. There's a reason for opening up the skull and going in there.

   2. JRJoe Rogan13:48

      Mm-hmm.

   3. AHAndrew Huberman13:48

      They're not, we're not just-

   4. JRJoe Rogan13:49

      Just curious.

   5. AHAndrew Huberman13:50

      There was a time a couple decades ago when you could do this kinda stuff, and there's some very interesting experiments that came outta that just because. You could decide to study rage in humans and go in there and start probin' around. Um, but-

   6. JRJoe Rogan14:01

      Lobotomies.

   7. AHAndrew Huberman14:01

      Lobotomies. Yeah. There's a, obviously a really interesting and famous and kinda sad history around that-

   8. JRJoe Rogan14:07

      Mm-hmm.

   9. AHAndrew Huberman14:07

      ... but also some interesting data came out of it. So, you know, a patient will come in, they'll do this, they'll record these areas, and what, what he's found, it's so interesting because if I, let's just say with that same statement, "Hello, my name is Andrew," there's a neuron in my cortex that responds when I say that and when I wanna say that. But if I just change it slightly and I say, "Hello? My name is Andrew?" I make it a question, there's a neuron right next door that encodes that. Turns out there's a map of inflection. So regardless of language, there's a map of, it's not quite meaning, but there's a map of intonation and inflection in the brain. So in theory, because that map is so regular across cultures, he's looked now in Chi- in Chinese-speaking people, in English-speaking people, and people who have a second language. He's even to- has some interesting data about people who have upspeak, the really annoying kinda-

   10. JRJoe Rogan15:01

       Oh, I hate that shit.

   11. AHAndrew Huberman15:02

       Yeah.

   12. JRJoe Rogan15:03

       That's a lot near where you live.

   13. AHAndrew Huberman15:05

       Yeah. Yeah. (laughs)

   14. JRJoe Rogan15:05

       That's a San Francisco tech thing.

   15. AHAndrew Huberman15:07

       I- is it?

   16. 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-

   17. AHAndrew Huberman15:15

       Okay. (laughs)

   18. JRJoe Rogan15:15

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

   19. AHAndrew Huberman15:20

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

   20. JRJoe Rogan15:22

       You think?

   21. AHAndrew Huberman15:23

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

   22. JRJoe Rogan15:27

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

   23. AHAndrew Huberman15:30

       Hmm.

   24. 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."

   25. AHAndrew Huberman15:39

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

   26. JRJoe Rogan15:42

       Oh, like Madonna.

   27. AHAndrew Huberman15:44

       Oh, did she do that?

   28. JRJoe Rogan15:44

       Yes, she did.

   29. AHAndrew Huberman15:45

       I don't follow pop culture carefully enough.

   30. JRJoe Rogan15:46

       Yes, she did.
6. 24:58 – 34:10

   Sleep and the ‘duration–path–outcome’ problem: why rest unlocks learning

   1. AHAndrew Huberman24:58

      So-Sleep and stress make a good, uh, sort of counter-examples. So, but if we're just gonna focus on sleep, first of all, sleep is the only time that you're in complete relation to only one thing, and that's yourself. It's also a time in which there's a core operation of the brain in wakefulness that's especially apparent in stress, but it's happening all the time, where your brain is trying to do two things in wakefulness, and I realize we're talking about sleep, but-

   2. JRJoe Rogan25:24

      Mm-hmm.

   3. AHAndrew Huberman25:26

      Most of what your brain is trying to do is pass things off to reflexive behavior, so I don't have to think about picking up water. I don't have to think about walking down the hall. I just do it. I just breathe. I just move. I eat. I'm not conscious of it. There's another mental operation which is very demanding but extremely important, and this is encompassing a lot of different aspects of neural circuitry and function, but the brain wants to figure out duration, path, and outcome. How long something gonna last? What's the path to do it? And how's it gonna work out? Those are the two things that the brain is mainly managing during waking states, and of course, it's keeping your heart rate going and your breathing going, your digesting going, but that's all running in the background. When you go to sleep, your perception of space and time, not outer space unless that's what you're thinking about, but space and time becomes untethered. It becomes very fluid. So when you lie down to go to sleep at night and you're drowsy, you stop doing these duration-path-outcome analyses, and if you have trouble sleeping, it's because you're still doing, "What's the duration? What's the path? What's the outcome?" Your brain's looping in that. So when you go into sleep, it's the one time in which the brain can untether space and time. Like if this were a dream, you know, your dog could float in here and sit down on the table and then morph into somebody that you know from long ago, and we'd be okay with that because it's a dream. So that period of six to eight or 10 hours, whatever you need, is essential for resetting neural circuits in the brain, there's some chemical events too, but neural circuits, so that during wakefulness, you can do duration-path-outcome, like learning a new martial art, um, move.

   4. JRJoe Rogan27:07

      So it's, the untethered aspect of it is crucial?

   5. AHAndrew Huberman27:11

      It's absolutely crucial.

   6. JRJoe Rogan27:12

      And what, how do we know this?

   7. AHAndrew Huberman27:13

      We know this, so when people come into my lab, we study these two states. We put them into VR goggles, and we deliver very real, not cartoons and animation, but very real 360 video of things like claustrophobia if you're claustrophobic, diving with great white sharks if you don't like sharks, spiders crawling up you. We find your pain point.

   8. JRJoe Rogan27:32

      Mm-hmm.

   9. AHAndrew Huberman27:33

      We bring you into a state of stress, and we find in everybody, and this is not necessarily a new phenomenon, that your pupils dilate. When your pupils dilate, the optics of your world changes, and you are looking at the visual world, which is space, physical space, and you start slicing time differently. If you've ever been stressed, it feels like things are taking forever.

   10. JRJoe Rogan27:55

       Mm-hmm.

   11. AHAndrew Huberman27:56

       That's because your body is sending your brain more signals per unit time. Str- it's saying, like, "My body's active. My body's active. My body's active. My body's active." Think about when you're drowsy. Your body is sending fewer signals to the brain per unit time, and what ends up happening is the brain uses physical space and use these signals from the body, we know this from neural recordings, to start creating a space-time relationship. The space-time relationship really says, let's just take the jujitsu example, even though I've never done jujitsu. You're trying to figure out, "Where do I place my hand? Where's my grip? How do I move my leverage? What am I gonna do?" When you're trying to sequence things, it's duration-path-outcome. In sleep, the forebrain essentially shuts off. There's some other things that happen too, of course, and the brain starts to f- drift and idle into these states that, where duration-path-and-outcome analyses become impossible. We also put people into deeply relaxed states. So we're studying three different ways to do that. One is hypnosis, which is not like, you know, charm hypnosis, stage hypnosis, but medical hypnosis. My colleague, David Spiegel, in the Department of Psychiatry is kind of world expert in hypnosis for pain management, et cetera, trauma. You can put people into hypnotic states, which are very sleep-like. They're a little different than sleep, but they're like a shallow stage of sleep. We also use particular patterns of breathing or respiration to bring people into states that are sort of like sleep. It's like a very shallow level of sleep, but they're completely immobile, or in some cases, we've, we've studied things like more traditional forms of meditation, although that's the less, less the focus these days. What we find is that the brain can go into states where duration-path-and-outcome, or, you know, cognitive processing, physical activity is impossible, and the brain starts to show wave-like activity that's very similar to sleep. And what I didn't tell you is that we also have people do a cognitive task. So while they're in a very stressful environment, like with heights, or they're being bombarded with, you know, snake experience, or, or we have a bunch of different experiences, they're required to 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-

   12. JRJoe Rogan30:20

       Mm-hmm.

   13. 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.

   14. JRJoe Rogan31:25

       You can't use him.

   15. AHAndrew Huberman31:26

       You can't use him.

   16. JRJoe Rogan31:27

       Just, just to break-

   17. AHAndrew Huberman31:27

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

   18. JRJoe Rogan31:29

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

   19. 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.

   20. JRJoe Rogan31:38

       Mm-hmm.

   21. 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-

   22. JRJoe Rogan31:48

       Yes.

   23. AHAndrew Huberman31:48

       ... he's crea-

   24. JRJoe Rogan31:48

       He's turned himself into that mutant.

   25. AHAndrew Huberman31:49

       He's figured it out.

   26. JRJoe Rogan31:50

       Yeah.

   27. AHAndrew Huberman31:50

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

   28. JRJoe Rogan31:52

       No.

   29. AHAndrew Huberman31:52

       We know that. And-

   30. 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.
7. 34:10 – 46:54

   Engineering adult learning: adrenaline + acetylcholine to trigger plasticity, then deep rest to cement it

   1. JRJoe Rogan34:10

      So, if you're an adult, say if you're a 35-year-old man with a family or a 35-year-old woman with a family and a job, and you wanna learn a new skill, what is the best way to force your brain to accept these new patterns and learn this quickly?

   2. AHAndrew Huberman34:28

      By attacking two separate parts of a process. Neural plasticity is not an event, it's a process, and it has two parts. The first one is, if you wanna learn and change your brain as an adult, there has to be a high level of focus and engagement. There's absolutely no way around this because... So, focus and intensity and that kind of... the, the Goggins phenotype, right? I think Goggins is now a noun, a verb, and a pronoun, right? It's like-

   3. JRJoe Rogan34:52

      (laughs)

   4. AHAndrew Huberman34:52

      ... it's amazing. So, if you're gonna Goggins this process, what you need to do is you need to, regardless of how agitated you feel, you have to lean in and focus extremely hard. Now, the reason for that is that there's a neurochemical, norepinephrine, also called adrenaline, same thing, that's released in the brain and body. Most people back off at that point because they feel this agitation. But we have to remember that that noradrenaline was designed to get us into movement. That's the purpose of noradrenaline, to take us out of stillness and into movement. And then the other thing we have to do is we have to take that elevated level of alertness and we have to focus it. And there's a second neuromodulator called acetylcholine, which is secreted from this little structure in the base of the forebrain when we visually focus on something, or in the case of maybe if you're doing auditory learning, when you focus with your auditory attention.

   5. JRJoe Rogan35:42

      Can I pause you there for a second?

   6. AHAndrew Huberman35:43

      Yeah.

   7. JRJoe Rogan35:44

      So, acetylcholine you could take in a supplement, and norepinephrine you can actually get from, uh, float- uh, uh, ice tanks. Like, you can get it from, uh, cryo chambers. You can get it from cryotherapy. So, using those strategies of taking... Like, acetylcholine is actually in Alpha Brain-

   8. AHAndrew Huberman36:01

      Mm-hmm.

   9. JRJoe Rogan36:01

      ... one of the supplements my company sells. When you take that along with float tanks and doing... or excuse me, um, uh, cryo chambers and do some intense exercise or whatever you're trying to get good at with intense focus, couldn't those things accelerate that process?

   10. AHAndrew Huberman36:20

       Almost certainly increases the plasticity, the rate of plasticity.

   11. JRJoe Rogan36:23

       So, you would recommend if someone was trying to get better at something, like, a cryo chamber would actually accelerate the process of learning?

   12. AHAndrew Huberman36:31

       Yeah. So, uh, yes.

   13. JRJoe Rogan36:33

       Wow.

   14. AHAndrew Huberman36:34

       So, so the reason for that though... But you don't necessarily need a, a cryo chamber. What you need are... So, we have these requirements. We need urgency and focus-

   15. JRJoe Rogan36:41

       Mm-hmm.

   16. AHAndrew Huberman36:41

       ... to trigger plasticity.

   17. JRJoe Rogan36:42

       Right.

   18. AHAndrew Huberman36:42

       That's one part of the process. I haven't, uh, mentioned the second pro- part yet. Neural plasticity is triggered when urgency and focus combine. Acetylcholine is released. For the aficionados out there, it's called the nucleus basalis, but that doesn't matter. There's a little compartment of neurons in the base of your forebrain that doesn't like to release acetylcholine on a regular basis. It's, uh-

   19. JRJoe Rogan37:02

       It's greedy.

   20. AHAndrew Huberman37:02

       It's greedy, and it doesn't wanna use that. With your child, it'll rain your brain with acetylcholine. But as an adult, 30, 40 up to 80-

   21. JRJoe Rogan37:10

       Why is that?

   22. AHAndrew Huberman37:11

       ... because they, you know, Mother Nature designed us to learn what we need to learn and then do that, reproduce, and die. I mean, not to be, you know-

   23. JRJoe Rogan37:19

       How rude.

   24. AHAndrew Huberman37:19

       ... dark about it, but I always say, evolution is not about us, it's about the offspring.

   25. JRJoe Rogan37:23

       Yes.

   26. AHAndrew Huberman37:23

       Right? Like, 100%, you know, it's-

   27. JRJoe Rogan37:25

       And then, it's not even about them, it's about their offspring.

   28. AHAndrew Huberman37:27

       Exactly.

   29. JRJoe Rogan37:27

       It never ends.

   30. AHAndrew Huberman37:28

       We are being manipulated from the inside.
8. 46:54 – 1:00:51

   Dopamine as ‘on the right path’: play, humor, quitting thresholds, and addiction pitfalls

   1. AHAndrew Huberman46:54

      You know, how can you leverage the nervous system to build better, longer-lasting warriors? It's a really interesting question. And you could do that with brain-machine interface. You could do that with, um, you can imagine doing that with drugs or with, you know, supplementation or nutrition, all of that. But the, since the nervous system sits at the foundation of any of those, we started to think about this problem, and there's actually another element to it, which is the reward pathways involving dopamine. So you asked about kids, like, why they can learn all day long.

   2. JRJoe Rogan47:24

      Mm.

   3. AHAndrew Huberman47:24

      So their brain is very different, but it still needs some degree of focus, and they still need to get their sleep. They still have to obey those two rules of this process. But they engage in something else which is really powerful, which is play. A lot of their learning is through playful exchange, especially with the little kids, like in kindergarten and nursery school, and then as they get older, the social dynamics can be kinda harsh, but they can also be really pleasureful and fun. So the molecule dopamine is a really misunderstood molecule. We all make it from a location in the back of our brain, and people think of it as, like, reward. Like, "Oh, I've got a bunch of money," or "I, you know-

   4. JRJoe Rogan48:02

      (laughs)

   5. AHAndrew Huberman48:02

      ... did a great performance." Dopamine is responsible for that feeling of feeling great, but in addition, dopamine is what's released any time an animal or human thinks it's on the right path.

   6. JRJoe Rogan48:14

      Hmm.

   7. AHAndrew Huberman48:14

      And that's very subjective. So this is not, and I wanna be really clear that this is not positive thinking or, you know, the secret or telling yourself that you're performing well even when you're not.

   8. JRJoe Rogan48:25

      Right, like if you are a rioter, and you break into a courthouse but you feel like you're on the right path, you're gonna get a release of dopamine.

   9. AHAndrew Huberman48:32

      Heavy release of dopamine.

   10. JRJoe Rogan48:32

       Even if you're, yeah, even if you're committing a crime and you really probably shouldn't be doing that.

   11. AHAndrew Huberman48:37

       Yeah. Mother Nature built these systems, adrenaline, acetylcholine, dopamine, to be very generic in terms of what can activate them-

   12. JRJoe Rogan48:43

       Mm.

   13. AHAndrew Huberman48:43

       ... on purpose. You know, cocaine will cause a tremendous release of dopamine, so will methamphetamine. The problem is it sets a focus on just getting more of that thing.

   14. JRJoe Rogan48:52

       Right.

   15. AHAndrew Huberman48:53

       So dopamine is evoked through play. It's evoked through humor. Right? If you've ever just been working like mad or you see this in, you know, team guys know this really well, they, you know, 'cause they tell me. The- you can be in the worst situation, and somebody will crack a joke, and all of a sudden, it's like you have energy.

   16. JRJoe Rogan49:13

       Mm-hmm.

   17. AHAndrew Huberman49:13

       Now, that couldn't have been glycogen. That wasn't 'cause you're ketogenic. It wasn't 'cause you're whatever. That's neural energy.

   18. JRJoe Rogan49:19

       Mm.

   19. AHAndrew Huberman49:20

       And that neural energy is dopamine.

   20. JRJoe Rogan49:22

       Is that what happens when you hear a great song and you get pumped up?

   21. AHAndrew Huberman49:26

       That's right.

   22. JRJoe Rogan49:26

       Is that the same thing?

   23. AHAndrew Huberman49:26

       Absolutely.

   24. JRJoe Rogan49:27

       Mm.

   25. AHAndrew Huberman49:28

       And the reason dopamine is so powerful in this process of neural plasticity is that dopamine has the ability to buffer.... noradrenaline. So that stress that you feel when you're in effort, it's very hard for most people to keep that going. But when you get a sh- a, and when I say a shot, I mean an internal release of dopamine s- through humor or through the sense that you're on the right path. Let's take the fight example, where it's stressful and you're getting beaten down. All of a sudden, you land one or you do something properly and the other guy starts to timber a little bit or shuffle a little bit, you gain a chemical advantage.

   26. JRJoe Rogan50:01

       Mm.

   27. AHAndrew Huberman50:01

       And it comes in two forms. One is it triggers marking of the synapses that likely will change later. We rarely forget the events associated with dopamine for that reason, 'cause they signal, "Oh, whatever's happening now, that was good." And in addition to that, they start pushing back on the level of acetylcholine, excuse me, noradrenaline in the brainstem. And this is crucial because there was a study that came out two years ago, not from my group, that asked, "Why do we quit?" You know, if there, if you set, you know, 800 or even 500 pounds on the bar out there, I can't lift it. So I'm not talking about that kind of quitting. I'm talking about a long run. Why do I quit? If I'm not injured, like what actually causes quitting? When do, when do we decide that something is futile?

   28. JRJoe Rogan50:44

       Right.

   29. AHAndrew Huberman50:44

       And it turns out that for every bit of effort, any bit of effort, lifting a glass of water or running up a hill or in a fight, there are little bits of this, of noradrenaline, adrenaline that are released in the brain and body. And there's a counter. There's a cell type which are called glia, which literally means glue in Latin. These cells are paying attention to how much norepinephrine is coming, and if it hits a certain threshold, the brain stops voluntary control over the musculature, says, "That's it. I quit." And there are these beautiful experiments where they manipulate the visual environment so that this isn't, they're certain that this isn't lack of muscle fuel, this i- or liver fuel. This is lack of neural fuel. Dopamine pushes back that level of noradrenaline and it gives you more gas. It lets you go further. And you see this through teamwork, when you feel like you're supported, when you're-

   30. JRJoe Rogan51:34

       Mm.
9. 1:00:51 – 1:33:29

   Hypnosis, meditation, and breath control: using physiology to switch brain states

   1. 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.

   2. JRJoe Rogan1:01:03

      Mm.

   3. AHAndrew Huberman1:01:03

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

   4. JRJoe Rogan1:01:08

      Have you been hypnotized?

   5. AHAndrew Huberman1:01:09

      Many times.

   6. JRJoe Rogan1:01:10

      Oh.

   7. 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.

   8. 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?

   9. 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?

   10. JRJoe Rogan1:02:39

       Mm-hmm.

   11. 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.

   12. JRJoe Rogan1:02:49

       Hypnosis every day?

   13. AHAndrew Huberman1:02:50

       Yeah, 30 to 45 minutes.

   14. JRJoe Rogan1:02:51

       Wow.

   15. 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.

   16. 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-

   17. 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-

   18. JRJoe Rogan1:03:24

       (laughs)

   19. AHAndrew Huberman1:03:24

       ... where they start with the whole-

   20. JRJoe Rogan1:03:25

       Yeah.

   21. AHAndrew Huberman1:03:25

       ... like, I don't know, know really what that's about and they make you use complete declarative sentences. It feels weird to me.

   22. JRJoe Rogan1:03:30

       Mm-hmm.

   23. AHAndrew Huberman1:03:31

       Um, but that's just my own bias. Um-

   24. JRJoe Rogan1:03:33

       Oh, they mean they make you set your intentions for the class?

   25. AHAndrew Huberman1:03:37

       Yeah, it's like, "I am this, this, and this."

   26. JRJoe Rogan1:03:38

       Ew. Do you say it out loud?

   27. AHAndrew Huberman1:03:39

       Or ... Oh, no. I would, no, no, no. That would send me out of the room.

   28. JRJoe Rogan1:03:42

       (laughs)

   29. AHAndrew Huberman1:03:42

       Or (laughs) the, you know, even though it's-

   30. JRJoe Rogan1:03:45

       Would they say it like this?

Episode duration: 2:44:45