Enhance Your Learning Speed & Health Using Neuroscience Based Protocols | Dr. Poppy Crum

Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. (instrumental music plays) I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Poppy Crum. Dr. Poppy Crum is a neuroscientist, a professor at Stanford, and the former chief scientist at Dolby Laboratories. Her work focuses on how technology can accelerate neuroplasticity and learning and generally enrich our life experience. You've no doubt heard about and perhaps use wearables and sleep technologies that can monitor your sleep, tell you how much slow wave sleep you're getting, how much REM sleep, and technologies that can control the temperature of your sleep environment and your room environment. Well, you can soon expect wearables and hearable technologies to be part of your life. Hearable technologies are, as the name suggests, technologies that can hear your voice and the voice of other people and deduce what is going to be best for your immediate health and your states of mind. Believe it or not, these technologies will understand your brain states, your goals, and it will make changes to your home and working and other environments so that you can focus better, relax more thoroughly, and connect with other people on a deeper level. As Poppy explains, all of this might seem kind of space age and maybe even a little aversive or scary now, but she explains how it will vastly improve life for both kids and adults, and indeed increase human-human empathy. During today's episode, you'll realize that Poppy is a true out of the box thinker and scientist. She has a really unique story. She discovered she has perfect pitch at a young age. She explains what that is and how that shaped her worldview and her work. Poppy also graciously built a zero-cost step-by-step protocol for all of you. It allows you to build a custom AI tool to improve at any skill you want and to build better health protocols and routines. I should point out that you don't need to know how to program in order to use this tool that she's built. Anyone can use it, and as you'll see, it's extremely useful. We provide a link to it in the show note captions. Today's conversation is unlike any that we've previously had on the podcast. It's a true glimpse into the future, and it also points you to new tools that you can use now to improve your life. 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, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my conversation with Dr. Poppy Crum. Dr. Poppy Crum, welcome.

Thanks, Andy. It's great to be here.

Great to see you again. We should let people know now, we were graduate students together. But that's not why you're here. You're here because you do incredibly original work, you've worked in so many different domains of technology, neuroscience, et cetera. Today, I want to talk about a lot of things, but I want to start off by talking about neuroplasticity, this incredible ability of our nervous systems to change in response to experience. I know how I think about neuroplasticity, but I want to know how you think about neuroplasticity. In particular, I want to know, do you think our brains are much more plastic than most of us believe? Like, can we change much more than we think and we just haven't accessed the ways to do that? Or do you think that our brains are pretty fixed, and in order to make progress as a species, we're going to have to, I don't know, create robots or something to- to do the work that we're not able to do because our brains are fixed? Let's start off by just getting your take on what neuroplasticity is and what you think the limits on it are.