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.
Recently, the Huberman Lab podcast hosted a live event at the Plenary Theater in Melbourne, Australia.
The event was called the Brain Body Contract and featured a lecture followed by a question and answer session with the audience.
We wanted to make the question and answer session available to everyone, regardless if you could attend.
So what follows is the question and answer session from the Plenary Theatre in Melbourne, Australia.
I also would like to thank the sponsors for the event.
They are Eight Sleep and AG1. Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity.
And one of the key aspects to getting a great night's sleep is to control the temperature of your sleeping environment.
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The other live event sponsor, AG1, is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also contains adaptogens and other critical micronutrients.
I've been taking AG1 daily since 2012, so I'm delighted that they decided to sponsor the live event. and the reason I started taking it and the reason I still take it every day, once or twice a 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, 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.
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And now for the question and answer session from Melbourne, Australia.
Hey, Dr. Heumann, some of your listeners are in or approaching our 50s.
Okay, same. and are thinking of doing all we can to prevent dementia.
Same. Do you have any additional thoughts or protocols or research we could focus on?
Yes, so... For the next two and a half hours.
No, I'm kidding. I'm not known for being succinct.
I didn't go over too much earlier. So, okay, so ground truths.
So let's start with ground truths and then let's move to emerging Let's maybe get to a little bit of speculation.
Let's avoid conjecture. Ground truths. Blood circulation is good for the brain, perhaps most important for the brain.
So anything that is good for cardiovascular health, is going to be good for brain health.
It's not the only thing, but that's true.
We know this. So you hear these days a lot about zone two cardio.
I don't know who gets credit for that. Peter Atiyah talks a lot about it.
I talk a lot about it. None of us invented the notion, but, you know, 150, probably more like 180 to 200 minutes of so-called zone two cardio per week is good. numbers to shoot for.
Some of us get more, some of us less. What is zone two cardio?
Zone two cardio is cardiovascular exercise could be running, could be swimming, could be walking, depending on your level of fitness, which you can just barely maintain a conversation were you to push any harder or faster you wouldn't be able to complete your sentences with much The ease, okay?
So is this zone two cardio for me? No, but if I were to jog and try and have a conversation at some point, I would have a little bit of a hard time.
That's a zone two cardio. So we know that's true.
Why? Well, it seems to do a number of things at the level of release of Growth factors, brain-derived nootrophic factor at the level of different, let's call them I realize the immunologists are going to roll their eyes, but anti-inflammatory cytokines and things of that sort.
You also have inflammatory cytokines. and things of that sort, it does seem that increasing blood flow in and through the brain is important for brain health. which is not all that surprising.
There are species of animals that spend part of their life swimming about, and then when they stop, And stick to a rock or something.
A good portion of the nervous system actually degenerates.
But neurodegeneration... and dementia are not necessarily the same thing, and this is something that we don't often hear about. the age-related decline in memory capacity, in particular working memory, can be related to reductions in dopamine transmission in the brain, so things that increase the catecholamines that we talked about earlier,
This could be pharmacology, of course, but it doesn't have to be pharmacology.
It could be, um, Anything that increases the catecholamines, and we talk about this on the podcast. zero cost protocols that you don't have to sign up for.
You can just go to our website and go to dopamine regulation and it will list out ways to increase the catecholamines through zero cost and in very low cost ways. are known to improve working memory.
Working memory, of course, the capacity to maintain a string of numbers or information for sake of kind of immediate goals, but not information that's passed to the longer term memory.
So that's different than neurodegeneration.
That's simply reductions in the amount of neuromodulators like dopamine being deployed as we get older.
So modulating dopamine through healthy, ideally, means But I do think we are going to see an increase in the use of selective pharmacology for this purpose.
And here I'm not recommending anyone do drugs or take drugs. prescription or otherwise.
But it does seem that certain compounds like nicotine, believe it or not, even though it increases vasoconstriction and blood pressure. can offset some of the age-related reductions in dopaminergic and cholinergic acetylcholine cholinergic transmission.
And you don't want to smoke, vape, dip, or snuff.
I'm not even recommending people take Zin patches, but I think there is some use cases for nicotine provided you're doing it with the, you know, your physician knows and you're not getting into blood pressure, dangerous blood pressure range or supplementation with choline donors and things of that sort to increase acetylcholine and dopamine.
Some people are starting to take things like modafinil and Adderall in older age.
But keep in mind, these are not modafinil, but Adderall, Vyvanse, et cetera.
These are amphetamines. They're amphetamines.
So I'm not recommending this. I think that's where we're headed.
I think you're going to see a number of different cognitive enhancers that are used to offset some age-related issues. cognitive decline, aka dementia.
Now, in terms of So we're going zone two cardio to like prescription drugs.
We're kind of bracketing here. And then behavioral protocols that can increase neuromodulators such as the catecholamines.
Now in terms of... other things that can perhaps decrease the likelihood of Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia as it relates to neurodegeneration.
Currently, there are a lot of do nots. Don't hit your head too hard.
If you hit it really hard, don't hit it again hard. um, the so-called to hit model literally, um, You know, and we think of football or I guess rugby, that's a sport you guys play down here where they use the head as a battering ram.
I've seen this, right? big necks on those kids and then it was boom.
But the problem is not necessarily just rugby or American football.
Someone told me I had to shout out an Australian football team, and I know it's a setup, so I'm not going to do it.
They're like, when you're in Melbourne tomorrow, you gotta say that your favorite team is blank.
And I'm like, this feels really dangerous.
So I'm not gonna do it. I'm not going to do it.
But what's that? Do it. I can't remember the name of the team.
But I watched the document. What's that?
But I still don't understand the rugby thing.
Do they use the guy's head or gal's head as a battering ram?
Because they used to play at UCSD outside my lab.
We had this big field, and my bulldog loved watching.
He was like, this sport makes sense. They were just like, run.
And then I never understood it. But anyway, what's that?
Got it. I need a translator, sorry. I need a translator.
But I love the enthusiasm. Yeah, so we think about...
Head injuries and brain injuries, mostly in the context of sport, but that's not where most head injuries occur.
Most of them occur, construction workers, car accidents, TBI, things of that sort.
There's some interesting data on hyperbaric chambers.
This is getting really into the high-level stuff here, meaning most people don't have access to them.
I look forward to learning more. playing with different concentrations of oxygen in a little micro environment for traumatic brain injury. and neurodegeneration.
I mean, do I think in five years that everyone's gonna be sitting in hyperbaric chambers in order to offset neuron loss?
Probably not. I think it's not cost effective.
But I will say that most of the things that are good for the body are good for the brain. keeping kind of anything that plaques the arteries capillaries and veins of the brain because so heavily vascularized and and minding those neuromodulators.
Obviously, drugs of abuse like methamphetamine can deplete dopamine neurons.
The data on MDMA, by the way, I don't know, there's drug enforcement in the room.
The data, you know where they have most of the safety data? or lack of safety data in some cases on MDMA.
Keep in mind, MDMA ecstasy is methylene-dioxymethamphetamine.
Methamphetamine we know causes neurodegeneration.
No question. It also causes bad teeth. Do you know how?
Do you know how? Turns people into mouth breathers.
Dry mouth and the teeth degenerate. Yeah, we have an episode on oral health coming up.
This is real. That's actually why the teeth degenerate is from excessive... and it limits saliva production.
Saliva is very important for remineralization of the teeth.
Shout out to the dentist in the house. The thing about MDMA is interesting because it turns out that MDMA, because it also increases dopamine just as... as methamphetamine does, remember MDMA, methylene, dioxin, methamphetamine, but also huge increases in serotonin seem to be most most of the effect of MDMA, the kind of empathogenic effect.
There was a study done of people from the LDS, Latter-day Saints, sometimes referred to as Mormons, Why was the study on MDMA done with people from the LDS community?
And I don't want to imply that everyone from the LDS community does MDMA, but why?
They're a very interesting test population because they don't do other drugs.
But for some reason, MDMA is not on the no-fly list.
So it's a beautiful paper in which they took people who had only done as any drug, not even taking caffeine, right? either once or semi-frequent or very frequent use of MDMA and they did a bunch of cognitive testing and there were some attention issues when people had taken over what was a couple hundred doses of MDMA at the 80 milligram dose or more.
Doesn't seem to be much neurodegeneration, which is not to say that it's all safe.
There is an abuse and addictive potential there.
The biggest issue seems to be contamination of...
We have a fentanyl issue in the U.S. I don't know if it's happening down here as well.
Very concerning. Okay, so the point here is that I think very soon you're going to hear about drugs, prescription drugs and supplements to augment the release of neuromodulators, not for sake of empathogenic states or psychedelic states. but to try and keep those dopaminergic neurons online to offset dementia, because that's what the question's about.
In fact, there's a Nobel Prize winning neuroscientist at Columbia University, whose name I won't tell you, or maybe I will, who when I went to visit his office, chewed no fewer than five pieces of Nicorette in the course of a half an hour.
And I'm like, what's going on? He's got a Nobel Prize, but this looks kind of pathologic.
And I said, why? And he said, well, the nicotine is to offset age-related loss of dopaminergic and cholinergic neurons.
I thought, really? He's like, yeah, when I quit smoking because I didn't want Lung cancer, but this is him, this is anecdata, I'm not suggesting you do this.
I think there are a number of things that we can do but protect those neuromodulators, keep perfusion, that is blood flow to the brain, strong.
There's a case for... cardiovascular exercise, and it does seem, it really does seem that exercise that engages the neuromuscular connections more than cardiovascular exercise.
So not just resistance training, but anything that involves coordinated bodily training, learning new physical skills. dance, et cetera, really does seem to offset some of the loss of cognitive functioning in So it's kind of interesting that physical exercise is great for cognition and probably cognition may or may not help physical ability.
But one Probably can imagine why there's a bi-directional relationship there.
Your nervous system doesn't really distinguish between physical and cognitive.
It's all working as a bunch of functional units.
I could go on and on about this, but hopefully that at least gets your ears turning around some things that perhaps you've heard about and some things that you haven't.
And we'll do an episode on dementia and offsetting dementia in order to get into some of the fine details.
Okay. Can we increase our willpower just like training a muscle group with your research into the AMCC?
Ooh, I'm so glad that you mentioned the AMCC.
I think of all the new areas of neuroscience research, that are out there.
I think the anterior midsingulate cortex is one of the most interesting structures and areas of research nowadays.
You know, I think if I have my way, then not only will most people have heard of dopamine and the amygdala.
I guess you need a Star Wars character named after your brain part.
Isn't there one? I only saw the first three.
I'm of that generation. But isn't there an Amy Dalla or something?
Yeah, right? Don't leave me hanging here, is there or not?
If I'm wrong, just say no. Okay, anyway, the amygdala, thanks, the amygdala is a brain structure that is involved in threat detection and novelty detection, not just threats.
The anterior mid cingulate cortex, is an area of the brain that we know is activated.
Well, let me tell you the best experiment.
The best experiment was done, in my opinion, by a neurosurgeon at Stanford.
Joe Parisi. He's probing around in people's brains.
They got a little piece of skull missing.
He's stimulating in the brain. He's asking them questions.
How do you feel? What's going on? How do you feel?
What's going on? And he's got this electrode in the anterior mid-cingulate cortex.
The patient says, I feel like something really bad is going to happen, like a storm is coming.
He's like, okay, well, we can stop stimulating.
He's like, no, I'm going into the storm.
He's like, oh, that's interesting. Stimulate a little bit further back just by a millimeter or so completely different subjective experience for the patient.
That's interesting. Get a different patient in there, map to the anterior mid-singulate cortex, stimulate. and the person says, I feel like I'm gonna get out of my chair and I'm gonna do something hard.
Wild, right? This is prior to any knowledge of what the anterior midsingulate cortex is doing.
Make a long story short, people who successfully overcome a physical challenge, a cognitive challenge, that learn a new skill, successful dieters, I don't really like that term, their anterior mid-singulate cortex grows. or becomes more active under conditions that challenge the anterior midsingulate cortex.
So this brain region seems to be the brain region that puts us in a forward center of mass. physically and sort of cognitively and emotionally.
I often like to think that the nervous system, as sophisticated as it is, and psychology as sophisticated as it is, as it is, excuse me, can be binned into kind of three categories.
Things that we like to eat or don't like to eat or can kind of be binned into yum. yuck or meh.
That's kind of what the nervous system has to do because ultimately you have to decide, do I want to go toward it?
So-called repetitive behavior. Do I want to get away from it?
Well, I can do nothing. People. We're either like, yum, or in some cases, yum, yuck, or in some cases, like, ugh.
Or like, meh. This is the sort of three tributaries that we have the option of moving down, not moving down, or moving away from.
So the anterior mid cingulate cortex, because it has inputs from so many different areas and outputs to so many different areas, it can access circuits related to dopamine, norepinephrine, it can access circuits related to memory and context.
It's a hub, it's a hub that by all views through all lenses of the existing research, suggests that anytime we do something truly challenging, in particular things that we do not enjoy, this is key, the anterior midsingulate cortex undergoes some sort of plasticity.
Everything's... in the research data now point to the idea that the inter mid cingulate cortex is the seat of so-called willpower. which is linked to concepts like tenacity or grit and et cetera.
And what I love about this research is that it comes from a bunch of different areas, human brain imaging, brain stimulation, et cetera.
Here's what I don't like about the reality, but that we all need to accept, which is that the inter-mid cingulate cortex is modifiable by experience, by leaning into challenges at any stage of life.
That's great. We talked about that earlier.
Plasticity. lest we forget. Plasticity goes in the other direction too.
It seems that when we don't engage in challenges that The anterior mid-singulate cortex, it doesn't atrophy, but it undergoes sort of a downshift in activation.
Here's what's really, really interesting and relates to the previous question.
The anterior midsingulate cortex seems to be especially active at baseline. and available for plasticity in what are called super-agers.
Super-agers, we've all heard of blue zones.
The super-agers are these people who they don't just exist in blue zones, They're spread around the world.
These are people that seem, at least by cognitive measures and other physiological measures of the body, seem to age extremely fast.
Slowly. So they shouldn't really be called super agers, right?
They should be called super non-agers. Anyway. the anterior mid-singulate cortex seems to be hyperactive in these super-agers, as they're called, and so it seems that Not only do they maintain cognitive function later in life, but that seems to be related to their regular engagement in challenging things.
So remember for so many years we heard, okay, like nuns don't get dementia.
And then there's all sorts of things you can imagine could be related to that.
And then we're thinking, oh, maybe it's crossword puzzles.
Maybe it's crossword puzzles. Maybe it's hanging out with other people. you know, and then you know that person down the street and she's cycling on the weekends like crazy and she's 90 and she looks like she's 50 inches sharp as a tack, it's probably leaning into challenge on a regular basis. leaning into challenge on a regular basis as opposed to one specific cognitive or physical thing, which means that if you love cycling, or you love the cold plunge, or you love a certain form of exercise, it's probably not doing that much for your anterior mid cingulate cortex.
But these super agers also live longer. And so there is this notion that because the anterior mid cingulate cortex has connectivity to a lot of areas of the brain and body. that it is somehow linked to the will to live.
And this is being examined now in so-called terminal cancer patients, terminal cases, I don't like the language, because there are these amazing instances, and Physicians and oncologists have known this for a long time, that when people decide they're gonna fight,
Cancer, they don't always win that fight, unfortunately, but oftentimes it's the people who insist on fighting it psychologically, that they won't give in, that end up still living more months, more years.
And in some cases, putting the cancer into remission with, of course, other tools, right?
I'm not saying you shouldn't use other tools to combat cancer.
It's a very interesting structure. It relates to the question on dementia.
Hopefully that was informative. Julian, thank you.
How would you recommend shift workers minimize the effects of disruption to their circadian rhythm?
Oh, this is so important. You know why? Because right now, 940 p.m.
We're kind of doing shift work right now.
Most people are on a shift work schedule now in the world.
This is true. We think of shift workers as only the people who are up in the middle of the night and sleeping during the day, but most people are doing shift work.
The criteria for shift work is at least a two-hour variant. at least in the US, a two hour variance in the sleep wake cycle. more than three nights a week.
Anyone here? Go to sleep every night, same time.
Wake up every morning, same time. Never stay up later than that, more than two nights a week.
Okay, most people are doing shift work nowadays.
They're just on their phone or they're on their computer.
And I'm not going to argue that's, you know, you shouldn't.
Many times that's me as well. Here's what we do know, and we did a whole episode on shift work, but I'll try and summarize some of the key points.
You want to have your cortisol elevated early in the day and then subside across the day.
That's the ideal pattern of cortisol release.
Cortisol is a great thing when it's high and then tapers off from early day into the later day.
It's a bad thing if that cortisol peak is shifted late.
That cortisol peak is coming every 24 hours.
You don't have a choice. Question is, is it gonna be early day or is it gonna be late day?
Late-day cortisol peaks are associated with depression, anxiety.
This was done by my colleague David Spiegel and the great Robert Sapolsky at Stanford.
I study about that. Robert, another great beard.
Amazing. And I always thought it was to blend in with the species that he studies because he was like the baboon guy.
You know, I haven't quite figured out how to master that one, you know, like the cuttlefish look, but I'm working on it, working on it.
Maybe I just have to sit down. Nevermind.
There's a, there's a story about. You remember the earlier story?
Anyway, the cuttlefish, anyway, never mind.
Again, this is why I don't like to speak too late in the day.
I get myself into trouble. The point here is that having that cortisol peak early in the day sets you up for mood focus and alertness, immune system function, and a really... in a really great way.
Shift workers have a serious problem, which is that late peaks in cortisol are kind of paramount in all forms of shift work.
And so what you need to do is to put yourself ideally in lighting conditions that limit the amount of blue light coming in at night or when you're doing that shift work.
Now, you have to do your work. And I think in the next two years, if I have my way, one idea that I'd like to of embedding people's minds is, You know, we hear a lot now about how hyper-processed foods and highly processed foods are bad for us, sort of empty calories.
What are empty calories? It's foods that are very calorie dense, but micronutrient poor.
Right. That's what it really is. It's also the quality of food issues and people get, you know, like, let's please not have the seed oil debate.
It's like people get really. into this and it's unclear to me still and okay.
But we sort of think of empty calories like alcohol, sugar, et cetera, Calorie dense, micronutrient poor.
Light can be viewed in much the same way.
These days we live in a very blue light rich world.
Lot of blue light, so short wave length light, blue light, UV light.
And by the way, in sunlight, especially down here, it's very UV rich, blue. which is great during the day, especially when it's offset, or sorry, when it includes long wavelength light.
Full spectrum light. By the way, for everyone that's obsessed with red light, and I love red light and red light therapies, remember, the best source of red light is the sun.
It's full spectrum light. It includes red.
It's just there's a bunch of other stuff in there too.
See, it doesn't look like a red light panel.
That said, if you are going to do shift work, one of the best things you can do that's been shown to reduce cortisol levels at night while you're doing that shift work is to filter out some of the blue.
So that is a use case for blue blockers or even for glasses that put you into more reddish conditions, provided you can still do the work you need to do safely. you will see a dramatic reduction in cortisol under those conditions.
This blue and UV pathway picked up by a certain set of neurons in the eye the intrinsically photosensitive melanopsin cells, et cetera, is a real thing and it's designed to activate you.
This is why so-called seasonal affective disorder lamps, sad lamps, are basically bright blue-white-ish light.
So when you're doing that, Shift work, if you can get into red or orange or amber-like conditions, That's great.
You can do this very inexpensively, by the way, by just getting some party lights.
It doesn't have to be any fancy red light.
This is not talking about red light panels.
The other thing of course is when you get back to your non-work environment, You need to do some work to think about when is best to sleep, when is not best to sleep.
You know, is it best to sleep all day and be up all night or get that sunlight in the morning?
And I talk about that in the shift work episode.
And I'm tempted to go down that rabbit hole now, but I would just encourage you to take a look at that episode.
And I'll just cue you all to a resource, the hubermanlab.com website.
Allows you thanks to our wonderful engineers to put in multiple topics so you could say shift work red light or shift work dopamine or shift work, sunlight, and it will take you to the exact timestamps across all the episodes where those specific topics occur.
It's all zero cost. as opposed to having to go and peruse all these different episodes.
A lot of people have said, why not shorter episodes?
It's like, well, the idea was to create a library of information that Now AI and better engineering of websites can allow you to just pull the relevant information just like you would a book, well, I used to go to the library.
For those of you like me, old enough to remember, you actually took this thing called a book off a shelf.
Xerox copied it. In any event, it was very archaic. and very expensive and you'd always get the margin of the book in the middle, like the spine, it sucked.
Now you can go to the website and just get that information.
And then we also just launched an ai.hubermanlab.com website.
It has all zero costs. You can just say, hey, what should I do for shift work?
But I wanted to come here tonight, so I didn't tell you that until you got here.
No, I'm just kidding, I'm just kidding. Okay, and there are a few other tools about adjusting eating schedules and whatnot for shift work, but...
Hopefully that gets you going, Julia. Thank you.
What's the difference between NSDR and meditation?
Thank you for this question. I am a huge, huge, huge... believer and proponent and practitioner of NSDR, non-sleep deep rest.
What is non-sleep deep rest? Well, to be fair, yoga nidra, which translates to yoga sleep, is a thousand-year-old practice, thousands of years old practice in which you...
Lie completely still. Keep the mind awake.
You're not thinking in a structured way.
It's more of a body scan, directed relaxation, et cetera.
I discovered this in 2015 when I was doing some research for a book that I still can't manage to seem to finish on trauma and addiction and I went, I have a friend, very talented trauma therapist who's managed to help people with all sorts of addictions.
He'll be on the podcast in the not too distant future.
And I went down to this clinic in Florida and Everyone there spent the first hour of the day doing yoga nidra.
This is pretty wacky. I was still in my pure science, quote unquote, pure scientist, naive. scientist's lens and I thought, what is this about?
And he said, well, you know, so much of addiction is about an inability to regulate impulses, to deal with agitation, especially in the early days of trying to get sober or being sober.
And it just helps people learn to self-direct their nervous system in terms of self-directed relaxation.
It also seems to help with their sleep. It also has these components about time and sort of, because he said, you know, it's kind of interesting.
If you take a step back, If you can tolerate craving for a second, you just did it, so why couldn't you do it for another second?
If I can do it for another second, another second.
It's not as if it necessarily increases linearly or over time.
So what's going on? And so again, sort of our ability and regulate our states across time, and to realize there's this funny thing where when we feel terrible, we think it's gonna go on forever, and when we're happy,
We were like certain it's going to stop.
There's a kind of asymmetry in our nervous system that we don't understand.
He started talking about yoga nidra really seems to help addicts recover and stay sober if they do it regularly.
I thought, well, this is cool. What is it?
I'm a neuroscientist. We started studying it in my laboratory.
We discovered that the brain goes into these states during yoga nidra that are similar to sleep, body still, mind alert.
And that seems to be very beneficial, maybe even accelerates neuroplasticity in learning.
And indeed, there's evidence for that. And there's evidence that Yoganija, from a laboratory out of Scandinavia, not my laboratory showing that it can increase dopamine levels in the striatum, basal ganglia, by up to 60% using human... positron emission tomography imaging.
So we're talking about how to increase dopamine through non-pharmacologic means.
There's something about body still, brain active, very, very powerful way to do that.
I made up this term, this acronym, non-sleep deep rest, because I have tremendous respect for yoga nidra and the yoga traditions, but I was concerned for a lot of people on...
Unfortunately, when they hear yoga nidra, It sounds esoteric and they're not going to approach that practice.
Also, yoga nidra includes intentions and some things that are a little bit on the mystical side.
And I knew I was going to take some heat for it. and I feel badly about it, but that bad feeling is offset by, I think when you call something non-sleep deep rest, it tells you what it is.
And then more people are likely to come to the practice, and I felt like it was worth kind of putting myself, jumping on the grenade for that one.
Non-sleep deep rest is very effective at restoring cognitive and physical vigor and can indeed offset some degree of sleep loss.
It also gets you better at falling and staying asleep and it's very simple and very easy to do and it's zero cost and if you want to try it, You can go onto YouTube and put NSDR on my last name.
There's a woman named Kelly Boyes, B-O-Y-S, who has a much more pleasant voice than mine. who does them as well.
These are all zero-cost protocols. She's also in the Waking Up app.
And there are many of them. Kamini Desai is another person who has wonderful yoga nidra scripts.
So you can find these things and they're really about 10 minutes to 20 minutes, sometimes 30 minutes long.
You can do it for an hour, but most people won't do that consistently.
You don't have to do them every day and they're very, very effective at restoring mental and physical vigor when you're feeling depleted and getting you to be a better sleeper.
So I figure that's a zero-cost tool that is grounded in good mechanistic science and makes sense logically, so why not?
Meditation. Typically, and there are many different forms of meditation, but if you're, let's just say, kind of standard, if there were such a thing, Third eye meditation, closing your eyes, focusing your concentration on a point just sort of at your forehead, concentrating on your breathing, redirecting your attention to your breathing if your attention drifts. we know based on work from Wendy Suzuki's laboratory New York University and some work out of the University of Wisconsin, can improve memory, can improve focus and does seem to have some stress offsetting effects, but it's more of a focus exercise as opposed to an energy replenishing exercise.
Now, some people meditate and feel better afterwards.
They have more energy, but then it sort of Like well, compared to what?
I don't think that's the major effect of meditation.
And while we're on these topics, I should just say that self-directed hypnosis of the sort that my colleague David Spiegel studies is more about solving a particular problem.
So hypnosis is more about engaging neuroplasticity.
Remember earlier we said that neuroplasticity in adulthood can be activated by focus, followed by rest, it seems that in the self-directed hypnotic states, the brain enters kind of pattern of activity in which neuroplasticity can be accessed more quickly, we think, because the brain is both focused and relaxed in a particular way, merging that focus and rest state.
And of course, The hypnotic script is not about getting you to do crazy things on stage.
That's stage hypnosis. But self-directed hypnosis is, for instance, smoking cessation.
By the way, the success with smoking cessation from hypnosis is far greater than the cessation with smoking from pretty much any other protocol.
Unfortunately, it has the name hypnosis, which makes people think about stuff that people do on stage that's kind of wacky.
So we need a new name for it. Because unfortunately, names are a problem.
Their names can be differentiators as opposed to integrators.
When people say, I'm going to hypnotize you, or you should try hypnosis, people are like, eh.
Like yum-yuck math or like yuck. So by the way, does everyone here remember how you know if you're highly hypnotizable?
Do you know that the Spiegel eye roll test, it's not what teenagers do, David Spiegel and his father psychiatrists discovered the clinical application of hypnosis.
It's a clinically approved tool. There's brainstem neurons that that cause elevations and alertness and focus, and they're associated with moving the eyes up.
They're brain stem neurons that close the eyelids and essentially drive the eyes down that are associated with parasympathetic states, which is why you go like this when you're tired.
You're out there, I'm sure. If you are capable of keeping your gaze upward and closing your eyelids, you score on a particular end of the so-called Spiegel eye roll test, which makes you highly hypnotizable.
Because that state of hypnosis is one in which you're what?
Alert, but very, very relaxed. If you go to Spiegel's laboratory, they're gonna look at you and they say, look up at the ceiling. and then close your eyelids.
And if they still see the whites of your eyes as your eyelids close, well, then you're in the highly hypnotizable realm.
Kind of interesting, right? There's all nervous system related.
And you can see this stuff is, this is like real clinical tools.
Okay, how do we stop ourselves from mindlessly scrolling on our phones?
Hard questions. I didn't look at my watch because I'm bored.
I'm just thinking, how much time do you have?
Well, on the way here to Australia, my Rob, who you met earlier, my friend and podcast producer, he said, okay, guys.
Everyone's deleting social media from your phones for the whole trip, the whole trip.
I'm like, I don't know if I can go on this trip, Rob.
No, I'm kidding. We have one guy who's kept it on his phone so that we can post things.
And we continue to. Honestly, I think that's what it takes.
If it's social media that you're scrolling, I think you should do a. delete and reinstall, if I'm honest, I delete and reinstall every day because I think, and then you have to limit the amount of time.
And one of the members of my podcast team experienced this.
He said, I just picked up my phone a minute ago and I went to like hit the Instagram tab and it wasn't there and I know it's not there.
And that's where I say, yeah, at some point it becomes more compulsive than addiction.
These are just reflexive behaviors. It's like walking in the refrigerator.
I could do it every day of my life, all day.
I walk into people's homes and just look in the refrigerator.
I don't even know. I get into people's cars, I look in the glove box.
I just do this. I've got like looking around, I'm not gonna steal anything, but it was like the teenage boy in me, you know, I just kind of like walk in, I'm gonna open your refrigerator.
So I think it gets to the point of reflexive and it's compulsive and it might be addictive, but it can't be good when it's like that.
But I think social media can be really useful.
You can set timers, you can try graying out the screen, getting rid of the color thing, There's all this stuff, but I think if there are particular apps that you're struggling with, I would just delete them from your phone and do a reinstall because that's enough of a, of a behavioral barrier.
There are enough steps involved, enough sequencing to put the thing back on there. each day and each time, maybe twice a day, that you're going to vastly reduce your use.
To be honest, I think that's probably the best way to do it.
And there are probably people in this audience that are thinking, this seems crazy.
Like, just don't turn it on. Just don't open it.
And look, if I was 65 years old, I'd say that too.
But it doesn't work that way for me. certainly the younger generation.
It doesn't, and I know this because I gave a talk at Santa Clara University a few years ago, and I was talking about limiting social media use use and phones.
And this kid came up to me afterwards. He said, you don't get it.
It's like, you're like back then. I was like 43.
So you don't get it. He said. For you, the phone was a thing that you integrated into your post-90s high school life.
You watched The Breakfast Club or something, I don't know how he knew that movie.
I was like, you're right, I did watch The Breakfast Club a bunch of times.
And he said, but for us, It's like life.
I rolled my eyes and I thought, wait, no, listen.
I'm going to listen because no one knows what it's like to be 16 years old or 24 years old. in 2024, unless you're 16 or 24.
Like, okay, here we go. Listen, he said, when my phone, he said, when my phone powers down, I feel the energy drain out of me.
And when it comes back up, I feel life energy come back into my body.
And I thought, oh my goodness, like we are hosed.
But that's, That's the reality, and I'm of the mind, I was a camp counselor, I worked with at-risk kids, I was a wild kid, and you learn something, especially when you work with kids like me.
When I was a teenager, I was a hellion. Be a channel, not a dam.
You cannot block this system that's emerged.
This is here and it's here to stay. So I think things like, deleting the app is putting it back on there is the only way to go.
And we have to listen. I think we have to listen, understand that, you know, we, after all adults created these technologies.
And these kids are using them and I don't think we're gonna see a reversal, I don't.
So we have to really, I think what he said to me, as scary as it was to me, I think reflects the reality.
It's part of their life energy. It's part of their connectivity. and we're going to have to come up with better tools.
And I doubt those tools are going to be to the effect of eliminating it.
You could say, unfortunately... You know, all the adult... Last I checked, I'm an adult.
People in my life have argued differently.
But... I think we're going to have to learn to be a channel, not a dam with this.
I do. If resources and ethics were not an issue, what would your dream clinical trial to run?
Oh my goodness. This is a hard question.
Okay, dream clinical trial. What's that?
Oh gosh, the accent is killing me. More cuttlefish.
Yeah, more cuttlefish. Like cuttlefish? I like the idea of more cuddling.
Physical contact, so key. I think we're all still recovering from the years.
We had a few years of just like no physical contact. like physical contact, so minimal.
I mean, there's the classic Harlow experiments, right?
The wire monkey versus the cloth monkey.
Primates go to the cloth monkey even if they don't get food there.
I mean, it's such a critical component. of how our nervous system forms.
I think, This is a, you know what? I'm gonna do something I've never done before.
I'm gonna turn the question around. I actually would, seriously, I'm not trying to avoid answering this, You know, we've worked on also, I've worked on cuttlefish.
We worked on respiration practices. We worked on vision.
We worked on neural regeneration. You know, I've enjoyed... working on a great number of different things.
I'm sort of curious what people, what do you think we need more of?
I've never done this, but I really want to know.
I don't know how we're going to do this in any kind of non-chaotic format, but what the hell.
It's late enough in the evening, we'll just do it.
Like really, I mean, so now there's trials on psychedelics.
Maybe we do this by kind of like, I'll throw out some options and then we'll do it.
So right now it seems that psychedelics are a big thing.
Do they increase plasticity? Yeah, I'm excited about it.
I'm a convert, but I do think that one has to be careful and there are certain people in populations, like people who suffer from certain types of manic bipolar or schizophrenia that really need to avoid these things, kids. being a kid is basically being in a psychedelic state that, you know, lateral connectivity of the brain is extensive.
Um, And I don't encourage it. I mean, the trials with MDMA and PTSD are incredible.
What's happening with MAPS is incredible.
60 plus percent remission rates. Done with licensed physicians, of course.
I don't get cavalier with this. So, okay, so I'll just ask.
So, I mean. It's going to be hard to draw out the dissenters, but more work on psychedelics, psilocybin, et cetera, as ways to ameliorate depression.
Are people like more like. Yum, yuck, or meh?
Is it like yum? Okay. Or like yuck? Don't be afraid to say yuck.
I like a good argument. Is anyone like yuck on psychedelics?
Sorcery, it's sorcery, I heard that. Meh, okay.
All right, interesting. Okay, so psychedelics get a strong push.
I think we have enough evidence that changing patterns of respiration changes brain states, but I think that that's an interesting area.
I don't know. Can you just shout it out?
Just shout it out. Okay, first over here.
Yes? Oh, God, the accent. You guys are so good.
I love the accent. Listen, I don't drink anymore, but when I used to go to bars, I'll just say the Australian accent never fails in the U.S., yeah?
Time chambers, time chambers. Oh, hyperbaric chambers.
Yeah, hyperbaric. That's an interesting one.
Yeah. I mean, when I think of ways to modify physiology, you think temperature, light, neuromodulators. right?
You think, by the way, anytime you want to think about changing something in the body or brain, you think mechanical and chemical.
So this is kind of This is changing the chemistry of the brain and body through hyperbaric chambers.
Thank you. Appreciate it. Did we run into each other at the gym the other day?
No. Anyway, I think I recognize you. Okay, I'll get to you in one second, yeah?
Yeah, love that. Okay, so protocols for childhood trauma.
Yeah, so I mean, I think we're finally at the place where we, where this word trauma actually is meaningful, because we knew it before, but I think before people thought if you hadn't lived in a war zone, which obviously is trauma, now I think people appreciate that trauma is inherent to a lot of life.
By the way, I love your shirt. I own that shirt.
It's like, Yeah, it's a Lonsdale shirt.
It was against racism. Hey, I love that shirt.
You know the history of that shirt, right?
It's like Lonsdale was co-opted by some neo-Nazi groups. as a brand.
So Lonsdale came out with an against racism and hate shirt, which is like the best, like to that, which is like, yeah.
So anyway, a little side note there, not sponsored by Lonsdale.
But rad shirt. Yeah, I think childhood trauma, trauma can be best defined as an adverse event changes the nervous system in a way that causes maladaptive functioning going forward.
It's not every bad thing, right? But it certainly happens and I think we need to learn to rewire the nervous system.
Let's face it, whether or not it's psychedelics or it's talk therapy or it's hyperbaric chambers or it's cold plunges, what we're talking about is neuroplasticity.
We're trying to rewire the nervous system.
So I love that one. We need some very structured tools, and there's all sorts of stuff about SOAS release for trauma.
There's little bits, like little silos of things that are all very interesting. breath work, release work, but so far there isn't a structured framework for treating trauma.
Different groups doing different things, EMDR, et cetera.
I think they all have merit. Okay, there was the shouting out.
Consciousness. The big C. Yeah. In my house, Costello was the big C. He would always remind me of that.
But consciousness, I think that... And now with AI, we have to ask ourselves like, what is consciousness?
And I think we need a clear definition of what that is.
Do you guys know the story of like, They were going to solve consciousness a few years ago and they didn't do it.
There was this bet in neuroscience that it was going to be solved by...
2015 or something like that. So I think we need And it's not, obviously.
So we need better definition of what that means.
But I think it's a very important problem, indeed.
So thank you. Free will, yeah, that's a tough one.
That's one I usually avoid. Robert slammed me on that one on the podcast.
What was it in the back? I heard it as an adaptive technique, but.
Oh, yeah. You know, we hear, yeah, we hear so much.
I'm agreeing with you. We hear so much about ADHD these days without an understanding of what it really reflects, except in the extreme clinical cases.
So I think a better understanding. I did two episodes of the podcast, by the way, on attention and ADHD.
One focused mainly on behavioral and nutritional tools.
It was positively received by about half of people.
And then the other half were like, this is garbage.
What about all the drugs that are useful?
Then I did one about all the drugs that can be useful.
People said, this is garbage. You're putting kids on meth.
And I'm like, wait a second. Hold on. We try and cover it all. because I favor balance, I heard excellent things, they were all male voices, we kinda got a sampling bias here, unless I've got a high frequency cutoff,
Thank you. Something negotiation, sorry.
Science... Of negotiation. Yeah, so people being able to resolve differences better.
Lord, please, yes. Oh my goodness. I mean, this is, yes, thank you. if ever there was a call to action, it's like, you know, this is a big question.
I'm a neuroscientist, not a historian, not a futurist or a politician, but thank goodness.
Can you imagine what a terrible job I would do?
I like being outdoors. I hate meetings. I like dressing like this and I don't like the news.
It'd be the worst. But yeah, if ever there was a need, and a question. are we just gonna continue in these iterative cycles of when the economy is good, things seem mostly good, and then a lot of people are still suffering, and then these cycles of,
Or are we going to finally just sit back and go, okay, what are we good at as a species?
What are we really bad at? What are we kind of good at?
And start coming up with some tools to try and function better on the whole with the understanding that there are bad actors out there that are constantly trying to you know, exploit and manipulate.
But there are also a lot of good actors, too.
And by good actors, I don't mean actors in the stage acting sense.
I think that, look, we're a smart species.
We can think in past, present, and future terms.
We can look at mechanism. We can communicate better with each other better than any species except maybe the cuttlefish.
And so I think the question is, is there going to be some sort of sitting back and finally just saying, like, enough?
Like, let's just figure out a way to dialogue.
And I love that. You know. It's a science that there are problems and there are hard problems.
Honestly, I think it's gonna come about.
If it comes about, it's gonna come about. through groups, not through individuals.
I don't think we're gonna get the world leader or world leaders of 12 people Let's get it done.
Let's get it done right this time. I think it's going to be a more collective. consciousness you know i'd like to see fewer individual leaders and more groups and panels leading things but anyway that's that's my bias and that you know um Genetics?
Genetics? Genetics. Love it. Yeah. Okay, I'll say two things and then I think my team's gonna make me close out.
Wait. Rad, okay, awesome. Now it's turning into like a science punk rock show.
So, the, Genetics, well, I think the big things in genetics are we're soon going to be in the place where we can do genetic Well, right now you can take human embryos and screen them for mutations by whole genome sequencing.
It's very inexpensive compared to a few years ago.
It's still expensive. And you can do selection.
You can select out based on lack of mutations, maybe even based on over-representation of certain genes.
That's interesting, has some ethical considerations, but soon you can do CRISPR.
You could. In theory, you could modify the genome. of adults and certainly babies.
And so that's where we're headed. It's already being done in certain countries.
It was done in China. It was not. looked upon kindly by the international ethics committees.
But it was done, a mutation in the HIV receptor.
So those babies exist. So it's happening.
It's going to be interesting times. The microbiome, I think, is really exciting.
Here's my big call to action is that there's a microbiome in the gut, but there's also microbiome on the skin and the nose and the mouth. and the genitals, like these, all these little niches, and well, I guess it depends, the little or not so little niches, um, depends, um,
I was thinking about the nostrils. The night's getting long.
There I go again. They are all important and there's a lot more to understand.
I think the gut microbiome is just one of the microbiomes.
And female hormones, certainly important topic.
It's received far less, sadly, far less attention than male hormone therapy or understanding, and things are starting to change there.
It's been slow, yeah. Yeah, it's been, can you believe it?
It was like only like eight years ago that the National Institutes of Health in the United States was like, hey, maybe you should start studying female mice. too it's like like this i mean we're modern science is very far behind We're very far behind.
And I think it's a resource issue. There's a bunch of sociological considerations in science.
I'm trying to change the story there, but I'm but one person, and you know, I hope to live a very long time, but you know. should I get hit by a bullet, a bus, or cancer tomorrow, I want you to know that It's going to be, or a long time from now, natural causes.
Sorry, I have a morbid sense of humor. I worked with the physicians.
They all talk like that. I hope to live a very long time.
But it's a collective effort. So I just wanna, before we wrap, I wanna say a couple of things.
We can get on with the rest of the night.
First of all, it is a collective effort You know, as I've mentioned several times this evening, I look no differently on the massage table therapy versus chiropractic versus whole genome sequencing.
It's just all different lenses to look at the same sort of set of goals through.
And yes, there's a range of quality and rigor and communication styles and personalities, but if you can maintain some level of curiosity and discernment about what works for you or doesn't work for you or where you think there's merit, that's great.
But it's going to be... A wonderful thing when we can all start to dialogue and see where the points of convergence are, where you're basically talking about Two different groups talking about the exact same thing through different language.
I think that's where things really can move forward.
The discourse of public science and health communication Obviously it's something I'm very passionate about.
I would love to see more podcasts, believe it or not, not just my podcast, but they're, more podcasts.
If you have something to say to the world, please say it.
Please put it out there on social media.
I do think that there's value there, so I'm encouraging every person, not just usually they go the young people, but like every people, to get information out there and to support the efforts.
Also want to say thank you so much for coming out on a Saturday night here in Melbourne.
And for listening to the podcast. And for...
Yeah, it really means a lot to me. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you.
Thank you. I really appreciate it. The podcast is indeed a labor of love.
I feel oh so blessed to do it and my hope is that The tools, protocols, and information will radiate out as far and wide as possible.
I don't need or want credit. I just want people to have the information.
I really mean that. and to share it where you think it can be useful to people.
And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.
