LIVE EVENT Q&A: Dr. Andrew Huberman at the Sydney Opera House｜Huberman Lab

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 Sydney Opera House in 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 Sydney Opera House in Australia.

I also would like to thank the sponsors for the event. They are 8 Sleep and AG1.

8 Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling heating and sleep tracking capacity.

And one of the key aspects to getting a great night sleep is to control the temperature of your sleeping environment.

And that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature actually has to drop by about 1-3 degrees.

And in order to wake up in the morning feeling refreshed, your body temperature actually has to increase by about 1-3 degrees.

8 Sleep makes it extremely easy to control the temperature of your sleeping environment at the beginning, middle, and throughout the night and when you wake up in the morning.

I've been sleeping on an 8 Sleep mattress cover for nearly three years now and it has dramatically improved my sleep.

If you'd like to try 8 Sleep, you can go to 8Sleep.com slash Huberman to save $150 off their pod three cover.

8 Sleep currently ships to the USA, Canada, UK, select countries in the EU and Australia.

Again, that's 8Sleep.com slash Huberman.

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.

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 probiotic 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.

To try AG1, go to drinkag1.com slash Huberman.

And you'll get a year supply of vitamin D3K2 and 5 free travel packs of AG1.

Again, that's drinkag1.com slash Huberman.

Thank you to the Sydney Opera House for hosting us and for making this event possible.

What are the latest findings on the physiological mechanisms behind stress's impact on the body and brain and what are some practical tools or techniques for managing stress effectively?

Well, thank you for that question. I'll deliberately not repeat what I said earlier about physiologic-sized panoramic vision, et cetera, and raising stress threshold because we covered that already.

But I think that one of the most interesting findings, two most interesting findings in the field of stress in the last five years or even three years.

I think the work from my colleague, Ali Krum, at Stanford, she's been a guest on the podcast. She works on mindsets as the following result.

Students, Stanford students, that is, come into the laboratory.

They view a, I think it's a five minute movie about how awful stress is for the mind and body, all the things it does like deplete your immune system, make you miserable, deplete certain aspects of the reproductive axis and on and on.

And then a separate group comes in and watches a video also five minutes also true about all the things that stress can do to enhance performance, both cognitive or physical,

or additional energy, additional cognitive power, access to certain memory sets, albeit narrow memory sets, et cetera.

And what you find is that the results point directly to the fact that whatever you believe about stress provided the information you have is true is what happens.

So if I tell you that stress improves your memory, focus attention, one observes that. If I tell you that stress depletes your immune system, et cetera, one observes that.

So this is something that we don't quite yet understand as neuroscientists and the psychology of it makes more sense, frankly, than the mechanisms.

But it's becoming very clear that what we believe about a given phenomenon strongly impacts how it shapes our response to that.

So I find that very interesting.

Now of course you can't delete information about stress being bad for you.

So what does that mean if you want stress to be enhancing as it's called?

There's literally now called the stresses enhancing mindset that the thing you can do is to learn more about how stress can be enhancing.

We're not talking about lying. We're not talking about placebo effect. We're talking about real knowledge based in fact that one can absorb.

And I find it amazing and wonderful that the mere learning of something can actually change how we respond to something at a core physiological level.

The second, I think very important set of findings on stress relate to a structure that I've talked about recently on the podcast and I talked about with the one and only David Goggins, most people presumably have heard like he's on his way is running here right now from Central America.

That guy, I'll tell you, that guy is every bit as intense as he comes across. I met him for the first time in 2016 at a gathering in Silicon Valley.

We're just doing a little bit of work for this company. At the end of the day he leaves for a minute and he changes into his shorts and his shirt.

He's like, I'm going running, I got to go to the airport. I'm thinking I'm going to go running, then I'm going to go to the airport. He was running to the airport. Seriously, well like 14 miles from the airport, which I realized 14 miles from marathon or no big deal, but he's got his bags.

I'm thinking myself this guy is nuts and I love him. He's really that guy. It's actually very refreshing. I think one reason we love the Rick Rubens and the David Goggins is they truly are different, but from one basic standpoint is they just don't give a shit.

They just do what they're going to do and they trust that they're doing right for them and for the people around them. It's awesome. It's really awesome. I think that it, again, brings about that, you know, that doesn't come about very often for me, but you just kind of stuns you into like, behold, David Goggins, Rick Rubens, the cuttlefish, whatever.

So, but I talked about this with David. There's a structure in our brain and these are recent discoveries, not by my lab. I wish I'd discover these, but actually a colleague of mine at Stanford, Joe Parvizi, who's in the Department of Neurosurgery, has made these beautiful discoveries about the anterior mid-singulate cortex.

The anterior mid-singulate cortex is a structure in the brain. There's a lot of subdivisions, but when Joe put a little stimulating electrode into this area because he had patients that needed neurosurgery and they probe around asking questions, what do you feel?

How do you feel? What are you going to do? And sometimes they hit an area. I've seen these experiments. They're unbelievable.

Stimulated an area in the person says, you know, I feel like I'm about to go into a rage. I'm like, okay, let's back off. Let's move over here. Antirimid-singulate cortex to stimulate. And the patient, the person says, I feel like I'm heading into a storm.

That doesn't sound good. They say, no, but I'm ready. I'm leaning in. A different patient, he's stimuli, they're anterior mid-singulate cortex, and the person says, I feel like I'm going to get up out of my chair and do something really, really difficult.

Okay, so this is interesting. Across multiple people, you're seeing the same general kind of forward center of mass, and of response.

And then there's now scores of studies, and just the last three to five years, showing that, for instance, people who successfully overcome a challenge of any kind, fitness challenge, cognitive challenge,

enter a mid-singulate cortex, expands or at least increases its baseline levels of activity. You see people that fail to meet that challenge, less enter a mid-singulate cortex activity. So there's a bidirectionality of the response. And on and on, and it seems that doing things that are difficult, that we don't enjoy, or that we have to push ourselves to do.

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it seems like time went by really fast, like, oh my god, I can't believe it. It's so much time has gone by. Sorry, so much has happened, excuse me, but not a lot of time has gone by, which means that our frame rate on life is highly dynamic, and in fact it is, and in fact it's set by, you guessed it, our visual system, at least for sighted folks, for people who are low vision or no vision, and by the way, I always reference that because my laboratory has worked on low vision, no vision issues for a number of years.

It's through the auditory system, but for sake of generalizing now and simplicity, we'll talk about the visual system. So it is a fact that when we focus on things up close, think a watchmaker, think about looking into your phone, our perception of time is more fine-grained, that is our frame rate is higher, okay, so more frames per second, then when we view things at a distance, you might think, well how could that possibly be? How could that possibly be?

But it makes perfect sense, you know, when we think about the time space coding in the brain, we need to anchor ourselves to something, the rising and setting of the sun, of course, you know, I mean, unless you're a flatterer, you know, we're going around the sun.

Yeah, what's that? No, we've got no flatterers, one flatterer, they're in the audience, okay, cool. I don't think that's what they were saying, but we need to anchor ourselves in time,

our visual system is the way that we anchor ourselves in time, we have facts about past, present, and future, so we have knowledge, but at an unconscious level, we need to anchor our frame rate, set our frame rate.

And so this is why if you go down to Bondi and you lie at, and you look up at the clouds and the clouds are kind of moving in an unpredictable way, whenever we're looking at a landscape which has some lack of predictable features, like waves,

or rustling of trees, where you could predict that if the wind's blowing this way, the tree's going to go this way, and then back again, but you're not really in a mode of trying to anticipate just how far, in the same way that, for instance, if you call an Uber, or you're waiting on a text message, you know, if you're ever waiting on a text message, you'll find slice, okay, dot, dot, ones that then come and ones that, you're find slicing time.

If your level of autonomic arousal goes up, your frame rate goes up, as your level of autonomic arousal goes down, so you're sleepy, or if you're viewing things that have kind of an unpredictable aspect to them, then your frame rate expands, the passage of time changes, or your perception of the passage of time changes.

So, I, one of the reasons why I love Aquaria, you know, and one of my favorite things to do, since I don't have a fish tank at home right now, but that's going to change soon, is I'll go on YouTube, and there's this beautiful live video of this aquarium in Japan, and I'll just, zone out.

The most relaxing thing ever, and every once in a while, a whale shark, and Aquarium, every once in a while, a whale shark will go through and go like, whoa, and then it disappears, and then a little fish in the kelp, and it's immensely relaxing.

What it does is it slows your frame rate down, and then I find that resets me after just five or six minutes to go back to doing this, you know, high frame rate type stuff, which is what we're doing when we're texting, when we're typing, when we're social media,

by the way, is tuned to a frame rate, that's really interesting, that keeps us engaged, just up into the point where then we want to swipe to the next thing.

It's, the algorithms are designed, and by the way, I have a somewhat benevolent, semi benevolent view of social media, I think it'd be used for good, I think it'd be used for not good.

I think you're limiting one's time on there is good, but there's some good content on there for sure. A lot of my life is spent on there, indeed.

So frame rate is set by where you're looking, the further out you're looking, the larger, the longer, sort of time bins you're capturing, bigger time bins, okay, less resolution.

Closer in, and the more you're trying to predict the next outcome, sort of fine green analysis, predicting what we call DPO's duration, path, and outcome, what's going to happen for how long or, and what's going to happen is something that you're thinking about, and wondering about, then frame rate goes up.

And there's actually a wonderful movie, a Hitchcock movie. The name escapes me at the moment, in which Hitchcock understood this, and it's a movie that's only about 90 minutes long, but in the background, the sun rises and sets, and the way that people move through the scenes of this movie gives you the feeling by the end of this 90 minute movie that a full 24 hours past.

It's really interesting. You feel it in your body as if it was a much longer movie, even though if you look at your watch, that happens, and now the cannabis smokers again are thinking, yeah, like where you sit there, and you're like, whoa, that was a really long time you look at, and it's like three minutes went by, and you're like, wow, psychedelics will do this as well.

They certainly do they distort our time perception mainly through the deployment of large amounts of the neuromodulator serotonin, which is intimately involved in a kind of clock perception mechanisms.

There are a bunch of other things that can set sort of intrudence and grids of the density of our auditory system that also adjust our frame rate.

I think one of the reasons why 40 hurts tones can be valuable for doing cognitive work is that they tend to entrain the certain circuits within the brain for doing the kinds of work that most people call work.

We have to type things out, think logically, kind of if then, kind of analysis. Very different than, say, writing new sheet music or coming up with poetry where, you know, here again, we can think back to the, you know, the Rick Rubin thing or the, you know, being stationary, right?

Like the wall or sitting within a movement in the brain going forward. There's something about adjusting frame rate for capturing new ideas versus implementing ideas.

Implementation of ideas tends to be carried out on higher frame rate type time perception. And now you can understand why visual perception said about the distance of a laptop or phone would be good for that or a conversation.

You know, remember that whole thing of like looking at somebody's face and having a conversation as opposed to looking off into the distance, walking and allowing one's gaze to go panoramic.

So hopefully now you're starting to sense some themes. So that's all I'll say about time perception now, but of course humans have throughout history and still now, frankly, also embarked on a lot of pharmacology if we're honest in order to try and adjust frame rate for sake of productivity.

So that's what we're going to do with caffeine will adjust frame rate in the predictable direction, but also things like alcohol and various drugs like cannabis in order to just frame rate.

I'm certainly not suggesting you do those things. I'm not a cop. You do what you want. Just know what you're doing.

Can you please talk about the jet lag protocol you followed when arriving in Sydney? Oh, yeah. Well, this one was a little bit easier for me because obviously it's not that far off is just you're a full day ahead.

I'm from where I live back home in California. But nonetheless, I suffered tremendously from jet lag and once actually in 2017, I went to Abu Dhabi, 12 hour flip from where I was living at that time in the Bay Area.

And I was a wreck. I barely make it to the meeting. I was crying. I was really messes me up. I slept great the first night and then just didn't sleep for two days. I was a mess.

So jet lag is something that I really had to work hard on. And there are a couple things worth noting. We've done a whole episode about this, but I'll kind of hit a few key bullet points. And maybe it's relevant to you, even if you're not traveling at any point soon because many people are jet lagged without traveling because of the way that they stay up late.

In fact, most everybody in the world now qualifies as a shift worker. Did you know that? And here no disrespect, only reverence and gratitude to the actual shift workers at stay up all night doing emergency work and hospital work and caring for children and things like that throughout the night.

So I'm not trying to take anything away from them. But we are all shifted enough by virtue of artificial lighting and electronic devices that we are effectively shifted and shift working because we're staying up engaging our cognizant.

We're engaging our cognitive systems in ways that frankly we didn't evolve to which I'm not saying is bad, but it's just the reality. Okay, what to do for jet lag.

The key thing is this. And actually this is very valuable in general for sake of sleep. So this is something I haven't talked enough about on the podcast.

I don't know what time you normally wake up without an alarm. I realize there's some variance day to day. But you know for me it would be about let's say 6 am. So let's say for you at seven, you know just pick your typical wake up time.

Subtract from that number. So for me 4 am. That almost with certainty is what's called your temperature minimum your temperature minimum we could measure it.

You could put a thermometer in your mouth or if you come to the laboratory unfortunately they have to do it rectally. 4 am would be my temperature minimum maybe for you if you wake up at seven typically or around seven.

5 am. Okay, so we're not actually measuring your temperature in this kind of good on can this thought experiment. We're doing is we're trying to find a time. So here's what's interesting.

If you expose your eyes not your skin but your eyes to bright light in the two hours or so. Maybe three hours prior to that temperature minimum time.

So if you wake up at seven am 5 am is your temperature minimum so in the two hours maybe three hours prior to that you're going to shift your wake up time and your to bedtime what's called a phase delay a shift in your circadian rhythm.

By about an hour. Interesting. Given that if you view bright light in the two to three hours after your temperature minimum you advance your clock.

Meaning you pull back your clock to want to wake up a bit earlier and go to sleep a little bit earlier.

By about an hour for every time you do that. You think well okay I wake up in the morning at seven let's say I'm using you as an example or me at six and I usually try and get some sunlight in my eyes especially on overcast days et cetera et cetera you've heard me

about this many times before in the podcast and elsewhere. So how come I'm not going to bed earlier and earlier every night and waking up earlier and earlier every morning and indeed you would you would keep phase advancing your clock if you did that except that in the afternoon if you got sunlight in your eyes as presumably you did today

and you're going to sleep a little bit in the middle of the day. It's a beautiful sunny day on your way here you phase delayed your clock a little bit and as a consequence you wake up and go to sleep at more

less the same time every day. It's an amazing mechanism and guess what viewing sunlight in the middle of the day does not do the same thing it doesn't shift your circadian clock they don't tell you that in school but they

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