Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.
Recently, the Huberman Lab podcast hosted a live event at the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles.
It was entitled The Brain Body Contract.
The first part of the evening was a lecture about science and science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance.
The second half, was a question and answer period in which the audience asked me questions from the podcast or related to their own interests or things that they've gleaned from social media or just general questions about mental health, physical health and performance.
And I answered those questions for them.
We wanted to make the recorded version of that question and answer session available to everybody. regardless of who could attend.
So what follows is the question and answer period from the Wiltern Theater Brain Body Contract Live Huberman Lab event.
Want to be sure to thank the sponsors from that event.
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And now without further ado, the question and answer period from the Huberman Lab live event in Los Angeles.
What occurs in the mind body when you have ADHD?
Are there ways to address it without medication?
Thank you for this question. So attention deficit hyperactivity disorder used to be called ADD.
The hyperactivity part is a little misleading.
And again, I'm not a clinician here. HERE'S WHAT WE KNOW WORKS FOR SOME PEOPLE, AND YET THERE ARE ALWAYS GOING TO BE SIDE EFFECTS OF ANY KIND OF CHEMICAL manipulation, which is that we know that people, kids and adults with ADHD actually have a tremendous capacity to focus and if they like what they're focusing on.
You take a kid with ADHD who can't focus and you give them their favorite video game and they are a laser. the threshold to access the dopamine system is higher.
And dopamine has this incredible ability to focus the brain and other aspects of the nervous system.
Certainly, if people require medication, I'm not going to tell you to stop taking that medication.
But the focus training exercises that have been explored mainly in China, but they're starting to be explored over here as well.
Do seem to be benefit and these are as they sound they use them in schools in China now which are literally visual focus exercises your mental focus is That is your ability to focus on things cognitively follows your visual focus.
And of course, your stress will anchor your, essentially put you in a soda straw view of the world.
So yes, there are non-medication based treatments.
By medication, I'm assuming you mean prescription medication.
There are of course, supplement-based medications that will increase dopamine, mainly L-tyrosine.
Again, this is something that carefully about before you start tampering with your dopamine system, but L-tyrosine is the precursor to dopamine, so it will raise your dopamine levels.
But I believe, and you'll hear me say this as many times as necessary, that one should If you can rely on behavioral tools first, then of course, sleep and nutrition are prerequisite.
Again, for all mental health, physical health, performance, you simply can't neglect those.
And then, and only then, if all of that isn't working to rely on supplement-based tools or on prescription medication.
So it's clear that Vyvanse, Adderall, Ritalin, et cetera, work for ADHD, but some people choose to rely on more subtle forms of pharmacologic manipulation like L-tyrosine. and this focusing exercise essentially consists of spending one to three minutes trying to maintain visual focus.
And yes, you are allowed to blink. I don't know why we tend to stare at something we don't blink.
But don't let your eyes dry out. And that can increase your ability to focus cognitively.
And it works. And keep in mind that Focusing always involves refocusing.
We covered a beautiful data set not collected by my lab, but by Wendy Suzuki's lab at NYU. that at roughly 10 minute, it's actually 13 minute a day meditation of the sort where you just focus on your breathing has been shown to improve focus significantly.
Why don't we hear about this more? Well, she's now Dean of Arts and Sciences at NYU and all the students are hearing about it.
Hopefully they're doing it, but it takes a little bit of discipline.
For some reason, 10 minute a day type meditation is something that very few people follow consistently.
But if you're looking for non medication-based treatments for ADHD, or you're somebody who just struggles with focus, the focusing exercise or the meditation I just described can be very useful.
So say the data. Yeah, thanks for bringing up spacetime bridging.
Are people familiar with what spacetime bridging is?
I haven't talked a lot about it. Okay, thanks for bringing that up.
We actually have an episode on meditation coming up soon where I cover it.
And I talked about it long ago, and then I kind of abandoned it because... well, we wanted more data and it's a pretty interesting technique.
You know, if you think about Now, the nervous system and vision in particular.
But if you're not a sighted person, you're low vision or no vision, you could do this with your hearing.
But I'm going to assume most people here are sighted. if not just translate this to the auditory system.
You have this incredible ability to close your eyes and focus, for instance, on people talk about the third eye center, focusing right behind your forehead.
Do you know why? People do that when they meditate.
The reason is that you actually have no sensation in your brain.
It's the one place to focus your attention for which you abandon sensation.
If I think about any portion of my body or my breathing, I'm going to sense what's happening.
I'm going to perceive my inner landscape, so-called interoception. or my outer, if I look out into the world, it's extra reception.
When you focus your attention with your eyes closed, just, you do have to close your eyes just behind your forehead. you are focusing on your thinking.
Sort of obvious, but I don't, at least to me, it had never been stated that clearly.
Again, one of the problems with some of the more traditional practices, but also the problem with science is that there's a shrouding of everything in very complex language, which sucks.
Why does it suck? Because it's a separator.
You eliminate the number of people that could be brought to potentially useful practices.
And I don't like it when people, including myself, overuse mechanism and descriptions of fancy phrases to mask basic principles.
Simplest language I think is a... It tends to unify people around the practices.
So when you focus on this so-called third eye center or a spot right behind your forehead or on your breath, It's a little tricky with the breath, but when you focus on your frontal cortex, there's nothing to sense because there's no sensory neurons there.
There's no touch, there's no pain, nothing.
That's why in these gory movies, you know, you can take the skull off.
Or in neurosurgeries, they're poking around in there and the person's playing a violin.
Like, no anesthetic. No anesthetic, doesn't require anesthetic.
There's no sensory neurons. Can't sense anything there.
So space-time bridging involves It's essentially a meditation, but it's really a perceptual exercise.
I think that's where we're going with this.
It starts by closing your eyes and focusing on that location for which there's no sensation, there's only thought, and then opening your eyes and focusing on a location maybe about the distance of your hand, and you focus also on your breathing.
So you sort of imagine kind of a tether between that.
You can split your attention to these two locations.
You're thinking about your body and you're thinking about a location outside of you.
And then while continuing to think about your body, so-called interoception, focus on your breathing, you focus further out.
And then further out and then further out.
And then ultimately, you know, that little cartoon or meme where they're like, we're just a little blue dot floating in a big universe.
And like, it's supposed to make all your problems go away.
Like it kind of works because what you've done is you've expanded your perception and you go, oh, yeah, like the stuff that's happening in here is really important when I'm focused on what's happening in here.
But when I'm focused on what's going on and the kind of the vastness of all this, and we're just a little, you know, pale blue dot and all that, it changes your perception.
Not just your visual perception, obviously.
Changing your visual perception changes your cognitive perception, which changes your emotional experience.
So the space-time bridging is a perceptual exercise where you step from focusing internally to focusing externally at a short distance, then a further distance, further distance, further distance.
And then trying to imagine yourself in this larger landscape, it sounds very mystical, but it's actually very neurobiological and it, captures something really amazing.
Why is the T in there, the time, space-time bridging?
Because this is space, but time is in there because When you focus in close, your slicing of time is finer.
You notice the subtle fluctuations in your breathing and things that are happening up close.
Whereas when you focus further out, your perception of time actually changes, which is why in panoramic vision we are calm.
And when you think about We're just a pale blue dot and we mostly only live to about 85 or maybe 100 years old.
And then like what's happening right now, my boss being a jerk and all that doesn't really matter because the Earth is spinning and all that kind of stuff. which is all true and is the stuff of philosophy and mindfulness.
And I think is beautiful. What you're really doing is you're changing your time perception by changing your space perception.
So space-time bridging is very useful because most people get locked at one step, one of these stations. especially under conditions of stress and people who have trouble focusing.
I'm glad you brought this up in this context. of ADHD.
People who have a hard time focusing whether or not they have ADHD or not tend to skip back and forth between different space-time domains as we call them in science.
So this is a simple exercise that you can do focusing internally then stepping out externally and then stepping back in all the while paying attention to your inner and the landscape just simply by focusing on your breathing.
It's a tool that we're still collecting data on in terms of its utility, but people are already using it.
I don't think of it as a meditation. I think of it as a perceptual exercise.
Thanks for asking that. As a teenager, what are five things you would recommend to physically feel my best?
I'm a 15-year-old surfer who attends high school and plays soccer.
It sounds like you're doing a lot of things right. to physically feel your best.
Okay, so I'm gonna grasp at some context here that's not within reach.
I'm assuming if you are doing all these things, hopefully doing a bunch of other things too.
And they're going to be demands on you that you probably, some of them you don't want to do school and things like that are going to have varying levels of, like joy and delight and demand of things you don't want to do.
I don't want to default always to the simplest of tools, but I certainly think that even as a 15 year old, If you're not already getting lots and lots of sleep, that's going to be great.
Tell your parents that I said you should get lots and lots of sleep.
Probably you're not sleeping through classes.
I am a professor after all. I couldn't tell you otherwise.
You know, I would say if I could travel back in time as a 15 year old, I would.
Encourage you to cultivate some sort of mindfulness practice I know this sounds a little cliche, but having some awareness of your Thinking about your thinking is good, but I'm actually not going to say sit down and meditate for 10 minutes a day. or do NSDR.
I'm actually not going to tell you that.
I think given how plastic your brain is, how much it's changing at 15, I would encourage you and maybe you would set a timer for this to actually develop just a really keen awareness of what stresses you out, what relaxes you, what delights you, et cetera, and just to simply develop an awareness of that because those are your antennae.
And I certainly had a meditation practice as a youth, mostly given to me because I was a little haywire and I needed it.
And it worked pretty well. But I think in retrospect, what I wish I had developed was more of a sense of how I navigated stress or things and things I enjoyed and things I didn't enjoy.
And I would just encourage you to Have a general awareness.
Try and detect and learn about what raises your adrenaline, what raises your dopamine, what raises your serotonin.
And then start thinking about tools. But again, the awareness is going to be very valuable.
And gosh, as a 15 year old, you are in this, you know, amazing, blessed period of heightened neuroplasticity, should we all be so lucky.
So enjoy it. Next question, please. Clarity on adrenaline regarding cold water.
Should we wait to feel the rise of adrenaline, the get me out of here feeling, and the fall of it before bailing?
Yes. provided it doesn't kill you. You know, I don't want to say cold water.
It's hard to kill yourself with cold water, provided your head's above and you're breathing.
Um, it's sorry. My podcast producer is always like, I can't help that the anyway.
Um, It's a great tool. and different days it'll feel different.
So for instance, doing cold, any kind of adrenaline and deliberate cold exposure or adrenaline increasing activity early in the day you might find that you are more quote unquote resilient than later.
In other words, the wall, like I really don't want to do this.
This is actually interesting for, I think it extends beyond cold water.
Let's say you really don't want to do something. pay attention to the fact that maybe it's not the right thing to do, but assuming it's something that you know you should do, but you don't want to do, you are already in the first wall of adrenaline.
You don't experience it necessarily as heightened levels of stress. you might experience it as heightened levels of fatigue or a hard time shifting on that kind of activation state that's required to move through the thing.
But I do encourage you, to take advantage of that.
Of course, and we have an episode coming out tomorrow, actually, that answers questions like, should you train if you're sick?
And what if you travel? And there's context always.
But I think that. you do want to experience the, if you want to get the most out of the cold water exposure and to be more specific, the adrenaline, then you want to get to that point of I really want to get out of here, but I know I can stay in safely, but I really want to get out of here. it's a little hard to explain, but there's just so much learning in those short moments about where your mind goes.
And this sounds very kind of Again, subjective and maybe a little wishy-washy.
But you can realize great things about yourself in those moments.
You can find insights. in those moments.
Also keep in mind that the degree of discomfort, not just physical but mental discomfort, is directly predictive Of the pain to pleasure wave that you'll experience afterwards.
The reason it feels so good when you get out of the ice bath and you're showered off.
I always do the warm shower after I don't do this end on cold thing.
I don't know. It just seems a little too painful and then take a warm shower and then you feel great.
And that's the surge of dopamine that we know. based on a paper published in the European Journal of Physiology, lasts many hours, and it's a 100% to 200% increase in dopamine is not a subtle effect.
And then people say, well, wait, is that dopamine going to crash my dopamine system?
No, because there's a nice slow rise. In fact, I'm actually not aware of many things besides love and delight that can create this long, slow. arc of dopamine lasting many hours.
Maybe you're aware of other things. If you are, let me know.
It turns out that long arc is a true antidepressant.
And my colleague at Stanford, Dr. Anna Lembke, who's the head of our dual diagnosis addiction clinic has talked about in her amazing book, Dopamine Nation, about patients of hers that have really helped themselves along and out of the more depressive phases of you know, working through addiction and just depression in general through directed cold water therapy.
So I, you know, I'm obviously a fanatic about it in the sense that It's a powerful, relatively safe, if done properly safe, if done properly way to modulate your internal dopamine.
Hopefully I answered your question. Next question, please.
Sorry, I caught it raise it went off the fall as well.
Yes. I think you should get out once you're once you're you've accomplished something Don't get out when you panic, unless it's dangerous.
Sorry. How can you train your brain to feel more confident in moments where you tend to feel intimidated?
Ah. OK. Hard question. Because context is tricky here because I don't know what the context is.
And confidence on short time scales and then long time scales.
So confidence in school, confidence in career, those are long. long arc things, whereas confidence to be able to do something in the short term is different.
But remember, those action sequences that trigger the release of dopamine, Dopamine, I've mainly talked about the dark side of dopamine, but I hopefully also talked about the sort of upward spiral that dopamine can cause mainly by thinking about delight things that you really enjoy, that carries over.
And I would say that you want to micro slice the demands of what's maybe got you back on your heels a bit.
Actually, a good friend of mine who's here tonight, I think also my friend Pat, He has a great way of conceptualizing this, which is, Most all endeavors, we either feel back on our heels, flat footed or forward center of mass.
Like we can really do something. we're flat footed, we're back on our heels and sometimes getting from back on our heels, let's call that lack of confidence to just, you know, on two feet. confident enough to move forward or at least stay in the game.
That's going to require you could lean on different tools.
I can't say which would be ideal for the circumstance you have in mind, but I do think that having a way to calm yourself will give you access to more resources, internal resources.
We know this. This was something I meant to bring up during the discussion about fear versus love, et cetera, trying to access delight and love.
When we are in a state of fear or stress or anxiety, the rule set, options available to us and indeed our creativity is greatly diminished.
And this has to do with the way that the prefrontal cortex interacts with an area of the brain called the insula, which relates to our internal landscape.
And there's this weird phenomenon which is that normally our brain, our thinking brain, and our rule-setting brain, it leads the brain parts that control and pay attention to how we feel internally.
And that's why, for instance, if you feel a little nervous, you can still do something.
At some point you get stressed enough and we know this from work by my colleague David Spiegel, it reverses.
And these areas of the brain that are paying attention, like how flushed my face is or whether or not I'm sweating or my breathing, actually start to shut down creative decision making.
So I would say the way to have more confidence is to learn to control that stress and keep the part of your brain, the prefrontal cortex, is that part. that can come up with new rules that can be funny, that can be creative, that keeps that brain part leading.
The way you think about this is that the prefrontal cortex is sort of like the coach and the rest of your brain are sort of like the players. get too stressed, the players start to lead the game and the coach follows and kind of drags them along.
So I would encourage you to focus on real time stress modulation and to raise your stress threshold using the sorts of tools we talked about, and to register your wins.
I didn't get into this in too much detail, One of the amazing things about the dopamine system is that it's highly subject to your interpretation.
If you tell yourself, that a fail was a win, and you can see or conceptualize some way in which that's actually true, you get to tap into the dopamine system.
You might think that's crazy. You can cheat your own brain.
You can cheat your own neurochemistry. And indeed you can.
You can change the timing space-time referencing.
We see this with examples like Nelson Mandela or Viktor Frankl.
You know, you read their stories, right?
Trapped in little cells, right? confined, imprisoned, and they come up with new ways to access the dopamine system by now not thinking about what they're not getting, but thinking about what they can control in their immediate experience.
Many, many examples of this throughout literature and history.
And the dopamine system is the life force system.
I don't say that in any loose way. Dopamine is. life force, it's the wish and the desire to continue.
It's persistence. And so if you can think about what might seem like a failure and really spend some time thinking about not the potential wins on the outside, but how you can conceptualize that as a potential win internally, you really do get to achieve an internal chemical wind, and that chemical wind sets you up for more real winds, if that makes sense.
It's incredible how contextualized the dopamine system is, but if it weren't, why would it matter if we're talking about money or mates or food or job or school, you don't get 50 reward systems and motivation systems.
You get one. And that's the dopamine system.
Next question, please. What is the competing mechanism behind bilateral eye movement EMDR that helps resolve psychological trauma? the competing mechanism?
Well, let me try and answer as best I can.
I'm not sure I understand the full extent to the question, but let me, EMDR, moving your eyes from side to side, right? and then recounting a trauma is a very common and actually one of the four approved treatments that are behavioral for trauma. taken seriously in the psychiatric and psychological community for good reason.
It tends to work best for single event traumas as opposed to like entire childhoods.
No joke there, like, you know, some people have their entire childhood was traumatic.
Other people, they experience a trauma, single event trauma or repeated periods of the same or similar type of trauma.
Eye movements from side to side have been shown in a number of studies to very potently reduce the activity of a brain structure called the amygdala, which most people are familiar with because of the character from the Star Wars movie, Amygdala. there's a neuroscientist somewhere on that team.
It is indeed a threat detection center. And when you move through space, not outer space, but when you walk like this, your eyes actually generate these subtle side to side shifts, unless you're focusing on a specific target.
My lab and other laboratories have found that that leads to a very potent quieting of the threat detection system And then EMDR is essentially a process of pairing that calmer state with no threat detection system activated with the recount of something that normally would be quite triggering.
So you've heard of Pavlovian conditioning, like a bell rings and the animal gets fed. animal salivates, eventually just the bell will evoke the salivation.
You're doing the reverse of that. It's called behavioral desensitization.
It has an underlying mechanism, etc., But the idea is to pair a calm state with recount of something.
It has been shown to be successful. There are people who think that the Side to side eye movements and the recount of trauma may actually be invoking some form of hypnosis.
My colleague, David Spiegel, expert in clinical hypnosis.
He's appeared on my podcast, Rich Roll's podcast, and a few other podcasts and talks about this.
It is not stage hypnosis, it's clinical hypnosis.
So there may be something going on there.
EMDR, again, some people get great relief from it.
Other people don't. What's kind of nice is that This eye movements from side to side or simply taking a walk as long as you're not looking at your phone and not allowing your eyes to move from side to side. is a very good way to shut down the fear and stress system.
So taking a walk, I think, is relaxing for obvious reasons.
And there are data showing that part of the reason why animals scratch at the door and want to go for a walk may not actually be the exercise.
There's kind of an anxiety and then an anxiety relief that occurs.
I have to go to the bathroom to one of Costello's great joys in life was just peeing on everything.
Um, Outdoors, thankfully. So the psychological trauma rewiring, unfortunately, there haven't been a lot of brain imaging studies long looking at this long term of how well EMDR works.
What I think is going to happen in the next few years, by the way, is it is not going to be a discussion around Should you do EMDR?
Should you do transcranial magnetic stimulation?
Should you do behavioral therapy? It's going to be combination therapies, combination therapies, including pharmacologic manipulations. to essentially give a boost to the systems that encourage neuroplasticity, like dopamine and serotonin and adrenaline, and then also then perform And if you want to talk about what's happening in the landscape of clinical trials on some of the psychedelics, I'm happy to talk about it.
They're still illegal. but they are being used in clinical trials and very interesting stuff is happening there.
Okay, next question, please. What new research or interventions are you most excited about in the realm of health and wellness?
What I think is going to be very interesting in the next few years really reflects my obsession that you've seen a little bit of tonight.
But the thing that I think is going to be most useful, and I've seen this in science before, and I think we're going to see it in health and wellness. is that there are all these tools and all these people, and he's saying this and she's saying that, and what we're going to start paying attention to is, what are the common themes right?
If it, and, A broader and more important theme is going to be one of modulation versus mediation.
What do I mean? Well, if someone were to pull a fire alarm right now and please don't.
That will shift our attention and make it hard to focus on what I'm saying and knowing me I'd probably just stay up here talking.
Do we think that fire alarms mediate attention?
No, they modulate it. if it were very, very cold in this room, like it was when we first got here tonight.
Arctic cold. Hopefully it's warmed up a bit.
It hasn't. I'm so sorry. So sorry. Yeah, I attempted to.
Yeah. I almost thought maybe we all just do a bunch of breathing to heat up like adrenaline release.
But these days, getting groups of people all breathe on each other is not exactly, you know, I can see that might go the wrong way in terms of what people interpret.
So the, The idea here is that certain things directly mediate something.
Like a physiological side directly calms you down quickly.
It mediates the calming response. Getting good sleep makes you less easily triggered.
It modulates stress. But is sleeping directly mediating stress control?
No. And I think this is really important.
And this brings up the topic of the gut brain axis.
The gut is rich with these little. Bugs, bacteria, trillions of them, which is an eerie thought to me.
But also the surface of your skin, the surface of your eyes.
You have a skin microbiome, a nasal microbiome, every mucosal lining. has a microbiome.
In fact, think about this. This is a crazy but worthwhile tangent.
Have you ever bitten the inside of your mouth?
It sucks, right? And you get a cut and it hurts.
But guess what? The inside of your mouth heals without a scar.
Think about that. Weird, right? You cut anywhere else on your body and depending on how well you heal and your age and your immune status, you get a scar.
Your mouth is filled with bacteria and it's open to the world.
But the gut microbiome, provided it's healthy, provides an incredible ability to heal quickly.
And, you know, I'm not somebody who's done a lot of acupuncture.
I've went a few times, and now there's interesting science happening on acupuncture.
But what's the first thing they do when you walk in there?
Yeah. And then they go, oh, yeah. And they have this cool intuition that's not based on Western mechanistic science.
It's more of an intuition based on. millions, if not billions of data points that have been put into these charts.
It's pretty cool, right? And what they are looking at, I believe, and from what my colleagues who work on microbiome tell me is they can look at the pallor of your tongue, in particular in the back, and get a sense of whether or not the microbiome there is of the appropriate stuff.
But they don't go, oh, lactobacillus, and then bacillus.
They all onto illus, right? Oh, you're dysbiotic.
Instead, they get a sense. Now, parents of small babies learn to detect all sorts of things coming out of essentially every orifice of the child. as a readout of health because the child doesn't have language.
And a dog owner, unfortunately, you learn to do this too, for better or for worse, probably for better, right?
So we have this intuition about gut health, but gut health would be another example where It's very clear now that fiber can be helpful, but it's mostly consuming these fermented foods that have been used for ages, but low sugar fermented foods of the natto, kimchi, sauerkraut, kombucha, et cetera, like all these things, depending on which culture you're in, they come in different forms. certain yogurts, etc., that allow the gut to be healthy, and it modulates a huge number of systems.
So I don't think that you're going to cure depression by... adjusting your gut microbiome.
But if your gut microbiota are not well and you improve that, it will indeed shift the neurotransmitter systems of your brain and give you a elevated mood.
That shouldn't come as a surprise anymore, but I think that the whole world thinks, gosh, it must be the serotonin in the gut.
No, it's actually not. Serotonin gut, it's that the gut microbiota create chemicals that actually become serotonin in the brain or become dopamine in the brain.
And so I think that the gut microbiome I would put in the same category, although not quite as important.
I would put it in the category of like sleep.
It modulates a huge number of other processes.
It doesn't mediate them. So sunlight, sleep. healthy gut microbiome, exercise, good nutrition, social connection.
These things all create this general milieu or environment of health.
I would like to see more distinction between modulating and mediating effects and tools out there.
I also see a lot of unnecessary argument.
People are like, there's no example Improving your gut microbiome cures depressions.
Of course there's not, but there are really good examples if your gut microbiome is off that improving it can improve mood, which in depending on where you are on that spectrum of depression can really relieve things.
So I think that the future of health, you know, we hear so much about personalized medicine and matched to your genome, but we don't even have the basic.
Most people don't even have the basics right.
And if you watch or listen to the podcast long enough, hopefully certain themes start to kind of repeat themselves, but a key theme that You learn in science, you teach your students, you know, does it modulate or does it mediate it?
You need to be careful with your language there.
And there's great information or, as we say, interpretational power there.
If you understand the difference, then I think we can go a long way. by making that distinction, modulating versus mediating.
There are probably other things that modulate health that I'm overlooking now just because of the flow that I'm in.
The cool mitt. Yeah. The cool mitt. Palmer Cooling.
OK, I promised to talk about Palmer Cooling.
Well, I'll do it now. Palmer Cooling, they changed the Q&A format.
This is like teaching in the classroom. All right, very briefly, the palmar cooling, which is essentially placing – you can cool the core of the body most quickly by – placing cold objects on the hands, the bottoms of the feet, or on the top of the face because of the arrangement of vasculature.
Normally, you've got this arteries, capillaries, veins things.
But at those locations in the body, you skip the capillaries and you can basically – you're not really passing cool into the body, but you're cooling off the core of the body more quickly.
And if you do that in between sets of exercise or during a run or cycling, you can dramatically increase your ability to continue.
I actually use the CoolMitt for cognitive work, but you don't need a CoolMitt.
Sorry, CoolMitt guys. You can just get a thing of ice water or just very cold water.
And I know it sounds trivially easy, but you're actually just cooling your core by putting your hands or even one hand on a relatively cold thing of water. or ice but not so cold that it constricts the vasculature there.
This is the incredible work of my colleague at Stanford, Dr. Craig Heller.
Why wouldn't more people do this if you can double the amount of endurance, believe it or not, or double the number of sets of exercise you can do or feel more alert and and do more cognitive work.
Why wouldn't more people do it? Because people just don't do it.
And it sounds crazy. It really sounds crazy, but it's a real thing.
And I wish more people would do it. The athletes at Stanford do it. people in the military do it.
So people who know, know, and they, and they use it, enjoy it.
It's just, it's a, it's a, it's almost like seems too off target from the, what you're trying to accomplish.
I don't know, for some reason people are finally on board breathing, like in a specific way as a useful tool a few years ago, no one was into that.
And just think of how far we've come. It's incredible.
People are talking about psychedelics, meditation, breathing.
I think the pandemic, for all its pains and what a challenging period for all sorts of reasons. did wake people up to the idea that you have to take control over your health because there's no magic fairy coming to do it for you.
With all due respect, there's no government agency that's going to drop off the kit at your front door of like, here's how you take good care of yourself.
So it's just not going to happen. And it wouldn't happen under any circumstances.
So it's a personal responsibility issue.
All right. What lessons from skateboarding?
The failure part, you know. failure, failure, failure.
I mean, for me, um, you know, skateboard never was a good skateboarder, still have close friends in that community.
And, um, Our photographer and the guy who does all the visuals and the other guys that do the visuals for our podcast, Mike Blayback and Chris and Martin are all of that community.
You know, I think that for me that community was really, as Mike will sometimes say, skateboarders hate everything. meaning they have a very high threshold for what they consider acceptable.
It's not just what you do, it's how you do it.
Super important. And I think in neuroscience, There are a lot of, there's a lot of stuff in science in general.
There are a lot, there's so many papers and there's so many experiments.
Like how do you navigate that landscape?
I think it helped me develop a sense of taste.
But the taste that I'm referring to is not necessarily a taste of which science is cool or not cool, that too.
It came through a few times tonight when I was talking about my mentors.
You know, I picked back then skateboarding because I really liked the people.
And also, you didn't need your parents to go to a game.
And so that worked for me. And you could kind of make your own schedule.
I do think it's very important to the extent that you can in science and in everything to surround yourself with the kinds of people that you just really enjoy being around.
And so to me, the podcast running a lab feels a lot like skateboarding.
It's the same energy. It's the same neurochemical systems firing.
So that's, uh, Yeah, that one. Next. Oh, wait, no, that's inappropriate.
I do have a Feynman story, but it's inappropriate.
Darn it. Damn. Maybe sometime. This is why I don't drink.
Good decision making. Well, I read all of Feynman's books.
So I had the pleasure, I never met him. He was dead before I was born.
But my dad did, and he had good Feynman stories, and they're inappropriate.
The cool thing about Feynman was that he didn't really care if people understood the specifics. of what he was talking about.
He just wanted people to get turned on to how amazing physics was, and he loved general principles.
One of the things, you know, the example that's sometimes given, I don't know how many of you are familiar with the Feynman books, but surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman, or what do you care what other people think?
All of that stuff, it's wonderful. He picked locks, you know, we worked at Los Alamos labs, they were working on the bomb and he basically, well, there and elsewhere and every morning, the offices used to come in and he would spread all the top secret papers out on the floor.
He would break into the safes at night and then they were perplexed who could do this.
And he liked safe cracking literally like, National security secrets, just for fun, prankster.
He also bongo drum naked on the roof of Caltech.
And he did most of his writing of theorems in strip clubs.
Learned to draw late in life. Was really into flotation tanks. and very curious about but never did psychedelics.
That's as I understand it. But one of the cool Feynman factoids is that when he was a kid, he talked about when he was a child that his dad used to take him birdwatching.
And he'd say, well, that's a whatever, scrub jay.
And that's a whatever, whatever, thrush.
And his dad said, no. Don't cloud your mind with naming and taxonomy.
That's not meaningful. because then what if it's the different, the pygmy thrush or the lesser this or that.
The more important thing is to start to identify principles of why certain birds behave one way and certain birds behave another, and to start finding the commonalities and the regularities.
And that's a theme that I obviously tonight have tried to impose.
And it's actually something that I can't do in podcasts. necessarily because I can't thread across 40 episodes or something like that in the same way that I could in an evening like this.
So that's an appropriate Feynman story. Um, also it just seemed like a delightful guy.
And he's kind of cool. He's a little bit street, right?
He had that thick accent. He was from far Rockaway, but he didn't really care much what people thought or he did.
And he pretended he didn't. Careful when people tell you they don't care what people think.
I think he did to the extent that it still allowed him to get the message out there.
Okay. Next question, please. My horse. Wow.
I love this. I delight in all things animals, but especially horses, because my high school girlfriend had a horse.
And you know they do that thing where People say, oh, you know, horses can detect how they know more about you than you know.
And then I get into the horse and the horse is like, you know, this and like.
It's like a litmus test. Having a girlfriend with a horse was very intimidating for me, actually.
I felt like I had to compete with the horse.
She spent all this time with the horse. It was very large.
Very like, you know. Anyway, eventually, I broke the horse.
Okay. My horse does the double inhale, long exhale often.
He's a bit of a stressy guy. Warm blood?
Yeah? Warm blood? I used to work at the barn.
I used to shovel manure and work at the barn.
She brought her horse to college. I actually followed her off to college.
I never would have gone to college if she hadn't gone to college.
The horses are interesting animals. They do tell you a lot.
The horse does the double inhale, long exhale often.
He's a bit of a stressy guy. Do you suppose this physiological stress regulator transcends for you?
Absolutely. In fact, I mentioned warm bloods, right?
I have a colleague at Stanford. She's amazing.
Her name is Sue McConnell and she. is an expert in dog genetics.
So you can imagine I'm always asking her questions.
And we talk about dogs and we talk about horses because she also, I think she raises warm bloods. and you hear about hot bloods and warm bloods, Also, if you have any familiarity with dogs, there are dogs like Costello, where like a nuclear bomb could go off and Costello might open an eye.
That's the bulldog economy of effort. They're not going to get activated unless there's a reason to do it.
They are very, as we call parasympathetic dominant.
That seesaw of autonomic arousal is just really, really relaxed.
Getting them into action is more of an effort.
There are other animals, like the whippet, or the Italian greyhound.
They're always cold. that are very sympathetic dominant.
And then of course, within a breed or within a species, there's a range.
And humans also, out within a range. I think anyone who's had children will tell you, you know, he or she has been like this since birth, calm, easygoing, or like really easily stressed.
I think that seesaw, we didn't get into tonight too much, concept with the autonomic regulation of a hinge so don't think so much about being really stressed out or really relaxed but certain animals the hinge is tightened so that the The seesaw just kind of tilts mellow like Costello.
A bulldog almost seems like a different animal than a whippet.
They're so very different. And within the category of horses, and I'm not an expert in horse genetics, but they are selected for not just for their physical attributes, but for their psychological or temperament. attributes.
And you see this in dogs too. In fact, the reason I picked Costello and Elvis can verify this story is I read, I wanted a dog for so many years.
And I went there, and there were all these puppies.
I heard you need to take them in the other room one by one.
And then if it barks for its siblings and you're like, oh, it's a healthy puppy.
So I walk in and all the dogs are running around like crazy.
It was right around Christmas time, right Elvis?
And they're running around and then there's one in the back.
And he's taking advantage of the fact that all the other ones are waiting.
He's just eating out of all of their bowls.
And I was like, I want that one. So I took that chubby little bastard in the next room and I thought, okay, he's going to bark for his siblings.
And he laid down and he took a nap. And I was like, this one.
I want this one. Why did I want that one?
Well, this completes the principle, which is I wanted... a dog like that because I'm not like that.
And I was very interested in a dog I could take care of, but also a dog that would help regulate my nervous system.
And so for me, having a dog like that, as opposed to a whippet or something that was going to, you know, like constantly around is, you know, a very calming effect.
And to this day, memory of his snoring still puts me to sleep.
So I think that your horse probably has, it kind of idles a little bit higher.
Think about the RPM. You know, revs a little bit higher at a given speed, more RPM at a given speed.
That's the way I think about the autonomic system.
How do you reset that? Well, this is why a lot of exercise is good, right?
And suddenly my girlfriend's horse was crazy.
It was gelded late and it was crazy. I almost said nuts, but that's a bad pun.
It was not nuts, but it was crazy. It was gelded late.
Next question. Is there any science behind staying motivated or developing discipline?
Ooh. So this represents kind of the higher tier of where I think things are going to go in the next few years where we're going to start seeing this convergence of psychology and biology where we can get to these harder concepts.
You know, I like to think that we can stay motivated through a simple process that now will make sense to you because the last thing I covered was toggling back and forth between Our ability to be gritty and lean in kind of in friction, maybe even a little anger, fear, competitiveness, et cetera, that kind of grinding in. but that the more sustaining fuel, the sort of hybrid version, hybrid fuel model. would be one in which you can access that, but that's a depletable and not so renewable resource without a lot of rest.
Working hard out of anger, determination and kind of grit will work.
But when you are depleted, you have to stop for a long while.
Whereas if you can access this delight system, which is really one of dopamine and serotonin both, in other words, And I want to think of a not of a different way to put this, but to try and think about what sorts of things and tools allow you to be and feel most loving.
I know it sounds weak, but it's anything but weak.
To be most loving in the verb sense of the word toward what you're doing.
I actually used to use this trick in college when I'd encounter a topic I hated.
I would tell myself, I'm just going to fall in love with this.
By trying to find the gems within it. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.
But the wish to do it that way as opposed to, okay, I'm just going to grind this out. at least for me at the time, was a powerful tool.
So motivation and discipline is a tricky one.
That's sort of the just do it thing. you need tools to modulate your stress and to get your sleep, you know, do all the basic things right, set the right context for you to be in your best, chance of being disciplined, and that itself is its own form of discipline.
But in terms of continual motivation you're not going to manage to go against the grain for very long.
People have managed to go against challenge for very long time. for very long times.
In fact, I was reading recently about the psychology of people being kidnapped.
And they have this odd trick that they used.
Have you heard about this? It's sort of like Stockholm syndrome, but they actually convinced themselves to fall in love with their captors.
And then they come up with new ways to escape them, which is kind of cool.
So there's something about Mentally feeling like you're trying to go from back on your heels to flat-footed that does that's very energetically costly So again, these systems are very susceptible to what we call context or top-down regulation.
Hopefully that helps. I know it's a little bit abstract, I wish I could give you a one-minute exercise that would make you motivated.
But we do talk about tools to get adrenaline going and things like that.
But spend some time thinking. about what would allow you to sustain effort through positive feelings.
It's not a light concept at all. Okay, next question, please.
What would be your biggest piece of advice for achieving one's dreams?
Oy, that's a tough one. Again, this is going to be a little abstract.
You know, I'm a believer in this idea of kind of a seed message.
Robert Greene has talked a lot about this. that we can all kind of think back to a event or stage of our life.
Typically it's before puberty. for other reasons that are kind of interesting, but where we delight in something, right?
So for me, it was fish. And obviously now I don't need to work on fish.
It wasn't about the fish. I hope that came through.
I mean, Aquaria are really cool, but it's not about the fish.
It was something about the way they moved.
It was something about the way that it tickled my excitement.
I used to get dropped off at this little pet shop in California Avenue in Palo Alto called Monet's Pet Shop.
My mom used it as childcare and she would drop me off there and I had this book and I would log all the tropical fish and which ones could be with which ones and then I would I was obsessed, right?
But for me, it was something about organizing and being able to make reliable predictions.
It was about parsimony. It was about principles as opposed to, And the colors delighted me and all that kind of stuff.
The equipment delighted me. But then I hit puberty, and then it was something else.
And then I went to college and it was something else.
And I got a girlfriend and it was something else.
It changes over time, but this is why I recommended to that young 15-year-old person that they learn to tap into that sense of like, oh, this is cool.
Like this feels cool. I know not everyone else thinks it's cool.
Maybe they do. Like this feels good. I actually have a somatic experience of this.
I'm not a very somatically oriented person.
I'm more up here. I actually know if I'm onto something, if this left arm just kind of starts fidgeting, like it's like I want to move or like some people, you can start to identify ways in which you suddenly have this positive energy.
It's not a fear energy. It's almost like a magnetism to things.
And just don't be confused in or misdirected in thinking that it's that thing.
It's that, again, energy or that attraction to something that feels right that is your, I wish we had these divining rod to find water.
That's your tool. It's like antennae. You want to grow your antennae.
So how do you follow your dreams? Well, I never thought I'd do a podcast.
I never thought I'd become a neuroscientist.
You have to be willing Of course, to take risks and to iterate quickly, but not so quickly that you fail out of the game, et cetera, if you do get back in, et cetera.
But it's really about developing an awareness.
Now, the key thing is you're not going to find this by going up a mountain and sitting there. or waiting for your passion to just kind of rocket, you know, does this sort of piano fall onto your head?
It's not going to happen that way. You have to interact with the sensory world and different kinds of people.
And you have to be a little bit of an adventurer in a safe way, of course, an adventurer, and learn to recognize the signals.
And some people are very in tune with this.
You know, there's an amazing podcast with Rick Rubin recently on Joe Rogan's podcast where he talks about the creative process as Kind of this, like, it seems like whatever's going on in that beard of his is just connects to the world and he can just like there, like that's where you need to go.
And that's. But that's part of the magic is you don't really know.
And because it's all energetic. It's all energetic.
And when I say energetic, I don't mean in the mystical sense.
I mean, you have to learn to sense those fluctuations in energy. can sense them very easily because they're very mellow.
And if something gets them really excited, they notice as a big Delta, as we say in science, big change, other people, They ride kind of high all the time.
And so everything is exciting to them. And they miss a lot of the subtle fluctuations in what's really special and right for them.
In fact, mania. is characterized by hyper-elevated levels of dopamine, then everything is a good idea.
And depression is the opposite. Nothing is a good idea. nothing's going to work, right?
And those are the extremes. And those are rough conditions, obviously.
But for most people, it's about learning to detect those subtle fluctuations.
And every time, every single time you find somebody who is exceptional at their craft and doing well in life.
Okay, there are a lot of people who are exceptional at their craft but not necessarily doing well on the whole. those people have a kind of intuition about what feels good to them.
This year's Nobel Prize winner in chemistry is my colleague Carolyn Bertozzi.
All I know of her, except the fact that she's amazing chemist, They did this interview with her, and she said that when everyone would go out in college, she was finding excuses to stay home and read organic chemistry.
Now, that to me sounds like a bad night.
But for her, it was pure delight. And she's wired for that.
And I think her work is going to be vitally important and transformative for humanity.
I really do. So how do you succeed in, in get chasing your dreams.
You succeed in identifying what they are, but you don't know at the outset.
You want to find the energy to find the right path and continually course correct when you will undoubtedly be off your path.
That's essentially what I've done. I'd still look for the feeling of delighting in Costello or the cuttlefish.
That's what I'm looking for. It's not a template I have to match, but that's my like, Oh yeah, I know what that feels like.
It's like a texture. It's like if you think about a bunch of different textures of sandpaper, it's like this one that just feels really good.
And so you're comparing everything to that.
Because the system, that involves all these chemicals, you'll find it if you learn to pay attention to it.
But you won't find it sitting staring at your belly button or going up a mountain, you have to be in sensory experience in order to find it.
Reflection is good, but you need to get into action.
Okay. Wow. All right. Well, Okay, so psilocybin, opinion of the psychedelics generally.
We just had an episode with my colleague, Nolan Williams, who's a triple board certified neurologist, psychiatrist, This is a fun thing about working at Stanford.
It's also very humbling because you're like, whoa, who are these people?
I got three board certifications. You know, the psilocybin, first of all, not for everybody.
People with psychosis, it is still illegal, decriminalized certain places.
You know, so obviously. with cautionary notes, people who have drug addiction issues or other kinds of addiction issues need to be thoughtful about diving into a neurochemical landscape like that.
But it does appear that the clinical trials on one macro dose.
This is what's interesting to me. A lot of people talk about micro dosing psilocybin, but the data, at least according to Matthew Johnson, who was also on the podcast.
The data for microdosing are not really there, frankly.
The data on single session macro dose, sort of heroic doses that have been talked about in the psychonaut community for depression and to some extent PTSD and for eating disorders and sort of end of life preparation. are quite encouraging.
In fact, the current data suggests that about two thirds of people achieve lasting relief from one session.
Keep in mind, those are guided sessions with physicians in the room, etc.
I do think there's a potential hazard of all psychedelics, which is they alter...
THIS INCLUDES MDMA OR ESPECIALLY MDMA, THEY ALTER THE CHEMICAL LANDSCAPE IN YOU SUCH THAT a lot of things can serve as attractors in that state, meaning you can get really into the sound of music in an MDMA session, feel connected to that, and waste the opportunity for some more meaningful transformative rewiring.
And I do think that that's worth paying attention to.
So that's the the usefulness of having a therapeutic guide there is they can continually steer you back to what at least for you is the more meaningful work.
But it's very encouraging. And Nolan Williams, who I trust, again, triple board certified MD, said that in the studies of lifetime perceived individual and societal risk of all the compounds out there except for caffeine, psilocybin is at the bottom of the list.
Whereas things like heroin, cocaine, alcohol, methamphetamine sit at the top of the list.
Actually, alcohol quite high on that list. at certain amounts of consumption.
So I'm very excited about what's happening in the landscape of psilocybin, but I'm not so excited about the micro dosing data, very excited about the single heroic dose data.
One interesting thing there perhaps, what seems to be the unifying feature of a successful psilocybin session is that at some point the person feels as if it's like too much of an autonomic thing, they kind of get to this point and then they are encouraged to quote unquote let go.
And I'm fascinated by this concept of letting go because, you know, I'm a neuroscientist. know what that means, but it seems like being able to ride the wave of of autonomic arousal from top to bottom seems to be very powerful for trauma and depression treatment.
And this is interesting, a lot of people think that One of the major issues in humans nowadays is we're stressed about a lot of things, but we never actually get to go into the full stress response and then let it relax again.
Um, and catharsis was big at one point, you know, scream therapy, Steve jobs is really new scream therapies that whether or not catharsis is healthy or not has been debated, but the data are kind of pointing to the fact that it may be provided that the catharsis is not obviously someone damaging themselves or somebody else.
So maybe we should all be screaming a lot more.
Why does my desire to eat disappear? after I use the sauna interesting I can go in hungry and get out with no desire to eat I can only speculate, you know, the sauna or any kind of deliberate heat exposure that's uncomfortable releases this molecule dynorphin.
This is actually the same molecule that's released under conditions of alcohol withdrawal.
It makes you feel agitated and not good, and then there's this rebound The way it feels good is later it causes this upregulation in the so-called mu opioid receptors.
The chemicals that you have, your so-called endogenous opioids, not the opioids that are related to the opioid crisis, but the ones that you naturally make are able to have a more robust effect after the sauna.
Dynorphin is an appetite suppressant and for reasons related to general discomfort in the body.
So that's the only reason I can speculate.
There are a number of other things that sauna does, including massive increases and growth hormone provided you don't sauna too much.
So if you do it once a week for four 20 minute sessions spaced five minutes apart, you get these enormous increases in growth hormone.
If you start doing it more often, you get still significant but smaller increases in growth hormone.
And my team, this is how the podcast goes to at some point, Rob just goes, it's enough.
So if you think that the episodes are long now, they'd be a lot longer.
Listen, I just want to before we part, I know it's a Sunday night and people have to go.
I want to thank everyone for coming out tonight.
I know that at least for me, I'm still sort of. baffled but pleasantly so that people are interested in investing time to come out and hear hours of a nerd like me talk about science. and tools, and I'm delighted that people are hopefully gleaning some useful information.
Please do pass along the information. I didn't invent this stuff.
As I mentioned before, I was not consulted at the design phase.
I have no domain over it. This is the stuff of Mother Nature.
Whatever other beliefs you have, they're here in us.
And of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't finish by saying have a wonderful night and thank you for your interest in science.
