Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - How the Brain Makes Sense of Stress, Fear, and Courage | Dr. Andrew Huberman

Episode Date: August 12, 2020

This week’s conversation is with Dr. Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist and tenured Professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine.He has made numerous important contributions to the fields of brain development, brain function and neural plasticity, which is the ability of our nervous system to rewire and learn new behaviors, skills and cognitive functioning.He is a McKnight Foundation and Pew Foundation Fellow and was awarded the Cogan Award in 2017, which is given to the scientist making the largest discoveries in the study of vision.Andrew is also actively involved in developing tools now in use by elite military in the US and Canada, athletes, and technology industries for optimizing performance in high stress environments, enhancing neural plasticity, mitigating stress, and optimizing sleep.In this conversation we discuss the influence of vision and respiration on human performance and brain states such as fear and courage._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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the ability to move through complex environments or high stress environments, and really trying to understand how we see the world, how we view the world drives our experience of life, both internally and in terms of what we can do externally. All right, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I just got to tell you, I love this community. I love what we are building here. And if you're new, my name is Michael Gervais by Trade and training. I'm a sport performance psychologist, as well as the co-founder of Compete to Create. And the whole idea behind these conversations is to sit with people who have dedicated their life efforts towards the nuances of their craft. And in some cases, these conversations are really about mastery of self.

Other times it's a hybrid between that and mastery of craft. And really what we're doing is we're trying to understand how do they organize their inner really about mastery of self. Other times it's a hybrid between that and mastery of craft. And really what we're doing is we're trying to understand how do they organize their inner life to explore the external world? How do they make sense of themselves and explain events that take place? What are they really searching for? And then what are the mental skills that they use to build and refine their craft? Finding Mastery is brought to you by LinkedIn Sales Solutions. In any high-performing environment that I've been part of, from elite teams to executive boardrooms, one thing holds true. Meaningful relationships are at the center of sustained success.

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slash findingmastery. Now, this week's conversation is with Dr. Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist and a tenured professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Andrew's made some incredible contributions to the field of brain development, brain function, and neuroplasticity, which is fancy for just saying it's the ability for our brain and our nervous system to rewire and learn new behaviors, skills, and cognitive functioning. Now, he's a McKnight Foundation and a Pew Foundation fellow and was awarded the Kogan Award in 2017, which is given to the scientists making the largest discoveries in the study of vision. So what does vision have to do with you and our community here on Mastery?

Well, as it turns out, we are visual creatures. So we are highly attuned to our environment around us. And our visual experience is actually in many ways a brain experience. And so Andrew is actively involved in developing tools now that some of them are in use by military in the US and Canada, also by athletes and technology industries for optimizing performance in high stress environments. He's also engaged in enhancing neuroplasticity, mitigating stress, and optimizing sleep. Now, in this conversation, we discuss the influences of vision as well as breathing,

respiratory, on human performance and brain states such as fear and courage. You know, those are two of my favorite conversations. And with that, let's jump right into this week's conversation with the legend, Dr. Andrew Huberman. Andrew, how are you? Doing great. How are you, Michael? Fantastic.

I am so stoked to have this conversation with you. I've really enjoyed following your work and it's very nuanced. It's very relevant and it's incredibly applied for, you know, kind of the frontier of reimagining what it means to do well in life. And so I can't wait to get into the weeds with you to understand as a neuroscientist, what you've come to understand and how to make that as applied as we possibly can. That being said, you know, like I want to get some context. I want to understand how you got to be not only at one of the most influential schools in the world, Stanford University,

but to also like your path to understand and break open a unique pathway in the brain that you guys have figured out. So before we get into those insights and weeds, you know, what was it like growing up? Where'd you come from? What'd you come to understand? Well, I was born into a scientific family, if there is such a thing. So my dad's a scientist. He was born and raised in Argentina and actually came to the States on a naval scholarship to do graduate school. There wasn't much support for science or studies of any kind related to science related to science there. Uh, and he met my mom in New York and they moved out to California and had me and my sister. And we actually grew up in

Palo Alto. I was born in Stanford hospital. The joke I always make is I was born in Stanford hospital. I trained at Stanford. I'm now a professor at Stanford. I'll probably die at Stanford. Um, but hopefully a long time from now. So, um, Palo Alto is very different back then we lived in on the South side of Palo Alto, which was by no means a, um, a rough neighborhood, but it was that where you found, um, single story homes, you know, this was before the.com craze, of course, I'm 44 years old. So this is, I was born in 75. So, you know, it was professors and, um, uh, people who worked in Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley was just a lot of engineers really. Um, and people worked at Hewlett Packard and the veterans hospital, incidentally, the veterans hospital where, you know, one flew over the

cuckoo's nest was sort of conceived in, um, in the mind of some, uh some Stanford related folks. And, you know, so for to put a little context. So, you know, the area that I grew up in was rich with engineering and science. There were a lot of places to ride my bike around. There were a bunch of kids at the end of the street and a cul-de-sac, a bunch of kids my age who played all the time. So my mom was a writer and my dad was a theoretical physicist. And so we would spend summers at a place called the Aspen Center for Physics. Every kid's dream. No, it's interesting because every, every other kid, you know, their dad was into

Boy Scouts or Cub Scouts or going to soccer games or, you know, really like sports. And my, you know, my dad had a very different outlook on, on that. You know, he thought he was perfectly supportive of me playing soccer and things like that, but wasn't really interested in going to the games. Um, definitely was not interested in Boy Scouts or Cub Scouts. He, you know, his, his ref frame of reference was very different. And, you know, so growing up, um, in my household, there were a lot of discussions about science. My mom wrote children's books and we had graduate students over for dinner and that kind of thing So I grew up kind of in the nest of ideas around science people talking about ideas we you know, I was fortunate enough that because theoretical physics was

Really doing quite well as a field back then it was a was a tremendous field and it still is but especially then in the 80s You know, I grew up, we'd spend summers, the Aspen center for physics. We weren't wealthy. We didn't go to Aspen cause we had money. We went to Aspen cause there was this center for physics that, um, a couple of Nobels put together. And so I grew up running around playing there, uh, as a kid, but I got to know, you know, some of the greats. And if any of your listeners are physics buffs, you know, um, they'll recognize these names. Most people probably won't, but you know, Peter Kaus greats. And if any of your listeners are physics buffs, you know, they'll recognize these names. Most people probably won't. But, you know, Peter Kaus, Murray Gilman, who discovered the quark, which is one of the fundamental particles.

Were they at the house or were these this was at the Institute? They were at the Institute, but we'd have these people over for dinner all the time. OK, so what was it like? What was the dinner table like? Yeah, so that's a that's a good question. So, you know, what was interesting is my dad, people would talk about physics, but it was different back then. You know, people didn't really talk about work at the dinner table. They would talk about the people they worked with. There's, you know, one thing that people don't know about scientists, there's a tremendous amount of rumor and gossip in science about the people, about their personal lives. People set the work

and the context of the work in the nest of, you know, how people's kids and families are doing. And so, you know, I knew these physics, these luminaries of physics, right? Most of the people who I named off, you know, Peter Kauss, the Gell-Mann, Feynman, these people, I mean, they had Nobel prizes. Some of them had multiple Nobel prizes and I didn't really think much of it, but what I did take note of was I, I, I knew they had some importance, but, um, just because of the way that, you know, I would be told, you know, someone's coming over for dinner and, you know, he invented the laser or something like that. I didn't really, I just want to shoot things with lasers, right? I was a kid. I just want to blow things up with lasers. I didn't want to, I didn't understand the physics.

Did you act differently because somebody of note was coming over? Not one bit. Not one bit. And your family didn't either. Mom and dad didn't act differently. They were the same, whether it was the neighbor across the street or it was somebody that was coming from the mountaintop oh um you know my dad always had tremendous reverence for people's discoveries and status uh my mom based on her upbringing which was more humble than my dad's um had kind of more of a broad appreciation from people from different walks of life. Actually, her dad was a scientist also, but he was a, you know, he's a veteran of world war two.

He boxed in the army. He was kind of a blue collar guy, like tremendously strong fit guy, having never touched a weight, you know, one of those just from having worked hard all his life. Um, and he actually became a biochemist on the GI Bill after World War Two. And so and he was a professor at Cornell and this kind of thing, but but more of a kind of a blue collar mentality that every you know, everyone's equivalent. And my dad was more he would cue me to, you know, we have someone coming over for dinner. He's very important. But I never treated anyone differently or behaved any differently. And actually, to this day, I don't know, maybe some of my colleagues will get upset with I, you know, my downstairs neighbor has a Nobel Prize, his dad has a Nobel Prize, he's a super nice guy. He has a wonderful family. You know, none of it really impacts me. I don't, you know, we're all flesh and bones. And this is the craft and what people have dedicated themselves to. But I don't have I'm not starstruck. I don't I don't get dazzled by people's status. I certainly have admiration for what people accomplish. a little bit sensitized to the fact that, you know, if people have amazing accomplishments,

whether or not they're in science or anything else, they're still subject to the same standards. And that's where some of the stories about people's lives kind of balance things out. Because oftentimes I would hear, you know, as a kid, I'd listen in on what my parents were saying, and they'd say things about people's, they weren't gossipy, but they'd, you know, they'd say, oh, you know, it's a shame that, you know, so-and-so's, uh, they split up or their kid is having problems. And so what I realized also because I grew up in Palo Alto, I knew I was friends with a lot of the kids of Stanford professors, some of whom, and I'm not going to name names, some of whom, um, were luminaries in these other fields, right? Non-physics, psychology and economics and all these, and

they're, and I knew their kids. And so I knew whether or not their families were happy, well-structured, productive families. I also knew a lot of people who had very functional careers whose kids were real were a mess because of neglect or from being pushed too hard. And so, you know, I integrated all that. I like to think. And so from about birth until about age, I would say about 11 or 12, I had this very magical childhood of playing with my friends, learning about science. My dad and I would we really did this. We would take walks together and he would explain how different elements in the in the physical universe work. And I told him I wanted to understand how things work. He said, you should think about studying the brain. I said, well, that's what I'll do. And so I was sort of born into it in that sense. But to be honest, as long as we're being open here, right about age 12, 13, my parents split up um, I love my parents. They did the best they could with what they had and they're wonderful people, but it was a very, very high conflict situation. And my dad moved away. My mom was experiencing her own struggles. And very quickly I stopped. I basically

stopped paying attention in school. Um, I also got very excited. It wasn't a rebellious thing. I got very excited about the sort of skateboarding punk rock culture and community. I've always liked having a lot of male friends that liked adventures. If you were to label the first 12 years as like a chapter in your life, would you split that up into two or would that be one chapter? Yeah, I would just call it all before puberty and, and, and I'd call it before puberty and before, um, my parents split, which basically was sort of, it was like there was kindling there, but then puberty and their separation was like the fire. And then let's just be fair. It was like throwing gasoline on that fire because suddenly, you know, my body was changing. My mind was changing. I mean, we forget sometimes that puberty is the single fastest aging event in our entire life. And it's the single greatest

neuroplasticity event, meaning condensed into the shortest amount of time, things look different. They, they sound different. Our perceptions of what, what things mean is completely different before and after puberty. We're treated differently. So I, I went from being a very innocent, um, adventurous and curious kid with a lot of structure to a, um, soon to be not so innocent, um, adventurous and curious. I was an adolescent. I wasn't even a young man. You can even say that. Yeah. I was adolescent with essentially no structure. Um, I, I leaned hard into communities that, um, where there was no structure and, and I have to say it wasn't, and there was a lot happened in there and I'm happy to get into it if you want. And, but from about, I would say from about 13

or 14 until I went off to college, I was basically in a free fall. You know, I fortunately was never into drugs or alcohol. It just wasn't my thing. I drank a little bit. I, you know, I experimented a little bit, but that just wasn't my thing. Looking back, what were you trying to sort out? Oh, that's a great question. Um, you know, I think I was just trying to put some sense of order on things. Things were so chaotic. Um, it's kind of ironic. My dad was, um, he studied chaos. He was one of the founders of chaos theory. There's a book chaos by Jim Glick, who's a New York times reporter and talks about some of this. Um, and my, my life was just at that point was just, it was just chaos. It was like, there was no structure, you know,

what used to be, um, meals together at the dinner table, what used to be, um, weekend, you know, summers in, uh, at the Aspen center for physics, what, you know, summers at the Aspen Center for Physics, all that was basically, it just didn't exist anymore. My house was empty a lot of the time. If your dad was in this conversation, would he say, he'd say, Andrew, chaos is relative to this chaotic time, but now you're an adult. what would he say about the chaos you were, you were having? You know, he and I have had a lot of conversations, uh, about that time. And I think, you know, I think he, he has, um, a lot of regret. Um, and I think, you know, he, yeah, I think he has a lot of regret. I think he, he wanted order. I mean, my dad is a, um, is a, just as is my mom, a wonderful human being. He wanted order and he

wanted it for me, but I think he had to create it for himself first. And I think that's just sometimes how it goes. I mean, it sounds very dark, but of course, as, as you probably know, right, that there are so many gifts in having to go figure things out for myself. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentous. When it comes to high performance, whether you're leading a team, raising a family, pushing physical limits, or simply trying to be better today than you were yesterday. What you put in your body matters. And that's why I trust Momentus. From the moment I sat down with Jeff Byers, their co-founder and CEO,

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your first subscription order at livemomentous.com. Again, that's L-I-V-E momentous, M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S, livemomentous.com and use the code Finding Mastery for 35% off your first subscription order. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Felix Gray. I spent a lot of time thinking about how we can create the conditions for high performance. How do we protect our ability to focus, to recover, to be present? And one of the biggest challenges we face today is our sheer amount of screen time. It messes with our sleep, our clarity, even our mood. And that's why I've been using Felix Gray glasses. What I appreciate most about Felix Gray is that they're just not another wellness product. They're rooted in real science. Developed alongside leading researchers and ophthalmologists, they've demonstrated these

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Just head to FelixGray.com and use the code FindingMastery20 at checkout. Again, that's Felix Gray. You spell it F-E-L-I-X-G-R-A-Y.com and use the code FindingMastery20 at FelixGray.com for 20% off. What did you lose? What did you gain during that 12 to 18 year, you know, on both sides, what'd you lose? What'd you gain? The easiest structure, but like right below that, what did you lose? Yeah. What I lost was, um, a scent, a real deep sense of, of safety, you know, of knowing that, um, there was a place to return to that was, you know of knowing that um there was a place to return to that was you know where there was food where it was warm where i could count on on a stable pillar what i gained was you know

outsize that you know a thousand fold what i gained was first of all growing up in palo alto even though i wasn't one of the you, we weren't one of the wealthy families. We weren't poor, but, you know, we were sort of middle class, right? I wasn't really exposed to kids that didn't have much at all and that were really kind of free and wild. And I formed a lot of friendships with people in San Jose and San Francisco, mainly through a skateboard community who they didn't go to school because why should they? Right. A lot of them went on to have great careers as skateboarders or start skateboard companies. A lot of them ended up dead or in jail, frankly.

You know, so it really depended. But I got to see that there was this whole other way that people were going through life because they were born into families where there was no structure from day one. So it gave me an appreciation for what I did have, a deep appreciation that I like to think has continued to grow. It gave me a sensitivity to the fact that as much as we, including myself, sometimes look at others and think, well, they just need to, take responsibility, take initiative. People are starting at, from different places often. And I also realized that there's, there are adventures to be had and not all of them are destructive. And that sometimes the best thing you can do is just, you know, and kids don't run away

from home, but sometimes the best thing you can do is just get in a van or a car with a bunch of your friends and go find that adventure. And there were, you know, too many adventures to list off, but I realized that adventure is really, it's the cornerstone of a really good life. And you don't have to travel to do it. But, you know, you can have it in your mind. You can have it in books. You can have it in a laboratory. But there's always a bigger and better adventure to be had. And I think that those years were they were definitely scary. I saw some disturbing things. I, you know, got involved with people that I just shouldn't

have, but, um, for a kid that age, you know, without the filters to make sense of what I was, um, being exposed to. But, you know, when, when I came away from that, I had all these questions that eventually I, I took to my scientific career questions about, you know, why do some kids take a sip of alcohol and become alcoholics? Whereas I didn't feel that. And why do some people go down the path of depression and suicide, um, violence and others just focus on their, their sport or their craft? You know, it, it, it was clear to me in those years that people were showing up with different genetic makeups, different propensities for success. I mean, I saw some kids that came in to that world with nothing where that truly had nothing. And, and some of them had, you know,

nothing except an abusive parent, um, drug addiction in the house. And I don't want to name names here cause I I'd want to check with them first, but that went on to have and continue to have tremendous careers in skateboarding and music and in clothing companies that have done things that, you know, by all accounts are incredible. And I should point out nowadays, it's a relief to see they have healthy families of their own, you know, that they're not just rolling in money. They're, they're doing well in a number of different dimensions in life. So those years, it's funny, I don't think about those years much anymore, but, um, they're cemented around my house in different little places. I have some old magazine covers framed and things like that of things that still draw memories up and, know but from 19 on it was

all about science and it was only in recent years i would say in the last decade or so that i've kind of returned to adventures outside of science and tried to merge those with my science and we get into that later if you want but um but yeah that many many many more gifts than scars or scrapes but um there were definitely some, there were definitely some dark days and some dark nights where I just wasn't sure what was going to happen to me. I think I just had no idea. Not everyone comes through it. You and I both grew up in action sports. And, you know, the interesting thing about action sports, I don't know if you vibe with this is that it is a approach to life to

get on the edge. And it's on the edge is where you learn the most, but it's also where you get some of the deepest scars. I've got a pretty heavy scar across my back from just being right on the edge and going too fast, wheels wash out, and I was asphalt and skin all over the place. And so I've got some of those experiences. And part of that that I was going to get to, I took guys and that was mostly guys in my group. Those are the guys that were doing the things that were harder and more aggressive. And like they're getting like they were the progressive ones. And then there's some stuff that comes with that, you know, seeing and feeling things that were above my age grade. And so I don't know if you had that same thing and you just learn a lot. And I tell you, like, I grew up at a spot called Burnout Beach and it has earned its name. And I feel fortunate to still love what I've learned there and have been able to not be a burnout. And so, um, yeah, I think that we've got some similar appreciations for, um, yeah, I don't know if it's a dark side so much as it is like a different counter culture

off access, progressive at all costs approach to, um, you know, tribal individuation. Yeah. Well, what's I, I want to, I want to just make sure I point out one thing, which is that like at that age, especially from about 14 to 19, I want to point this out in case any of those people listen, I sucked. I mean, like, honestly, I, my body wasn't ready. I didn't, I w I had hit puberty at about 14, but I hadn't developed. I w my body wasn't strong. And so one of the big frustrations for me is I just wasn't very good. I just didn't have the, the, the kind of physical ability that I wanted to be able to pour myself into a physical pursuit. You know, later when I discovered, and it was because of a high school football coach, even though I never played football, it was because of a high school football coach that turned me on to weightlifting and martial arts that, and running, I ran cross country,

got into weightlifting, Thai boxing, that kind of thing that I realized that I had some control over how strong I would get, how resilient I could get. You know, I was getting injured a lot skateboarding, but, you know, so I wasn't one of the good ones, but I certainly got to witness a lot of the greats in their early days. You mentioned that the age discrepancies, you know, skateboarding and surfing, um, BMX and some of these other, um, action sports. And there, there are others of course, um, are unique in that you've got kids that are, you know, often eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 30 hanging out with, with grown men basically. And then now I know, I realize that more, um, girls and women do this as

well, but involved in those sports. But it is unusual in that way. You know, it's not a league sport in the in the same way. And so you're getting an education in everything. The one big gift that I just realized is that I'm comfortable in pretty much any environment. I'm comfortable with that crowd. I'm comfortable with scientists. I feel comfortable in most any group. You know, we're an odd species that we can diversify our behavior so much. Other species don't do that, but humans do that. And so I'm comfortable in a variety of settings and, and not as a consequence,

you know, not much, you know, I don't live in a lot of fear, uh, at least not physical fear. Right. I mean, of course I have fears. I'm a human being, but, um, so yeah, so many gifts and, and, and thank you for asking about that time. I, I rarely think about it. Um, but when I do, I'm, I'm filled with gratitude. I second that note. Like for me, I am incredible. I don't know how things happen, you know, like the serendipity nature of things, but I'm so grateful that I am practiced at scaring myself. I'm practiced at committing to action and knowing how to pull away from action when it's way too dangerous. But I'm so thankful that my parents created a structure where they're like, yeah, yeah, go ahead. And, you know, I don't know if I have that, that approach with my son, you know, yeah, yeah, go ahead. But I, I wanted to, in this book that I'm writing,

I wanted to have a chapter called making a case for broken bones. And it was a response to, you know, the Zamboni parenting, you know, kind of smoothing everything out. So kids will have this nice sliding, you know, skate in life. And I want to say now, like there's a case to falling out of trees and breaking bones and, you know, figuring out how to get wheel wobbles on your bike or your skateboard. And do I bail or do I stay committed? You know exactly what I'm talking about. And if you stay committed, you just might make it. And if you bail, you know, you might have your chin rubbed up against asphalt. And so I love that. And I'm incredibly grateful too. And I don't want us to get too lost in that because I think you and I could vibe there forever. I want to get into your insights as, you know, a leading scientist in this space of neuroscience like you know you've got some deep and rich insights and i'm actually kind of confused about why you went from hardcore razor's edge um real consequent sport with low culture into a vr lab like it's this you know from the dirt to the sterilization like that, that actually is a leap

that I wanted to ask about. Yeah. So it was, it was, it was a little bit, um, more gradual than that. So basically I'll keep this, I'll keep this portion of the story, um, relatively quick for your listeners and, um, in terms of personal parts, so we can get into the science, but, you know, so I followed a high school girlfriend who was essentially my, my family, right? She, she was the one person I wanted to be in contact with besides my other, you know, my community of male friends. I followed her off to school. Um, and when I went off to somehow, I got in, don't ask me how I got in. I, I somehow managed to take the SAT and I got accepted. People I run into nowadays that I knew in high school are still somewhat in disbelief because I really wasn't present in high school. And for any kids or parents listening, you know, the truth is that, you know, at least in the United States, that there is there are a number of opportunities for second chances, but the window for those second

chances really does taper off with time. So, you know, I caught it right in time. You know, I went off to college. I took a class in biopsychology because back then it wasn't a field called neuroscience. It was what we now call neuroscience was fractured into neurochemistry and neurogenetics and psychology and biopsychology. And now it's this unified naming thing we call neuroscience. But I took a course that got me really excited about thermal regulation, how we regulate body temperature, as well as addiction. I was really interested in the biology of addiction. Actually, my senior project was looking at how MDMA ecstasy leads to shifts in body temperature.

And back then, you know, there was a big rave culture. I'd never been to a rave. I'd never done MDMA. I was just I thought it was a cool project. So that's what I did for my senior thesis. Why did people overheat? What's the short narrative there? Yeah, the short narrative actually reveals something fundamental about perception, which is that there are sensors in our skin which detect temperature, both cold and hot.

And there is also a brain area in the hypothalamus that integrates that information and essentially compares changes in temperature over time to internal body temperature. So it's constantly analyzing how quickly things are changing. This is why it's much easier to just get into cold water all at once than to go in gradually. Every step is another painful increment of the same size. It is really much easier to just get in all the way. The opposite is true for hot water, by the way. Um, and as a protective mechanism, you can imagine why, why that might be, you have to get into it. Water has to be very, very cold and you have to stay in it for quite a while before it's damaging. Whereas hot water, it's, it can be instantaneous. So, um, there's a hypothalamic area that, uh, hypothalamus just

being this primitive brain area over the roof of your mouth, um, that regulates basic functions like, you know, feeding appetite temperature and sex behavior and that kind of thing. So it's part of the circuits that do that. And so I was just very interested in why people were dying from taking MDMA. And it turned out they weren't dying from the MDMA itself, although there are rare cases of cardiac arrest, but they were dying from overheating. And so the, and so I was just interested in thermal regulation. So that was the drug that we decided to study. So it was prompted by a real world phenomenon, but I was just interested in the biology. But in my freshman year, I, I, I sort of attached myself to this professor

who was talking about that stuff. He was talking about depression. He was talking about all this psychological stuff that I was curious about, like depression. I had had a friend commit suicide. I had a friend who went schizophrenic. And he was telling me about neurochemicals and he was telling me about circuits in the brain and neurons. And he was giving me really good, solid explanations for this stuff, as well as some hope that if we could understand these mechanisms, we might be able to help relieve some suffering. And he was a remarkable human being, both for his abilities to teach and for his ability to teach really complex material, but embedded in kind of real world, you know, stories. And his name was Harry Carlisle. And he was a favorite

teacher of many students. A lot of people actually in the neuroscience community that I know, took classes from him back when. And so I just fell in love with it. And I loved working in his lab. And he was a little bit of a punk rocker. He used to smoke cigarettes, you could never do this nowadays. He used to smoke cigarettes in the lab is a chain smoker and used to hang his head out the window or do it in the fume hood so that he wouldn't get caught. And they were all, and the, the department admins were always yelling at him and he just totally ignored it. And I just thought this guy was like the coolest guy ever. Right. I mean, he, he drove a little black pickup truck and he had a couple of kids and he, um, that seemed happy and he ran a lab

and we did experiments and we published papers and he taught lectures and he, um, and he had a really nice wife who worked over in the, the counseling and career center. She's a head of psychology, um, and you know, did counseling for students. And I just thought, you know, that's the life for me. I want to do this. And so I made the decision. I'm going to get a PhD. I'm going to become a professor. And I want to study anything and everything about the brain. But I started off in developmental neurobiology, how the brain develops, how sperm and egg meet.

We know what happens before that. But after they meet, how you go from a fertilized egg to nine months later, a creature that is prepared to learn what it needs to know to have a life. The first person I heard describe the hypothalamus being above the roof of your mouth. And so that makes sense though, because of the embryonic fold around the palate is, is that why you talk about it that way yeah so i just like i want to orient people yeah so right above the roof of your mouth you got these two little glands that look like little grapes that pituitary that make all the hormones that signal to the testes if you're male and yet to the ovaries if you're female whether or not to make testosterone or

estrogen respectively i mean sexes make both but um you know in different ratios of course men have more testosterone generally and women have more estrogen so right above there is the hypothalamus and and it sits right at the midline and so it's a little hard to um envision this uh in an all audio podcast, but basically we all start off as a, as a little sheet of cells that then turns into a tube. Um, I like to think of it, it kind of looks like a churro, you know, those, like those donuts, those little hollow donuts. Um, and then one end of that tube gets thicker and that's going to be your brain. And then the end of that tube stays thin and that's your spinal cord. And so in order to go from a sheet

of cells to a tube, you have to take that sheet and pull up the sides like a sheet of paper and seal them at the top or the bottom. And it actually gets sealed at the top. So along the bottom, along that bottom fold, that's running just along the roof of your mouth. And that's where the more primitive brain areas tend to reside. Areas like the hypothalamus, not far off is the amygdala. Um, I wish I, I had a brain diagram here cause I teach neuroanatomy to medical students at Stanford, but, um, and there I can point to things and, and, and show you these things. But, um, but we basically all start off as a, as a fertilized egg that goes to, that becomes a sheet of cells, that becomes a tube. And then we're basically a tube.

And that tube starts at your forebrain and goes all the way to the back of your spinal cord. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Cozy Earth. Over the years, I've learned that recovery doesn't just happen when we sleep. It starts with how we transition and wind down. And that's why I've built intentional routines into the way that I close my day. And Cozy Earth has become a new part of that. Their bedding, it's incredibly soft, like next level soft. And what surprised me the most is how much it actually helps regulate temperature. I tend to run warm at night and these sheets have

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And when your day demands clarity and energy and presence, the way you prepare for it matters. If you're looking for high quality personal care products that elevate your routine without complicating it, I'd love for you to check them out. Head to calderalab.com slash finding mastery and use the code finding mastery at checkout for 20% off your first order. That's calderalab, C-A-L-D-E-R-L-A-B.com slash finding mastery. You know, Andrew, I was working, sometimes I get out there in meeting people and, you know, folks that are on the frontier and their science. And sometimes it's really amazing and sometimes a little wacky. And I like all of it. You know, I really do have an

appetite for all of it. But there was a gentleman that I came across that was 100% convinced that the key to flow state is palate massaging and restructuring. I was like, what? And so I took a deep dive with them. Like, what are we doing here? Because immediately I was like, oh, kind of the first fold. Wait a minute. And so, you know, I actually did some of the work and I had him up there massaging my palate and I'm like, oh God, this is awful. And so it is really interesting though. You know, he was talking about realignment of jaw and placement of restructuring the teeth and massaging palate and this, that, and the other. And it was fascinating. It was just a bit too far out for like a first step.

And so I'd love to hear just a quick thought on that yeah and um and it might offer a good transition point to um to something that we know for sure uh that i think there are solid data to support so i mean i want to be i want to be respectful of all those that are interested in the brain and how it works but you know that they're you've got standard science, you've got, um, biotech, you've got the sort of fields of let's call it biohacking alternative health, you know, Ayurveda, like a lot of different sectors of that, that are all scientific in the sense that they're asking questions and they're developing practices and, um, and so forth. There are a number of areas. And I have friends in some of these communities that, um, that take something like, I don't want to be disparaging of whoever this person is, but they will take something like that a brain structure is nearby another structure and assume that that means that they have a relationship. like for instance, we know that every cell in the body critically requires light information. It requires information about time of day. And in fact, also about time of year. And that

information is conveyed via the only two pieces of the brain that are outside the skull. And those are your retinas, your eyes at the back. Your eyes are two little pieces of brain and they're not connected to the brain. They are actually part of the central nervous system. Andrew, I love your pivot. It's so good. Yeah, no, I'm just appreciating the art of the conversation. Yeah. I mean, I'm going to weave back to, you know, I get asked a lot about, well, what about light up the nose or what about light behind the knee? First of all, the famous study that showed leg behind the knee could shift circadian rhythms. That paper was retracted by the authors because it was faulty experimental design. People were getting light exposure to the eyes. You know, unless you're

a lizard or a snake, you don't have holes in your skull that allow light directly in. You have to get light information, all the cells of your body by viewing it with these two pieces of your brain that sit outside your skull that we call the neural retina, which, or we can just call them the eyes. And I don't doubt that if people put red lights or other colored lights up their nose or in their ears, that they're going to see some effects, but that, um, and there's some papers, although frankly, I'll just be honest that the P the papers that I've seen are, are in less than stellar journals. Most often they're in pay to play journals. You know, not all journals are made equally. Some journals, all you have to do is pay and they'll publish. That's not really high stringency. So publish

to me is not, it's a prerequisite, but it's not, it doesn't get you all the way. There's a difference between nature and a lot of the others, which you've been published there or your lab has been published in nature. I'm not sure. Yeah. Yeah. I've been fortunate to have published there several times, signed several times, but the, and there are other high quality journals. It's just that the joke I always make is if, if I get into a fight in the parking lot at the UFC, I'm not going to tell people I fought at the UFC. Right. So there's a difference. So,. So there are effects of light. But I want to leverage your point that this person brought up because there are's being transmitted to the rest of the body through hormone signals and neural signals meaning electrical signals which is the language of neurons so and and it's an important one because fundamentally we think of the eyes

as for seeing for seeing objects where they move etc but that's actually a late stage evolution of what eyes were designed for. Eyes were designed first and foremost to set the overall arousal state, the alertness or the sleepiness of the rest of the nervous system. Think about it. How does your brain know when to be awake or when to be asleep? Well, it knows based on when the sun is out or when the sun is down. We're a diurnal species. We're not a nocturnal species. And so all every cell in our body has a 24 hour clock. If you take out a cell from your liver and put it in a dish, it will have a rhythm in activity, a rhythm in metabolism. That's a 24 hour rhythm or very close to it. So-called circadian rhythm. And so the eyes are responsible

for instructing the brain. And then the brain is responsible for instructing the brain. And then the brain is responsible for instructing all the cells of the rest of the body when to do their respective jobs, just like at a factory, not all the cells are going to do the same things at the same times, but they need to know when to do what they need to do. So there are a lot of questions about how to access the nervous system and control the nervous system. And I do want to emphasize, I think that's a valid pursuit to ask that question. But when we think about sensation, meaning physical events in the world around us, light, sound, touch, and how those can be used to change our nervous system or control our biological functions, including immune system and including digestion and including emotions

at a very different level, we need to think about what the nervous system was designed for. And the eyes were really designed first and foremost to set this overall level of arousal. And then later, cells were added to the eye that allowed us to see dark versus light and consciously perceive that. Then it was edges, and then it was moving edges. Then much, much later, it was color. It was the addition of what we call a third cone photopigment, which is just geek speak for we got the ability to perceive more colors. Dogs don't see red the way we see them. They see things in kind of orange-ish green. We see reds versus orange versus greens very differently because we're working with more

paints in the system, so to speak. So the eyes are fundamentally the most powerful driver of what we think, what we feel, and ultimately what we can do because they set the basic level of alertness or sleepiness. And they do it not just at a low subconscious level. There are also ways in which the eyes are adjusting these things on very fast time scales and that impact our health on very fast time scales. And a lot of this leads into fairly actionable items. It's a lot of what my lab works on. So just to really quickly, I mean, I went from developmental neurobiology, the visual system, so how the eyes wire up to the rest of the

brain and so forth, and then eventually transitioned to regeneration and repair of that system, which is something my lab still works on quite extensively, things like glaucoma, neurofibromatosis, diseases where vision is depleted, trying to cure blindness essentially in humans and in animal models. And then we eventually realized that vision has such a powerful effect on how we feel at a basic level and has such a tremendous capacity to shift how we feel and how we perform cognitively and behaviorally that we realized that we had to study how vision drives stress, how vision drives calm, how vision drives the ability to move through complex environments or high stress environments. And so that's led me into a number of different worlds, including

work with, um, you know, various sectors of the, of the military, very fortunate to work with, with those groups because they're tremendous teams and individuals, as well as do a little bit of work with athletes, but mainly those groups. And really trying to understand how vision and how we see the world, how we view the world drives our experience of life, both internally and in terms of what we can do externally. So how do you separate perception and meaning from what we see, like the perception of what we're seeing and putting meaning to it, to the actual just kind of neurostructural impact from the sensory input that's taking place? And I don't know if i'm being clunky around

this but it's like there's no no it's a it's it's the question it's an excellent question it's it's you're being very very clear so so the visual system um breaks up so photons are just light energy and they're floating around all over. And for people who have a hard time envisioning what light energy is, it's just light. Let's just think light and different colors or different wavelengths of light. But let's just set all that aside. Basically what the, what the retina does with this amazing three cell thick, three cell layers, thick structure. It's about as thick as a credit card lines, the back of your eye. And this is an amazing structure. It basically takes light information in the world and it separates it out into contrast and motion and direction of motion and eventually color and

other things like that. All that information is sent into the brain and then the brain unpacks all that and makes some very basic analysis. It says, okay, first of all, is it a dark edge or a light edge? Is it moving? Where is it moving? Is it moving up? Is it moving down? Is it moving to the right? Is it moving to the left? This kind of thing. Is it getting bigger? Is it getting smaller? It then compares that whether or not it's getting bigger or getting smaller to where, whether or not you're moving forward or backward or to either side, you know, it evaluates self motion. Cause if I walk down the street, things are moving on my retina, but I know because I'm moving at a certain rate that it's because I'm moving. It's not because

the street is the buildings aren't sliding past me. I'm sliding past the buildings, so to speak. Are you giving this in order? Is it sensory motor strip first or is this the fast gate into the hypothalamus and then cognition? Like I thought there was three gates, but there might only be two. Yeah. So, so there are slow events that the visual system controls, like telling when you look at light outside during the day, your, your, your brain is being informed about that and is sending hormonal signals like cortisol and will eventually melatonin. It's controlling the timing of cortisol and melatonin to decide when you'll be awake and when you'll be asleep. So there's some slow events, some very, very slow events, but that are controlling your overall level of alertness and sleepiness. I know, you know, it's three 30 in the afternoon

right now. I feel fundamentally different at three 30 in the afternoon than I do at three 30 in the morning. Even if I were nocturnal, it would be fundamentally different. Now those are slow events. Then there are faster events like how fast things are moving through our environment. And so the basic analysis of the visual system is try not to fall off high objects or cliffs. Okay. So depth perception is very important. Try not to let things that are moving that are also getting larger come straight at you, right? These are just primitive survival mechanisms. Those signals are routed to areas of the brain that are very fast and very reflexive. There's actually a phenomenon called blindsight where people who are completely blind,

pattern blind, because of damage to an area of the brain that controls high level pattern vision, which I'll talk about next. These people say, I can't see anything. And you say, well, I'm going to show you some moving dots. Okay. And tell me which direction they're moving. And they say, that's ridiculous. I can't see anything I'm blind and you show them moving dots and you say just guess and They guess far better than chance. So they're subconsciously detecting where these things are moving Okay, and it's kind of eerie to think about that's blind sight by definition It's because there are pathways from the eye to your brain that are completely subconscious Like the ones that are controlling your cortisol rhythms and melatonin rhythms. They're completely subconscious. You don't, they're operating at that

level. Then there's a third category of visual signals, which are faces and shapes that have meaning. So my dog's face has tremendous meaning for me. There's a famous paper published in nature where they describe what was in that case, which was actually, they call them Jennifer Aniston cells. There was literally a neuron in this one subject's brain that responded selectively to Jennifer Aniston's face. I can't remember if the subject was male or female. But it was definitely Jennifer Aniston. So not everyone had a Jennifer Aniston cell, right? And this was a long debate because this gets back to kind of early psychological theories about whether or not we're a blank slate or whether or not everything's learned. It's both, it's nature and it's nurture, of course, right? So now attaching meaning to a face happens because of the visual signals get routed,

not just to the areas of the brain that are involved in visual perception, but they get those, they get copied and sent off to areas of the brain that are involved in stress and arousal, the so-called limbic systems, those things like the amygdala and hypothalamus. The signals also get routed off to areas of what's called the infratemporal cortex, deeper layers of cortex that are deeply involved in context and memory. So that if you see a red Ferrari in West Hollywood, you go, oh, another red Ferrari in West Hollywood. Whereas if you see one in West Oakland, where, you know, I can say this

because I'm a resident of Oakland, it might stick out a little bit more. It's a little bit more unusual just based on the demographics, right? So that kind of high level context has to do with memory, has to do with the general space you're in, recognition of your landscape, regularities in that landscape. So some of this stuff really is learned. And my scientific great grandparents, because they trained the people that trained me, are two guys named David Hubel and Torrance and Weasel. They won the Nobel prize basically for describing this, what's called a hierarchical visual system,

a visual system that works, that creates very complex perceptions with a ton of meaning. I mean, think about your child's face, your dog's a tremendous meaning for you and less for other people, but still more meaning than a picture of a brick for anybody. And they figured out that that that complexity is built up from very simple basic elements. And those elements are what I mentioned before, dark versus light edges are the, the protective mechanisms, right. From height and things coming at you, um, you know, at speed for safety reasons. And then there is, um, the meaning making experiences, right? Like the, you used your dog, but could we use, um, and the red Ferrari, but could we also use like if the frontalis muscles are squinting or, or compressed, like the little frown muscles, youinting or compressed, like the little frown muscles, you know, that there's something there to pay attention to.

And I can't get out of my head the low road and the high road, right? The low road is the fast information that's coming through the... Yeah. So the classic definition about this was sort of what and where pathways. So one pathway for looking at where things are, and that's very fast. And indeed, the neurons that carry that things are and that's very fast. And indeed, the neurons that carry that information are faster because they're bigger. So neurons that are big and fat can carry information really fast because they transmit, they're like big pipes carry more water much faster than small pipes. So that system is designed to be fast. It's the system that if

you're biking or you're walking along the street and you blink and a bee hits your eyelid all of a sudden, but you don't remember actually seeing the bee coming at you. It just happens below your conscious detection. Those fast reflexes are mediated by that where pathway. The what pathway is slower. It's a slower, more analytic system. It's still very fast, mind you, but it's definitely slower. And keep in mind that faces in particular for humans are an especially important stimulus because of the rich information they convey about other people's moods and safety, et cetera. And there's a woman at MIT, and there are other labs as well,

but it's really Nancy Kanwisher's lab at MIT that pioneered this field over many decades and has done beautiful work showing that there, we really all have dedicated areas of our brain that are designed for the analysis of faces and facial expression. Old world primates like rhesus macaque monkeys and gorillas, they have these as well. Animals like dogs and cats, who knows, probably for dog and cat faces or for dog and cat body postures, right? They might pay attention to other things, but they're probably more smell oriented than humans. But faces are a particularly important stimulus for humans for so many obvious reasons. And so we dedicate a lot of neural real

estate to them. Okay. So this is a pretty concrete question. And then I've got a more nuanced or complicated question. It's going to get into like how to help people down-regulate some anxiousness, some fear, some paralysis stuff, you know, so that they can express themselves, you know, either thoughts or actions more eloquently. But the first part is what is the faster system? Is it the ocular system or is it the, um, oh gosh, what's the, what's the word for smelling? Uh, olfactory. Olfactory. Yeah. So which is the faster system? Ah, great. I'm glad you asked that because a lot of people get this one backwards. It's definitely the visual system. Well, you're biased, aren't you? Well, no, it is just by sheer speeds of transmission. So there's a fact, although I call it kind of a factoid because it's more of a misleading fact. And so I'm trying to, you know, and no one really claims this fact.

So it's fine. I don't feel like I'm insulting anyone. The olfactory information. So if your retina is detecting photons, your nose, you've got neurons up your nose, believe it or not. They live there. They're olfactory neurons for smell. They detect volatile chemicals that are floating around in the environment. So if you smell a nice steak or cookies baking or something, those molecules and chemicals are floating in the air

and you're smelling them and you've got receptors that detect different odors. And that, that information is conveyed to an area of the brain. We call the cortex, although it's a more primitive area of the cortex than the visual cortex. Cortex is just the outer shell. But it is true that smell information bypasses some intermediate stages of processing. However, the neurons that carry that information transmit it slowly. So just because they go through fewer stations doesn't mean it arrives at its location first, nor does it mean that the information is used quickly. Now that's true for humans. You know, a scent hound is mainly reliant on, as the name suggests, scent in order to navigate its environment. A guy who he's no longer a faculty member at Berkeley. He did great work

there. It's just that he got recruited away to another university named Noam Sobel had undergraduates at Berkeley with where these, um, these outfits basically where their eyes and, um, and touch and hearing were completely blacked out. You know, it's essentially putting them in sensory deprivation and had them navigate scent trails using their nose like a dog would. And, you know, humans can do that if they're forced to rely on scent. But typically we don't rely on smell too much. We've given up a lot of our sort of the expression of certain genes for different olfactory receptors. In other words, we've given up a sensitivity and a complexity of odor sensing in favor of sensitivity and complexity of visual sensing. And some animals got more and better

hearing. You know, some humans are more tuned into auditory stuff and have more of an ear for music. Some people do have a great sense of smell and some people have a poor sense of smell. But vision is by far the dominant sense. And I can say that not because we work on it, but because 40% of the human brain is involved in vision in some way or another. And you can't say that for the other senses. Now it's all important, but if you really, if you, most people, if they had to choose would give up hearing before they'd give up vision. A person who doesn't have vision is strongly dependent on, you either outsource that vision to an animal or to a machine or a cane, or you have them work with a cane. Whereas somebody who lacks hearing,

it's still a great challenge, of course, but many people can overcome that more easily, especially if they lose their hearing or smell, hearing or, or vision rather later in life. Okay. So let's get into like fear and paralysis and anxiety and courage, you know, and the responses to be able to activate particular pathways to strengthen or down-regulate the fear and paralysis and maybe up-regulate or enhance the ability to be courageous. And like, can you walk through some of the neurobiology of it, but also, you know, get into some very practical things. And you know what I wanted to say? It was kind of stuck in the wings from 20 minutes ago, but I was so caught in the narrative that you're doing is that I wanted to say at some point, like about the eyes and sun is like, that's why when you travel, get outside to reset to the, you know,

the rhythm of the world, right? So you get on that new time zone. And even if you don't, you know, my friend Samer Hattar, who's at, he's the head of the chronobiology unit at the National Institutes of Mental Health has shown that, you know, a lot of people are jet lagged at home. They're looking at screens at night and they're not getting enough photons or light in their eyes during the day. And they're severe mood disruptions. It actually, that pattern of behavior actually triggers a pro depressive circuit. There's good evidence for that now. And in addition to that, it disrupt because of this area of the brain that's called the habenula. If anyone wants to look it up, that's driven by light.

If the light comes in at the right time of day, you get an elevation in mood. If the light comes in at the wrong time of day, meaning at night, um, in the middle of the night in particular, between the hours of 11 PM and 4 AM, you get activation of the night in particular, between the hours of 11 p.m. and 4 a.m., you get activation of this pro-depressive circuit that's also signaled to the pancreas. So it throws off blood sugar regulation and metabolism and can start creating some serious problems. Here's what I'll do in order to weave, because now I think we've gone pretty deep into vision science and hopefully your listeners would like to think they can appreciate now how complex and yet how organized their visual system is and how much

it serves at various levels, slow, fast. And in order to think about how vision and stress interact and what that means for things like courage, I'm just going to seed it with the, with the takeaways that we'll end with so that I make sure that I stay true to that. So first of all, we will end with a tool that's far faster than breathing to calm yourself down when you're stressed. And that's completely covert. Like you don't have to step away. No one has to know you're doing it. This is actually something that a lot of people do either without who are high performers who don't realize it. But something my lab has worked extensively on there. The other thing that we'll talk about are ways to get better at sleeping because everyone now knows that sleep is really important

because, you know, Matt Walker wrote this beautiful book and, you know, there are a number of things we can do to improve our sleep. You know, now everyone knows sleep is super important and we've heard that for years, but I, you know, I think we can credit Matt for really making that, um, you know, as widely known as it now is. I know he's been on here before. Yeah. He was awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Matt's great. He's terrific. So, um, so we'll end with some, some actionable tools and then, and then the last one is one that, uh, and I'm friends with Steven Kotler, so I don't, I don't want to, um to disrupt the use of the word, but I'm going to talk about optic flow, which is different than flow states as he refers to them. So I want to distinguish between flow states and talk about optic flow and why that's a powerful modulator of internal states, which is basically saying you can really shift how you feel for the better by getting into specific kinds of optic flow, moving through space, not outer space unless you're an astronaut, moving through space at particular rates and in particular ways. So we'll just start, and I won't give all the experimental evidence, but I'm going to just briefly describe one study.

In 2018, a graduate student in my lab named Lindsay Soleil, who's now a postdoc at Caltech, described in a nature paper. She published this paper in nature. So if you want to read it, you can find it on our website. I'll give you a reference to it at the end. She discovered a neural pathway by which animals, and eventually we realized humans as well, react to visual threats. In this case, a large object coming at you really fast or at a mouse really fast, depending on the experiment. React to visual threats in one of three ways. And it really illustrates that there are really only three responses to stress ever. One is you

freeze, which doesn't have to be a paralytic freeze. It can be a pause. It can be a pause and reflect. It can be a pause and observe. Okay. It doesn't have to be paralytic, you know, ready to dissolve into a puddle of tears type of freeze. I'm showing how little I know about actual psychology. So freeze, then there's the flee response where you run, you retreat, and then there's the moving forward toward the threat, hopefully an adaptive or an intelligent way. You would want to move forward towards a cliff without a parachute type of thing. But you get the idea. And so it's not fight or flight. It's really fight, flight, or freeze. her research and I don't know where to point to, but Grossman and Sittle, two authors, one is a Lieutenant Colonel, but did some nice work on this system for what's his book called on, on killing. And he added something that I go, Ooh, I like it. And I want to add something to it that isn't well-researched. And I'm going to

borrow Cutler and our friends as well. So let's go freeze, flee, fight. But what about submission? And I want to put a pin in that in a moment because I want to hear what your response is. And then what about flow? Yeah. So submission to me is it's in the pause response. So we broke it up into this kind of trinary pause, forward, or backward scheme because it's what we could observe and we were certain about. When you look at animal behavior and in many ways when you look at human behavior, we don't know what the animal is feeling. Oftentimes we don't know what people are feeling. Oftentimes people don't know what themselves are feeling. So their subjective reports could help. But for instance, if I have a person in the lab and we have a, we do work on mice and we do work on humans and we create fear and visual fear and visual

threat in humans using VR. And we measure from the amygdala, we record direct signals from the amygdala, et cetera. And oftentimes you'll ask people what they're feeling while they take one of these three different responses. And it's, it's very subjective, you know, sometimes they don't even know. And so, um, if you have a very clear readout of submissive behavior, like for a dog rolling on its back and exposing its genitals, which is really a dog's most – it's a very submissive posture because many animals – this is kind of horrible to think about, but many animals injure each other by injuring the other animal's reproductive organs so that they don't pass along their genetic information. They're not thinking that far ahead, but that's what they've been programmed to do. So unless you have a very clear readout, it's hard to look at submission and separate it from freeze. So we didn't do that. But that's not to say that it's an interesting and certainly a valid way of exploring this. Flow is a little trickier. We could talk about flow states maybe at the end. There's certainly a visual component to flow, but of course,

you don't need vision in order to get into flow. I guess the similarity with flow, and I think Stephen would second this, although I don't want to speak for him. But it's very clear that when animals or humans take one of these three responses, that the pause response, what we're calling freeze, but the pause response is the lowest level of what we call autonomic arousal or stress of activation. We measure that by pupil size, heart rate, breathing, sweating, and we can measure it directly from the brain as well. The flee response, the run and hide response is the next level up of let's call it anxiety, autonomic arousal, et cetera. Because we don't know what, again, what the animal person is really feeling. We only know what they're doing, at least in our lab. That's what, that's what we're focused on. Now, the third response of moving forward towards

a threat, and it's not always a physical threat of the sort, like a big object coming at you or moving across a narrow beam across heights, you know, over between two buildings. It can also be public speaking. It can be confronting an irate boss, you know, over between two buildings. It can also be public speaking. It can be confronting an irate boss, you know, in an intelligent way, you know, in an adaptive way, of course, again. But the forward movement itself revealed something really interesting to us is that it that is the highest anxiety, highest arousal response. And yet when an animal or a human takes that step forward and the reason we call it the courage circuit is that it triggers

activation of the release of a neurochemical called dopamine which of course many people are familiar with for its role and reward but dopamine is not only involved in making us feel good and it has this element of reward and it's associated with reaching goals, but it also tends to reinforce, it changes the structure of those circuits so that we're more likely to engage in that behavior again, in part because it's desirable, but in part because the circuit itself gets, um, wired up in a way that it's, it's more likely to get triggered in the future.

So for us, there were a couple surprises from Lindsay's study. One is that there really is a separate circuit in the brain for courage. But if you didn't, if you just looked at the level of stress in the system or the animal or the person, you would say, well, they're really, really stressed out. But what we found was animals will actually work for that experience. And there's a famous study published by a guy named Robert Heath in the 1960s in the journal Science, another phenomenal journal, where he gave human beings the option to stimulate pretty much any area of their brain that they wanted. He got six people over about four years that had electrodes at different areas of their brain. Could never do this study nowadays.

And they could self-stimulate anywhere they wanted. And so some brain areas when they stimulated, they felt drunk. Some areas they felt they got – they wanted. And so some brain areas when they stimulated, they felt drunk. Some areas they felt they wanted to mate. Other areas they felt hungry. Other areas they felt giddy. Other areas they felt rage. This kind of thing. Across subjects, the number one area, the winner, where people wanted to stimulate their brain,

was an area of the brain called the central median nucleus of the thalamus. Name is important, but it's analogous to the area of the brain that Lindsay discovered controls courage and subjective report. If we're going to put some value on subjective reports, the subjective report of what it feels like to stimulate that brain area is frustration and mild anger. And to me, this explains so much about human behavior. I also, I, um, I've been fortunate enough to do a little bit of consulting work alongside David Goggins. And I think about his attitude toward leaning into challenge and that, that sort of embracing friction. And of course, he's not the only one. There are a lot of people not, of course, in the SEAL team community

and other communities, um, that embrace that friction as a means to not just accomplish something, but they seem to have somehow engaged these circuits to the point where that's the juice. And it can lead to tremendous progress. In fact, I think this circuit, because this circuit didn't arise recently, this circuit has been around for probably tens of thousands of years, if not longer, especially since it's present in so many animals. this circuit is largely responsible for humans driving through challenge. And it doesn't have to just be a physical challenge. It could be solving a pandemic. It could be solving a scientific problem, writing a great piece of

music or a book. This circuit, this, what I'm calling the courage circuit is I think at the, at the heart of what it is to be a human in pursuit of greatness or in pursuit of something more than what you have at any moment. And that's really what dopamine is responsible for. Dopamine is the molecule that drives us toward things outside our immediate sphere of experience. All the other neurochemicals involved in reward, serotonin, oxytocin, the opioid system, they tend to make us quiescent and sedentary. They serve an important role for things like pair bonding, for, you know, petting your dog and just

realizing how much you love your dog, um, for, you know, feeling what you need to feel to create bonds with you already have dopamine. And I didn't say this, this is a book. That's a great book. If anyone wants to read it and I didn't write it called the molecule of more is a book that talks about this. It's the molecule that makes you say, I want more of that. I want to go out there in that direction. And it's largely responsible for where humanity is today. And it's going to be largely responsible for where we end up, you know, in a hundred years. Why do you say that last part about it's going to be largely responsible because it's about taking action. It's the, because it's about it, it, it works.

So the amazing thing about the dopamine system is it's, you know, it's most often talked about with gambling and drug abuse and sex behavior and, you know, facing here, I'm talking about it with facing threats of a physical kind, but dopamine is works on very long time scales. It's what allows us to pursue things of great uncertainty over very long duration. You know, there's this, you know, I don't want to go too far down the weeds, but there's It's what allows us to pursue things of great uncertainty over very long duration. You know, there's this, you know, I don't want to go too far down the weeds, but there's this phenomenon of a reward prediction error, which basically has to do with this fundamental discovery, not by my lab, but that shows that dopamine is released en route to goals as you pursue goals.

And that makes total sense because you need that dopamine release to replenish motivation. You need it to replenish drive. You need to give some buoyancy to the system to continue to march off toward these goals. And those goals can be very distant and based on a lot of uncertainties. But dopamine is really what moves mammals toward a new place from the place that they're in the other neurochemicals you know with like serotonin oxytocin tend to keep us in the same place physically they don't tend to move our body and there are other neurochemicals that are important acetylcholine drives focus and focuses our energy and attention and these are broad i'm making broad sweeping

statements here, but this is largely true for the circuits. They engage a norepinephrine and adrenaline tend to create some agitation in our system so that we move from places of rest and relaxation to, to modes of mobility and action. But dopamine is, uh, is a remarkable chemical in its ability to move us forward, drive us to the next milestone, ensure that the circuits that underlie that behavior get repeated and so forth. Okay. Let me nerd out with you for a minute. Tyrosine. So tyrosine as it relates to dopamine. Yeah. Are you familiar with that bit of work? Yeah. Okay. So, yeah. So, oh yeah. Sorry. Good. No. So the simple question is like, if you're, if you don't have tyrosine on board,

right back to, you know, Krebs cycle, but if you don't have tyrosine on board and you feel stress, you make a conscious, let's say you make a conscious decision to move toward it. And so I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm in some ways bifurcating the conscious and non-conscious responses to stress, but let's say that you become a person of agency and we say, I'm going to move toward that thing. It heightens my stress in some ways, but I don't have the ability to make tyrosine for whatever reasons, right? I'm deficient there. And it, does that mean, so I'm not going to be able to produce dopamine if that's, if I'm thinking about this correctly,

which would mean that my act of courage would then not be reinforced. That's right. And if you, a shitty stress, it would just be effort. It would just be a fight. It would just be effort. So, you know, and, and so, so it sounds like we'll get back to vision, I promise. But so when we're thinking about neuro, these are all what Michael and I are talking about are neuromodulators. So neuromodulators are distinct from other chemicals in the brain in that they're designed to modulate specific circuits. So dopamine gets released to change the activity of certain connections and things in the brain. Serotonin gets, it goes in, even if you squirted serotonin all over the brain, not all cells would respond

to it, only certain cells, in particular cells involved in behaviors that are involved in pair bonding and satisfaction, right? So what he's referring to is that tyrosine is this amino acid precursor to making dopamine. Effort generally is derived from epinephrine and adrenaline which are essentially the same thing but scientists are totally unimaginative um when it comes to naming but they're so imaginative that they came up with four names for basically the same thing noradrenaline adrenaline uh epinephrine and um norab and then they're all very they're not exactly the same depending on where they are in the brain or body but just if you see here in those for sake of most discussions just think

adrenaline so adrenaline moves us forward it gets us in an activation state that we want to move forward but over time it's gonna we're gonna burn down there's actually a beautiful what i mean by that is we'll quit. And there's a beautiful study that was published in Cell earlier this year by a group from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute out in Virginia showing that if effort is made over and over again and it's unsuccessful, epinephrine goes up faster and faster and eventually high levels of epinephrine in this one particular brainstem circuit, they trigger the quitting reflex. And I don't mean quitting like a cognitive quitting. I mean, it shuts down the premotor neurons that control the motor neurons.

So when epinephrine hits threshold, quitting happens. Now, dopamine, and this is the experiment that you laid out, the Gdankin experiment. Gdankin just means in your head. It's a kind of Einstein talked about Gdankin experiment. So the Gdankin experiment that Michael pointed out was, well, okay, well, what if you have effort, you have norepinephrine or adrenaline, but you don't have L-tyrosine, so you don't have dopamine. And that's exactly the right experiment because dopamine creates a reward in the system that buffers against these high levels of epinephrine. It engages circuits that actually through synaptic connections, suppress that epinephrine to a point where it becomes manageable. We've all experienced this. If you've ever been really, really down in

the dumps or you're working with a team or it's could be sports team or business team, and it's just the worst. And somebody cracks a joke, immediately people, if it's a good joke, people get buoyancy. You feel like you can lean back into things. Now, it's so fast that it could, there's no way it could have been hormonal. It wasn't testosterone or estrogen or oxytocin, because those work on the timescale of hours and days and weeks, not milliseconds. That phenomenon is dopamine. It's dopamine triggering a reset by engaging a whole new set of circuits in a way of viewing the situation. And so dopamine changes our perspective by making us outward facing again, and also by making things seem tractable or possible. The extreme example of this, which is not a good one, and I don't recommend this behavior, is when people take amphetamines or cocaine, their behavior shifts

to high arousal and an attitude of everything I need is outside me and pursuit, pursuit, pursuit, pursuit, pursuit, pursuit. Contrast that with drugs of abuse that trigger high levels of serotonin, you know, marijuana and some other drugs as well. And I'm not here to say what drugs people should or shouldn't be doing. I'm not a cop. I'm a scientist, but I'm just describing the extreme form tend to make people more quiescent and more placid and kind of happy with what they've got. They might get hungry, but they're not really rabid with intensity. So you've experienced this on a, on a safer legal level. Well, I guess some of these drugs are legal now But when you eat a high tryptophan as the precursor to serotonin when you eat a high tryptophan meal You eat turkey and you feel sleepy part of the reason you feel sleepy after Thanksgiving meals because you've filled your gut with so much food

There's a ton of blood there. But the other reason is you have high levels of tryptophan So these molecules were designed to put us in pursuit, but buffer our, the effort process. So it's manageable. They were also designed to give us satisfaction when we finally reach goals and to pair bond because people, if you've ever dealt with somebody who takes cocaine, they are very difficult because they don't really care about interpersonal relations. It's all about getting stuff. Healthy people pursue things with this norepinephrine and dopamine system. They relish in the wins, but they also relish in the molecules, the serotonin and oxytocin and molecules that reward people for what they have. Again, I'm referencing this book,

The Molecule of More, but the sort of what are called the here and now molecules, the ones that lead to satisfaction with what you've got here and now, as opposed to what's out there in the world. So the, the, to kind of circle back to the courage circuit and the way that people can implement this, people should, if you're, if you're a hype, you know, if you're a hard driving person, there are a couple of things that are really important to keep in mind. Epinephrine is what gets you moving and you can be the most type a. You can be type AA. I guess that's a different thing. You can be A to the extreme.

It was probably the better way to describe it. A is a whole other phenomenon. A to the extreme. And eventually burnout does happen because the rewards are not coming. You're not getting dopamine in the right pattern. There's something called reward prediction error. If you get more dopamine in pursuit than you get when you finally reach the goal, it's going to lead to a dramatic disappointment and dramatic and dramatic depression. This is well studied in humans and in animals. Reward prediction error says if you get the dopamine signal at the final, at the final

finish line has to exceed the dopamine along the way, or it becomes a depletion event. If, so if you are, if you're a hard driving person, you definitely want to use this dopamine system intelligently. You want to incur, you want to reward your little wins and root to your goals. You want to, that can be through subjective telling yourself you made it, made it to a small milestone toward your team cohesion. Whatever wins, you want to register those wins. You don't need to over-celebrate them, but you need to register them even if it's just for moments, even if it's just through gratitude, which is actually a powerful practice. And then when you reach a win, it has to be rewarded in a major way.

And if you do that, it's more likely you'll be able to re-engage those same circuits in the future. You know, I've always been struck, I didn't play football, but I've always been struck by when you look at the Super Bowl, and I know you've worked with the Seahawks extensively, you know, when you look at two teams playing in the Super Bowl, I have to believe that they're all at max output. This is everything. Everything's on the line and it's all public. And when you look at the winning team, the winning team is not exhausted. They suddenly have energy to spare. They're jumping up and down. They're throwing buckets of whatever it is, is in the buckets nowadays. They're, they're celebrating for days. People have made a lot of the testosterone boost that comes with that. That's a later stage thing and a very slow signal. That is dopamine. What you're observing there is the epinephrine being crushed back down

to manageable levels because of a huge increase in dopamine. The key is you don't want to do that en route to your goals or else you're not going to feel, you're not going to get the reinforcement of the circuits when you finally reach those end goals. The other thing that's really important, and I've seen this a lot out here in Silicon Valley, I have some friends in the tech community who've done very well for themselves. And then it's like the depression sets in. What's the meaning? What am I going to do? I need to do 45 transcendental meditation retreats. I need to find myself, all this, which is great. And I applaud their self-discovery, right? And it's not just people in the tech sector, but what they haven't done in most cases is support these serotonin systems and the reward

systems that come from the deep satisfaction and joy that comes from great relationships that come from your dog, a relationship with your dog or your cat, or if you're a cat person or your children or your spouse or your friends for that matter, or your coworkers, you if you're a cat person, or your children, or your spouse, or your friends, for that matter, or your coworkers, you have to balance these reward systems. Because they're not just independent systems. They all support each other. And so that's the struggle, because we also need to work really hard in order to accomplish things. That's a great insight.

Okay. Let's get to those three brilliant gems that you got about sleep, about something more powerful than a deep breath, and then optic flow. move into states of courage. We also study respiration. We're launching a large scale study right now with a guy named David Spiegel in the department of psychiatry, looking at how respiration impacts brain states and body states and so forth. And I just want to pass this off as a tip because, um, respiration and breath work has gotten a lot more attention recently, but one of the quickest ways you can calm yourself. In fact, the fastest way I'm aware of it using respiration is to, you somewhat follow the advice of take a deep breath, but you also make the exhale longer than the inhale. But that information is fairly well known now. But there's a specific class of neurons in your brainstem that

are responsible for sighing. These are neurons that are activated periodically throughout the day and while you sleep. And these neurons have the specific job of balancing the ratio of carbon dioxide and oxygen in your bloodstream. So this isn't, you know, a hack. This is a set of neurons that were created specifically with the purpose of rebalancing oxygen and carbon dioxide in order to reestablish calm. And so the way to activate these neurons is you inhale twice, ideally through the nose, and then you exhale long once through the mouth. So it's inhale, then another little inhale, even if you have to sneak in just a tiny bit more air, and then a long exhale.

Now what this does, in addition to balancing the ratio of carbon dioxide and oxygen and the bloodstream and lungs, is it activates a circuit that goes from this very special organ, the diaphragm that we've all heard of. There's a nerve that controls the diaphragm called the phrenic nerve, but that diaphragm also sends signals back to the brainstem and informs the brain about the status of the body. And so your brain is constantly back to the brainstem and informs the brain about the status of the body. And so your brain is constantly listening to the frequency of signals like a Morse code coming from this phrenic nerve. The phrenic nerve goes in both directions and it's saying, is my body alert? Is my body calm? And it's comparing that to what the needs of your situation are. So if you're out

running and you're breathing hard, your brain is like, oh, this is great. I need to be breathing hard. In fact, maybe I need to be breathing harder. But if you're about to go and give a talk or you're trying to recover from exercise, or you need to listen to somebody who's telling you something challenging, you need to calm down. What you need to do, or wait, I'm suggesting you do is this double inhale, long exhale, and maybe repeat it two or three times ensures that your diaphragm sends the brain, these sign neurons, the signal, okay, yes, you're sign that's balancing carbon dioxide and oxygen ratios. And it signals back to the brain. It's time to be calm because the brain doesn't really know what's going on in the outside world, except in reference to what's going on internally,

what's called interoception. So that's the first tip. And what I like about this is it's based on respiratory physiology, gas exchange in the blood and lungs, and the neural circuitry that is a real thing. Neuroanatomy is there. You can see this phrenic nerve. It's not an imaginary thing. It's not spiritual. It's mechanical. And how certain are you about the exhale through the mouth? Because my findings have led me to the nose as a way to conserve some of the dioxide exchange.

Yeah, you know, I suggest it that way because I'm glad you brought that up. Because for a lot of people who are doing breath work or doing some conscious breathing each day, nasal breathing is going to be more powerful because of the, the various things you described and also nasal breathing in general throughout the day is probably a good idea. There's a great book called jaws, um, uh, which is by Ehrlich and Khan and some colleagues of mine at Stanford talking about how nasal breathing is, is really important for fighting off infection and for jaws, the integrity of the jaw and teeth, especially in kids. I highly recommend that book. For most people who are just trying to learn this and are going to come to the table, if they inhale twice through the nose and they try and exhale, it's going to feel like it's blocked because a lot of people feel like they have obstructions.

Most people have obstructions because they're not using their nasal sinuses enough. And so, you know, so your advice is good. If you can do it all through the nose, double inhale through the nose, long exhale through the nose, even better. Just most people can't sort of manage their respiration that well through the nose because they haven't done enough breathing, conscious breathing to allow the sinuses to dilate. The sinuses can change shape. So if you, yeah, all through the nose would be ideal.

Okay. Brilliant. Okay. Good. Okay. shape. So if you, yeah, all through the nose would be ideal. Okay. Brilliant. Okay, good. Okay. Awesome. So, yep. So in terms of vision and stress control. So first of all, now we, based on our earlier discussion, we know why the eyes are there.

They're there to control our internal arousal state. So if you're sleeping great at night, you have tons of energy all day and then you don't need to follow this advice. But if you're not in that category, then the two practices that are most critical for achieving that are going to be to view light early in the day, close to when you wake up. Hopefully that's in the morning. Ideally, it's sunlight. Yes, it could be through a window, but ideally you would be outside. And you just get two minutes to 10 minutes of sunlight. You don't need to stare directly at the sun. And even if there's cloud cover, a lot of photons are coming

through. It doesn't have to be sunny Southern California. It can be the depth of winter in England, believe it or not. And a lot of light energy is coming through far more than you're going to get from artificial lights. Okay. The other thing is to get some sunlight in your eyes in the evening as the sun is setting. Now I've had people from Scandinavia and I have a stepmom from Scandinavia tell me, wait, no, the sun's not out in Scandinavian winter. Okay. It does come up in and then it goes down very briefly. If you're in that extreme environment, you might need to rely on artificial lights for this kind of thing. But view sunlight, get photons in your eyes during the day, especially in the early part of the day, but also in the evening, because it sets the appropriate timing

of secretion of this hormone cortisol, which, which will make you alert at the right times of day. And you want cortisol dropping by about 9 PM. And in the psychiatric community, it's well known that a peak in 9 PM cortisol is kind of a signature of anxiety and depression. And it, and it's well known that a peak in 9 p.m. cortisol is kind of a signature of anxiety and depression. And it's related to things like insomnia. You want cortisol up early in the day. You don't want it coming up late in the day. The other practice that's very important, and I alluded to this earlier, is to avoid bright light exposure between the hours of 11 p.m. and 4 a.m. Now, if you work a job where this is where it requires that you be up during that time, you might want to use, you know, blue blocker type technology or something where if you do

have to be awake, use dim lights. Even better are dim lights set low in the room because the cells in the retina that transmit this information about time of day to the brain are on the lower half of the retina, which means they view the upper visual field because they were designed to look at the sun. So you can you can look at a nice fireplace if you want. You can have dim lights in the evening, but really try and avoid bright light in the middle of the night because it activates that pro-depression circuit we talked about earlier that also signals the pancreas and can really throw off blood sugar rhythms. Another time maybe we could talk about jet lag and shift work because it's a whole

two hour discussion, but there are things that you can do. People in the military are adopting some of these behaviors, shift workers to help their circadian health when they can't be following a normal schedule, but we'll get to that another time. So that's just kind of basic stuff. Now, the other one, which is, as far as I know, the fastest way to introduce calm to the nervous system, and this can be used in conjunction with the breathing we talked about before, is to employ this amazing ability that we all have to switch our vision from focused, what I'll call focal vision, on a particular location in space. So think about looking at your phone, looking at someone's face, looking at a computer screen versus panoramic vision, which is the kind of vision that you're in when you're walking down the street, provided you're not looking at a phone or you're biking or you're stationary. And you can even do this now if you're stationary and listening, you just, what you're going to do is you're going to keep your head and eyes stationary,

but you're going to deliberately consciously dial out your gaze so that you can see the ceiling, the floor, the walls around you, and even yourself in the environment that you're in simply by consciously controlling the, what you're doing is you're controlling the muscles of the inside of the eye, believe it or not, you're moving the lens. So the way that you do this is you keep your head and eyes stationary. Although if you're walking along or you're moving along, you don't have to be, you know, statue still. You just don't need to move your eyes around a lot or your head around a lot. And you're going to dial out your gaze. And, you know, for the yoga practitioners out there, you could think of this as soft gaze or something like that.

But really, I'll describe why this works. What it's doing is it's disengaging a circuit for alertness and vigilance in the brainstem that leads to, when you disengage it, it leads to a very rapid but meaningful shift from, let's call it a higher stress state to one of more calm. Now, looking at one location like a phone or being in a conversation with someone or looking at a computer screen doesn't itself cause stress. That would depend on what you're looking at. But it is sort of like spending quarters in the quarter slots. You spend enough of those, you can run through a lot of money. You're spending out this norepinephrine mechanism. When you, that we talked about earlier, when you go into this panoramic view, you're releasing

that. So remember, it's like a car. You can accelerate a car. That would be like stress by pressing on the accelerator. You can hit the brake, which will slow you down, but you can also slow down by coming off the accelerator. So in this analogy, the panoramic vision is like coming off the accelerator. So in this analogy, the panoramic vision is like coming off the accelerator. And the reason I like this so much is for a couple of reasons.

One is, first of all, it's grounded in the basis of this what where pathway that we were talking about earlier. Um, second of all, it, it's very fast and it's covert. So I can be in conversation where I can be in action and I can do this without having to change my breathing. If I start doing breath work in the middle of a meeting, it's weird depending on the meeting. If I do a couple of inhales and that longer exhale, I can do that somewhat covertly. But if I'm speaking, that becomes very hard to do. And so this panoramic vision thing is allows you to move into calmer states and to control those states very quickly because they disengage this vigilance circuit. Now, some people say, well, I don't want to disengage vigilance because I want to make sure I'm fully aware of everything that's going on. And that's where the real magic of this is. It engages this where pathway or it has you rely more heavily on what we called earlier the where pathway as opposed to the what pathway. And what that enables you to do is actually detect – is to detect events in your environment on much faster time scales than, that if you really want to see things coming at you and

detect all those events, you can't afford to have your vision locked to any one location. So this is actually the mechanism that you use anytime you're moving through space. And it's what keeps you from running into other objects. It's what allows you to see things in your periphery. People who have high situational awareness are often, they're not scanning the environment by jumping their eyes from point to point. They're bringing in the whole environment all at once,

the whole gestalt. And actually we have a paper that we're in the process of submitting now, which hopefully will be out this year, which shows that actually a signature of anxiety, we looked at people with high generalized anxiety, is the fact that they evaluate environments, in particular novel environments, by darting their eyes from location to location, as opposed to just taking in the visual environment all at once. And that brings me to the final takeaway, which is optic flow. So when you move through space, whether or not you're walking or running, or just walking to the space, whether or not you're walking or running or just walking to

the kitchen, whether or not you're on a bicycle, and in most cases, if you're driving, provided that you're not looking at the dash all the whole time or looking at your phone, in fact, if you're looking at your phone any of the time, you're not going to experience this. You're in what's called optic flow. Things are moving past your retina at varying speed, depending on how fast you're moving. But your brain has knowledge of how fast you're moving and the fact that you're generating that, even if it's in a car or by walking or running or biking or surfing. And it cancels out the movement in a way that says, okay, these objects aren't moving past me. I'm moving past them. And that has the property of triggering some release of some of these

positive neurochemicals that at once relax our nervous system and make us feel very alert and aware. And this is where Steven Kotler and I have been in some discussions about flow, because I don't have a neurobiological definition of flow that I can point to a specific experiment in the lab yet. But, you know, in the original definition of flow that Cheek Simha put forward was quite different than the one that people are using now. But this optic flow is a very real phenomenon. It's been studied for decades because we are constantly generating little head and eye movements to stabilize the image on our eyes as we move through space. And that mechanism evolved to coordinate with our balance, to coordinate with our limb movements. And all of this boils down to a set of circuits in the brain

and body that make it so that when we're moving through space, it has this property of relaxing us and giving us a sensation that is somewhat rewarding. And that has to, with almost certainty, boil down to the release of the kinds of neurochemicals we were talking about earlier. And so what this translates to is, at least once a day, get out and move. Experience optic flow, even if it's through walking. For folks that are in wheelchairs, it would be even possible in a flow, even if it's through walking. For folks that are in wheelchairs, it would be even possible in a wheelchair, even if someone was on crutches. Optic flow doesn't

have to be fast. It can be at slow speeds. Ideally, it's variable speeds. But this, I believe, underlies the sensation, the both calming and invigorating and kind of replenishing feelings that we get from taking a bike ride or a long run or swimming for that matter. Um, and so get those sunlight, get the sunlight in the morning and the evening, avoid bright lights in the middle of the night, use panoramic vision. And this, what I call a proper side, double inhale, long exhale, breathing to calm, to shift yourself toward calm and try and get into optic flow of some sort. It could be vigorous exercise, but it doesn't have to be at least once a day. And the people that do this at least report back to me. And we've done some studies on various aspects of this in different pieces and papers, tremendously positive effects

on sleep, wellbeing, stress management. And in general, you're learning how to control what is typically called the autonomic nervous system. You're learning how to control the aspects of your neurology and your wiring that feed directly into your state of mind and psychology and well-being in a very deliberate way. And none of these things take very long. They're very fast and they're very effective. And they're very fast and very effective because they were hardwired into us to be very fast and very effective. I love the panoramic vision. You know, this is great because the panoramic vision piece is actually reverse engineering what happens to our brain under the sympathetic activation, right? Which is darting around to find the danger.

And you're saying, oh, why don't we reverse engineer that and just kind of zone out a bit if I have the feeling right or the the the essence of it right it's almost like a just a relax it's a forcing function of relaxation to allow your gaze to be open it's almost you could almost think about it like um let your eyesight be a little blurry you know like but that's not quite right that i'm i'm extension yeah accentuating the feeling but it's just allowing it, uh, to slip into more of a gaze than a hyper-visual focus. Is that exactly the practice?

That's exactly right. And you know, when, when we, when we hit a stress response, our pupils dilate and that basically makes your eye like portrait mode on your phone. You can see individual things very clearly and the rest becomes blurry and untangible to you. When you're in this panoramic vision, not only can you see more of your visual scene, but there's a relaxation of the stress response. Your situational awareness goes up. Your reaction times go up four times, 4X. And you're calming yourself using a mechanism that was built for this purpose.

But as you said, you, you're let you're controlling your neural circuitry. So the very beginning, you say, you know, we were talking about, are you top down? Are you sort of thinking about top down processing in the brain or, or bottom up processing in the brain? And this is an instance of strong top down processing. You're using your conscious control to take control of these limbic or fear or stress related circuits that for, you know, hundreds of years, people have thought were outside our control and could only be regulated by slow events like eating a big meal and feeling relaxed or something.

But there are very fast, very powerful mechanisms that we can engage that require no training at all that can do this. I love it. Okay, I've got a couple of double clicks, like super crisp questions is, okay. So I want to talk about cortisol release and sleep. And obviously you want cortisol to be released more during the day, morning slash day, as opposed to nighttime. Okay. What if the only time you can work out is 630 at night, 730 at night. And that's the only time you can figure out how to get some fitness in. And under high stress, high strain, there's a cortisol dump. And now you've got some cortisol flowing at, let's say, 8.30 at night. What would you recommend? Yeah. And here I'm going to make some recommendations that extend into my personal practices and some experience doing some consulting with various groups. So it's, it's, it's based in some science, but not science that my lab's done. So if I recommend things about

nutrition or that sort of thing, that's what, what's going on there. Um, just to make it, I want clarity about where I'm drawing my sources from. So the, if I'm sometimes I'll finish out the day and I'm pretty wiped and I'm kind of been grinding along and I don't know if I should exercise or I should rest. And so sometimes I'll find myself doing a workout or a run at 8 p.m. and feeling spectacular afterwards and getting a great night's sleep. So it can't just be that exercise is driving up adrenaline. Even if it's very intense exercise, sometimes it can lead to a post-exercise relaxation state that's deeper than the stress we showed up to the workout with, right? So the autonomic nervous system, if it's very stressed, it tends to have a rebound. This is why some people pass out when they see blood.

That's not because they're so stressed. It's because they're so stressed that they suddenly get flipped the other way. They got so calm they fell asleep basically. So that's why that happens. So the system is, is, is sort of like on a hinge. And so in the evening, if you're going to work out and you're showing up to that workout with a ton of extra energy, we'll then blow off that energy and you'll probably cruise right into sleep much better afterward. If you're showing up to that workout exhausted,

then you want to be careful that you're not driving yourself towards more exhaustion. Cause you can't really do that for too many days before you deplete yourself. That's that norepinephrine depletion thing that we were talking about before. But there are a couple things one can do with nutrition. We talked about amino acids and biasing our neurotransmitters. Really toward the evening, you don't just want cortisol low. You also want things like serotonin high so you can emphasize tryptophan rich foods. So it's not just turkey, but some dairy products, if that's in, in your nutritional plan, a complex carbohydrates, things like rice and pastas are actually, if it works for you are best consumed towards sleep.

And during the day, the foods that promote tyrosine release are going to be things like red meats, um, nuts, vegetables, and, you know, complex carbohydrates, and probably should be in more, occupy more of your diet toward late in the day. This is that opposite of what a lot of people describe. But of course, I'm not a nutritionist. I'm just sort of emphasizing the effects of different foods on neurotransmitter milieu. I will say what I said before, which is that if you eat a huge meal, it doesn't matter if it's red meat, nuts, pasta, or Snickers. If your gut is full, you're going to siphon a ton of blood to your gut and you're going to get sleepy.

So that's just regardless of what you bring. Okay. So I want to make sure I heard you correctly is that you're saying eat complex carbs and meats and nuts earlier in the day. Or are you saying do those later in the day? I missed the kind of final point. Yeah. Yeah.

Sorry. I wasn't clear. When you want to be active, so for most people, that's going to be during the day and maybe even into the evening a bit. For most people, you're going to do best ingesting foods that contain tyrosine and promote things like dopamine and norepinephrine. So that would be red meat, nuts, and vegetables we should probably be eating all the time, right? And if you eat fruit, you know, small amounts of fruit are

fine. When you want to rest and you want to slow down and you want to sleep and relax, that's when you want carbohydrates. You're going to want pastas, grains, and those sorts of things. So towards sleep. So if I had a hard workout at 8 p.m PM and I'm wide awake and I want to sleep, I'm going to have pasta or oatmeal or something or rice that's going to allow that L-tryptophan mechanism and ideally turkey too, to kick in and allow my nervous system to transition to more of what we call a parasympathetic state, or it just means calmer. Um, some people, including myself, and I'm not here to make supplement recommendations. I don't, I don't do that. But what I do also people, including myself, and I'm not here to make supplement recommendations, I don't do that. But what I do also, for years I had trouble sleeping. And when I finally started

moving the bulk of my carbohydrate intake either to immediately after high intensity workouts, regardless of when they were, or into the evening and nighttime, my sleep vastly improved. And I also, I use theanine, T-H-E-A-N-I-N-E. I use 200 milligrams of theanine and I use magnesium threonate, T-H-R-E-O-N-A-T-E, because those together promote the secretion of a neurotransmitter called GABA, which tends to shut off the forebrain, which is responsible for thinking. You don't really want to be thinking too hard when you want to fall asleep. So I'm not, I'm not here to promote supplements. I don't, you know, that's not what I do, but for, but I do take those in conjunction with higher carbohydrate meals toward the end of the day in order to relax.

So basically it's meat, nuts, and vegetables when you want to be alert and it's carbohydrates, vegetables, and smaller amounts of protein. You can still have some eggs or fish or whatever, or even red meat later in the day. But the idea is that you're biasing the production of dopamine and and turkeys and things like that in the evening time in order to promote the L-tryptophan serotonin pathway. Now, one thing I don't recommend for myself or for anybody is to take neurotransmitters directly. A lot of people nowadays are kind of dabbling in taking L-DOPA or a supplement called

mucunipurines, which is actually, it's actually a bean from Southeast Asia that, that, that chemically is almost identical to L-DOPA, which is very close to dopamine itself and chemical structure, or they're taking 5-HTP, which is very close to serotonin itself. I think, um, and there's some evidence for this, that the closer you are to the actual chemical that you're trying to produce, the more likely you're going to get disruption of the synthesis of that chemical. In other words, you're going to start messing up your own endogenous creation of those chemicals. This is also true of hormones and things like that. But when you start, but amino acids are early stage precursors to these things. So you're kind

of, you're tilting the balance in a certain direction by eating these foods and getting certain amino acids rather than blitzing your system with serotonin itself or with dopamine itself, which gives you the effect you want in the very short term. But you can often pay a severe price the next day. People can end up with insomnia the next day if they're using serotonin, or they can end up with dopamine depletion, which can make them feel depressed. I mean, these are powerful chemicals, and I don't think anyone should really be dabbling with neurochemicals in this kind of direct, high-potency way, unless you really have a physician who's working with you

and has instructed you to do that. Yeah, and I would double-click on that in two ways. One is, unless you're doing a blood draw and you've really got some examination of what's happening internally. Um, but I would say even at a blood draw, I wouldn't start there. I would start with, um, let's say that you, let's say that you, uh, you've got some neurotransmitter stuff that you're noticing. I would, I would double down on the amino acids. And just for folks that might not know what that is, like anything that's got an L in front of it, for the most part, is amino acid, like L-tyrosine, L-tryptophan, L-theanine. And so check those out for sure.

And, you know, I was part of a company. I'm not really part of it anymore. Like it was a good drink company, but we're trying to create like an ideal focus slash calm. And, uh, it was good theanine, like a high quality grade theanine and some magnesium in there. Um, and theanine is one of those really interesting amino acids that, uh, has some, some focus properties that we really liked with some relaxation properties. I really, I really liked that, that structure. Yeah. You know, 10 years ago, if we were having this conversation and my colleagues overheard it, they would be rolling their eyes. But, you know, I actually know. I know.

I know. I feel the same way. I can't say his name, but there's a very famous and in my community famous Nobel Prize winning neuroscientist who gave up smoking and felt like he lost his focus when he gave up smoking and he did it because he didn't want to get lung cancer, of course. But, you know, smoking is nicotine and the receptor for acetylcholine is a nicotinic acetylcholine receptor. So he uses various compounds that I'm not going to mention because I'm not going to out him in order to keep his focus now that he's a recovered smoker who no longer smokes. But these are powerful neurochemicals, right?

What I've been talking about over the last, I guess we've been talking for a couple hours now, about these things like acetylcholine for focus, dopamine for drive and motivation and reward, and serotonin for feel good in the present, these chemicals are the core ingredients. These are the macronutrients of brain states. And they really, you can take them exogenously, and many people do. And there's prescription drugs that emphasize these pathways too. But when people start dabbling, you run into trouble. The other thing is that it's always best to see what you can generate from your own stores of these chemicals. You have tons of stores of these chemicals in you,

and to be able to access them through behavior, through even if it's just driving yourself and motivation. I have a good friend who was in the SEAL teams for 22 years, and I won't mention his name, but he jokes. He says there are people, they call them nuts and berries guys. These are guys that can't do the workout. They're obviously not team guys. He was referring to people outside the teams in a kind of a joking way. He was like, oh yeah, nuts and berries guys, the people that can't do the workout or can't do the run unless they have their exact amino acid

shake and they have their tyrosine thing, you know, and he himself takes supplements. So what he was referring to is it's fine to lean to these things if it's done safely because they can be effective. But you always want to check in and make sure that you can generate the core of what you're aspiring to achieve without anything because it's just a great place to know that you can do that on demand and that you don't need any of that stuff. So I strive to not be a nuts and berries guy because he teases me, but I, I do, um, I do a lot of things with nutrition and supplementation and mindset and so forth to try and access these pathways. Andrew Huberin, legend. Thank you. Awesome. Where can we find you? Where can we, where can we pay attention to what you're putting into the world and be part of your mission in life.

So, well, my laboratory is always recruiting subjects. Right now, we're a little bit, we're doing that mainly remotely because of this COVID-19 situation. But the best place to find me for most people is going to be, believe it or not, at Instagram. I give some short tutorials on different aspects of neuroscience, as well as some actionable takeaways. And that's Huberman lab, H U B E R M A N L A B all one word, all lowercase. Um, and so you can look there. I do respond to messages. I sometimes take a little while to do it cause I get absorbed into other things from time to time, but that's a great place. Um, if you want to learn more about neuroscience and practical applications of brain science and brain states for performance stress and all that kind of stuff. And then in general, I'll announce there from time to time about experiments that we're running.

And here it's kind of fun because I can actually say we pay you. So we pay subjects to participate in experiments where we're having them do specific patterns of respiration or breathing. And we're collecting metrics, everything from cortisol, uh, to sleep patterns and so forth. So we're going to be ramping up a number of studies over the next 12 months and hopefully for a very long time thereafter. So check back there at Instagram from time to time. And then of course, if anyone's, um, ever in the Bay area at shoot me an Instagram, we're always looking for in lab subjects as well, but I think that should be plenty. And, um, thanks for allowing the opportunity to, to, to mention those. Oh, so good. Okay. Awesome. I can't wait to do this again. I know you got a book coming out,

you know, uh, 2021 ish. And so, you know, uh, let's circle back a handful of times before that, like you're a wealth of information and, um, the practical, simple approaches to improvement are clear. And so thank you, brother. Appreciate you. Thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity to connect with your audience and to connect with you. And I really, um, I really value your questions. They were, they were, they were challenging in the best ways. They forced me to think much harder than I would have had to otherwise. And I'm really quite grateful. Thank you so much, Michael.

Yeah, man. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community. And if you're enjoying the show, the easiest no-cost way to support is to hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you're listening. Also, if you haven't already, please consider dropping us a review on Apple or Spotify. We are incredibly grateful for the support and feedback. If you're looking for even more

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