Huberman Lab - How Hormones & Status Shape Our Values & Decisions | Dr. Michael Platt

Episode Date: February 17, 2025

My guest is Dr. Michael Platt, Ph.D., a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. We discuss how factors such as hormonal or social status influence what we value, how we make decisions, and even our perceptions across a range of areas, from who and what we find attractive to our political affiliations. We also discuss how humans evaluate and shift power in relationships and form hierarchies in groups. Dr. Platt also shares new science-based tools for improving focus, creativity, and attention. Read the full show notes for this episode at hubermanlab.com. Sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman Our Place: https://fromourplace.com/huberman Wealthfront**: https://wealthfront.com/huberman BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/huberman Function: https://functionhealth.com/huberman **This experience may not be representative of the experience of other clients of Wealthfront, and there is no guarantee that all clients will have similar experiences. Cash Account is offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC, Member FINRA/SIPC. The Annual Percentage Yield (“APY”) on cash deposits as of December 27,‬ 2024, is representative, subject to change, and requires no minimum. Funds in the Cash Account are swept to partner banks where they earn the variable‭ APY. Promo terms and FDIC coverage conditions apply. Same-day withdrawal or instant payment transfers may be limited by destination institutions, daily transaction caps, and by participating entities such as Wells Fargo, the RTP® Network, and FedNow® Service. New Cash Account deposits are subject to a 2-4 day holding period before becoming available for transfer. Timestamps 00:00:00 Dr. Michael Platt 00:02:12 Humans, Old World Primates & Decision-Making; Swiss Army Knife Analogy 00:07:52 Sponsors: Our Place & Wealthfront 00:11:01 Attention Allocation, Resource Foraging 00:16:40 Social Media; Marginal Value Theorem, Distraction 00:22:22 Tool: Remove Phone from Room; Attention & Urgency 00:25:23 Tool: Self Conversation; Visual Input, Attention as a Skill 00:29:29 Warming-Up Focus, Tool: Visual Aperture & Attention 00:38:57 Sponsor: AG1 00:40:13 Control of Attention, Tool: Changing Environment 00:44:07 Attention Continuum, Professions, Measuring Business Skill with Neuroscience 00:53:06 Theory of Mind, Covert Attention, Attentional Spotlights 01:00:05 Primates, Hormone Status, Brain Size, Monogamy 01:09:31 Monkeys, Neuronal Multiplexing & Context; Equitable Relationships 01:20:05 Sponsor: BetterHelp 01:21:11 Relationships, Power Dynamics, Neuroethology 01:29:34 Humans, Females & Hormone Status; Monkeys, Social Images, Hormones 01:38:03 Humans, Attractiveness, Value-Based Decision Making 01:44:32 Altruism, Group Selection & Cooperation, Selflessness 01:49:08 Males, Testosterone, Behavior Changes 01:55:46 Sponsor: Function 01:57:34 Oxytocin, Pro-Social Behaviors, Behavioral Synchrony 02:08:13 MDMA, Oxytocin, Anxiety; Social Touch, Despair & Isolation 02:17:12 Isolation, Social Connections & Strangers, Tool: Deep Conversation Questions 02:21:17 Bridging the Divide, Tribes & Superficial Biases 02:26:58 Testosterone, Risk-Taking Behavior 02:30:52 Decision-Making, Tool: Accurate or Fast? 02:38:31 Decision-Making, Impact of Time & Fatigue 02:45:23 Advertising, Status, Celebrity, Monkeys 02:52:19 Hierarchy; Abundance & Scarcity, Money & Happiness, Loss Aversion 03:02:47 Meme Coins, Celebrity Endorsement, Social Sensitivity 03:12:22 Decisions & Urgency; Bounded & Ecological Rationality 03:18:09 Longevity Movement; Mortality & Motivation 03:24:48 Retirement?, Serial Pursuits & Pivoting 03:30:17 Apple or Samsung?, Brand Loyalty, Empathy 03:38:15 Political Affiliation, Empathy 03:46:22 Zero-Cost Support, YouTube, Spotify & Apple Follow & Reviews, Sponsors, YouTube Feedback, Protocols Book, Social Media, Neural Network Newsletter Disclaimer & Disclosures

Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Michael Platt. Dr. Michael Platt is a professor of neuroscience

and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. His laboratory focuses on decision-making, more specifically how we make decisions and the impact of power dynamics, such as hierarchies in a given organization or group, as well as hormones on decision-making. We also discuss valuation, that is how we place value on things, on people.

And what you'll find is that there are many factors that impact whether or not we think something is good, very good, bad, or very bad, that operate below our conscious awareness. In fact, today's discussion will teach you how you make decisions, how to make better decisions in the context of everything from picking out a watch or a pair of shoes, all the way up to something

as important as picking a life mate. Indeed, hormones, hierarchies, and specific things that are operating within you and adjacent to nearby the things that you're evaluating, whether or not those things are people or objects, are powerfully shaping the neural circuits that lead you to make specific decisions. So today you're going to learn how all of that works, and as I mentioned, how to make better decisions.

Dr. Platt also explains how we are evaluating the hormone levels of other people, both same sex and opposite sex and the implications that has for relationships of all kinds. It's an incredibly interesting and unique conversation, certainly unique among the conversations I've had with any of my neuroscience colleagues over the decades. And I know that the information you're going to learn today

is going to be both fascinating to you, it certainly was to me, and that it will impact the way that you think about all decisions at every level in everyday life. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science

and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, this episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Michael Platt. Dr. Michael Platt, welcome. Thanks, it's awesome to be here. I've been following your work since I was a graduate student and it's really interesting.

You're an anthropologist by training, turned neuroscientist, turned practical applications of neuroscience and related fields to everybody as it relates to business, decision-making, social interactions, hormones. You've worked on a lot of different things. The first question I have is, let's all agree, we're old world primates. Yes.

Right? Most people don't even think of us as old world primates, but we are all old world primates and we share many similarities in terms of the neural circuits that we have in our skulls with some of the other old world primates like macaque monkeys, for instance. When you step back and look at a process like decision-making or marketing out in the world or how people interact with one another, engage value of objects, relationships, or even their own value, if I may, how much of what you see in human

old world primates do you think is reflected by the interactions of old world primates like rhesus macaque monkeys and vice versa? I mean, in other words, how primitive are we and or how sophisticated are the other old world primates? That's a great way of putting it, because I think it's both. I always like to say there's a little monkey in all of us, right?

And I believe that going in, having spent actually my formative years just watching monkeys. And I worked at the Cleveland Zoo when I was in college, and I took every opportunity I could get to go. I went to the field. I watched monkeys in South America and in Mexico. And I think we all get that. But over the course of my career, I'm astonished at how deep that goes. And basically, for every behavioral, cognitive, emotional phenomenon that we've trained our lens on,

it looks almost exactly the same in people and monkeys. Now obviously we're not just monkeys and we can talk and we're doing this and that's a big, big difference. But all the things that you talked about, decision making, social interaction, the way that we explore the world, the fountain of creativity, not only the neural circuits, but the actual expression is so similar. We have monkeys and people do the exact same things in the lab, and if I didn't label the videos,

the outputs of like the avatars and whatnot in games, you couldn't tell the difference. What's striking about what you just said is that I recall, I guess at that time it was called a tweet. And I think it was from Elon that said that we're basically a species that got a supercomputer placed on top of a monkey brain. So in thinking about it the other way,

what aspects of being human, this old world primate that we are, do you think is distinctly different than, say, a macaque monkey aside from language? I don't know that anything really is. I mean, so actually, it's an interesting time to have you ask me that question because the spring semester I teach a seminar for the psychology department at Penn called Being Human. And the whole idea of that, each week we tackle an aspect of who we are that has at one point or another been considered to be uniquely human or close to, right?

And that could be something like art and creativity or theory of mind, right? Or economics and markets and things like that. in creativity or theory of mind, right? Or economics and markets and things like that. And when you take a look at these things through the lenses of neuroscience and anthropology, this is how we do it, economics, psychology, neurology, and on and on and on, you start to really see that there's a lot more continuity than discontinuity. And that's kind of pretty shocking.

And I want to go back to that Elon tweet, if I may, because I think that's where we go a little bit astray, too, and thinking about the brain as a computer. So it's obviously not built on silicon. It's made of meat and fat, so it's well, obviously it's not built on silica, right? It's it's it's made of meat and fat and it's subject to all of the constraints that that go along that go along with that And what I think instead is a better metaphor is that we've got a 30 million year old Swiss Army knife in our heads right, so yes, you can learn how to do all kinds of different things, but you've got a Brain that's got essentially specific tools in it, you can learn how to do all kinds of different things, but you've got a brain that's got essentially

Specific tools in it, you know, you'll have you know, it's like having a knife and a corkscrew which is most important one You know nail file saw etc. And the monkeys got those too. Now ours might be a little bigger, you know and sharper But they they look in and they look pretty similar and they do the job in a very similar way. And I think once we appreciate that, then that opens up a lot of territory for applications. Not just trying to understand how some of those tools might get broken or dull as a result of illness or injury or disorders, et cetera, but also how we can measure them and how we can develop them better because some of those are, you know,

we use all the time, say in business. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, Our Place. Our Place makes my favorite pots, pans, and other cookware. Surprisingly, toxic compounds such as PFASs, or forever chemicals, are still found in 80% of non-stick pans, as well as utensils, appliances

and countless other kitchen products. I've talked before on this podcast about these PFASs or forever chemicals like Teflon, which have been linked to major health issues such as hormone disruption, gut microbiome disruption, fertility issues and many other health problems. So it's really important to avoid them. This is why I'm a huge fan of Our Place.

Our Place products are made with the highest quality materials and are all PFAS and toxin free. I particularly love their titanium always pan pro. It's the first nonstick pan made with zero chemicals and zero coating. Instead it uses pure titanium. This means it has no harmful forever chemicals and it also doesn't degrade or lose its non-stick effect over time.

It's extremely durable and it's also beautiful to look at. I cook eggs in my Titanium Always Pan Pro almost every morning. The design allows for the eggs to cook perfectly without sticking to the pan. I also cook burgers and steaks in it and it puts a really nice sear on the meat. But again, nothing sticks to the pan

so it's really easy to clean and it's even dishwasher safe. I love it and I use it every day. For a limited time, Our Place is offering an exclusive 20% discount on the Titanium Always Pan Pro. If you go to the website from our place.com slash Huberman and use the code saveHuberman20,

you can claim the offer. With a hundred day risk-free trial, free shipping and free returns, you can experience this fantastic cookware with absolutely zero risk. Again, that's from our place.com slash Huberman to get 20% off. Today's episode is also brought to us by Wealthfront.

I've been using Wealthfront for my savings and my investing for nearly a decade. And I absolutely love it. At the start of every year, I set new goals. And one of my goals for 2025 is to focus on saving money. Since I have Wealthfront, I'll keep that savings in my Wealthfront cash account where I'm able to earn 4% annual percentage yield

on my deposits. And you can as well. With Wealthfront, you can earn 4% APY on your cash from partner banks until you're ready to either spend that money or invest it. With Wealthfront, you also get free instant withdrawals to eligible accounts every day, even on weekends and holidays.

The 4% APY is not a promotional rate, and there's no limit to what you can deposit and earn. And you can even get protection for up to $8 million through FDIC insurance provided through Wealthfront's partner banks. Wealthfront gives you free instant withdrawals where it takes just minutes to transfer your money to eligible external accounts.

It also takes just minutes to transfer your cash from the external accounts. It also takes just minutes to transfer your cash from the cash account to any of Wealthfront's automated investment accounts when you're ready to invest. There are already a million people using Wealthfront to save more, earn more, and build long-term wealth. Earn 4% APY on your cash today. If you'd like to try Wealthfront,

go to wealthfront.com slash Huberman to receive a free $50 bonus with a $500 deposit into your first cash account. That's wealthfront.com slash Huberman to get started now. This has been a paid testimonial of Wealthfront. Wealthfront brokerage isn't a bank. The APY is subject to change. For more information, see the episode description.

So if we were to start at what us neuroscientists would call kind of more low-level functioning, even though it's pretty high level, with something like attention. You know, we are very visual creatures for those of us that are sighted. Most humans are sighted. We rely on vision to assess the world around us, to assess emotions of others, et cetera. And so are the other old world primates. How do we allocate attention? What grabs our attention?

And maybe in this discussion, we could also touch on, because I know you've worked on this, what underlies some deficits in attention? So yeah, if we could just explore this from the perspective of, okay, you go into an environment, let's say it's a familiar environment, you wake up in the room, you wake up in each day. What grabs your attention? What keeps your attention? And if we do in fact have control over our attention,

which we do to some extent, why is it so difficult for many of us to decide, you know what, I'm just gonna put everything away and I'm just gonna focus on this task for the next hour? Why is that so challenging for so many people, regardless of whether they have a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder? Okay, there's a lot in that question.

Any questions in there? And let's talk about what attention is right it is a prioritization right or an Amplification of of what you're focusing on right and we do that by where we point our eyes Right and then that it gets turned up in the brain with a lot of consequences and really why why do we have attention? Because you can't do everything at once right so? So it's in the name of efficiency. What we attend to is a product of two things. It's what we're looking for and what the world looks like.

And that kind of what the world looks like part is importantly shaped by what our ancestors experienced and also what we experienced when we were developing, when we were growing up. So things that are bright, are shiny, are moving fast, or loud or whatever, that grabs our attention. Things that stand out, that are different. And for us as primates, one thing that's super important

and kind of really deeply baked in is other people. So if there are faces, if there are people in the environment doing something, then that naturally just grabs our attention unless we happen to be an individual who's sort of wired a little bit differently, like folks on the autism spectrum disorder or schizophrenia, things like that, where that prioritization is not quite the same.

So that's kind of how our experience as primates, you know, and just the design principles of the way our brains work to overcome some of these limitations in the name of efficiency come about and then as you mentioned what we can control our attention to a certain degree and that's super important for a lot of I think overcoming a lot of the challenges that we have and we can talk about that like in decision making for example because you or or learning because you because you can't control what you're attending to, that gets turned up in the brain. Right. And that affects what we choose and, and it affects what we learn.

It affects what we remember, um, as well. So now I'm trying to kind of go back to like then the, the end part of your question. Oh, so that had to do with multitasking or just things in the environment. And that gets at this question or topic of, in my view, of foraging, right? And so I think that attention, this is the argument we've made, operates according to essentially the same rules

and principles that our bodies do when we are searching the environment for resources. So all mobile animals search for food, search for made, search for water, you know, for the resources that they need to survive and to reproduce. And as it turns out that kind of decision, that the clash made very memorable, should I stay or should I go? That's the key thing. So when you encounter something,

the question is like, do I take it, do I stick with it, even though it might be depleting, getting worse, or should I take a risk and invest time and energy and go look for something else? All animals have to do that. It turns out there's an optimal solution to that, which was written out by one of the great mathematical ecologists, Eric Chernoff, in a paper in 1976.

And so he wrote this out. And what's cool about it is it's very simple. It's basically you leave, you abandon the thing that you're harvesting when what you're getting from it falls below the average for the environment. That just makes sense. The marginal returns, right? This could be a social interaction. It could be a social interaction. It could be food, it could be water, it could be the money that you're making in the moment, could be the information that you're getting from a book or from a website or whatnot. And we, from studies done over the last,

whatever that is now, 50 years, have shown that every animal that's ever been observed behaves as if they're performing that computation. Could you give an example in the context of let's say social media? And as we were walking into record today, We were comparing and contrasting X as a platform versus Instagram and it occurred to me now based on what you said a few moments ago that Instagram is very visual so you see faces

Yeah, many accounts on X either the icon is so small or people even just have cartoons or whatever or people even just have cartoons or whatever, avatars there that aren't really faces in many cases. And it does seem that on X, there's a kind of an elevated level of emotionality to what people write. That's what tends to grab attention. And I wonder whether or not that's because of the absence of faces. I mean, when somebody is on an Instagram post and they're kind of ranting a bit, in fact, I saw this yesterday.

Tim Ferriss, another podcaster, had the investor Chris Sacka on and Chris was talking about environmentalism and the fires and he had opinions about AI. He's a very smart, very opinionated guy. People were commenting – I don't know how he felt, how could I? But people were commenting, he's so angry. He's so angry. He's so angry. And he was just being passionate and emphatic. Maybe he was angry, I don't know,

but he was clearly very alert, leaning forward into the camera. And people were paying, most of their comments were paying attention to the emotion behind what he was saying. And whereas on X, I feel like if you just took the text of what he was saying and you put it there, it would be kind of below the average emotionality on X, I feel like if you just took the text of what he was saying and you put it there, it would be kind of below the average emotionality on X.

And so when you say that we are drawn to faces or that faces are, we naturally forge towards faces versus other things, that feels very true. And do you feel like elevated levels of emotion in faces are what harness the most attention? And by parallel, if you get a bunch of monkeys together and one of them is really upset, do they all look at that monkey?

Speculating a little bit here. Yeah. Since I've not thought about it in the context of say, X versus Instagram. But I think you're right on. I mean, I think that's spot on. You're just combining, like you're turning, the I mean, I think that's spot on. You're just combining. Like, you're turning, the volume gets turned up

because there are faces there. And if they're more emotional, they're just going to be much more salient. Grab your attention, and that's something that's really important to pay attention to because somebody who's very aroused, right, that's activation, that's sort of pre-activation before they do something. Like, they might attack you or they might you know

Take something from you who knows right something something could happen there I want to take this back a little bit. I'm older and I want to take this this idea of Different sources like where you could place your attention take it back a little bit more in time Because what's been shown and it's interesting Computer science picked up on this marginal value theorem from mathematical ecology around 2000 or so and began to investigate how people searched the web and It turned out people would leave a website the moment their

information intake rate fell below the average their information intake rate fell below the average for sort of all the websites that they were encountering. The average is determined by your behavior in what, the preceding bin of time, like 10 minutes, until you arrive at a site or within site. So that's less well known, but we're now learning that it is pretty short term, right? So it seems to be driven by reinforcement learning

processes that kind of are telling you how rich that environment is. And so one of the things about the marginal value theorem I think is really, really profound for understanding our current predicament is that it says that if you're in a really poor environment, like let's say you forage for apples, right, and there's one apple tree for the next 10 miles.

You stay in that apple tree until you picked every apple, rotten or not rotten, not ripe, right, before you move on. If you were in an orchard with apple trees everywhere, you just pick the ones that are easiest to get and then you move on. So now think about it in the context of web surfing, the web. Like, when you were, you know, if you're coming up when I did, you know, I was in graduate school or, you know, as an undergraduate, the way I accessed the internet was through a dial-up modem.

So it was very slow. It was a very poor environment. You're sitting there waiting for the information to load up, right? It might take 30 seconds or longer. You don't abandon that. You read the whole thing. You might print it out, put it in your file cabinet, right? Now you get like super high speed internet. Yeah, you can have 12 tabs open, 50 tabs open.

And you're like, you just spend like half a second or a couple seconds on any one. You certainly don't scroll down beneath the fold. So it totally makes sense. Now think about all the devices you might have. It could be tabs, it could be, most people are sitting around with a TV on, their phone, a tablet, a laptop, whatnot.

I'm guilty of having meant, I have three phones and a laptop. So you're just cycling, you are doing exactly what you're designed to do, Yeah, so you're just cycling on you you are doing exactly what you're designed to do Right which is to? Move between these resources Quickly and easily because it's so easy so in some that's what going back to your question about like why is it so hard? It's gonna be really really deliberate you have to either

reduce You know make it a harder environment I guess is the idea you would have to actually put things away or make the return rate that you're getting from any of them much worse. Like for example, if you turn your phone monochrome, some, which we know works, right? It helps you to stop checking your phone and spend less time on it because it's just not as good of a source. Yeah, the information feels really depleted. You reposted a paper result recently,

and I did as well after I saw it on your ex account, that if you look at the working memory, the ability to keep information online in real time and work with it, it seems that working memory is worst when your phone is right next to you. If it's somewhere else in the room that you're working, then we're trying to do real work of some sort, your performance is slightly better than if it's right next to you. But if the phone is completely outside of the room, improvements in working memory are statistically significant.

In other words, get the phone completely out of the room. It's not sufficient to have it next to you turned face down or even in your backpack behind you. It needs to be in a completely separate environment in order to maximize this effect. Yeah, I mean, it's completely consistent with what we're saying here with regard to foraging. But if I take my phone and I put it,

I don't have my phone here under the chair, but let's say I did, this result suggests that some component of our neural circuitry is operating in the background thinking, well, I guess something could be on there. Maybe I got a text or maybe there's a tweet I should look at or an Instagram post. It suggests that we are multitasking even when we think we are not multitasking. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. It's beneath our awareness, right? So that's, and that's where I think the kind of comparative psychology, comparative neurobiology is really important here because I don't

necessarily, you know, impute conscious awareness to all these critters that are out there doing these things, behaving exactly the same way we are. And so to me, that just indicates that all that hardware, those same routines are just running under the hood, running under the surface, and we're not aware of it. So when your phone is somewhere within the sphere that could be accessed. The brain's aware of that, and it's including that in the calculations about what to do next. And it actually reminds me now of,

there's actually a couple papers that we published some time ago on foraging. And one of the things that's really interesting about it is that as you are considering your options and you're experiencing sort of these depleting rewards or whatnot, you see this urgency signal kind of building up in part of the brain, the anterior cingulate cortex that we know is important for moving on, for switching, for searching for something new. And it does, you know, I don't know

what the emotional component of that is. We never explored that. But it seems reasonable to imagine that that's tied to, you know, this sense of like, I really, you know, I really want to turn my phone over and check what's going on there. Are there any data that suggest that just being able to maintain a thought train independent of visual input can help us get better at maintaining attention?

So for instance, this morning I woke up very early, unusually early for me because I went to bed unusually early for me and I decided to try something which is something that actually our colleague in neuroscience, Karl Deisseroth, had mentioned he does and a previous guest on this podcast, Josh Waitzkin, who is a former Chess Grandmaster Champion, has described something like this, I decided to try it, which was to keep my eyes closed and just try and think in complete sentences, not let my mind drift off topic for a while, have a conversation with myself in my head, but with the constant redirect of trying to stay in a thought train.

And it's actually much more difficult than I thought it would be, right? There's no other input. My eyes are closed. I was comfortable at the temperature the room was, et cetera. I was well rested, no phone, no input. And you get one sentence of thought out, then the next. It's a bit like writing, except here, no visual input. So I would have thought it's a lot easier

because you don't have a set of tabs across the top or even a word doc with a, like, do you want to change it to bold, et cetera. Like no other input competing for one's attention. And I found that after about 10 minutes, it became pretty easy, but it took me about 10 minutes to get into this redirective focus.

And then at one point I thought, I better stop this because it's seeming kind of weird, but that was very different, I would say, than sitting down to say, meditate and think about my breath, which is a physical phenomenon that's tangible at the level of feeling one's breath. So how do you feel about practices that teach us to maintain attention and redirect our

attention that are very deprived of visual input as a kind of training ground for being able to harness and maintain visual input when we need to get work done, work on problem sets, write, do like what I call real work or Cal Newport would call deep work. So I've never tried that and it sounds fascinating and I'm going to try to give it a shot, you know, tomorrow morning. At first I was thinking this sounds a lot like meditation, right? But there are a whole variety, I'm no expert on meditation, but there are a whole variety of different kinds of meditation. Some, as you mentioned, you're focusing on breath work, physical stimulus.

But there are others that are not and that are much more kind of cognitively focused. So for example, like loving kindness meditation is one where you're kind of thinking about a particular person, you're imagining them, and you're imagining something really good happening to them, right? So it's sort of one of these self-transcendent types of meditation, which are not, I don't think, really tied to any external input coming out,

although it's an internal input, right, that's based on your memory, or awe-based meditation. So maybe it's more similar to those, but I... But it's like thematically anchored. Exactly. Yeah. It's supposed to visually anchor, like staring at a flame or concentrating on one's breath. Yeah, I didn't have a, it was like free,

in terms of putting in language of foraging, it was like, I didn't have a plan. I wasn't writing a paragraph. It was just, can I stay in a conversation with myself that's where there's no moment that some external voice or input or thought about something else in the room, you know, just can I just kind of stay in there? Can I just stay in there?

That was really the question. Yeah, I think that that makes complete sense because it's kind of like you're forging for apples in that tree that's, you know, in the middle of the Serengeti somewhere, right? And there's nothing anywhere around you. And so you're going to stick with that and just keep mining it until there's nothing left. One of the reasons that I brought up this example was

I noticed that anything that has to do with attention, whether or not it's visual attention, or you know, needing to write, or cognitive attention and redirecting attention, unless there's some high level of, as you call it, arousal or emotionality, I find there's always a kind of warmup period required and that this isn't taught to us in school

and that so many people who think that they have a hard time maintaining attention, I have this hypothesis that they are training non-attention or brief attention by, you know, scrolling through movies on a social media platform is basically training, redirecting your attention every couple seconds or maybe every few minutes.

So you get good at that. You get good at scrolling. You get good at what you do. But also I think it was always the case that sitting down to do something difficult or learn or write or pay careful auditory attention, maybe even to a podcast, that there's a kind of a warming up period.

What is the evidence that neural circuits in the brain are kind of, here I'm using very top contour language in front of another card carrying neuroscientist, but that neural circuits are kind of more dispersed in their activation patterns, but that over time we kind of drop into a trench, not just of attention, but then the signal to noise of that circuit required for attention and the other components of the task gets much greater compared to the background noise.

Is there evidence for that? In the same way that warming up to work out, no one expects to walk in and train with their work weight or to run at the speed that they would in mile three, right? You know, that you warm up. But this notion of warming up the brain for specific cognitive activities doesn't seem as abundant out there. And I think part of the reason might be, and I'd like your thoughts on this,

that we are all familiar with something super exciting or scary grabbing our attention in this. But then I would say, well, you can sprint into the street to save your kid from getting hit by a car. You didn't warm up for that. But that's not how you exercise because there isn't the same level of urgency. That's a question. I think and I you know, it's funny to me too because it it I

Don't warm up often before I work out and that's like so you seem to be in great shape No, but it's like it's funny. You know, I've been in CrossFit for like 17 years. Oh, wow, and you're still uninjured You're one of the fun. I've got plenty of injuries. I you know, I've had Oh, wow. And you're still uninjured? You're one of the few that I know. I've got plenty of injuries. I've had a couple of hernias, surgeries, and maybe another one. Maybe just like five or six minutes of mobility work.

We have a lot of episodes on this with experts. No, the mobility is really good. And I actually, what I have, periodically, it's like take many months off to do just purely mobility, PT, because I did Pilates intensively for a year and a half after one injury and I loved it. It's cool to see what it does to your body because it totally refashioned it. I've always been like the guy up here and then you do Pilates or yoga for a long time, went through a yoga period too, and suddenly it's all core. You become like a very different,

very different human. Yeah, so this issue of warming up, you don't like warming up, which explains your injuries. No, no, I like warming up, it's more a question of time. The reason why, and that's why I got into CrossFit in the first place, was because I could do a workout in 10 minutes or under that left me dead on the floor. I'm telling you. Super awesome.

I'm telling you, 100 jumping jacks, just like in PE class, is still the best warmup I'm aware of. It's amazing. Like people laugh at me, you know, it's like, it's so old school, but you do 100 jumping jacks before you do any kind of cardiovascular resistance training. And I don't, I haven't run a study on this,

but you greatly diminish your chance of injury, probably because of just raising core body temperature. But so the question is what, okay, well then let's pose it in this parallel fashion. What is the equivalent of the 100 jumping jacks for cognitive work? For me, it's like internally, like what's wrong with you, Andrew? Why is it so hard for you to like punch out these 10 paragraphs? But if someone on my team says, hey, we need this in eight minutes. I could do that anywhere Unless I'm actually driving a vehicle. I can work anywhere anytime

But I would say We don't have the the equivalent of a hundred jumping jacks for cognitive work, but we need it We need that I think people need that and they need the understanding that it can help them get into that trench of attention I have a bunch of disconnected thoughts on this. Please. So one would be the converse of that, which you kind of alluded to earlier, which is the not warming up, but the opposite of warming up, like the distraction.

So there have been some really interesting studies done in sort of more business-y settings, management settings, about, that looked at foraging, okay? And think of it this way, it's more like a measure of creativity, your proclivity to explore, to try new things, to go to be the opposite of focused, okay? So, and you can measure that, for example,

like an anagram task. So you get a bunch of letters, make as many words as you can. At some point, you decide to dump them and get new letters. And so that's sort of an, you're taking a risk, and you're exploring, and you're getting a new set. You don't know what's going to happen. And really cool studies showed that if you precede that task with a task where people are foraging

for points on a screen, there's hidden, it's like a visual kind of thing and you're just looking for stuff. If the points are really dispersed and spread out, then people, we don't know how long that kind of after effect lasts, but then people are way more kind of hyper explorers. With the words in the...

With the word thing later. And if they're doing, if they have to like decide, if they're playing virtual fishing and the number of, you know, the rate at which you catch fish in a pond is declining and you can press a button and take a time out to travel to another pond, people are much more willing to move on, okay, when they do that. Whereas if you put all the points kind of together, which is essentially related to what you're saying,

cognitively warming up by focusing, literally instead of having your filter, you know, your aperture, your lens like this, it's now like this, even though it's a different task that you're going to do. Oh, I love this. Then you're much more focused on that. Okay, I've sat here and done many, many podcasts and I have to say it's rare that I say I love

this probably the first time. I absolutely love this because as a person who's worked on a variety of topics in neuroscience but visual neuroscience has really been my first home and continues to be the way that I think about a lot of this. You know, there are a couple of really interesting papers that have led to some practices, mainly in China, where students focus on a fixation point before they sit down to do cognitive work.

And it improves their attention and performance on cognitive work. And it sounds so silly to people. People think, oh, okay, I'm going to stare at a dot and then you're going to like stare at a dot at the given distance that I'm going to do my work. How lame is that? Well, I think it's incredible

because what you just said fully supports this idea that we're, well, we all agree here, and there's two of us that we're mainly visual, even those of us that like to listen to music and things like that. We're very somatic, very visual creatures, and that where we place our visual attention and the size of the aperture of that attention, whether or not we're looking at a small box or a big box,

not metaphorically, but literally, determines the aperture of our attention going forward. In other words, I think this is such an important thing because when we look at a horizon or we walk through a city, there's information flowing past us and all kinds of, without us placing our eyes on any one particular point.

And that people don't notice until they do this and they hear this, but that's very relaxing. We look at a horizon, it relaxes us, and that's because panoramic vision, non-phobiated vision, it's associated with a decrease in autonomic arousal. So has this been leveraged toward teaching kids and adults how to attend better?

Because I think this is immensely valuable. I mean, this is behaviorally driven pharmacology, as I like to call it, because clearly there's a change in our chemistry when we do this sort of thing. I mean, other than what you just said about the work that's done and what they're doing in China, which is entirely consistent with what I just said, I'm unaware of any utilization.

And I think it could be. I mean, I love that phrase that you just used, right? Which is, when we understand the underlying neurochemistry, let's say, that's great, but you're not gonna go in and directly manipulate people's neurochemistry. No. But if you can change the environment they're in, or you can change the state that they're in,

behavioral state, cognitive state, emotional state, then that's an effective, potentially effective, practical, ethical way of having this kind of same or similar impact. I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor, AG1. AG1 is an all-in-one vitamin mineral probiotic drink with adaptogens. I've been taking AG1 daily since 2012, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring this podcast. The reason I started

taking AG1 and the reason I still take AG1 is because it is the highest quality and most complete foundational nutritional supplement. What that means is that AG1 ensures that you're getting all the necessary vitamins, minerals, and other micronutrients to form a strong foundation for your daily health. AG1 also has probiotics and prebiotics that support a healthy gut microbiome. Your gut microbiome consists of trillions of microorganisms that align your digestive tract

and impact things such as your immune system status, your metabolic health, your hormone health, and much more. So I've consistently found that when I take AG1 daily, my digestion is improved, my immune system is more robust and my mood and mental focus are at their best. In fact, if I could take just one supplement, that supplement would be AG1. If you'd like to try AG1,

you can go to drinkag1.com slash Huberman to claim a special offer. They'll give you five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3K2 with your order of AG1. Again, go to drinkag1.com slash Huberman to claim the special offer. Yeah, I think that so many people, including myself,

think, okay, what's a way that I can increase my level of alertness and attention? Well, I have this gallery of caffeine. Actually, the middle one's water. For those that are just listening, I've got a mate gourd here, plenty of caffeine in there. I had a cold brew mate, plenty of caffeine in there. I had several actually, and then water in the center.

But caffeine raises our level of alertness and thereby attentional capabilities. But I think that most people are not familiar with using behavior as a way to increase their endogenous release of the neurochemicals that increase arousal and attention. And we just tend to over rely on pharmacology and I'm not against that, I use it obviously.

But what do you think it is? I mean, now I'm asking you to be a bit of a cultural anthropologist. What do you think it is that has led people in the United States and Europe to mainly focus on this idea that if you can't attend easily, that it's a pharmacologic issue, that behavioral tools are not as useful?

Because the experiment you described is so cool, right? Look at dots that are close together, your then cognitive space becomes kind of more bundled into a tighter bundle. Look at dots that are more dispersed and you tend to kind of disperse your cognition. It becomes almost like more of a creative exploration. Maybe this is why my friend Rick Rubin,

whose name is sort of synonymous with creativity because he wrote that amazing book, The Creative Act is so into sky and clouds and sunsets and space, open space. Rarely have I ever heard Rick say, hey, you know, you should stare into a little soda straw. I'd love for you to just kind of riff on what you think some of the better tools are for improving attention

and focus and whether or not you think some of the better tools are for improving attention and focus. And whether or not you think we're really as challenged in that as many people assume? Well, I don't think we're that challenged. I think, as I mentioned earlier, our brains are just performing the computations that they have been endowed with by millions of years of evolution,

which is to allocate attention, to allocate behavior, to allocate focus according to how rich, I call it rich, or poor the environment is, how many different sources are there. And so those are the rules your brain lives by, and you're not really going to change those. I mean, you could kind of modulate up and down a little bit, whether that's through neurochemistry or other kinds of things, but ultimately it's in this case, the brain in the environment that it's in. So from my perspective, the best thing you could do is just change the environment.

Put those devices away to, to enable you to focus. Right. those devices away to enable you to focus, right? And so, anyway, I don't know if I had that much more to say on that topic. No, I think what's great about this is you're essentially pointing to the fact that we have control, we're not somehow deficient or messed up if we find ourselves having a hard time

directing our attention, because we've been training ourselves to scroll. We've been training ourselves to redirect our attention constantly to new things. I mean, as you can probably tell, I'm a big fan of intervening in that process so that one has the ability to drop into focused work. I do feel as if progress in life,

scales fairly directly with the ability to focus on one thing for some period of time. For sake of learning in school, for sake of sport, for sake of relationships, the ability to have like a real connection to somebody, you know, and we're going to get into a discussion about social interactions in a bit. But when it comes to foraging, do you find that people fall out into different kind of clusters of how they forage for information? And what are some of the themes of that or kind of signatures of the different groups? Yeah, that's a great question. We haven't really approached it with the idea

that there are clusters, but rather that there's, let's say, a continuum of being either, most people are somewhere in the middle, of course, but some folks hyper-focused, right? And you might just metaphorically imagine them at the extreme and obsessive-compulsive almost, right? You can't get unstuck from a routine. And at the other end would be folks

who explore too readily, right? So folks who we would say have attention, deficit hyperactivity disorder. And so folks fall somewhere along that distribution. Now we've seen that there are differences between species in terms of where they are on that. Difference is a function of age in humans. So you kind of move from being more hyper-exploratory

toward more focused as you get older. Oh, good. And that also one of the things that we've talked about a lot is that that variation where you are on that continuum might make you more or less suited to different types of careers, different types of jobs. It's not to say that people can't change, but think of it this way.

For, you've got a dial that goes from super focused to a major explorer, and creativity goes along with that One person might come with their dial set at three another person at seven and you could Help that person at a three maybe turn theirs to five, but probably not to ten, right? The person is a seven you could turn them up to nine, right? So through through various kinds of practices because I think it's really important to just recognize that people do vary and that variation we pick up on in the sort of neurological context of like issues, problems that people experience like with focus in school, et cetera, like that.

People are no doubt wondering, well, if I am good at dropping into a trench and focusing my attention for long periods of time, maybe it's more obvious what types of careers would let that person would be better at, you know, maybe it's programming or writing or who knows, painting. But when you have somebody whose attention tends to flick between different things,

what sorts of professions do they align well with? Yeah, that aligns with creative professions. So, and also being entrepreneurs, actually if you look at the data on entrepreneurs, the rate of attention problems is two, three, four X. The general population, you also see that it's often comorbid with other issues related to anxiety, bipolar, et cetera. So they kind of like all cluster there with a real issue on that sort of focus.

And we work with a team out in Berkeley, actually actually that provides support to entrepreneurs so that they can do their best, do their thing, which is to be like wildly creative and innovative I should say. But when they need that focus so they can have it. And we have a big research project going on right now looking at entrepreneurs in California and also MBA students at Wharton to just kind of try to identify the prevalence of these issues and then to potentially provide support

for them. And that support could take any number of different forms. It could be true psychiatric support in the sense of like maybe attention-focusing pharmaceuticals, drugs like Ritalin Adderall, which can be used appropriately, but that doesn't rob those individuals of their mojo. But in other cases, it's going to be more like providing an ecosystem, so where they can learn focusing practices,

as we've already talked about, where when they build their teams, they can build complementary strengths in the people that surround them so that they're much more likely to be successful. And our economy depends on those people being successful. So that's where the vast majority of economic activity is coming from,

is people who start small businesses, who are entrepreneurs and who are innovators. So it makes all the sense in the world to do that. I think we've been neglecting all this. Now, actually the thing I wanted to say earlier about this and that where I think neuroscience gives us a new tool to approach a lot of these business questions is that let's imagine you're hiring, right?

And you're hiring, well, we need a creative type, okay? So you put an ad out and you get resumes and responses and people come in for interviews. How do you measure that creativity typically? When you say, how creative are you? And you're like, you really want the jobs. You're like, yeah, I'm super creative. Or you give them a personality test, for example, or like Myers-Briggs or something like that.

And we know those are not particularly accurate and self-report can be not only inaccurate, but biased and biased by the context. and self-report can be not only inaccurate, but biased and biased by the context. Why am I here? Who's asking me a question? How is that question asked? Whereas the neuroscience gives us tools

to kind of measure those things directly. And in some cases you could measure it directly from the brain and we do that, but that's not going to be practical, not going to be scalable, right? Not going to be something a lot of people want to, you know, embrace, let's say, as applicants. But find ways to interrogate the brain that are not asking people to assess themselves. For instance, what would a small number of questions be that for this?

Not even questions. One of the things that we've done is develop games, like brief little, very engaging games, that are based on specific tasks that we know interrogate specific circuits in the brain, like foraging, for example, where people are literally harvesting berries, let's say, okay, and they're going along, and the goal is to kind of get

as many as you can, and from their behavior, we can figure out exactly where they are on that continuum mathematically, and say, okay, well, in the dashboard that we create, like, okay, you are pitched a bit more toward Being an innovator and creative type explore and unless so less likely to be say a good manager Who would need to be you know sort of have a higher degree of focus and we do that for? for a number of different

aspects of you know of cognitive emotional performance. So things like, in terms of social competence, for example. And so we have a little, actually a little game, it's mimic soccer, and we've had monkeys play it, humans play it, we know exactly what it kind of elicits from the brain and what circuits it relies on. And that allows us to numerically identify like your strategic planning abilities

or your something like theory of mind, getting in the head of an opponent. And those games we found, it's really been very gratifying to demonstrate that those predict performance in a number of different jobs it's really been very gratifying to demonstrate that those predict performance in a number of different jobs in high performance jobs like actual soccer players, but also in the military, in cyber operations. And so we're now exploring and we've helped to stand up

a startup company in, that is actually, that's their mission is to go out and try to use those tools to see if they can do better than basically a whole bunch of questions. Yeah, it certainly goes way beyond kind of typical Myers-Briggs or Enneagram type personality tests, which I think has certain value.

If nothing else, they, people like to know about themselves. And I do think categorizing oneself a little bit, going to like, are you a three on the Enneagram or a four or an eight? You know what, certainly gives you a frame of reference, but yeah, it doesn't seem very useful for the kinds of work environments that you're describing,

whereas what you're describing sounds much more sophisticated. You mentioned theory of mind. We should talk about theory of mind because here we are back to visual neuroscience, but I have the understanding, you can tell me if I'm right or wrong, that as old world primates,

one of the more impressive features that we've developed is the ability to attend to a location with our eyes but pay attention to something else in the periphery. People used to refer to this as the the other cocktail party effect. The cocktail party effect is the ability to pay attention to a conversation while there's stuff in the background but this is the other cocktail party effect that sort of with sometimes chuckles gets described as you as you're out to dinner with somebody and you're listening to them and you're paying attention to them but you're also paying attention

to the conversation next to you or maybe someone else at the bar. You can fill in the blanks there. This is an amazing ability, regardless of what it's used for, that a lot of other primate species don't have. I mean, as far as I know, no other species have. So this seems to be, we know macaques can do this, for example, and humans do this routinely. We assume all apes do this. And the adaptive explanation is, I think,

exactly what you're alluding to, which is the fact that, like, when you live in a complex, multi-level society with differentiated relationships, where the things that matter to you are, like, your family, your rank, your status, right, your friends, your enemies, all those kinds of things. That then creates a really complex environment for, as you said, devoting your attention,

because where we look is the focus of our, typically that's the focus of your attention and what's turned up, and other brains know that. And so now, let's imagine you're a baboon and you're not the highest ranking baboon and the high ranking, the alpha is over there. And so you train your gaze on that alpha baboon, but there's a really attractive female over here that you want to know where she's heading because that's a good mating opportunity later. So it's that ability to split attention from your overt attention, what your gaze is pointing at,

and covertly what you're amplifying and tracking in the environment. And there's this, to tie this back to theory of mind, there's, I think, it's reasonable and consistent with some of the data that theory of mind, which is a sense of being able to infer what somebody else knows, what they can see, what they want, their state of mind, which might be different from yours, that it develops through the way that as infants and and young children our experience of first

Gazing at a caregiver maintaining attention with them and then learning to follow their gaze When they look somewhere and they say hey, that's a you know, that's an apple or whatever That you do the same thing and that gaze following then is a precursor to joint attention and that gaze following then is a precursor to joint attention and joint attention being really important for the development of this theory of mind, which is our sense of being able to understand, make predictions, make inferences about what's going on

in somebody else's head. I feel like the overlap of covert attention and theory of mind, as you described, comes from this assumption that I have, which is that we have effectively two spotlights of attention and that we can merge them. So I can place all my attention on you and what we're talking about in your face, et cetera. I can split my attention between you

and something over there in the corner. Or I can take that second spotlight of attention and place it on myself like, oh, you know, like I need to move to the side because I've got a little, you know, maybe an itch on my thigh or something like that. But I don't think we have three spotlights that we can work with very easily anyway.

Maybe we could train that up, but that we don't naturally have more than two spotlights of attention. We have more than two spotlights of attention. We can merge these two spotlights of attention. And I feel like, and I've done some practice at this, just because I'm a neuroscientist and I like to try things of ramping up my level of focus, just trying to really like,

like I'm doing it right now, I'm looking at you and like the contour of your shape against the background. Like I can really decide to emphasize those borders. I'm not really doing anything behaviorally that's different than I was a few moments ago. But then I could also bring that spotlight of attention kind of down a little bit in an intensity. So I feel like we have two spotlights of attention

that we can ramp up in intensity. And we don't normally do this so consciously. Normally we're more in stimulus response. And I think about this a lot nowadays because, and forgive me for referencing previous podcasts, but we had this brilliant, absolutely brilliant 84 year old psycho analyst, Jungian analyst named James Hollis on the podcast. And he talked about, you know, what it is to be human and to create a life. And it boiled down basically to two things, which was to

acknowledge that we're in stimulus response a lot of the day and how to be functional in that domain was a lot of that conversation, but that there's this essential aspect to life, which is to get out of stimulus response and bring those spotlights of attention inward and to think and to reflect and then go back into stimulus response.

And when we just sleep, wake up and go into stimulus response all day, or if we go meditate all day and are not in stimulus response, neither is good. So it's that balance. And so this notion of two spotlights of attention, I'd love for you to tell me this is like complete BS or that it works. I don't need to be validated here. I was more putting it out there as a hypothesis because it feels true to me, but that's obviously just a feeling. Well, I think that feeling, as far as I know, is consistent with what we understand about how attention can,

how it amplifies the visual signals or other signals that are coming into our brains and the ways in which we can kind of, I don't know if it's divided purely or if it sort of bleeds over, you know, what that really exactly looks like. But the landscape, let's imagine it's a landscape of neural activity and you can kind of raise up two humps

or just one hump and it doesn't feel like you can go beyond that. That's really, really hard to measure. And I think, you know think our best data on that comes from recording the activity of neurons in macaques and monkeys while they are doing attention, these sort of visual discrimination tasks. And I think that'd be really, really hard to actually elicit

that kind of behavior from them. Well, we both agree, I know because we were talking before we started recording that certain types of stimuli really grab our attention and influence our decisions and our valuation of things out there in the world. So talk to me about monkey porn. Okay, we never called it monkey porn, but a lot of people have said that essentially no matter what else I do in my career, that's going to be on my tombstone. This man worked on monkey porn. This man unpacked the neurobiology of monkey porn. Okay, so let's go back in the way back machine. You know, and so back when I was an anthropologist

and I'm going out and watching monkeys, and it's very clear that there are certain things in the world that are important to them that they prioritize, and those, they're very similar, the same things that we do. So they pay attention to each other, to their faces, but also to other cues. And these cues seem to make adaptive significance, right?

That they're relevant for your ability to survive and reproduce, which is the name of the game for Evolution. That's all that really counts. Okay, and what are those things? Well, they're cues to status, like so, who's dominant, who's subordinate, who can take my stuff, who do I got to watch out for, who can I dominate and take stuff from.

And cues to how to sort of mate quality, mating opportunities. And if you look at non-human primates, they display those things very conspicuously, right? So males have these big canines, and they have sort of physical dominant features, very square jaw, all that kind of stuff. And females, for example, in macaques display their hormonal state, how receptive they are to mating and likelihood of ovulating at that time

through the swelling and coloration on their perineum. Here's a good word for your listeners, perineum, which we introduced, I think, into the neuroscience literature. And that's just the sort of anogenital region. So that's where they're putting a lot of someone else on here. Signaling. Listen, another card-carrying researcher, Dr. Shana Swan, Shana Swan, excuse me, came on here to talk about phthalates and microplastics and endocrine disruptors. She spent a career working on this. She's a serious scientist.

And she talked about how taint sizes are diminishing in males by virtue of endocrine disruptors accessing the fetus during pregnancy. in males by virtue of endocrine disruptors accessing the fetus during pregnancy. This is a statistically very robust effect. I know we're going to get into a discussion about fertility later because you've worked on this issue as well.

So we can say the perineum taint, and now everyone knows what we're talking about. So the females display their perineum region differently when they're ovulating. Yeah, so it becomes redder, fuller, et cetera. So the females display their perineum region differently when they're ovulating. Yeah, so it becomes redder, fuller, et cetera. So if you go to the zoo and you just, you could say, you see the monkeys with the red butt, big red butts, they're the ones who are, the females who are,

it turns out the males do that too. So males signal kind of how they're circulating testosterone levels by how red their taint is. and actually even you can just see the physical size of their testes is is a pretty good proxy in a queue And they're in in Reese's macaques. There's also kind of these signals around the eyes that get a little bit darker the theory is that Humans so for a long time people said oh oh, humans don't display anything about their hormonal biological state to promote monogamy and all kinds of stuff like that,

even though it seems that monogamy is not the, monogamy does not seem, monogamy in terms of mating does not seem to be the dominant strategy in humans. Let's call it that. that seemed to be the dominant strategy in humans. Let's call it that. Yeah, but just to make sure that I'm clear on this, it used to be said, you are saying that it used to be said that humans don't signal their hormonal status. And the reason people were saying that

is because it was a promotion of monogamous behavior, which is actually not true in humans? Well, so this goes back to Darwin, really, who sort of theorized that humans, during human evolution, that as monogamy became more adaptive, for whatever reason, it's all speculation, right? That these sort of cues were hidden so that, you know, males couldn't, you know, you wouldn't be encouraged to find other mating opportunities outside

your monogamous relationship. And so it would kind of keep the focus to get back to that, you know, on your partner. But you know, all the data that's out there, both from when societies were encountered by Western scientists, whether polygyny was practiced or not, to just what we understand about extra pair matings, like in the offspring, et cetera. Strict monogamy does not seem to be

the dominant strategy. Now that's also consistent with the observation that you know we are a sexually dimorphic species. So if you know when you look at the animal kingdom, or in primates in particular, those that are obligate pair-bonded monogamous primates, males and females don't really differ much. Like if you look at marmosets or tamarins. In terms of body size. Body size, coloration, conspicuous sexual characteristics. Brain structure as well.

That's another interesting point which we can circle back to. But even if you just look at, well, even if you just look at brain size relative brain size relative to body size that is is smallest in pair bonded monogamous species the difference in brain size not between males and females was just overall and it's sort of scales up with with group size and group complexity. It's slightly different but there's a point there which is that pair-bonded monogamous species look very, very different.

I'm sorry, I'm different than us. It's very unusual. Let's just say this. So it's very unusual in mammals overall. It's very unusual in primates. There's only a few. very unusual in primates. There's only a few, you know, I'm not gonna miss primates An ominous obligate pair bonded primates and in general their behavior is

Not as complicated or complex as individuals that live in societies where there's a lot more Going on in terms of Strategizing to attain mating opportunities through going on in terms of strategizing to attain mating opportunities through, either through sort of physical challenge or through being sneaky or making friends, et cetera, et cetera. There's this sort of proliferation of different strategies

that requires a lot more mental calculation apparently that goes hand in hand with an increase in brain size, cortex size. Which makes sense from the standpoint of like more prefrontal cortex, more context dependent strategy setting and decision making. It could be based on, it seems that with more prefrontal cortex, one can, a species can incorporate different valuations of mates. It can be about hormonal status. And I want to make sure we get back to that, how human signal hormonal status.

But it could also be about, you know, reproductive potential as it relates to resource allocation or whether or not there'll be a good caretaker. I mean a lot of Additional factors can be incorporated in and working with more variables Flexibly requires more neural real estate Mostly in prefrontal cortex, right? Yeah, absolutely. Although I will I will Based on a paper we published last year in Nature, I would

say that our notions of sort of the breakdowns of like where stuff is in the brain and how it's encoded, I think is going to change a lot. And there are a number of other studies that have come out in the last year or so that echo this. And so this was a paper in which we did something unthinkable, I think, in the sort of history of neuroscience, which is all about reduction. Let's make the experiment as simple as possible. Only very one thing, right? And we're going to find where that one thing is in the brain. And that's the

tradition going back to Hubel and Weasel, right? Hubel and Weasel, folks, are my scientific great grandparents. No, we were bound to do it sooner or later. They won the Nobel Prize for their understanding, for their parsing of the neural basis of vision, neuroplasticity, et cetera. Torsten's still alive. I think he's like 100 now. Last time I saw him, he was 96 and he was still jogging and doing art. David passed away. Amazing. You can look it up. H and W, we call them, he will result there. They're among our, they're on the Mount Rushmore of neuroscience, and we'll get back to this. So, please, yeah, explain to us what this paper showed, and then we will then talk about how humans signal

their hormonal status. And we'll go all the way back to monkey porn, I hope, because it's really near and dear to me. we won't leave monkey porn in the past. So near and dear to my heart. Okay, so, human weasel, you know, let's... We're gonna really simplify, because, you know, that's how we figure out exactly how it works. But it's not what our brains do.

That's not the environment our brains are in. I mean, when you're out there in the world, you've got this well ter... this just incredibly complex visual environment, social environment. And what you do in any moment depends on what you experienced recently, what you think might happen next, what might have happened last week in a similar circumstance. It's super complicated.

And it reflects all these different competing interests and values. And that's true for monkeys, too. And so we did the dream, my dream experiment from back when I was an anthropologist, which was to get rid of the lab. And instead, we recorded wirelessly from thousands of neurons in the brain in prefrontal cortex, which you

mentioned and we tend to think of as being important for decision making and setting goals and context. And also the sort of high level visual area in the temporal lobe that's important for sensing objects and maybe faces and things like that. So seemingly, one at an input level and one at a higher order level. We did this mostly because of some of technological limitations. But it turned out to be really a good thing in the end

because it told us something really unusual. So what we did then is we let monkeys just be monkeys with each other. It told us something really unusual. So what we did then is we let monkeys just be monkeys with each other. So we'd have a male with his female friend or alone with a female friend on the other side of a sort of plexiglass divider. And then there could be other monkeys present,

like as observers, who are watching what they're doing or not. And then we also introduced challenges to them like so basically my graduate student would come in and like you know threaten one of the monkeys and this elicits a lot of agitation and arousal you're gonna have month they how you threaten monkeys you know look we're just like big kind of not as hairy monkeys to them and And that makes. To threaten them, you look at them directly. You look at them and you.

Yeah, so if you go to the zoo folks and you look directly at a monkey and you smile, that's a threat. If you want to be friendly with the monkeys, lip smack. That's an affiliation thing. It almost looked like we were blind because it's one another. You notice we both looked away.

It's probably where it comes from. That's right. That's probably where it comes from. So this right. That's probably where it comes from. So you got a naturalistic experiment. So a natural experiment. And so rather than having one, you know, varying one thing, these monkeys engaged in like 27, 28 different kinds of behaviors, okay?

They would forage, they'd scratch, they'd groom each other, they'd threaten, they'd mount, they'd do everything that monkeys do, right? And then we also, you know, as we were varying the context as well. And so that's like blows the lid off of the complexity in a typical experiment. And what did we find? We found that neurons in both these areas, they were indistinguishable, were modulated,

they were affected, their firing rates, their activity was affected by the behaviors that the animals engaged in and what the other animals engaged in too. Also who's around, who's watching me? Is it like male, you know, X or female Y? And that and what was really surprising, so first of all you see these signals they're basically the same, these two parts of the brain is supposed to be very very different and the average neuron cared about You know something like seven things Rather than you know like one or two

Okay, like a grandmother cell, you know Which was kind of one idea for how the brain encoded things like there's one neuron and only responds to your grandmother, right? Something like that Jennifer Aniston Jennifer Aniston cells. Jennifer Aniston cells, very famous. Barack Obama cells. Barack Obama cells. And now there's this question about whether or not they're in a relationship. So that's why I brought it.

But that was actually in the paper. There were neurons in the cortex that responded to Jennifer Aniston specifically, Jennifer Aniston cells, Barack Obama specifically. I'm guessing there are Donald Trump neurons. There's probably quite a few. Right.

And I'm guessing there were Biden neurons. So- Maybe. Maybe. So you're saying that two very distinct brain areas can respond very similarly to the same things. And that, so that's one interesting finding. And the second interesting finding, as I understand,

is that neurons are paying attention, not just to what you're looking at, or the monkey is looking at, but also who's looking at them, who else is around, what the goal is. So individual neurons are multitasking. They're multitasking. Got it.

Or as we say, multiplexing, but it's really the same thing as multitasking. And that raises a lot of really interesting questions. Why? Why are these signals all over the place? Which it seems to be the case, right? And one idea that's out there is that because, you know if you let's say it's a visual area those visual neurons might need to know the context in which something is happening in order to

Appropriately like encode that stimulus right because it matters the meaning of that stimulus It's another monkey like what I'm looking at you It matters that we're in this setting here in California And I flew out here yesterday and all that stuff might be really really important for What my brain does with that information like what how I how I encode it what I put into memory etc And so that's sort of one Hypothesis that that that I think that we're all entertaining because it would be. Cause it would be, I mean, it would be heresy to say

that like actually it's a more like another name drop. Carl Lashley kind of view of the brain that it's just one big mush. That is all sort of. So in 30 seconds, Carl Lashley ran a really critical experiment where it was the equal potentiality of cortex experiment where basically there'd been decades of experiments

with people lesioning a given area of the brain and seeing some deficit in behavior. Lashley decided to do the same experiment and found that regardless of which area of the cortex, this is important that it was the cortex specifically that he scooped out, lesion, got rid of, set it in addition next to the, his case I think it was rats.

He didn't observe deficits in that behavior, at least that persisted. But you see this in the monkey and human data. You can lesion a brain area, see a huge deficit. I know I'm telling you what you already know, Michael, but I think most people don't realize this. A brain lesion can lead to a huge deficit in behavior that is recovered later over time through plasticity,

unless you start digging into the deeper stuff of the brain where lesions lead to permanent deficits unless some intervention is provided. Yeah, the cortex seems to be maybe a little bit, I don't want to say equipotential, but it's very plastic. It's very flexible and very adaptive. So this was a really cool finding, I thought, and we could decode from the population of neurons

exactly what each of the animals was doing, and who was around, and who was watching, right? I mean, which, I mean, to me, it was very gratifying. But the thing that was most exciting to me, the most exciting, I think that finding is really cool for neuroscientists, but for the primatologist, the anthropologist in me, the finding that was most exciting was that we discovered the account,

the mental account for our social relationships. Okay, so for monkeys, a large fraction of their, the way that they build and maintain relationships is through grooming each other. So when they go and they pick through each other's fur, and that's how you make friends, okay? That's how you make allies. And what has been observed, going back to when monkeys

were first being watched, is that they tend to be really equitable, right? They're like, if I invest two minutes in you, you will eventually invest two minutes back in me. It might not happen right away, but we're gonna balance out. It's gonna come even. And that raised the idea, which most people thought was like ridiculous that well, they're actually

Tracking and keeping notes on all this. They've got a ledger For their investments and withdrawals in this social relationship. So to make it more more Salient for the listeners like think of it as like when you're texting, and you text a friend and they text you back, and then you text them and you text them again and you text them again, and you're like, am I getting ghosted? What the heck's going on here? Why are you not texting? You start to feel that sense of,

like, urgency, betrayal, like, you know, I'm not gonna text you, no, I'm gonna wait, I'm gonna wait until you text me back. It's the same kind of thing. We have this sense of, and in fact, when we think about now all the stuff that's going on socio-politically, in terms of equitable relationships, I think that this bears on that. So we did something that had never been done before,

which is we tracked every single grooming interaction that ever happened between these monkeys over months, because we could. We had cameras on them, and we used computer vision to do all that tracking. And yeah, they were perfectly equitable. But sometimes it would take minutes to balance it. Sometimes it took weeks.

Like, you owe me, you owe me. And then it would come back. What we found is that in the brain, in these two, both of these brain areas, we're carrying that mental account that precisely tracked who owed whom what. Amazing. How much grooming they, you know, that blew, I mean, that blew my mind.

It's like, cause we all feel that, right? It's like one of the most salient things there is in our lives. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online. Now I personally have been doing therapy weekly

for well over 30 years. Initially, I didn't have a choice. It was a condition of being allowed to stay in school, but pretty soon I realized that therapy is an extremely important component to one's overall health. There are essentially three things that great therapy provides. First of all, it provides a good rapport

with somebody that you can trust and talk to about pretty much any issue with. Second of all, it can provide support in the form of emotional support and directed guidance. And third, expert therapy can provide useful insights. BetterHelp makes it very easy to find an expert therapist with whom you resonate with, and that can provide you those three benefits

that come from effective therapy. Also, because BetterHelp allows for therapy to be done entirely online, it's super time efficient and easy to fit into a busy schedule. There's no commuting to a therapist's office or sitting in a waiting room, no traffic, no parking issues, et cetera.

If you'd like to try BetterHelp, you can go to betterhelp.com slash Huberman to get 10% off your first month. Again, that's betterhelp.com slash Huberman. This explains, occasionally I'll get a text from a friend that says, nice conversation, which means they texted me a bunch before and I didn't respond.

And part of that has to do with, for me, the way that texts are archived, they can kind of drift down and then they're hard to find. And I'm a known long latency response person, but then I barrage, not intentionally, I'll get on a plane and be like, oh, that's right, I'm gonna get to these texts from a couple of weeks ago and respond to them

or a couple of days ago. And I find voice memos to be a good solution to this. I have a couple of people in my life with whom I mainly communicate through voice memo, but it is very interesting that, you know, like my team here, we have a, what feels like a very consistent cadence and balance of accounts.

Like even the text duration, like, you know, like I'm fine with a one word or even one letter text and I'm fine with an essay, like, but certain relationships, you just don't do that. So what is this, just because I can't help myself, what is the brain area that's tracking this account or is it a network? It's a network.

Okay, great. Then we don't have to- We don't have to- Calm people down with people's, with brain areas. Well, this is amazing. I mean, I think that rather than, people talk about love languages, right? Like are you people, is it physical touch?

Is it acts of service? I think that there are some words of affirmation. I'm guessing that some people are tracking these very carefully too in humans and balancing the account. And that kind of love language idea seems like our five acts of support or five physical contact events, whatever you want to call it. I know I'm really sounding like a scientist and nerd.

Are those equivalent to, you know, five sentences of affirmation? What I'm gathering is that the brain is probably calculating these things on an individual basis. So, and so it's not like five sentences equals five acts of service. So, but that maybe it is, there's some like internal valuation that is like very mathematical. You're just trying to balance the checkbook.

I think it is very mathematical, but I think I want to point out that in the pairs of monkeys, we've now expanded this to multiple monkeys in a big open field, but they're equal kind of partners, right? So it made sense that that balance was sort of one for one. And we know that studies of wild monkeys, wild prim primates that the sort of conversion you know like you know dollars to pesos or whatever is not one-to-one if the if there's something else in that relationship so if there's a power

differential it's like if you're beta male and you're grooming alpha male right it might be a hundred minutes of grooming that alpha male that you get, like, one groom back. Or, more importantly, you groom that alpha male for months and years on end, and then he comes and saves your life when you are in an aggressive encounter with another individual.

So you see how that... there is this... I think that's what you're getting at, with the love languages, which is that there is this underlying currency, but the value of that currency for each individual varies depending on what they... I don't know where that variation comes from, but depending on what's most important, what's most salient for them, and then also probably what that relationship is like, and if there's a power differential, if there's any other kind of differential as well.

The math of power dynamics online is really interesting to observe on X where people tend to be a bit more combative at times, not everybody. But I've noticed this, like, you know, this notion of like, don't feed the trolls, right? Like someone says something that's insulting and you know, you don't honor them with a response. You just let it go by that.

That would be somehow completing some sort of reward circuitry because what they really want is not to harm your reputation, but to be acknowledged that their opinion matters. And social media, as long as people have access to an account, effectively levels the field. Although then there's this prioritization

of like high follower accounts and what used to be, when blue checks became purchasable, right? A lot of people were upset because it was essentially equaling the status playing field somewhat, right? But it's very interesting to see how this stuff plays out. You know, like, do you honor somebody with a response or like ignoring somebody's insult, the classic Mad Men, Don Draper response, you know,

in the elevator that has turned into a meme, that, well, I don't think of you, I don't think about you at all, being the ultimate sort of display of his power that in terms of, you know of not even allowing his neural circuits to keep track of an account, that's like zero for you, is essentially what he was saying.

So is it the case that power dynamics are tracked across for conflict, for collaboration? We talked about love languages, which is a collaboration. Some people do seem in life to be very transactional is the word we assign to it. They're tracking like what you did this and I did this. No, you paid last time, I paid this kind of thing. Or they're elevated by the idea that,

oh yeah, they did this and this, therefore the relationship must be much tighter than perhaps the other person in the relationship thinks it is. These are complex features, but the idea that we are old world primates and that there's a brain network tracking this stuff, to me makes really good sense.

And I think it's wonderful that you've identified a physiological anatomical substrate for it. I think it's, it's lends a lot of support to like thousands of years of observations. No, I, I, I think you're, you're spot on there. Um, in the, in the sense that, and at some point it's, it's all really transactional in the calculus of evolution. Right? So in, it's if your calculations do the right thing so that you get resources and mating opportunities

and translate that into offspring, and that they do that into offspring as well, then those, whatever the biological substrate was that did that is going to proliferate and potentially become honed and really specialized for doing that job. And that's actually the argument, one other argument for why, you know, we study primates because we're so closely related to them. We share all these features of our biology and our behavior.

But also because, and this is where I think, for example, personally, I find it much more compelling to study animals like rhesus macaques as opposed to say marmosets, which we've talked a little bit, in the sense that if we're thinking about the forces that have made us who we are, which as we just talked about, you see it displayed on X every day, like attending to all these things, tracking all these different relationships,

deciding whether or not to give somebody your attention, the purest form of generosity, as it was said, that's what monkeys have to do too. And so this argument from what we call neuro-ethology and ethology being the science of basically trying to understand behavior as a product of evolution, right, that it's designed just like physical features, just like the wing of a bird, right, that our mental processes and the underlying mechanisms are designed to serve very specific functions. And so if we want to understand

how we got to be the way that we are, we should look toward animals that seem to be doing the same kind of things, facing the same kinds of pressures in the environment, and particularly the social environment, which seems to be the one that's most important for us. How do humans signal their hormone status? Is that on a very different end of the spectrum?

Yeah. But, you know, everything we're talking about, which is fairly high level and in the brain exists as I like to think about it on a kind of a water level or a tide that's set by our levels of autonomic arousal, like thinking, feeling, action changes when levels of autonomic arousal are very high, AKA stress, alertness versus when we're sleepy.

And hormones certainly influence autonomic arousal and a bunch of other things too. Hormones is a broad category, but let's just stay with the ones that most people are familiar with. So what are the data on how females signal, let's just say, you know, testosterone, estrogen and other, you know, relevant hormones and other relevant hormones,

and for males as well, what are the external signals? Or behavioral signals. Yeah, so that's a really important point that you made because they both, those things go together. So it's been most controversial for females, but in my view, the data is pretty clear and it aligns, I think, with our own intuitions just from daily life, which is, well, some things are

apparently not consciously perceptible. It's hard to report. But through studies where you just ask males for, OK, how attractive is this woman, et cetera, that there are changes in the face, for example. And that's been one argument. This is going to sound funny. But that the signals that in non-human primates

are in the rear are not because we're walking upright, you can't see that really. So now it's kind of in the face. And so these changes that happen, that the ovulatory cycle is reflected in the turgidity, how tight the skin is in the face because it gets a little plumper and a little bit redder. And we may not be consciously aware of that, but that it's there, right?

And it shows up in sort of preference data when you ask heterosexual males, you know, how attractive is this woman, et cetera. So that seems to be the case and also Behavioral, you know, so so sort of flirtatious behavior Increases around the time of obligation. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, there's there is a classic study that That exotic dancers, strippers, would actually get bigger tips, more tips,

when they were ovulating than when they're not ovulating. Interesting. So they're maybe, you know. And it could be by virtue of their behavior, but it could be the way they dance proximity to the, what I guess the observers, clients, whatever you call them. Yeah, I don't recall that being quantified,

but it suggests that there's a latent signal there. And that men are unconsciously processing this. They're not saying, oh, her cheeks are particularly plump and red right now. They're that, but that if you measure their ratings are particularly plump and red right now. That, but that if you measure their ratings or scores of attractiveness, when she's ovulating, it's these features that are,

that might be drawing out that response. Correct. We can take this back to the monkey porn studies, which is, was our first real foray into trying to quantify the value of various kinds of social information for guiding decisions. And we already came into this with a sense that like,

yeah, things like status, physical prowess, mating status, are you, you look like a good mate, bad mate, are you in mating condition, et cetera. And so when you think about that, how do you ask a monkey that question? You could ask them, they're not gonna tell you because they can't talk, but you have to develop a behavioral way to elicit that.

And so what we did, I think it was pretty clever, was to riff on the studies that I had already done, looking at varying the expected value of two options. So this was the work I did as a postdoc with Paul Glimcher, where we revealed economic signals in the brain, in the parietal cortex, an area between where visual signals come in and where you make a choice to make a behavioral response.

And we varied, like in this case, monkeys don't work for money, though they work for juice. Okay, and it's been, actually it's really fun, you spend a lot of time figuring out what juice they really love best. And then economically you would would vary the size of the juice reward that each of the two offered or its probability while maintaining size constant. When you combine those, you multiply those together, you

get expected value. That's the first model of economic decision making that was really ever developed. You compute the expected value, different options, you choose the one that has the highest value. It doesn't work all the time, but it's sort of a rough proxy. And we showed that neurons in the parietal cortex signal that.

Monkeys are good economists. They choose the one that has a higher expected value. So now take that experiment. I'm going to have monkeys choosing between two options that vary in how much juice they pay out. But I'm also going to pop up a picture when they choose one of them, okay? And they don't know what picture's coming up,

but the picture's gonna be, it could be, it could be a nothing burger, just like some gray square, it doesn't mean anything. Or it could be the perineum of a female, if it were males that we were studying, we did this with males, sorry, females making choices eventually as well. Could be face of a dominant male,

face of a spordinate male, face of of female, et cetera, et cetera. What's the equivalent of the swollen taint of a female monkey for if you reverse the experiment and it's the female monkey who's making a choice about male monkeys, what do they find really attractive in a male monkey? Yeah, so it's the taint of the male monkey because it's providing a signal about how much- Monkeys looking at taints of other monkeys. Yeah, so it's the taint of the male monkey because it's providing a signal about how much.

Monkeys looking at taints of other monkeys. Yeah, how much testosterone is circulated, that they've got on board basically, which is a good predictor of their status. It's a good predictor of their fighting ability, all that kind of stuff. And if you're a female, that's a reasonable kind of choice to make

because if you have male offspring and females are predisposed to choose that, then your male offspring are gonna do pretty well. So that's what reasonable kind of choice to make. Because if you have male offspring and females are predisposed to choose that, then they'll, your male offspring are gonna do pretty well. So that's what we did. And we varied how much juice. So sometimes monkeys would get paid, they'd have to give up juice to see the pictures.

Sometimes they get paid more to see the pictures. And what we did then is we constructed choice curve and we use the differential. If it's not 50-50, if it slides one way or the other, it tells us that monkeys are paying X amount to see certain kinds of pictures, or you have to overpay them, right? And so what did we find?

It was really, I think, scientifically revealing, but it's pretty fun. People got it immediately. They will pay. Juice. Juice, they will give up juice they will pay it to see pictures of the perineum the hindquarters of females this was original study was in male monkeys they will pay to see the faces of dominant males and you had to pay them to see the faces of subordinate males. Okay, so.

So females will give up juice to see the taints of testosterone rich male monkeys and male monkeys will pay juice to see the swollen taints of female monkeys that are because of the swelling indicates a better reproductive competence. Yes, better, you know, that was the time, the time is ripe, okay, to mate. But it's just in general, it's a signal

that is like what we would say is it's important, it has value. Monkey porn. Something you should track. And in fact, yeah, they're paying for it. So, you know, this just blew up on the internet, even back then, it was like suddenly million every website was like, oh you proved monkey porn blah blah blah It was kind of a fun ride. It did it was a New York Times idea of the year in 2005 which was

Again kind of shocking, you know Well, I think word on that but but people it sense. And the thing I want to point out is that we ran this same experiment in people, not with unclothed humans. So we used, and we used only, well no, it was, and we had to create our own stimulus set because all the stimulus sets that were out there for visual studies of humans were like

a bunch of German people looking very dour. They were very well controlled. We wanted something that's more natural. So we downloaded thousands of photos from this website, hotornot.com. I don't know if you recall that, but it was a website where you could upload pictures and people would rate you. I mean, now that's like- Probably wouldn't be allowed now.

I remember rate My Pet. Rate My Pet, Rate My Professor, I think, which is still around. And we were saying rate. Rate. Rate. Rate. With a T, my pet.

Yeah. But this was hotornot.com. So you get all these really natural looking, and then we had, this was really funny though too. So we had a group of separate groups of raters from the people who we actually tested in the experiment. So we had a group of males, heterosexual males,

rating the female photos and vice versa. And that was interesting in its own right. So we were just trying to establish, we're not saying why they're attractive or anything like that, just like, let's measure it, okay? And it was really fun because you know by that it took was hard work. You have to do one every three seconds and it took like an hour. And the you know when the women were done rating, they're like okay I'm glad that's over. The hours over and our male raiders were like did you have any more? You know can I I'd be happy to sit here

and rate more photographs for you. Interesting. So women got sort of like, they got tired of rating males for attractiveness. Males did not tire of rating females for attractiveness. They did not at all, which that's anecdotal, but it's still, I think it's revealing. Then we ran the pay per view experiment,

just like in monkeys on humans. Pay per view. And we also ran a couple of other economic, you know, standard economic tasks. One would be how long are you willing to wait? So that's a delayed discounting. Like in general, you will wait longer for a bigger reward, a smaller reward.

And also how hard would you work? And the work was like you had to alternate pressing two keys on a keyboard. It was really just menial, laborious, et cetera. So the two interesting, just sociologically it's interesting what comes out of this. Our female subjects basically wouldn't give up money. They were working for money. They were hearing the sound of coins coming out female subjects, um, basically wouldn't give up

money. They were working for money. They were hearing the sound of coins coming out of a slot machine, which was proportional to how much money they actually got. Real money. Each choice. Real money. If you ignored the pictures, you'd go home with like $17 extra compared to if, if you were influenced by them.

And the females did really well economically. So they pretty much kind of ignored the pictures of the males even though they were rated, even the ones that were super hot, they were not very concerned with that. For the males it was the exact opposite. So the males are giving up essentially. They're paying and they had thousands of trials. They're paying somewhere between a half and three quarters of a cent to see images of women who are rated in the top like third of attractiveness they also would wait

significantly lower and they would work really hard as like rats pressing for cocaine quite literally to keep those pictures up on the screen okay so that's the setting we've established in monkeys and in people similar economic principles that are guiding social, you call it attention, social valuation, whatever. So we're like, okay, let's go look in the brain. So we did an MRI experiment, fMRI experiment, measured blood flow to different parts of the brain. And we only tested males because they were the ones who displayed differential preferences there. And what we found is that parts of the visual system that are involved in encoding faces, but then the reward system was activated and tracked linearly how much money these guys were paying

to see images. There's basically the trade-off value, the currency, the translation of pictures into money. Then in monkeys, we studied all the same areas, but now we could record from individual neurons in those areas rather than looking at blood flow, which is a crude proxy. And we found exactly the same thing,

which is that neurons in the reward system were spontaneously and strongly activated by those pictures. And that made sense, right? So the pictures of the perineum of females by dominant male faces. And that correspondence I thought was pretty compelling. So these are brain areas that are involved in value-based decision-making. Not unlike the value-based decision-making

of tracking how many grooms, grooming events one received versus needs to give or texts one has received or gives or acts of service one trades for some other love language. I mean, here I'm extrapolating to a lot of different themes, but I mean, talk about transactional. I mean, this implies that our neural circuitry, while flexible, we can trade two of those for one of those, or we can decide, you know,

I'm just going to be a selfless giver, that that's a decision. And that altruism, well, it certainly exists. I mean, we fortunately see acts of altruism a lot, probably not as much as humanity would be served by, but it exists, altruism exists. But nonetheless, there's a formula that's maintained in the brain. Like, I'm going to do all this for nothing.

And the circuit kind of understands that, versus I'm going to do this, but there's an expectation maybe with a long latency that at some point it's going to be payback. I expect to be paid back. The idea of altruism has been very controversial within kind of evolutionary biology for a long time because it's kind of hard to imagine a scenario

in which being purely selfless could persist if there was a genetic part of that, right? If it were heritable. So that's why we have ideas like kin selection. Like I will give up my life for eight of my cousins, for example. Well, right, and I was saying in parenting and taking care of young, like we give selflessly,

but there's this like unconscious or semi-conscious backdrop, which is you want your own offspring to proliferate, to survive and flourish. And so it's not quote unquote really selfless, although in the short term it can appear selfless. That's, I guess, supposed to be the real evolutionary biology argument. I would say that in terms of just pure acts of giving where we don't expect anything in return,

I think most people that do that say, certainly I've had this experience, right? It feels good. So there is a return on investment. It's just that the return doesn't come from somebody else doing something to reciprocate in the same domain, but it feels good. You know, there's nothing more impressive than an anonymous donor, right? You know, actually, I don't want to take us too far off track, but there's this idea in a lot of Europe that if somebody donates a lot of money to a cause, that, you know, they're doing philanthropy,

that they're like trying to hide something. Whereas in this country, that tends to be not the case, although it's sort of growing this idea that, oh, if somebody's giving a lot of money to a university, they want their name on the side of a building, they're really looking to kind of either hide other features of their life and or they want respect, right?

They want fame. So it's kind of interesting. I like to believe in pure altruism. I just, it feels good to me to believe in true altruism. So I you know I don't think this is settled and I think this is where there's another feature of human and maybe human evolution that humans and human evolution that's relevant here which is that we may be one of the only organisms in which something called group selection might happen right and that's this idea that like groups are competing with each other in addition to individuals

competing and collaborating and competing. And so that evolution might favor groups in which there are certain individuals who are in a sense wired to be selfless. And there's one of my colleagues at Penn, a guy named Duncan Watts has done these really interesting experiments, where he ran these massive online, like Prisoner's Dilemma games, where people are having to decide whether to know, their partner or defect essentially. And, but what was unusual about these games is he let people play them over and over again,

hundreds and hundreds of times. What typically happens is once you've experienced the fact that like, if you cooperate, you're gonna get screwed eventually, then everybody just says, I'm just gonna, I'm just screwing the other guy from here on out, but he identified that there's a population Like 20% of people I think something like that who are persistent cooperators who cooperate no matter what? their experience and

That is resonant with this idea kind of from group selection that groups that had individuals who were with this idea kind of from group selection that groups that had individuals who were Cooperators who were selfless no matter what might out compete other groups, right? And I think that's a really interesting idea. I want to circle back to what you're saying about the feel-good Like when you give there's a real substrate to that if we can engage in a little reverse inference Which is that and, and this was shown actually a couple decades ago by a neuroeconomist named Bill Harbaugh for the first time, which is that when you give to a charity that you love,

you see activation of reward circuitry that looks just like if you got the reward yourself. So it's like if I give to whatever March of Dimes or something, and that's what I love, then it in essence feels good to me. And that reward system activation, right, is the thing that through dopamine reinforces behavior. So when you have that warm glow, it makes you more likely to do that again in the future. It's a self-reinforcing signal.

I love that those sorts of circuits exist because they seem to serve the greater good. And I'm not trying to rub away our more, I don't know, harsher features of primate brain wiring, but they're all in there. So speaking of which, are there external signals besides muscularity, jaw shape, et cetera,

that relate to levels of testosterone in male humans that are transient? You know, the male hormones don't cycle as robustly as female hormones because of the lack of a menstrual cycle. They might change with age, et cetera, but is there anything that signals testosterone or free testosterone level? Certainly stress hormone level is signaled,

quaking of hands, that kind of thing. But what about testosterone signaling that is independent of the kind of like vigor display stuff that we normally hear about? It's a good question. I think it's important as you pointed out that it doesn't vary too much over weeks or months or anything like that. It's pretty stable. But, well, one thing we can think about is work done by my colleague Giddy Nave,

who's in the marketing department at Wharton, and working with Colin Kammerer, actually, out here at Caltech. They did a number of studies, not where they are measuring testosterone, but doing very well controlled placebo, trials of applying testosterone gel versus something that people, you didn't know which arm you were getting.

So testosterone versus placebo. Versus placebo, yeah. And measuring things like desire for conspicuous consumption, so buying luxury cars or things like that, or other things are, they're cognitive reflection, like they're really bad at,

they start to fail on things that require not just giving the simple answer, they become more risk taking. So there's a number of features that we kind of I think collectively anecdotally think of as being like hyper masculine associated with testosterone. Like you want a signal, like you're a big guy, you take more risks, and you're less reflective. You just play more and you're less reflective. So that you know that and I'm gonna screw it up right now if I actually tried to give you the question,

but it's like a bat and a ball cost $1.10 together. I'm gonna screw it up and then you're gonna say, well, you lack cognitive reflection. Well, let's just leave that aside. But then they're much more likely to give the wrong answer, go to the, jump to the conclusion, which seems obvious, but it's wrong. So higher testosterone, more impulsive with responses,

less reflective, tend to be wrong more often. Yes, but more confident. But more confident. More risk-taking, that kind of thing. That's kind of a, okay, fully expected one. And I guess the purchasing items that signal wealth or status. It's a display. So, you know, I think of it as like the chimpanzee. So when researchers first went out to study chimpanzees, you know, in Africa,

and then they had like generators or whatnot around, and they had these big gasoline cans or whatever. And the male chimps, one of the male chimps, discovered that he could take these cans and run around the group banging them together and getting a lot of attention. You know, which is similar, you see them up in a tree. Vigor display. Vigor display, displaying, yeah, just grabbing,

I think, so much of its attention. Just look at me, look at me, look at me. And I think that's what you've got going on with this sort of, you know, buying a Jaguar or whatever. You know, it's like, it's- Or people are trying to signal what they don't have actually have, right? I mean, it's tricky because we,

now you can buy things on credit, like, you know, there are a bunch of jokes about Los Angeles that can be made here. You know, I grew up in the Bay area and there are areas of the Bay area where there's a tremendous amount of wealth. My dad used to always say, you know, up here like wealth is really kind of hidden

back in the trees, literally. You know, you go to LA and there's all this display through stuff. It depends on where you are in LA, but it's largely true. You see, let me put this way. You see a lot more yellow Lamborghinis here than you do in Portola Valley,

but I'll be willing to bet that there's far more money in Portola Valley than there is in all of Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles, if you really just looked at actual net worth, not an experiment I want to run, but I'd be willing to bet one entire limb of somebody's choice to run that experiment. And so there is this kind of strange thing where the display of vigor is so flexible in humans.

It's like nowadays you know, nowadays, there's a lot of discussion about billionaires signaling more traditional or primitive forms of vigor, like fighting ability or muscle versus, you know, like it's almost like, and I think part of the reason for that is that the concept of a billion dollars is very hard for most people to conceptualize as like an operational

thing, like what they would do with it and how it would impact their level of happiness, which is probably actually very little, et cetera. But we can assess physical qualities so readily. Like, and so, anyway, I guess that this is really just my way of taking us back to this idea of valuation, like how we place value on a potential mate or a friend or a coworker.

It sounds so transactional, but clearly the brain is performing these operations all the time and it's highly variable depending on who you are, the social context you live in. And yet these hormones, especially testosterone and estrogen, seem to really be playing with the volume or the gain on all of this stuff. Yep, that's exactly how.

And in fact, that's how I think about all, we can think about oxytocin the same way as like a volume knob for pro-social interactions in general and testosterone. So I think that works. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Function. Last year, I became a Function member

after searching for the most comprehensive approach to lab testing. Function provides over 100 advanced lab tests that give you a key snapshot of your entire bodily health. This snapshot offers you with insights on your heart health, hormone health, immune functioning, nutrient levels, and much more. They've also recently added tests for toxins, such as BPA exposure from harmful plastics and tests for PFASs or forever chemicals. Function not only provides testing of over a hundred biomarkers

key to your physical and mental health, but it also analyzes these results and provides insights from top doctors who are expert in the relevant areas. For example, in one of my first tests with Function, I learned that I had elevated levels of mercury in my blood. Function not only helped me detect that, but offered insights into how best to reduce my mercury levels,

which included limiting my tuna consumption, I'd been eating a lot of tuna, while also making an effort to eat more leafy greens and supplementing with NAC, N and acetylcysteine, both of which can support glutathione production and detoxification. And I should say by taking a second function test, that approach worked.

Comprehensive blood testing is vitally important. There's so many things related to your mental and physical health that can only be detected in a blood test. The problem is blood testing has always been very expensive and complicated. In contrast, I've been super impressed by Function's simplicity and at the level of cost.

It is very affordable. As a consequence, I decided to join their scientific advisory board and I'm thrilled that they're sponsoring the podcast. If you'd like to try Function, you can go to functionhealth.com slash Huberman. Function currently has a wait list of over 250,000 people, but they're offering early access

to Huberman podcast listeners. Again, that's functionhealth.com slash Huberman to get early access to Function. Let's talk about oxytocin. We hear about it as the love hormone, the affiliative hormone. Folks, it's a neuro hormone, so it's somewhere in between a neuromodulator and a hormone.

Let's set all that aside, all the mechanistic stuff, and I'd love to know your knowledge about what changing levels of oxytocin does to perception, to behavior, humans. So yeah, oxytocin, we've been interested in it for a long time because as you said it seems to be a dial that Can turn up or turn down? Certain aspects of social even other other aspects of mental and emotional function. It's important to point out that oxytocin and its sister neurohormone vasopressin arginine vasopressin sister neurohormone vasopressin, arginine vasopressin,

which is sort of maybe a little more important in males than in females, and females' oxytocin a little more important, but they're in both. They've been around a long time. They've actually, you know, it's very early in vertebrate evolution. In mammals, oxytocin has the primary role, right, of helping to build bonds between mom and baby. So oxytocin is released during childbirth, it's released when mom is nursing.

And it seems that in humans and some other social, really, really social creatures, it's now been co-opted to kind of have a similar kind of role in the relationships you have with other people who are not your offspring or your your pair mate right so because oxytocin for example is released you know when you orgasm and so then that's you know thought to be why that sort of pillow talk afterward is you know like it's more engaging and you know people feel things at that time that they might have that they're different from what they would have felt. It fosters attachment. Fosters attachment, that's a good way of putting it.

So, oxytocin levels are hard to measure, right? You can measure at a distance in the periphery, in the blood, but it's not exactly like one-to-one correlated with what's going on in the brain, and in general we don't wanna to put a pump or a little thing in your brain that we could measure how much is in there. So we can look at instead, what is often done is to look at what happens if you introduce oxytocin,

more oxytocin than you normally have, like into the brain. You can't inject it or anything like that. And the way that it's typically applied is to squirt it up your nose or inhale it intranasally. So it then is taken up by the nerves that are in your sinuses and whatnot and then goes into the brain. That was what it was thought to.

I think that we were the first to show that that's actually how it works. We did all the work in monkeys where all these things are just easier to do and the behavior is a little bit less complex. So our readouts are, I think, a bit more straightforward. In the human studies, there's a lot of variation. It's controversial because there's some crap studies and there's just a lot of variability

in the effects across studies. I think some of that's just because you ask people to squirt it up their own noses And so there's a lot of that introduces variation and just how good they were getting it in the right place With the monkeys what we did instead is we used what's called an nebulizer or aerosol eyes or like I noticed when like my kid had like pneumonia and I took him to the ER they put this mask on him and they You know, they they missed this al on him and they, you know, they missed this albuterol which opened up his airways. Oh, we could do that with oxytocin too.

So that's what we do with the monkeys. It makes sure they get like a really good dose and then we show that that gets right into the brain. Okay, now that puts us in a position to ask questions of what does it do? Well, one of the first things that oxytocin does is it relaxes you. So just overall, you know, you were talking about autonomic function,

it's a relaxer, it's an anxiolytic. So it, and in monkeys, what that does is it reduces their vigilance to sort of any threats. So they're just a lot more chill. So that's sort of a primary thing. And then we've looked at how it affects their behavior in males and females separately, because as I said before, they sort of, first of all, males and females have different strategies and behaviors and the expression of where oxytocin receptors are in the brain, et cetera,

and vasopressin receptors are a little bit different. And in male monkeys, it's super interesting because we've been talking about how you know dominance and they're really like recent Macaques if it's really steep hierarchy and One of the things we found right away is that you give oxytocin and it just flattens the hierarchy so the dominant male monkeys become super chill and friendly and The subordinate ones become a bit bolder

Perhaps because you know when if I dose if I dosed my own or I've dosed you with oxytocin and change your behavior Which would change my behavior so it reverberates Across individuals so so it flattens the hierarchy they spend more time making eye contact They pay more attention to the other individual and we've've shown that, um, it's Burning Man. Yeah, it's true. I've never been to Burning Man. I've never either, but this is what I hear. No, I think it's that that's the right point.

And I'll, I'll circle back to that because we also showed that, um, uh, in a task-based situation where a monkey can choose, we gave monkeys choices of whether they could give a reward to themselves, to another monkey, to a bottle that could collect reward, in case they just like to see juice dripping out. And they would become more pro-social. So they're much more likely to give a reward to another monkey.

They're more altruistic, as we talked about earlier. So that's, it looks like a real pro-social kind of thing right which I think is is super interesting In females is it's a little bit different they Females become kind of nicer to each other and we see that greater eye contact, etc. But they come more aggressive toward males and We speculate I think it's the hypothesis that because oxytocin is released when you've got an infant, basically, for females, males are a bigger threat then. Because in many primate societies and other mammals, males sometimes can be infanticidal because if they kill off a female's

infant that's you know then that will bring that female into receptivity for mating much more quickly and so so that's sort of the brutal evolutionary yeah it is brutal the evolutionary rationale behind that so that's kind of our supposition the other thing that I thought was really interesting as well is we find a greater, or an increase in the synchronization of behavior. So when I do, you know this idea of mirroring, which has been talked about in business contexts

for a long time, you know, it's a real thing. And it's a marker of a good relationship, a strong relationship. If you have good rapport with somebody, you tend to adopt similar movements and postures. And if you do those things. Shirts. Shirts.

Exactly. We didn't coordinate here. Yeah, similar clothes. Yeah. You just happen to be a great dresser. Well, same here. So when you have that, actually, if you do those things, if I subtly mirror

You you're and I'm in a job interview I'm more likely to get the job gonna get a higher salary. It's a role really all sort of good things so Oxytocin turns up behavioral synchrony and one of the things this is like something. I've been fascinated in for the last decade, and we and a lot of other people have been working on is that This synchrony the behavioral and neural level physiological synchrony is kind of it's this black magic of social behavior it's the glue that allows us to live and work together so the observation is that if you and I we have a good rapport here let's say if we are measuring activity in our brains right now,

we'd see that they were coming into alignment. So they might have been very disparate when I arrived here and you arrived here today. And as we've grown closer and we've discovered things that are similar about us, that our mindsets and our emotional sets are more overlapping. So we see this world more similarly similarly we feel more similarly about it we're more likely to take similar decisions and

And then that were verb the coolest thing is this reverberates down to your body so If I if our brains begin to align our hearts actually begin to beat together, you know if we have different resting heart rates You've been to breathe together and you start to move together you even if we have different resting heart rates. You're getting to breathe together and you start to move together. You start to look at the same things in the environment. We've talked about attention. When you look at something, the same thing, you're getting the same data.

And that feedback loop, which I think now you can see that that is a way to coordinate behavior. And that is the essence of sort of, that's our secret sauce as a species, which is that we can collaborate and do things together and it seems to like Oxytocin vasopressin are involved in this as a way of kind of turning up the dial on Synchrony it seemed to turn up the so-called social brain network and Then that synchrony is is the glue and it's a biomarker, a biological marker of a close relationship that predicts better communication, increased trust, more in sync with each other, their hearts

are beating together, are more likely to reach the right decision in a really difficult problem than committees that are not. The cool thing is that now that you have a biomarker, you can hack that in the sense that now we can start looking at all those trust building exercises or anything else that we know is supposed to turn things up, turn up the dial on teamwork or communication, and we have a readout. And we could say, yeah, that's working. That's actually doing the thing. It's not BS, right?

You should invest your time and energy in that rather than something else. And there's like, now we've been working through this list as well as others. There's a whole host of things that seem to actually turn up synchrony. And that's a shortcut to team chemistry. So interesting. I'm sure you're familiar with the molecule MDMA, AKA ecstasy. Never taken it.

I have. High on my my list yeah, I have It's an illegal drug, but if you are part of a clinical trial exploring MDMA, then you can do it legally If you're not you're breaking the law right so Methylene dioxymethamphetamine is it it's very interesting because it dramatically increases is it's very interesting because it dramatically increases dopamine, but not nearly as much as it increases serotonin. And it also leads to enormous increases in oxytocin. And it's not really a classic psychedelic, it's an empathogen. It has unique properties in that it raises dopamine and serotonin simultaneously. That's unusual among compounds like,

amphetamine, dopamine, epinephrine, psilocybin, serotonin, broadly speaking. There's a really nice experiment that was done trying to isolate the effects of dopamine versus serotonin versus oxytocin on the empathogenic effect. And by administering different drugs and in the case of oxytocin, oxytocin directly, what they basically concluded was that oxytocin has very little, if anything, to do with the

pathogenic aspects of MDMA. But if I recall correctly, and I have to go back and look at this, but if I recall correctly, it had a profound impact on, as you pointed out, the reducing anxiety. And that reduction in anxiety brings us back to this idea that as we change the tide of autonomic arousal, things become more or less available to us in terms of emotions and behavior. So I find oxytocin to just be like spectacularly interesting compound for so many reasons, but perhaps for that reason, more than all the others,

that it's like it's our own affiliative, as you said, anxiolytic, is that how I pronounce that correctly? Yeah, yeah, yeah. To, I never actually said that word out loud. I've written it many, many times. It's kind of, when I said it, I was worried that like, maybe I'm saying the opposite.

Or anxiolytic, or is it anxiolytic? Anyway, it reduces anxiety, folks. Chills you out. Chills you out. And I think that it's so interesting that oxytocin can be evoked by all these different types of stimuli. Yeah.

So as you mentioned, it's like postcoital or post-orgasmic, but it can be elicited by non-sexual affiliative touch. There's actually really interesting evidence that, and this led to this question about whether or not cesarean sections versus vaginal births are, are they truly equal in terms of their effect on the fetus? And it does seem to be at least in rodent models

that the passage through the vaginal canal during birth helps stimulate oxytocin, that it has a bi-directional effect on the mother-infant relationship. Is there any evidence of that in primates as well? I know the evidence that you're talking about. I don't know of evidence in primates for that. But I think I'd like to circle back to what you talked about in terms of social touch,

which I think is a really, especially right now today, I think is a very important topic to consider. So we, like other primates, we have these, they're actually unspecialized sensors in our skin, the hairy parts of our skin, like your arm, whatever your, and they provide input, essentially to a system that releases oxytocin directly. And that's basically all they do.

They're really bad at telling you exactly where or how, what's being done or how much pressure. But they operate best at body temperature. So you're being touched with a body temperature stimulus. And in a way that's what we would consider to be very pleasant, like getting tickies, you know? It's like grooming. Like, it's the same thing as grooming in monkeys.

And so, it tells us that this is an ancient part of our heritage to building relationships, which is actually through social touch, right? And it's been said, and I think reasonably, that we're living through an epidemic of the loss of social touch for a lot of good reasons, right, because of raising awareness of inappropriate touch, et cetera.

But now it's almost as if we've swung the pendulum too hard in one direction, which is that we're being robbed of this very natural intrinsic signaling mechanism for building bonds that humans would normally, you know, normally, would, you know, in the past have benefited greatly from. And it's, you know, it's not clear how we move forward in terms of like replacing that but I do think it's possibly part of the constellation of forces of losses that is is making us very sick as a species and as a society

you know namely the loneliness epidemic, the sort of anti-social century, which with concomitant, with basically all these follow-ons in terms of anxiety and depression and- Despair. Despair, exactly. Yeah, what a despair.

It's such a heavy word. Yeah, it captures so much. Couple of reflections about this, I guess I think about this a despair. It's such a heavy word. That's a great word. Yeah, it captures so much. Couple of reflections about this, I mean, because I think about this a lot. I never forget when I was traveling overseas in 2019, so this is like pre-lockdowns and all that. You would see in certain areas of the world, men walking holding hands.

Right. And, you know, I didn't know their sexual orientation, but my assumption was that they were heterosexual men holding hands, because it was like just very much part of the culture over there. The other thing was if you, and I have gone to South America, you'll see school kids walking home, all holding hands,

boys and girls just walking, holding hands. It's very casual, non-romantic hand holding. A lot more hugging, a lot of like, I wouldn't say long, firm embrace, but I'd say like vigorous embrace upon meeting kind of thing. And I grew up in the era of like fist bumps and side hugs, that was like a thing over here.

And as you pointed out, I think that the lack of physical touch of that sort, meaning just whatever is culturally acceptable, consensual, casual physical touch, definitely according to the literature that I'm aware of, signals to the rest of the nervous system and body, isolation, even if we're surrounded by people. And I watched that Chimp Empire series on Netflix

where they talk about this allopathic grooming, this collaborative grooming, like I'll trade, you know, fine, you know, pick your back for a while, you pick mine. And when they decide that they're going to ostracize a given member of their troop for whatever reason, sometimes it's because the chimp misbehaved, other times it's more diabolical than that. They're trying to really get rid of,

they're trying to adjust the power balance in the troop for other reasons. They basically just leave that chimp to try and groom itself and then the parasites start to eat away at it. It develops these immune issues and then they often just go off on their own and die. It's an incredibly hard thing to watch and what the underlying reasons are in each case

are not made completely clear. But I think about this whole thing of like deaths of despair and not long ago, you were talking about group selection. I feel like these two themes might be related. I feel like right now, politically and culturally in this country and now starting in Europe as well, it really is, it has become an us versus them kind of scenario.

There doesn't seem to be a middle at all. It's like a big trough. And even the suggestion that somebody could kind of switch between groups is kind of like a no, because they believe in have said and done this, no, because they believe in us have done this. And very strong opinions from both sides. So I don't think we're in a just hug it out

kind of landscape right now. And so I'm curious what forms of non-physical affiliative behavior exist out there. There are social media accounts out there like Upworthy, which just consistently puts out positive content. There are people who are very positive in their, you know, in their online behavior, but and there's encouragement exists online, but it seems to be swamped by these like high salience, like attacks, like what's the deal? What can we do? Yeah, I mean, this is a fundamental question for our age I think and we're on a trajectory toward I

Mean, I don't want to give the impression. I'm a complete pessimist, but I could I was about to say toward oblivion Between like the despair that's drive. It has been driving people to to either commit suicide or to develop severe mental illness or physical health issues, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, et cetera, that are, I think, a consequence of being, in some cases, a consequence of being isolated

because you are not interacting. That's part of who we are as a species, and we don't thrive. I mean, the work is very clear that like being isolated being alone is worse for your health and smoking 15 cigarettes a day I mean, it's just really really bad and it's it scales It's almost linear to how many contacts you have, you know per week or per month. So That's all really bad. And I do believe that's also driving That's a big driver for not just the deaths of despair but like the lack of

coupling and the lack, you know and crashing rates of fertility which is is also a Real thing and it is happening and if we don't counter it's it's it's gonna be bad getting back to synchrony one of the most effective Ways to get in sync with somebody that you're out of sync with or or that you don't know, right, who's different from you, is through conversation, but deep conversation. And there's a couple parts to this. You have to make the time and the space to do this. You have to have an intentional mindset. And we and other scientists have worked with,

there are these structured sets of questions that have been developed. There's one called Fast Friends developed by the Arons in the late 1990s. There's commercially available decks online that you can get. And they're cool because each question, you can kind of take it at a superficial level or a deep level, but they're designed to kind of break the ice and then get you really fast into really deep questions. Is this like 100 questions to fall in love type thing that was published in the New York Times?

Yeah, it's very similar to that. But in this case it's about connecting, like deep connection. I think it's more about deep connection than sort of romance part of this. And what happens during that, and my good friend and colleague Emily Falk at the Annenberg School,

had a really nice paper recently that showed that by measuring brain activity itself in people who don't know each other, as they work through these questions, and their brain, you know, one brain is in this space, another brain is in this space, and they, over time, come into really close alignment, and that's associated with all this good stuff, like I like you more, I feel closer to you, I value you more, et cetera, et cetera. And once you're in that kind of alignment, now you're set to sort of do things together. And now I think that gets back to your question,

like we can't hug it out, but we have to somehow create space, and when I say space, like give people the space to do that. Like I'm going to talk to, you know, somebody from the other political party or from the whatever. That's not a bad thing, right? In fact, that's what we need to do. But instead we're, especially online, reinforcing and making the barriers harder to have those conversations, which are the necessary thing, I think, to establish the glue that keeps us together.

Yeah, I feel like unless there's a organized effort to try and create a bridge, it ain't going to happen. I just feel like there's, I don't want to take us too far off course, but maybe this is a good segue into the neuroscience of decision-making and value-based decision-making, which is so much of the work that you've done.

But I feel like there's this property of the human brain that there's evidence for. I've seen a beautiful neuron paper showing that confirmation of our beliefs leads to a reward-based, activation of a reward-based mechanism. Basically, we're getting a little bit of dopamine for confirming our biases, essentially, about others. And then, of course, if we then experience

more affiliative behavior from our group, we feel more protected, and then there's a tendency to do more of that. And I feel like with the knowledge that we have about dopamine incentive schemes, group selection behavior, there ought to be a program that could be established that isn't hug it out, but that is designed to, again, that word exploit is so loaded,

to leverage the same neural circuits that led to the divide, to try and bridge this divide. And what it has to do though, is it has to break with the value system of both groups. I mean, let's just be frank, we're talking about the left and the right here. I don't want to dance around the margins. You know, and somehow acknowledge that there's good and bad within both of those

groups, which itself, as I say, is like a heretical statement. Like people are going to be, I mean, there's just so many assumptions made just on the basis of that, but create a new value based system that is self rewarding and allows for group selection to fill in the gap or at least come up with a third option, if not politically then in terms of sociology. Yeah. So the solution is Independence Day, that movie. So we need an alien invasion. So there's an out group that we can all identify with each other as, okay, we have to come together to fight. I think that's really at the root of this, which is that because of group selection,

humans are very tribal by nature. We are wired to connect, to glue together with the people who are in our tribe, but that means almost by definition, there's another tribe, right? So that we're over here and we're defending ourselves against them. Now it's not like complete, right? People have been engaging in long distance trade for 100,000 years plus,

there is interbreeding between homo sapiens and Neanderthals and Denisovans. So there's some flexibility in those rules. But in general, yeah, I mean, to have an in-group, that means you have to have an out-group. And if we want to take the left and right and put them together, in some ways, it's like, the easiest way to do that is if we had a third out-group that we needed to unite against, such as third out group that we needed to unite against, such as drones from over New Jersey or, you know, aliens or, you know, who knows what, but.

Well, these go back to classic psychology experiments, right, as I recall, where, you know, the best way to build affiliations have a common goal and or enemy. Yeah. Unfortunately, being under attack, when two opposing groups are both under attack, they form alliances.

So it's the classic minimal group experiments of Zion's in the 60s, which I love, and I teach on this all the time, because it's relevant for all these tribal biases. And so, and what he did was like, you take the random people off the street and go like, okay, you're on the red team, you're on the blue team, you're on the red team, you're on the blue team. you're on the red team, you're on the blue team.

Okay, in five minutes, you're gonna have to compete against the other team. And immediately the people on the red team are like, I don't like the people on the blue team, they're stupid and they're ugly. And you don't know anything about them, right? But you end up immediately forming a tribe, even though you might not have had anything in common.

And what I think is really interesting and relevant here is that any number of different biases that are sort of superficial based on race or ethnic group or whatnot, which have been shown to, even though people say, oh, I feel, if I see you in pain, like you're getting stuck with a needle, I feel the same for anyone, doesn't matter. But it tends to be selective for your own tribe

when you measure the brain activity. But if you now put the emphasis on team, literally you do that science experiment, that minimal group experiment, and I put you in a red, or like we're both wearing black t-shirts, I say you're gonna work with the other people with black t-shirts, doesn't matter who you are, that, and I think the way it does this is through attention,

is put my attention on what's shared, rather than what's different. So now we're on the same team, and now that kind of recovers, restores that, the empathy that I didn't feel toward you before. And that's interesting when you think about, say, in the US, the first places, the first groups that became integrated

were like military and sports. And what's common amongst those? They wear uniforms. So the uniforms say, we're on a team that takes your attention away from the things that are different. And the Stanford prisoner famous Zimbardo experiment where, you know, assigning people to prisoner versus guard and that led where it led.

Exactly. That occurred not but a short distance from where my lab was. So we have this anxiety lowering pro-affiliative oxytocin thing, activated by touch affiliation. And it's bi-directional, like it promotes more touch, which promotes more feelings of safety, which lowers anxiety further.

And then we have testosterone, which signals certain things about others and seems to play a role in the hierarchy. And you mentioned that when oxytocin is given, that it kind of flattens the hierarchy. And you mentioned that when oxytocin is given, that it kind of flattens the hierarchy. And my understanding of testosterone from Robert Sapolsky and others is that testosterone tends to exacerbate

existing traits in people. It doesn't turn nice people into jerks or jerks into nice people, but rather it turns jerks into super jerks and nice people into super nice people, which fits well with my idea that testosterone makes effort feel good. And what type of effort feels good

depends on a lot of complex features within us as humans, like too many things to explain by molecules. Yeah. So I feel like the primate literature and the human literature map so well to one another. And I think this is a good segue to take us into value-based decision-making,

because I do recall a paper published, I think it was in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, I should point that out. There are other proceedings in the National Academy of Sciences, USA, should point that out. There are other proceedings in other countries that showed that if day traders or people on the stock market floor took testosterone or they tended to be more aggressive in their,

and impulsive in their decision-making, or if you just looked at performance and then you measure testosterone that it tended to fall out on a pretty nice correlation between higher testosterone and basically more aggressive decision making, more risk taking. So is that all still true? That's my read of literature that is still true and it raise, I think, a worrying specter. Because I don't know how much of a phenomenon it is now, but it was the case maybe a decade ago or so

that a lot of guys who were traders who were feeling like they were losing their mojo after 40 or whatnot, declining testosterone. So they decide they're're gonna start juicing, put some Androgel on, and if that is then, if that's taking you above typical levels, then what might that do in terms of markets if enough people are actually,

or even if they're juicing just for physical performance, right, and they're engaged in, you know, in trading, that could have a lot of, a lot of bad effects, right, as it cascaded through the market. Yeah, I would say that probably the dominant effect of exogenous androgens and all this TRT nowadays is it's very clear that it allows people to maintain moderate to high testosterone levels, even if they're not sleeping as much, it enhances recovery. So if people have their behaviors right,

their nutrition, their sleep, et cetera, it really does give them a significant advantage. If they don't have their behaviors right, it gives them the significant advantage of not having to deal with the normal fluctuations caused by minimal sleep, et cetera. But the decision-making process, like to say yes, no, maybe, or maybe later,

is reliant on things like good sleep, being rested, things other than testosterone. Like this is the idea of a committee as opposed to one individual, you know, recklessly driving decision based on state of mind or androgens. So if we could zoom out and in for a moment on some of the work that you did with Paul Glimcher when you were a postdoc in his lab, but also in your own laboratory. When I sit down and make a decision, should I do something, should I not do something? Let's say I have some general sense of what the potential

payoff is within a range, the potential payoff of not doing it within a range, and I always think of like some, like kind of tension or pressure as it relates to time. Like for instance, I've been considering buying a house. I really like the house. It's a bit of a reach for me for a number of reasons. And I'm trying to make this decision, right? And I'm trying to gauge whether or not other people

are looking at this house also. What do we know about how we start to establish an internal representation of that? And I give that example as just one example, this could really translate to any number of different scenarios about whether or not to get married or not, whether or not to stay in a relationship or not,

whether or not to move, whether or not to have another kid, and on and on and on. What are the core mechanics of value-based decision-making as it relates to outcomes and time? Yeah, so I think we understand this system pretty well at this point. So the last 25, 30 years have been enormously productive. So we have a good sketch of the circuitry that does this. And essentially what happens is you're confronting a situation.

And it doesn't really matter whether it seems to be the same process, matter whether you're trying to decide between eating a donut or an apple or buying this house versus renting an apartment or marrying this person, you know, proposing or not. It's sort of all the same system. And what happens is you come to the situation and your brain takes in evidence about the alternatives. What are the options that are available to me? What do I know about them from their stimulus properties and from maybe prior encounters or just other information? And it takes that evidence and it weighs it

against stored information about things you'd done in the past, other decisions you've made, and then begins to assign value, computes the expected value of those different options in terms of what it will return to you. And then essentially that is the basis along which that decision gets made. So it's a soft max function, as we say, so it's not like a hard deterministic one. So there's some statistical noise in there.

For some, we could talk about what that reason might be. You make a choice and whenever you make a choice in any behavior that you're engaging in, your brain is making a forecast of what's going to happen next as a result of that. And your brain then determines, computes, did things go exactly as predicted, right? Is it better than predicted or is it worse than predicted? And then that signal gets fed back into the system to update it so that it hopefully performs that job better in the future, right? So like, oh, actually that was a,

it went way better than expected. You should assign that a higher value and do that thing. Again, this process of weighing up the evidence takes time and that's why we have this speed accuracy trade-off in decision-making where we observe that the faster you go the more mistakes you tend to make. Been there. Exactly, we've all made split second decisions that we regretted later. Oh yeah, or slightly sleep deprived. Sleep deprived, exactly. The more time you take,

the more evidence you can accumulate. And when you have to recognize that the data your brain is taking in from the environment is noisy, right? It's not perfect. It's noisy because of the environment. It's noisy because the wetware of the brain is statistical and biological. So you can make the wrong choice by virtue of the noise dominating the signal. And that happens when you go too quickly, right?

And one of the things that's so so there's a good mantra from that you know which is if you want to make really good decisions or if it's really important you kind of have to decide ahead of time like do i need to be accurate or do i need to be fast and if accuracy is important you need to slow down take your time take as much time as needed to get the most information that you can. And even in the moment, that doing simple strategies like breathing or having a mantra that says, it's not what matters, every little decision does not what counts, but it's the long run.

That helps to turn, we've talked about arousal a lot here. And that turns down arousal. One here, and that turns down arousal. One of the things you think of arousal as doing, we keep talking about volume knobs, it's like a volume, volume knob for the stuff that's coming into your brain that could be signal or noise. So it can turn up noise too, so you could count as evidence toward the value of an option, something that is not actually,

you know, evidence. And then you make the wrong decision. So by turning down arousal, slowing down, you're relying more on evidence than, than on noise. Does increasing arousal increase the likelihood of false positives? That is thinking something is there that's not generally speaking, as well as false negatives, thinking that something is absent when actually it's present?

I haven't thought about it that way before, but it seems to me like that's, yeah, that seems consistent with my understanding. Just by way of example, one of the things that's been really different for me in the last few years is how quickly you move to publication when you podcast or when you're doing social media. You just click, it's out in the world versus the way I was weaned was spend two, three, four years on a project. Maybe it doesn't go anywhere. Maybe it does, goes to multiple papers, gets reviewed.

So by time it comes out, you know, it's been proofread and you've read the proof. So it's been vetted by a number of hopefully expert sources, usually really good sources of feedback as opposed to nowadays where you can just kind of move immediately to publication. And I used to have this saying, which was in the lab, because sometimes you have two months to do a revision

or something, it's never really two months, it always takes five times as long. I used to say, I go as fast as I carefully can. And I used to tell my students in postdocs, we go as fast as we carefully can, because the moment you start going fast, you start making mistakes. You start making mistakes, you definitely pay for it later.

And the mistakes that I've made podcasting were a product of going fast and or fatigue. And the two things kind of relate to one another or occasionally somebody will highlight conflicting evidence. And then nowadays you can go back and repair things with AI. You can, you know, you put things in, but I feel like so much of life in terms of decision-making is trying to make decisions

when most of the time we think we don't have more time, but most of the time we do have more time, unless somebody's hemorrhaging, we usually have more time. But then there are some real things where we don't always have more time. I mean, we are biological aging machines, and there is such a thing as too late. How do you think these systems change as a function of playing a game for some money in the lab or we can get caught up in it?

But there's this tremendous backdrop of context. $100 might be fun for one person, might be the difference between making rent and not making rent for another person. You know, the decision to stay in a relationship or leave a relationship when you're in your teens or twenties is fundamentally different than when somebody's for instance, at the near the transition zone of having versus losing their fertility. I mean, these are like, yeah, and those change

all sorts of these pressures are so real. And yet if we only have one system in the brain that handles this similarly to the reward system, it seems like we ought to learn in school how to work with and update our decision making process based on immediate term, short term, like all the different time scales. To be able to do that seems really important. Are there any ways to train that up?

Yeah, I think it's a, so there's a few things in here that I think are worth unpacking. I mean, one is what you brought up about fatigue, which I think is really critical. And we did some work with the wrestling team at Penn. Coach came to us and I had had a few of the wrestlers working in my lab and he said, you know, we're having this problem, which is that, I don't know if you've ever wrestled,

I wrestled my middle son. One match. It's the worst six minutes of your life. Well, I didn't quit because I lost that match and I did lose that match, it was seventh grade. I quit because my dad gave me a choice. I could either continue to wrestle or I could play this other sport that I really wanted to play.

He said he can't do both because it was going to impact my grades negatively. And so I opted for the other sport. What was the other sport? Soccer. Okay. Yeah. And I love soccer.

But losing that one wrestling match was informative. The guy just dead fished on me the whole time and he deserved to win. It was a really good strategy. He just dead fished on me. I couldn't gumby out of there. But it is the worst six minutes of your life. You're, you're exhausted within like 30 seconds. It's, it's incredibly grueling.

And what, what the coach observed was that their guys, it was the men's wrestling team, was they were performing very well in the first two periods. They got to the third period and they started making really dumb mistakes, bad decisions. And so we, so he said, what's going on? I said, well, it's about the speed accuracy trade-off, but we have to investigate how it's related to fatigue.

So what we did, this was a really fun experiment. So we go to the wrestling room and we wire these guys up. They got wearable EEG, heart rate monitors, the whole nine yards. And what we do, we gave them like this simple little decision making slash impulse control task. It's just like a control response task. It's a trade off.

If you go too fast and you make mistakes, okay? So it's like a go no go. And so they do it, then we run them through two minutes of crossfit exercises, really brutal. Then they come back off and they have to do the same thing again. And we do that three times and then they have to wrestle each other. So it's cognitive and physical. Not unlike chess boxing, which is not a sport I recommend.

Have you seen this? I have. Where they play around, they play some chess and then they literally fight and then they... It's crazy. It's like switching between these two very different states of mind. It's insane, but also somehow really appealing. I think for the neuroscientists in you and me, and I think we're all neuroscientists to some extent,

we want to understand the brain and ourselves. This notion of very disparate behaviors, boxing and playing chess, being associated with very disparate types of arousal, and how those map onto one another, I think is interesting. I think the confluence of chess boxing is fencing, which is very much like chess. My youngest son fenced for a number of years. And so mentally it's like that, but it has the physicality. Or jiu-jitsu, my friend.

Jiu-jitsu, Brazilian jiu-jitsu. You tell me that it's like, there's an infinite number of options that become constrained in certain dynamics. And yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, very similar. So this was really cool because what we found was that speed accuracy trade off, the more fatigue they got, the more calories they spent, the faster they would slide down

to emphasizing speed over accuracy. They just started like, just like, just going, just gotta get done, just gotta get, I don't know what they're feeling, but that they are just not deliberating, not really being focused. They just lost the capability of doing that. And aside from, you know, you could say, well, we could help you guys, you could become more physically fit maybe you wouldn't fatigue as fast but they're about as fit as they could be they said well why don't we do this why don't we

offload the decision in the third period to the coach as soon as you in the third period you're going to just look at the coach at you know some cadence or whenever it's he's gonna yell at you to look and you do it with the coach tells you. So I think this is really interesting because you think about it in like other contexts like in a business context or something when if somebody is really fatigued or your unit's fatigued maybe you have an external person then who takes over making the decision that you are just you just execute in a sense.

The other thing I wanted to say about this all too, which I think gets to your point about, well, in the lab, it's one thing, you got an undergraduate gambling for 10 bucks over an hour, and how well does that map on to the real world where there are all these other things going on? And I think that that's the challenge. When I teach business school and classes,

MBA students or executives through Exec Ed, they all wanna know, give me the five-step formula. You know, and it's like, that's supposed to apply. How do I take into all, and it's like, well, we mostly know about one, this dimension or that dimension or that dimension, and how in the real world you know in a real complex environment to put that all together so that is a I think that's a gap that's a and one that we're trying to fill which is to study decision-making

whether it's individual or collective decision-making in real world environments, right? To where all of these factors, context and the various priorities that are coming in are more natural, they're not controlled. And how then, I mean, we think we know how that works, but we haven't really proven it yet. So often we think that we know how we feel about something, but some of the work that you've done in monkeys and in humans has really highlighted the extent

to which we base our evaluation of other things and people based on things that are in proximity to those things and people. Could you tell us about this experiment? And I swore I wasn't going to say the words highly processed foods during this episode, but I think we got to talk about monkeys and Doritos. Ah, all right. I thought this could have gone, there's a number of different, and I will,

I do want to bring up one study that I think people find interesting that gets at this difference between what we think we know and feel and What our brain what our brains are actually telling us so we talked about how? monkeys and people their Brains are I don't say hardwired, but they're they're tuned tuned to Value social information and particular kinds of social information, like information about high status individuals, right, and information about sexy individuals, attractive individuals, right, and it's baked into the same circuitry, or attention circuitry, or reward circuitry.

And that, once we had observed that, of course, it led me to wonder well okay this is really weird phenomenon in humans that in marketing right that we use celebrity you know status celebrity and sex to sell to people like why should they ever care about you know Brad Pitt likes this thing or Jennifer Aniston like smart water when the world you're never gonna meet them are they do they really know a lot about you know water or whatever What's the point of all that and if George Clooney selling espresso? Yeah, who cares right but now when you think about in the context of like, oh our brains are wired tuned to attend to and process more deeply and value information about others that are essentially high status, celebrity, sexy, whereas like George Clooney's, all

those things put together. Now that starts to make some sense. And so we thought, well, given that monkeys and humans are so alike in this regard, I bet we could run an advertising campaign on monkeys that's based on sex and celebrity. So that's what we did. We just basically had monkeys, you know, they were just sitting there in their own colony and we had a, you know, television monitor, computer monitor in there that would display like, you know, the Doritos logo next to you know

high status monkey A and maybe the Cheetos logo next to low status monkey D B or you know coke next to like sexy monkey but and you know Pepsi next to you know the front end of you know or backside of monkey that's not so sexy okay so you just do that, just pairing. And so it's just association, simple association. And then what we did is we then gave the monkeys choices between brand logos that had either been endorsed by,

essentially celebrity monkeys, sexy monkeys, or peon monkeys, right? And they got the same reward no matter what. No matter what they chose, they always got the same banana pellet. But the monkeys favored the brands that had been paired with celebrity and sexy monkeys, just like you see in people. You know, I just keep saying this. There's a little monkey in all of us. I'm shaking my head because it says a couple of things to me,

but one of the things that it says to me as a neuroscientist is that it's almost like the bins, like the map of valuation in the brain. There's overlap of, I'm going to get into lingo here for a second and then I'll explain of the receptive fields. So like you mentioned Hubel and Wiesel, H and W, and I mean, they basically won the Nobel prize for a couple of things, but not the least of which

was the identification of like, what are the specific qualities and positions of light and shapes of light that activate a given neuron, which eventually led to the Jennifer Aniston, Barack Obama cells. By the way, their coexistence in the same sentence does not mean that I have knowledge of their dating. I have no knowledge.

And that paper was, that study was done a long time ago. Right, right. But it speaks to the same principle, which is that when we see two things next to one another, sometimes there's a merging of those in our cognitive space or our memory when in fact there's no overlap conceptually. Right, you know where you see this very dramatically is that if there's a podcast with a male and a female

guest host pairing, I guarantee that 25% of the comments are theories about their dating and or sleeping together. post pairing, I guarantee that 25% of the comments are theories about their dating and or sleeping together. It's just, it's incredible. It's like people see male and female together and they just like start doing this thing of like, oh, they're dating or they're, you know, they see flirtation where it may or may not have existed. You know, it's just wild.

And so that when I hear about this experiment that you did of pairing products with sexy monkey or non-sexy monkey or high status or low status monkey, I can't help but feel that the area of the brain that's involved in valuation is just taking visual images, conceptual images, because it'd be visual, it could be any number of things, and that there's just overlap in the maps of these

in the brain, and then that the effect is born out of that overlap. That's one interpretation. The other interpretation, I suppose, and they're not mutually exclusive, is that we want to go up the hierarchy. And that's kind of an assumption that maybe we could just like poke at like a couple of nerd academics for a second. Because like I like my life very, very much.

There are people that live near me that have far more resources than I do. And I never for a nanosecond wish for their home or my home. I've tried to make it a point in life to either have the life I want or be aspiring to the life I want. Have the things I want or aspire to the things I want. But I've never found myself in a mode of like, oh, I want to be working on that experiment, or I want to be living in that house. If I see a beautiful house or a beautiful thing or some feature of someone's life, it inspires me to want to go try and

create something similar. And so I'm not, it's not that I'm without competitive spirit in me. I am like anyone else, but I feel like that's so far in a way different than the notion of a hierarchy where for me to move up, someone else has to move down. And for somebody to be above me in any domain, that means that I'm quote unquote below. So can we talk about hierarchies as they exist in old world primates like the tax versus us?

Because I don't want to map this on anything political, but oftentimes this will get mapped onto the political. Some people live through the lens of abundance. There's plenty to go around. Some people live through the lens of scarcity. Their win is my loss. Their loss is my win, that kind of thing. Do you see this in monkeys too?

Again, it's really hard. You can ask the monkey, but he won't necessarily tell you because he doesn't know what you're asking them. But I think it is, well, first of all, across primate species, there's different degrees of the steepness of hierarchy. So in rhesus macaques, they're really despotic. They have a very steep hierarchy. In like, Barbary macaques, which live in North Africa, and in Gibraltar, very relaxed society. Even though they're macaques, they're all the same genus. So why that's so, we don't really know. The general idea is it has something to do with how

rich the environment is the resources that are available and how monopolizable they are so if if you can monopolize resources then that can help to create a steeper hierarchy if they're not mon, like let's imagine you eat grass for a living, you know, you're like a cow or whatever and there are some monkeys that do that, eat grass. Like I can't hoard all the grass to myself, it's just everywhere and so everybody can just spread out and kind of eat grass.

It's a very boring life and you spend all your time digesting and fermenting in your, you know, in this extended gut which is kind of a gross thing to do. Sinicide. But I think you can see that like that that that spans a continuum for what you're saying from abundance to scarcity and has a lot more to do with whether it's sort of monopolizable. And does that make sense? So if you can monopolize something, then you have something that other monkeys need, right? And you're creating that scarcity.

Yeah, so let's drill into this, because I think this is, everybody is operating from a certain frame in this context. And so for instance, there are billionaires, hundreds of some people, like Elon has hundreds of billions of dollars, doesn't seem to care much about money for instance, there are billionaires, hundreds of some people like Elon has hundreds of billions of dollars. Doesn't seem to care much about money for money's sake or I think he's sold all his homes or whatever.

He's motivated by clearly other things as well, if money at all. And then there are people who are destitute poverty. I think many people will say, why does anyone need that much money kind of thing? They'll say this about billionaires. What's been interesting is one of the more prominent themes in pop psychology that is supported by research

is this idea that past a certain level of income, your happiness doesn't scale upwards linearly with the increase in income or maybe at all. And the number that's thrown around is like past $75,000 a year, you know, your happiness doesn't grow. I would argue that indeed money can't buy happiness, but it absolutely can buffer stress or certain kinds of stress.

Let's just give an example of a single mother with raising three kids on her own versus a single mother raising three kids with three night nurses when they're infants and nannies. It's a different level of output required. Like you just can't argue between those two. Now, whether or not one is happier than the other is a discussion, different discussion altogether, excuse me. But I think the cow example makes a lot of sense.

The hierarchies within primate troops make sense. But as humans, I think that I observe tremendous variation as to whether or not people say, oh, wow, this person is a millionaire or billionaire, but I'm good with what I've got. Or this person has so much more and I resent them for it. And I guess we don't really think about there being a limited amount of money

in the same way that we think of it as like grass or resources. Now, if we were to talk about mates and that, that's a whole other thing. But you just have to go to a bar with a particular bias towards having more men or women. And then, you know, like that starts to play out immediately, right?

But let's keep it simpler. Do you think that this whole stance about abundance versus scarcity is dynamic? Like if you're surrounded by people that make more or less the same amount of money as you, do you feel better than if you're surrounded by billionaires that have yachts? And I think the fundamental drive is to to climb the hierarchy is more

or less kind of baked in again with a lot of variation across individuals and probably across cultures which I'll get to in a moment going back to that seventy five thousand being kind of like where you know it, it just asymptotes, there's a number of papers that came out from colleagues at Penn and Wharton. So a guy named Matt Killingsworth showed in a famous paper five or six years ago that in fact it actually continues, like happiness just keeps going up with income. And then there was a back and forth with Danny Kahneman about that. And then they worked on a paper together.

And what it looks like is this, it kind of goes up, flattens out for a while, and then like above another level, wow, happiness really goes up when you got a lot of money. Ah, so that study isn't discussed as much. So that's new, well, it's new. It's like in the last year or two. So being very, very wealthy does increase your level.

Yeah, I mean, for a variety of reasons, right? So sure, it's a buffer of stress, but it also allows you access to lots and lots of different things that can make your life just easier, right? So that's, I think, part of it. But the other part, and I think this gets back to that question of what makes us human, is that we can intentionally, just like you said about yourself, it's like, well, I'm just going to chill. I'm happy with what I've got. And there's lots of ascetic traditions in a variety of cultures, especially Eastern cultures that

have taken that approach, or even in the West, like early Christianity, et cetera. And I'm trying to remember the name of the book that was recommended to me, I haven't read it yet. But that in, for example, in India, in amongst some of the most extreme poverty in the world, you have people who are kind of ecstatically happy, and they're very, very happy with being alive and being alive where they are, when they are, and with the people that they're happy with.

How does that happen? I don't know, but here's my guess, or part of my guess, I guess, which is, it gets back to what we talked about in terms of attention. So what you attend to is being turned up in the brain, and what you're not attending to is being turned down. It's kind of like glass half full, glass half empty. And if you're paying attention to the sort of good things, then those are getting kind of priority of access to your brain.

So you're kind of getting like, oh, every... It's magnifying. Every little small positive surprise is amplified in your brain. So you're kind of getting like, oh, it's magnifying. Every little small positive surprise is amplified in your brain. And you get a bigger dopamine hit for that, rather than the sort of small negative surprises. Now, I'll put that into another context, which is we've done a number of studies on loss aversion. Loss aversion is this observation

that if I give you a 50-50 gamble, like win some money, lose some money, in general for most people I have to offer them a lot more to win than to lose for them to take the gamble, which doesn't make any sense rationally and economically. It should be, it's even chances. So people are loss averse. There's been a lot of theories about why. Danny Kahneman famously thought that people feel the pain of loss more than the pleasure

of winning. Probably. And I think that's true. We investigated that using a combination of modeling, computational modeling, and we looked at people's behavior and we did eye tracking because we're measuring where people attend. Your average person, most people attend to what they might lose rather than what they might win. And the longer they focus on what they might lose the more

loss Averse they are and that tends to be associated with people who have like negative affect So if you're anxious or you're depressed you're in a negative State then you're you're looking more for what you could lose than what you could win So that sets up a really interesting Test causal test which we're like, well, you know, where you look is a function of what you're looking for. They're looking for what might hurt them and also what the world looks like. So let's just manipulate the visual display.

We made the wins bigger font or brighter than the losses. Okay. When you do that, that attracts people's attention. They look at the winds, what they could, the good things they could get rather than the bad things. Just by changing the font. Just by changing the font size or the brightness, they look at it more, this gets turned up in the brain, and now they're not loss averse anymore. Now they're willing to take the gamble.

So that's what I'm talking about in terms of like, what you focus on. So if, and that's a way to do it. I mean, obviously, you could take advantage of people by doing that. But with their consent, so for example, we started that work on behalf of a financial services company who was saying, we're having trouble with our customers, older customers, to get them to take good risks that could really

pay off for them because they're too afraid. And so we did some basic work, and then we tested that we could actually causally change that. We could shift that. So with their consent, yeah, if we amplify, we just put what you could win instead of what you could lose in a make it more obvious. People pay more attention to that,

and then that will subtly shift the decisions that they make. Wow, we are so malleable when it comes to changing the context and thereby the variables that shape our decision making, but I'm always struck by the way that it comes in below our conscious detection. This might be, this is the appropriate time to ask about meme coins, right?

Because we all grow up learning about the US dollar or Euro or whatever backed by something, right? Backed by the Fed, but also, you know, backed by real world physical objects of gold. Yeah. That's what we're told anyway, right? You know, and this is, you know, why just printing more money is never the solution, right?

Because meme coins borne out of the kind of larger theme of cryptocurrency and Bitcoin are an interesting kind of derivative of cryptocurrency, whereby you're pairing reputation of a person, or in some cases a Shibu Uno dog, right? With a currency that has no intrinsic value except for the person's reputation plus whatever backing, whatever value backing it's obtained

when people decide to purchase that coin. So I don't know how many listeners track cryptocurrency and I am by no means an expert on this, but one thing that people get excited about is how much money is flowing into a coin, not just the value of the coin on a given day. So essentially how much has been invested in that coin as something of potential value.

So when we hear about Hak'tuagirl coin, the Hak'tuakoin, or there's a Trump coin now, I think there's a Melania coin. There's a Doge coin that was developed long before the idea of a department of government Doge, the Shibu-un-un coin. Is this all just exploiting, again, there comes that word, a leveraging this proximity between reputation and value. So I think that's partially it, but it may be even simpler than that,

which is it's leveraging, it's harnessing our wiring to attend to what other people are doing and what they're getting or losing. So we care a lot about, you know, when we're in a group, the behaviors what other people are doing and what they're getting or losing. So we care a lot about, you know, when we're in a group, the behaviors of other people. So let's think about how we learn something, the value of something. If you're a simple animal,

you learn from direct experience, and that's reinforcement living, you know, reinforcement learning driven, the dopamine system, et cetera. You can also learn from what you didn't choose, counterfactual, fictive learning. And then in groups, you have this rich source of information of what other people are doing. Like I could watch you try that food and if you die from eating it, then I won't eat

it, right? So that's, we're deeply wired to pay attention to the decisions that other people are making. And if they look good or if they, you know, then we start to copy what they're doing. And you see this in, it's not just these meme coins, but like meme stocks, you know, like GameStop. This is very similar to the FTX phenomenon slash debacle where celebrities joined in and people had trust in these celebrities, admiration of these celebrities

and invested a lot of money in what turned out to be, you know, in the end, a failure. So how often is this happening in advertising? Like if we really step back and we go like, is the BMW really the better choice compared to the, you know, compared to the Range Rover? Like, are we really basing our decisions on the thing that we're purchasing as much as we think?

No, I don't think so at all. And there's a few things we could kind of unpack there. I think in terms of meme coins, meme stocks, there's probably two things, a confluence of two things going on. So one is this sort of celebrity endorser. And we have studied that also as well. We talked about the monkey stuff,

but we looked at, we did eye tracking studies of people making choices amongst products and brands that had been endorsed either by celebrities or not, just paired with them, right? And one of the things we found is that when people chose a product or brand that was sort of unfamiliar to them, if it had been endorsed by a celebrity, their pupils didn't dilate. Normally they would dilate because that's like overcoming your default and mental effort

and arousal goes up because it's sort of surprising. And so the pupil staying silent is an indicator of kind of enhanced confidence and trust, if you will, that I'm not making a mistake. I'm putting a lot of words here. But like, you know, that was the impact in a very subliminal way of that celebrity endorser. So I think that could be going on,

as well as this other process I was talking about in terms of what we pay attention what other people are doing which seems to be a major driver of bubbles in stock markets like that goes all the way back to like Isaac Newton losing his fortune in you know the South Seas trading market you know he famously said like you know I you know I can I can divine the mechanics of the the planets in the heavens but I can't understand the minds of men or something like that He just couldn't help himself He got out first and then he got back in when he saw his friends were making continuing to make money

And then he got wiped out so we were like super interested in this and we ran experiment with MBA students at Wharton and They were playing a stock market game. Actually it turns out it's a stock market we developed for monkeys. We had monkeys play the exact same stock market. They're buying, selling, they've got a portfolio that they can trade in for juice. Humans get money for this. This was based on some studies that Colin Kammerer and his colleagues had and Benedetto DiMartino did a while ago. In the MBA students, we used a standard psychometric

scalar, you know, a questionnaire that's used to test people for sort of social impairments, okay. And then what we did is we looked at how their likelihood of getting caught in a bubble market related to Social sensitivity how attuned they were to other people and basically the more dialed in you were to other people the higher your likelihood of losing everything In a bubble and it was those people who were like You know socially impaired who did the best they never got sucked into bubbles now

What was cool is we found the same thing in monkeys. Okay, so monkeys in the same stock market, okay, if they're playing alone, they're making pretty good decisions. Okay, as soon as you put another monkey in the market that they can see, they see what they watch what that monkey did, that monkey buys GameStop or whatever, then I buy GameStop. And he sees me do that, and then he does the same thing. And it just goes back and forth, back and forth. They create this bubble, and then you get this crash. It was like really phenomenal.

And we found that the brain circuit that is essentially involved in theory of mind, but is about controlling your attention to others and registering what they're doing, is driving driving that okay, and it was really funny It was like the bigger the portfolio imbalance between what I've got and what you got the higher the signal in Monkeys are like shit. I don't know if I can say that but you can say whatever you want. Okay. Well fuck I'm losing Relative to you, so I'm gonna I'm paying even more attention to what you're doing and what you've got in your portfolio And I'm gonna be much more likely to to copy you and do what you're doing. So again like

There's a little monkey in all of us. I See very little difference between what people are doing, you know with GameStop and what monkeys are doing in that market. So when we hear about these, for lack of a better phrase, pump and dump type things where, I'll never forget in 2017, a friend who's a spectacularly successful investor said, you should put 2% of your investable earnings into Bitcoin. And I was like, well, I don't know about that and then Not long after that there was some press releases about

who was buying Bitcoin and the price shot up and then I Said went back to them and said I have to be really careful here and said you were right They said yeah, you know, but you know, whenever you read about who's buying Bitcoin, it's not clear when they bought that. You know, a lot of those purchases were likely made a long time ago.

So there are ways that people, you know, kind of, kind of like build some hydraulic pressure through social interaction on these things, right? He's not, it's very different than someone picking up the phone and the whole notion of insider trading, right? Very different. If people kind of create a swell around something,

this is great, or let's make it real estate, it's a little more tangible for people. Like that neighborhood is really terrific, we're all going to move there. And then you know, people start moving there. Then you realize that they've actually owned that very inexpensive property for a long time. And they're actually the seller.

You get a very different impression of the advice that you got. So, and I'm not a finance guy, but I think about these things in terms of the neuroscience and the human psychology. I mean, just again, I'm just struck by how our notion of valuation is adjusted in the short term by virtue of proximity, probably also in the long term,

but that how we kind of lose ourselves in these things, that we just become less than rational based on things like arousal, the relationship between hormones and arousal. What I love about what we're doing today is, in case people haven't caught on already, is that we've got multiple mechanisms and themes here that are starting to converge.

As arousal goes too high, it's mostly what we're exploring, you start making, you start speeding up, you start misjudging information, you think noise is signal, and you start correlating things that are like not correlated in reality, and then you can quickly find yourself

down the path of bad decisions. I think one of the best advice I ever got was if somebody ever wants you to make a decision very, very quickly, and it's not clearly an emergency, like you don't see them hemorrhaging, chances are it's a scam. Like if anyone, you know, this is the best thing to tell anyone that's older, let's say,

because they'll get these calls from people and it's like, this is urgent, this is urgent. The urgency usually is suggestive of it being false. Like using time pressure on people. Like I need this money now. I'm going to miss my bus and my kid's going to be waiting for me. This kind of thing.

I mean, it like pulls on you, right? You don't want some kid waiting out in the middle of nowhere. But if this is somebody you don't know, then you could say, well, maybe five bucks. I'm willing to lose it. Maybe that that's probably the calculation I would do. I'm willing to lose it. I don't, if they're lying, okay, if they're telling the truth, great. But when it starts getting higher stakes, it gets kind of kind of kind of scary. I think we should address the word rationale, rational rationality that you used, which is like, oh, we're being irrational.

It seems like we lose our rationality. That's a word that's bandied about a lot, right? And especially in economics. And that kind of makes the assumption that we are essentially a computer and we just kind of weigh things up dispassionately. And we have complete access to all information here and now and into the future. There are other concepts here. One is called bounded rationality, which this guy Gerd Gigerinzer kind of came up with,

which is the idea that there are constraints, there are brain constraints that are built in. We've got energetic constraints, we've got, you know, which actually limit how much information we can process, which is why we fall prey to choice fatigue and decoy effects and things like that, why we see visual illusions in some ways. And then there's another concept of ecological rationality,

which takes that bounded rationality and it puts it into what you might call the environment of evolutionary adaptation which kind of we've talked about before like what's the environment our brains are designed for and it's not the one we're in right now so our brains are designed for I mean probably 130 million years ago but let's say 200,000 years ago our species right homo sapiens. And what was that environment like?

Well, we lived in small groups with face-to-face contact of somewhere between probably 20 and no more than 100 people. You knew all of them. You talked to them every day. Things didn't really move faster than an antelope or change faster than the seasons. There was very little wealth inequality. People are physically active all day long and they ate natural food.

And so what are we like now? We're in these so-called weird environments Western Educated industrialized rich democratic, but but you were in these industrialized societies. We have money. We're in markets We're interacting with thousands of people perhaps millions of people their behaviors their thoughts everything are in Pinging on us stuff is changing super super fast, right? We sit on our butts all day long, stuff is changing super, super fast. We sit on our butts all day long. We're not active. It's like you have to be intentional

and have enough resources to be active, and we eat garbage. And for those reasons, I think that's a source of a lot of the misery that we have. Now, I'm not saying we should go back to being subsistence hunter-gatherers or horticulturalists. Maybe we should. It'll be a painful process to get there and we may end up getting there given some of the trajectories that are, you know, we're on. But people who live in those environments seem to generally be, you know, healthier and

happier. For example, you know, like studies of, you know, brain and body in subsistence, hunter-gatherers, horticulturalists, people who are in their seventies look like people, you know, Westerners in their thirties or younger. They're incredibly fit, lean, no evidence of cardiovascular disease, no evidence of anything like, you know, dementia's major cognitive decline. And we're always trying to hack that. We're trying to hack it. We're trying to do zones and then people say,

well, it's the diet. No, it's the wine, by the way, it's not the wine. It's not the wine. Now, finally, after years, I'm not going to say I told you so, but alcohol's not good. A little bit maybe every once in a while, but not more than a little bit.

I'll respond to that. Yeah, but the social component seems critical. What are your thoughts on the longevity movement, if you will? Like I always assumed if I do well, that I'll probably live to be somewhere between 85 and 102. And my hope is that my last five years, I like the Peter Atiyah thing, like what is the quality of your final decade? Right, right. Will be at least as vigorous as my dad's.

My dad's 80, gosh, he's 81, and he's doing great mentally, physically. He was a guest on this podcast, actually. He's a scientist. Yeah, it was, and so, but he's always been very, very moderate about his drinking. He'll have like a half glass of wine now and again. He just never ate too much.

He never exercised too much. He worked nine to five, nine to six, just consistently. But he never was a, you know, like burn the midnight oil type, but it's just his consistency is what's so impressive. So I think that might have something to do with it. But what are your thoughts on the economics of decision-making as it relates to live fast, die young,

versus be more monastic and try and live a very long time? Well, that's a personal preference, isn't it? So I, you know, and that kind of is, that's interesting because it maps onto concepts in ecology. They typically we use to describe different species which are like R selected and K selected. I don't know if you've heard of this before, but R selected are species that are limited

just by their pure reproductive rate. Think about weeds or rabbits, you know, something like that. And K selected are like oak trees and, you know, I don't know, whales. And humans are sort of like this mix, right? And so that's where we are very plastic and flexible. So in some environments, you can be more R selected, like especially if conditions are really not very favorable toward investing

in the long term, then it's kind of like kicking up your reproductive output. But if conditions can be favorable, right, that investment is worthwhile, then you can do that and be more like the whale or the oak tree or something like that. Now, yeah, you're right. I think that does map onto economics in a certain way

because certain people by virtue of what they know and what they have can invest in trying to live the longest, healthiest life. And other people who may not either have the wherewithal or the knowledge are going to be invested in surviving until the next day. Right? And so humans are sort of, you know, exist in that whole space in between.

My dad died at 55, so I lived him by two years. You know, so for me, every day is like gravy, but I also don't have this sense of a long time horizon, which is, you know, just being a little weirdly self, you know, just introspective may be, you know, part of my drive to like work a lot. And it might have served you well. I mean, I've read and listened to Steve Jobs's biographies

by Walter Isaacson several times, in part because I grew up seeing that stuff happening as I was born and raised in the South Bay and Steve used to come into the toy store slash skateboard shop that I worked at to get new roller blade wheels. And so like I would like see him around and see him at this little shop called Shady Lane,

which is like little trinkets and that, like he was around town a lot. And so then of course he became Steve Jobs, right? And he was Steve Jobs and he stayed Steve Jobs. But in that book he talked about, where it was talked about him that he, humans knowledge that we are going to die someday can be the ultimate motivator.

I mean, I think I look at some of the mistakes I made with, you know, bringing myself to places of physical risk in my life. And it's not like I thought I was immortal, but I didn't really have a good sense of time. And I think as I get older, I'm 49 now, so I can finally say that, I think my sense of the passage of time and mortality

is much more visible to me in my psychology. Yeah. So yeah, this is the ultimate time scale over which one has to make decisions. So actually let's talk about this. So if your dad died two years younger than you are now, do you have the assumption that you'll make it to a given age or are you just trying to maximize

on the day, the week, the month? What's your unit of time scale? So I think I did not anticipate, like 55 was a magic number for me, the double nickel, you know, like Michael Jordan. I didn't know what I would do or think about when I, if I got past that. And I got past it and I was like, okay, I got past it.

But now I'm confused, I guess. I mean, physically I showed no evidence of like rapid decline. No, you seem, you appear very healthy. Not just for your age, but you're like very physically fit, you're cognitively fit, clearly. So that started to, I think that I'm opening up and I'm trying to look at some wisdom that's out there

about like, hey, yeah, you know, probably got a lot of life ahead of me and if I keep doing what I'm doing, what do I want to do? That's another part of it. Because, probably because of focusing on that 55, and I'm like, oh God, everything that's come my way, every opportunity that's come my way,

I've taken it and I just keep adding. I don't subtract. We can talk about this. I keep adding more and more things. You can look at the diversity of papers that I've published or the other things that I'm doing, and it's just getting wider and wider, and I keep taking more things on

and reluctant to give anything up. But at some point, I think, that's not the recipe for success. There's gonna have to be some winnowing. And you know, okay, 57, so when's that gonna happen? I don't know, 62, 65, I mean, I don't plan on retiring although also that was like, wow, people in my family never got the chance to retire.

They didn't live long enough. But that's a short way to death though, I think too, and decline is like retiring if you don't do something else. Yeah. I might have a solution for you. Okay, good. Give it up. I've thought about this a ton.

Give it up. And I think about time perception constantly, and people can laugh because I'm always late, but that's because I'm really enveloped in whatever I was doing previously. Yeah. Like I'll be thinking about this conversation tonight and tomorrow morning when I wake up, for sure.

Right. Okay, a couple of reflections and then thinking about this conversation tonight and tomorrow morning when I wake up, for sure. Right. Okay, a couple of reflections and then ideas about this. So previous guest on this podcast, Josh Waitzkin, Grandmaster Chess Champion at a very young age, then realized at some point, started asking the question of whether or not his love for the game was gone or whether or not it was taken away from him. Was it the fame? Was it the, because a lot of things came to him young

when that around chess and he spent two years asking himself that question and then cut ties with chess forever, never picked up a chess piece again. But pivoted into martial arts, investing, pivoted into martial arts, investing, now foiling, you know, this like, yeah. But then had a near-death experience. He had a drowning event, survived fine, decided then to move his family down to Costa Rica where he now spends four and a half hours a day or more foiling, raising his sons.

That struck such a chord with me. I've been involved in a number of things. I don't want to make this about me, but early on it was like fish. I was obsessed with fish, then birds, then skateboarding, then firefighting, then eventually it was like neuroscience, and then now I do this.

And so I would say I've read a lot about people who need something to bite down into. They can't retire. And it seems to me, my informal read of this is that the ones that are happiest, who don't die young or in their 50s like Steve Jobs did, tend to be, for lack of a better way to describe it, kind of serial monogamous as it relates to their pursuits, which is the way I would describe myself. Like I'm, you know, like super into whatever it is professionally.

And then after about anywhere from five to 15 years, it's like done and kind of move forward some of the elements and the learnings from that into the next thing. But Josh Waitzkin is the ultimate example of this, of achieved like world champion status in multiple things. And then now seems very much to achieve world champion status at like family life. And he's got his economic and professional life

intact from the previous stuff, but also he's still involved. He coaches for the Celtics and he's not the head coach, but also he's still involved. He's, you know, like he coaches for the Celtics and he's not the head coach, but he coached and so on. So I feel like the serial monogamy version of this is the ultimate. And then the question is when to cut and pivot into the next thing.

But I'm not telling you not to go with bread. But I was looking over your CV and your papers and I was like, this is going to be a really interesting conversation because you have worked on a tremendous number of different things. Adding in more isn't the thing, but then again, maybe some of us are just designed to be involved

in a ton of different stuff, and your vigor is undeniable, right? Like you're super fit mentally and physically. So I don't know, I'm not going to tell you what to do. I offer Josh as an example of one extreme. You you're sort of at the other extreme I suppose and then And I suppose I'm kind of in the middle. So I think well, I've done a bit of that Over my career and the way that has happened is through external leadership

Opportunities not really opportunities. I was like, you need to do this. Or like, you know, so is you kind of, you know, broaden portfolios getting bigger, and then somebody says, I want you to direct this thing. And then I would say, well, then I have to, I have to cut some of this out, and then go back and narrow again. And then the problem is then I start to do this again,

and then okay, then I moved to, you know, Penn and Wharton, then I start to do this again and then okay then I moved to you know Penn and Wharton and I got the narrow again but now it's bigger than it ever has been so the question is like at some point does that just fall apart or can I I think intentionally you know at some point and maybe maybe some of those decisions you you know, the other thing one can do is just allow the universe to make some of those decisions for you, right? It might be the case that some of the research I do will not be fundable at some point, right? And then that decision is made for me. I know I have lots of other things I can do.

You know, we have, you know, for For example, if outside of the pure neuroscience, basic and clinical and technology development, we've got all this corporate facing work, funded work through Wharton, which is a totally new space, a new opportunity. So if one, I don't want it to be taken away, but if it is, then there's plenty left to do. Well, you're clearly one of the few people

that I'm aware of that is a true card-carrying research neuroscientist highly respected in the domain of real neuroscience, who's also involved in business school type stuff, and people on both sides of that take you really seriously because there's real rigor there and that vigor perhaps goes along with it. It's hard to know what's causal there. Which comes first.

Which comes first. But in any event, maybe we parse this over a coffee sometime. Apple and Samsung. Oh, Apple and Samsung. I'm an Apple guy. Me too. But I heard that the cameras on the Samsung phone. How much do you love your iPhone? How what's your loyalty? What's your brand loyalty for Apple? I grew up near the original Apple store. It was in

a different location. Gosh, I love Apple products. I don't like that they keep changing the port. I know. That's annoying. That's super annoying, but they seem to be hovering on USBC. I love the ease and simplicity. And yeah, I have a bit of a historical South Bay relationship to it. So yeah, I would say, could you get me to use a Samsung phone? Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, this is the interesting observation, like loyalty for, let's just talk about smartphones and Apple and Samsung are the dominant players in the US market. They're basically the same device. You know, I mean, they're, they're both little handheld computers

that can do a million things and amazing stuff. And yet the loyalty amongst the Apple users is through the roof. It's near 100% year in, year out. And that's not true for Samsung. Despite Steve Jobs passing away. Yeah, despite, I mean, it's just a legacy, right? But I think that reflects a lot of the design and the emphasis, I think, that he put into the product,

but also trying to understand it through the lens of the customer, right? So that's like an empathy. I mean, it really is empathy. This was one of the first questions I got when I came to business school. I was like, what the hell accounts for empathy for a brand? It's not a person or this connection.

Why don't I have loyalty to a thing that's not a human being? You know, a product and a brand, a company, right? What in the world is that all about? Doesn't make sense. And there's this idea in marketing that actually, and it makes sense, is that what's happening is we're applying, or we're getting leveraged,

the hardware in our brains that's used to connect to people, and now it's connecting to brands and to the brand community. And you could see that kind of in like the words we use to talk about brands for example that's a rugged brand the creative brand you know we use personality words to talk about them say I love my brand I hate that brand whatever and Steve understood this he talked about the Apple icon needing to look a certain way that it was like friendly but technically right but you know balance and this is the idea that objects or images could

look friendly when they weren't objects or images of faces or bodies is a very interesting concept. Yeah yeah so so we decided to test this idea so we brought people in lab we've done now like I don't know ten studies on this. We brought people in who are Apple or Samsung users. And the first experiment we did was a brain imaging experiment. And first we just asked all the standard marketing questions. How long have you had the product? How much do you love it?

What's your loyalty? What's your identification with it, et cetera? And it was equivalent, Apple and Samsung. They said the same things about their brands. OK, so now we bring them into the lab, put them in the MRI machine, and we're going to expose them to news bits about each of the two brands, like something good happened to Apple,

something bad happened to Apple or Samsung, et cetera. And we ask them to rate it. How do you feel? Good, neutral, bad, about that. And then we go through the whole thing, and we scan their brains, take pictures of what's going on in their brains. It was really interesting because what we found is that behaviorally, in terms of their

responses, they both expressed empathy for their brands, which hadn't been really measured before. I feel good for good news about my brand, bad for bad news about my brand. For Apple customers, they said, yeah, that's really true for Apple, but I don't feel so much about Samsung. Samsung customers said, yeah, I feel really strongly about my brand. Oh, and they had reverse empathy or schadenfreude for Apple, which is part of the story. So they felt really good when something bad happened to Apple, and they felt really bad

when something good happened to Apple. Talk about tribalism. That's tribalism right there. When you look at their brains, it's totally different. So in Apple, Apple customers show empathy in their brains for Apple. You get activation of areas that are active for reward for myself, reward for my kid winning spelling bee for good news, and the extended pain network, pain for me,

pain for my loved one. For things that happen to Apple, if I'm an Apple customer, it's silent for Samsung. You look at Samsung users, you know, customers, and if you're the CMO of Samsung, you should be worried because they show absolutely nothing, no feelings towards anything that happened to Samsung. The only thing you see is this schadenfreude, this reverse empathy. So you see like pain for good news about Apple and joy for bad news about Apple. So the first take-home message is it's all about Apple. Like Apple customers choose Apple because they love Apple and they want to be part

of something bigger and I'll get to that in a second. And Samsung users choose Samsung because they don't they hate Apple. So that's sort of that. Where they hate winners. They hate winners. Whatever. There's a whole thing. They don't want to be part of the community They don't want something bigger than themselves There is something to in our data that essentially Apple is like kind of like a cult you could say it's a family I would say it's the dominant culture now though. Yeah, they're not the niche like thing Samsung's the niche thing Yeah, right there. Yeah. Well, what's happening? What's really fascinating now is that, and this is by virtue of things that Apple, smart things

Apple has done to reinforce this sense of in-group, be part of that community, like the, you know, the green text bubble thing. So now it's like 91% of teenagers are choosing Apple over Samsung because they don't want to be left out. They don't want to be ostracized. Now we talked about synchrony before, and synchrony is this marker of community and closeness, and we're all on the same team. So we used EEG to measure brain waves

in people while they're, in a number of conditions, while they're getting news about Apple and Samsung, also while they're watching the commercials, you remember that spectacular Apple commercial where they crushed all those beautiful instruments and whatnot and turned into an iPad or whatever and then there was the Samsung response to that.

So we measured EEG activity and what we found is that Apple people are all in sync with each other. Their brains are humming along at the exact same rhythm. To news of the world, to ads about Apple, and each Samsung person is like an island unto themselves. They're just not in sync at all. These are like the incels of technology. You said it.

I didn't say it. Probably going to catch a lot of black for this. But look, the data is the data. And so Apple's this sort of extended family and they're all in sync with each other right there like they're like a real team and And you don't see that in in Samsung so Apple people are seeing the world through similar eyes right and feeling similar things and Beyond that I things. And beyond that, I said, well, this is all true. Maybe it's a question of now, like, are Apple people wired that way, you know, at birth, in a sense, you know, or how

much what's the balance of like, what, who they are versus what Apple has done, you know, through their marketing and design activities, I can't do that experiments really hard, but when we looked at the structural MRI data, we found something really interesting, which is the parts of the brain that are really intimately involved in managing our social relationships. So the parts that are involved in theory of mind and empathy.

So those are physically larger in Apple people than in Samsung people. They're physically larger in monkeys, monkeys who have more friends, those same brain areas are bigger than monkeys who have fewer friends. Please tell me you've run this on politically leaning left versus politically leaning right. So we started to do that experiment and then the pandemic hit. So we haven't gotten nice excuse. It is, I know it's an excuse. We haven't gotten that back off. I'm just kidding. No, it's true. I would be too afraid to run that experiment. Not because I'd be concerned about the results or what people would say if I shared the result, but here's why. I feel like when I was growing up,

it was like, if you were a rebel, you were associated with anything like indie music, punk rock, like you were associated with like hip hop, anything that was kind of outside the mainstream, which at the time, this was like the 80s and 90s, we had a mix of Republican and Democrat governments at that time, you know, depending on which four year segment we're talking about. But there was this idea that like,

if you liked anything about the government, you know, you're, this is kind of the carry over, I think from the post, from the Vietnam era and the post Vietnam era, that if you liked anything associated with government, that you were a conformist. And if you didn't, you were an iconoclast, right? Now I feel like it's become very issue specific, right?

Like who's in power, basically, that the party, like politics has, it was always split into two. It used to be you agree with the establishment or you don't agree with the establishment. Now, it's like depending on who's in power, people say, well, they're the establishment. So it's like the game has changed. It's sort of subdivided itself and changed.

And so if one were to run the experiment of kind of like affiliation, I would assume my prediction would be that within the right, there's a lot of affiliation. Within the left, there's a lot of affiliation. But that you wouldn't necessarily see a difference in terms of activation of affiliative neural circuitry. It depends on with whom they're sitting. Absolutely.

Which is very different than the phone situation that the Samsung versus Apple thing is a lot more like when I was growing up. And it's complicated because what used to be niche and rebellious inevitably becomes mainstream. Like I remember the movie, Revenge of the Nerds. Of course. Which of course was about like the nerds being marginalized

and then being like the popular ones And and on and on everything was like a John Hughes film jocks versus, you know rockers versus, you know nerds versus Things really blended together for you know, 20 years or so and then now it's very divided along the lines of politics Yeah, whereas before it was politics of versus Non-conformists right now it's like, depends on which can't like literally what color you're wearing. It's like gang warfare. It's like blues versus reds. And so- Jets and sharks. Jets and sharks. So it feels very like the experiment. That's why I'd be afraid to run

the experiment. I wouldn't know how to design the experiment. Yeah, I mean I think, well it would be interesting just at the outset to demonstrate that, like a very easy way to elicit these sort of empathy signals is like just create a video that's fake is what something a former postdoc of mine did in some studies. You just like a fake needle stick to the cheek.

And you get, you know, generally, this sort of activation of empathy signals in the brain, but it tends to be tribal specific or ethnic group specific, which is like, even though people say, I feel just as much pain for these two different people, the brain signals, which we know are what actually predicts what you'll do next. It predicts your behavior.

The brain signals are specific to within your group. So I think that was in fact the experiment we were gonna do, which is like, people are gonna be, we'll have these videos of like, proud Republican or proud Democrat, whatever you wanna say on the hat, and then they're getting stuck with a needle, and then we ask you what you feel

and then we measure your brain activity. And I think it would be obviously very highly specific. You might say you feel pain for that person who's from the other political party. Maybe you wouldn't now anymore. Maybe you'd be like, yay. You see a lot of, yeah gosh, you see a lot of people take enjoyment

and other people's suffering when the person's suffering is sort of perceived by a lot of others as a winner. Yeah, we saw that with the fires with rich people's houses burning down and a lot of people piling on. Oh yeah, you know. Well, the media was very skewed there.

Like we were hearing about people's, you know. Well, the media was very skewed there. Like we were hearing about people's, you know, first of three homes burning. And that's hard for people that have very little. At the same time, you know, for anyone experiencing loss, it's loss. Yeah. That's a tough one. It's tough.

It's a tough one. Yeah. Man, this conversation has given me a ton more to think about, which means it's a great conversation. I have to say, you know, in our business of research science, there's that term, you know, he or she is a serious scientist. I feel like there are very, very few serious scientists

doing experiments in the real world or trying to map to the real world. I probably just offended about 300 scientists, but hey, listen, we only have a limited number of guests we can bring on here anyways. I know I'm just kidding. There are others certainly, but I have to just applaud you for the range of things

that you've embraced and taken on at the level of neural, anthropologic, sociologic, psychology, like endocrinology. This is a big field that you're trying to get your arms around, a big set of questions. And yet it's clear you are serious scientists. You do like real experiments with isolating variables and all the necessary controls that are required

to really tease out mechanism and larger themes. So, whereas a few minutes ago, we were talking about maybe you taking it on less. I'm not, I would say, first of all, who am I to tell you what to do? Second of all, and I'm not, hope I didn't give that impression. And first of all, who am I to tell you what to do? Second of all, and I'm not, hope I didn't give that impression. And second of all, like what a service

to the world you're doing, because certainly in researching for this podcast, and even with guests, you know, oftentimes it's really a struggle to try and figure out how to talk to someone who's really down at the level of mechanism, who's not working on small animal models, or even if they are, how to map that to everyday experience.

And today, we've been talking about potential mate valuation, meme coins, politics, hierarchies, decision-making, timescales, all through the lens of real serious science. So first of all, thank you so much for coming here and spending these hours with us, educating us. And first of all, thank you so much for coming here and spending these hours with us, educating us. And right alongside that, thank you for doing the work that you're doing. It's really spectacular. I knew we were going to get into a number of these things, but I didn't really

anticipate just how much it was going to geyser out of this in terms of changing my way of thinking. And I'm certain that's changing the way that other people are thinking now and are going to think about their decisions and just kind of themselves and the world. I'd be very grateful if you'd come back again and talk to us about the next round of amazing experiments before too long. Well, I would love that. And thanks for having me. And this has been a really stimulating conversation.

I've enjoyed it. There is a lot more that we could cover, which would be super fun. Surely, and your endurance is something to behold. Thank you. Please do come back again. Thank you for the work that you're doing. We will provide links to all the resources

and places to find out more about your book, the work that you're doing and some of these tests that you were talking about earlier, where they go beyond like standard personality tests so that people can answer those critical questions about where they are, you know, perhaps best placed in the landscape between creativity and, you know, strategy implementation in a different way.

So thanks so much. This was a real thrill for me. Thank you. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Michael Platt. To learn more about Dr. Platt's work and to find links to his books, please see the show note captions.

If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us. In addition, please click follow for the podcast on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast

or guests or topics you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comment section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. For those of you that haven't heard,

I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled, Protocols, an operating manual for the human body. This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years, and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience. And it covers protocols for everything from sleep, to exercise, to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation. And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation

for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by presale at protocolsbook.com. There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called, protocols an operating manual for the human body. If you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms.

So that's Instagram X, formerly known as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and threads. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the content on the Huberman Lab podcast.

Again, that's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. And if you haven't already subscribed to our neural network newsletter, the neural network newsletter is a zero cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries, as well as what we call protocols in the form of one to three page PDFs

that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize dopamine, deliberate cold exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training. All of that is available completely zero cost. You simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab in the top right corner,

scroll down to newsletter and enter your email. And I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Michael Platt. And last, but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.