The Joe Rogan Experience - #1513 - Andrew Huberman

Episode Date: July 23, 2020

Andrew Huberman is a neuroscientist and tenured professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He has made numerous important contributions to the fields of brain development, brain plasticity, and neural regeneration and repair.

Andrew, how are you? What's happening, man? Doing great. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Really excited to talk to you about this. Just sort of for an introduction, tell people what you do. So I'm a neuroscientist, meaning I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology, Stanford School of Medicine. So I run a laboratory. I teach a little bit. I teach neuroanatomy to medical students, but mainly my lab does research. So I've got students and postdocs

and we're trying to figure out the answers to two problems. The first problem is how to regenerate the damaged nervous system, in particular, the connections between the eye and the brain to restore vision to the blind. So that's a big mission of ours, and to prevent vision loss in people that are losing their vision. And the other thing that we're doing is we're focusing a lot on stress and other states of mind. So I'm obsessed with the idea that all our states of mind come from the brain and the body. And we're trying to figure out what happens in the brain and body when we're stressed and how to control it. What happens in the brain and body when we are creative and how to control it. And essentially for all states of mind. But rather

than try and tackle the really high level stuff like flow and states of awe, we're really focused on these states of stress and things like focus and the ability to think clearly and do certain things athletically or cognitively. Because first of all, there's a lot of suffering. There are a lot of people out there that are suffering from an inability to control their states of mind. And also there's great potential for people who aren't suffering to be able to create and perform and do better things once we can understand how those states come about. That's an interesting way of putting it, suffering because they can't control their states of mind. That is the case, but that's not like a politically correct way of describing it. I guess I never thought about that.

Would that be accurate? Well, I think it's fair to say that all our states of mind and body – and I never thought about that. Would that be accurate? Well, I think it's fair to say that all our states of mind and body, and I say mind and body because the nervous system, which is the brain, the spinal cord and all that stuff, it connects to our body and our body connects to our brain. So we can't really separate those. But states of mind, which include the stuff in our skull and the body, those essentially dictate our whole life experience, right? So whether or not we're feeling calm when we want to be calm, whether or not we're feeling stressed when we'd rather be calm, whether or not we are feeling focused when we need to do work, or whether or not we're feeling

creative when we want to be creative, all of that stems from the nervous system. The other organs of the body are involved, but the nervous system, the brain and those connections, it's really what it's about. So if you see somebody who's in a state of depression, or you see somebody who's in a state of flow and creativity, you can be pretty sure that that's reflecting the activity of neurons in the brain. It's the idea that the body and the brain are inseparable. Most people who are physically active, accept that and appreciate that. And they know that this is probably true. But there's a lot of people that kind of want to deny that and concentrate only on the brain. And particularly, like, there's psychiatrists that will prescribe medication before they'll prescribe exercise.

And this is, it's a controversial subject. That's what I meant by saying, like're, you are unable to control aspects of, of, of your brain or aspects of the way you're viewing things or the way you feel about things. But. Yeah. So I think if we take a step back and we just kind of think about what the brain and nervous system does, and again, nervous system includes all of it. We can say the brain is special, right? This brain, there is something fundamentally important about the brain part because somebody who, let's say, has a limb amputated, it doesn't fundamentally change who they are. It can change what they can do, and there will be aspects of their personality and temperament that might shift, but who they are hasn't changed. Whereas if someone has a brain lesion where their brain is degenerating, that person is fundamentally different.

So there is something special about the real estate in our skulls. But that said, the job of the brain is really to combine our experience of what's going on in our body with what's going on in our mind, and to react and behave to things in an adaptive way. So if I may, there's just sort of like, if we take a step back and just think there are basically five things that the nervous system is responsible for doing. First is sensation. Sensation is non-negotiable. It's happening all the time. Sound waves are coming in. Your feet are in contact with your shoes or the floor. That's all happening. And you can't control it because we have sensors, things in our eye, our tongue, our nose, our skin, our ears that take physical events in the universe. Photons of light, sound waves, touch,, that take physical events in the universe, photons of light,

sound waves, touch, you know, physical pressure on the skin. And it transforms that into one language. And the language is the language of electricity of neurons. Now, perception is the next thing that the brain does. And perception is all about which sensations we are conscious of. So if I say, you know, the contact of your hands with the table, now you're conscious of it. That's just your perceptual window.

It's like a spotlight. It just goes straight to your hands. So there's sensation, perception, and then there are these things we call emotions, which are brain-body states. They tend to make us either want to get up and move or stay still. They tend to make us think, this is a good place for me to be at mentally and physically, or I want to shift this. And then there are thoughts, which we could

discuss in detail if you want, which kind of arise spontaneously. They're kind of running in the background all the time, like pop-up windows on a badly filtered internet connection. But we can also deliberately have a thought. Like I can say that pad of paper to my right is yellow. I can decide that. In the same way, I can do the fifth thing, which is an action. So you've got sensations, perceptions, feelings slash emotions, thoughts and actions. And all five of those include the brain and the body. But how much brain and how much body is shifted by a kind of underlying, let's just think of it as a tide, like the level of the tide, and that's the autonomic nervous system. So if I'm suddenly stressed for whatever reason, my perceptual window is going to shift. My eyes are literally going to change their focus.

My world will become more like portrait mode. I'll see you and everything else will become blurry. When I'm calm, I actually have panoramic vision. I can see everything around me. So my state, my internal state of alertness or sleepiness impacts all this. And in sleep, which is kind of the opposite extreme of stress, I'm not in relation to anything outside me. I'm not perceiving anything. I'm sensing things. It's non-negotiable. I'm not having real thoughts, but the thoughts are kind of disoriented in space and time.

And behavior is done. You're lying down. You're sometimes down. You're sometimes paralyzed in sleep. So when I say states, it's really about this dynamic shift between what we're perceiving and how we're perceiving it. And we could go really in depth in this or not, but states of mind are fundamentally, I think, to me anyway, are the most important aspect of trying to understand how the brain works. Because ultimately, if you want to understand mental illness and mental health, if you want to understand high performance, which is something my lab is really interested in, if you want to understand any of that, you have to

understand how these states of mind and body relate. Because the autonomic nervous system, which is strongly impacting these states, is in the body. The is, the basis of it is connections between the brain and body. So you're analyzing people in stress states and are you doing cognitive function tests on these people in stress states versus people in calm, placid states? Like how are you, how are you doing? Are you doing like similar tests or? Yeah. So there are two states that, like we can take that whole tangle of mess that I just, you know, threw out on the table and simplify it and say, look, there are two states that I think if we could really crack, we could really understand the underlying neural mechanisms and we could understand how people could get themselves

into these two states. We would greatly improve human health and human performance cognitively and physically. Okay. And those two states are the state of sleep. So not just the importance of sleep. I know you had Matt on here. So you're a great sleep researcher. Not just that sleep is important, but how to get better at sleeping, how to access sleep. So a lot of people struggle with that. And the other state is clear, calm, focused. Those two states for my lab right now are the target states. There's so many states, but if we can figure out how those work and how to allow people to put themselves into those states, I think it's my belief that we'll do humankind a great service.

Okay. So when you say sleep, the state of sleep, like what techniques are you talking about to achieve the state of sleep or do a better job of sleeping? Yeah. So when people come into my laboratory, we essentially start pressure testing them from the moment they walk in the door. So we have a laboratory, we do some animal work, we work on mice, and we study states like fear and courage. And we're interested in what leads to winning in certain forms of competition between animals and these kinds of things, aggression, those kind of very primal states. We also have a human lab. So people come into the laboratory. We have an equivalent lab essentially to our mouse lab. People put on VR

goggles. We wire them into a lot of gear that allows us to measure things like heart rate, breathing. We're measuring pupil size, eye tracking. And in some people, because they are neurosurgery patients, we have access to the brain. We drop electrodes down into the brain, record from the human amygdala. So you have a hole in their head? They have a hole in their skull. The neurosurgeons actually, which I am not, tell us that, you know, it's no big deal, right? That, you know, that basically they look at the skull as kind of a poorly evolved device. They always tell me, you tell me you're much better off with a titanium plate there anyway. It's much stronger. So they don't have a problem putting a little hole in the skull.

These are patients that have other issues, right? They're saying you're better off with a titanium plate than skull bone? Well, if you're concerned about concussion or anything, if you really want to protect the brain, you could build a better device to protect the brain. But isn't the real brain damage comes from the brain slamming against the inside wall of the skull? Yeah. How is that going to be better with titanium? Yeah. I mean this is neurosurgeons and they're – There's some foam inside the –

Yeah. There are synthetic materials that they use to protect against sloshing around. Do they – how much – how far do they go with this? Do they ever remove the top of someone's head and replace it with titanium? Yeah, large portions, large windows. I've seen windows in the skull that are the size of an iPhone. What? Yeah, sure.

You don't flip it open. Oh, no. No, but now keep in mind that these are- Like a lid, a manhole cover for your brain? Basically. Really? Is that available online? Can Jamie look that up?

He's looking at it already. Well, you know, a guy who used to work in my lab who's now at Neuralink, a neurosurgeon. Oh, one of those guys. One of those guys. Ready to fucking bring on the AI hyper world. I'm scared. Among other things. I mean, I think that, well, I always say, you know, all of human evolution is based on human neuroplasticity,

the ability to learn and acquire new functions in the nervous system or where our biology kind of cliffs off and can't support us in what we want to do. We build technology. Right. And this is the idea. Innovation steps in and says, I've got an idea to accelerate this process. And then you get Captain Super Genius, who thinks it's no big deal, cut giant holes in the top of your head and stick these wires in there. I mean, I think there's that version of it. And I think what – I haven't spoken to them directly, except this one individual there. But, you know, first of all, they're not – I don't think they're thinking about large windows in the skull unless there's a clinical need.

They're talking about behind the ear. Elon said it's about a quarter. Behind the ear. Yeah. The route in through the bone there. quarter. Behind the ear, the route in through the bone there. And the other thing is that I think it's very likely that the first 10 years of that work will be clinical in nature, movement disorders, Parkinson's, you know, and of course, because I said that they'll probably beat that by, you know, five years. Well, the quote that made me uncomfortable was when Elon

told me, you're not going to have to talk to communicate anymore. I was like, Oh, Jesus Christ, where are we going with this? Steve McLaughlin Well, this is interesting because, so I have a good friend who's a neurosurgeon at UCSF. We've known each other since we were little kids, since we were nine. His name is Eddie Chang and he's kind of the world expert. He's a neurosurgeon, but he's also the world expert in speech and language. And what he's been doing is decoding, essentially figuring out what neural signals come out

of the brain that allow us to speak in a certain way. So let's say I wanted to build a device that would allow you to speak eight languages tomorrow that you don't know today. The reflexive idea is that people like Eddie and people like me and maybe the Neuralink folks are going to go in and build chips that are going to stimulate the hippocampus and you're going to learn faster and do all that. But there's a whole other version of this. And it gets right back to this issue of brain and body that we were talking about before. Now, speech is a brain thing. You think about what you want to say, maybe for a joke or here, and it's in your head.

But it's transformed, meaning those nerve signals go in the form of electricity to the pharynx and larynx. And you say things like, hello, my name is, you know, in my case, Andrew, right? That transformation is happening at the muscle. So in theory, if I know that in English, right, and I know the nerve signals that come out of that area of cortex, that speech area, that say, hello, my name is Andrew. Well, I can take those, look at how it controls the pharynx and larynx, and insert maybe a little box. Maybe I don't even have to put it under the skin. Maybe it's a device that I hold. So that when I say, hello, my name is Andrew, but I dial it to Mandarin or French, I'll just say, and I can't do this because I don't speak Mandarin or French. Hello, my name is Andrew. I'll think that, say it in English in my head, but my pharynx and larynx will say it in Mandarin or French.

But isn't the problem with the way language is structured in different languages? Like just it wouldn't – I'm sure you've read translations from like Russian to English. Sure. It's really weird. Very different. Or English to Russian is even weirder sometimes. Right. So this is really Eddie's work.

But because we're such good friends, we talk about this a lot. One of the fundamental discoveries that he's made – and I should just mention all these neurosurgery patients, they have epilepsy or something else. There's a reason for opening up the skull and going in there. They're not, we're not just, just curious. There was a time a couple of decades ago when you could do this kind of stuff. And there's some very interesting experiments that came out of that just because you could decide to study rage in humans and go in there and start probing around. Um, but lobotomies, yeah, there's a, obviously really interesting and famous and kind of sad history around that, but also mean, lobotomies. Yeah. There's a, obviously really interesting and famous and kind of sad history around that, but also some interesting data came out of it. So,

you know, a patient will come in, they'll do this, they'll record these areas and what, what he's found. It's so interesting because if I, let's just say with that same statement, hello, my name is Andrew. There's a neuron in my cortex that responds when I say that and when I want to say that. But if I just change it slightly and I say, hello, my name is Andrew, I make it a question, there's a neuron right next door that encodes that. Turns out there's a map of inflection. So regardless of language, there's a map of, it's not quite meaning, but there's a map of intonation and inflection in the brain. So in theory, because that map is so regular across cultures, he's looked now in Chinese-speaking people, in English-speaking people, and people who have a second language. He even has some interesting data about people who have up-speak.

They're really annoying. Oh, I hate that shit. Yeah. That's a lot near where you live. Yeah. That's a lot near where you live. Yeah. That's a San Francisco tech thing. Is it?

Yeah. It's like what they're doing is letting you know that they're one of the tribe. Okay. And we're all in this together. And I think like you do. And you can trust me because I'm an original. Well, it might reflect a subtle brain damage. You think?

I think the data show that it's a distortion of the regular map. I think it's the same thing as a Southern accent. I think you're just fitting in with your environment. Because I know people that have adopted that shit once they've gotten into the tech world. I'm like, hey, fuckface, you didn't used to talk like that. Or the people that go to England and start speaking with a British accent. Oh, like Madonna. Oh, did she do that?

Yes, she did. I don't follow pop culture carefully enough. Yes, she did. Yeah. I'm moving to Texas. I'm going to start saying y'all two weeks in. I'm giving myself two weeks. I'm going to try out y'all. Interesting.

Well, some of this stuff is learned. Are you moving? Yes. Oh, you are? I've heard rumors of that, but I guess, okay. Sorry to hear, sorry for California. Congratulations, Texas. There, you know, these maps have some regularities across people because when we're born into the world, you know, we are not a completely clean slate.

There's a kind of a map that expects the world, including language, to be a certain way. And we can't expect that we're going to be born in China or born in France or born in California or Northern California for that matter. So the map is what we call semi-malleable. It's not a rigid, concrete, hardwired map. So what makes you think that this upspeak is like damage? Well, so I asked Eddie about this. Eddie? Chang, my friend, this neurosurgeon who is, you know, kind of premier world, not kind

of, he is the world expert on speech and language and the neural transformations and how it controls the pharynx, all that stuff. And I said, what's with the upspeak thing? He said, yeah, you know, we see that sometimes, and I'm concerned about that. And when a neurosurgeon tells you they're concerned, you kind of go, okay, what are you concerned about? He goes, there's something wrong with the map. And this is kind of, you know, so maybe that's, you's – it could be because of upbringing and people – the brain is plastic as adults too and not in the same way it's plastic in childhood. But if you are forced to learn another language, your brain will fundamentally shift. Neuroplasticity.

You know, in the 70s and 80s, and my actually scientific great grandparents, David Hubel and Torrenson Wiesel, won the Nobel Prize for showing there are critical periods, these periods of development after which the brain cannot change. And they had important implications for amblyopia and eye stuff. Merzenich came along and said, you know what, I don't buy that. And he started doing experiments with his students and postdocs where they would create an essential need or contingency. Like if the animal doesn't eat

unless it learns something, then the brain can change. If you break down learning events into kind of smaller, more focused events, the brain can change as an adult at essentially any age. And so the strongest drive for adult neuroplasticity is focus. It's the ability to say, this is really important. It's making a soda straw view of the world. It's almost like being in a state of stress.

really important. It's making a soda straw view of the world. It's almost like being in a state of stress. And the best way to do that for a young person in adolescence, or maybe even older, is the social pressures. If they're strong, they will shape and rewire the brain. I mean, I look at what's happening in the world right now, and I think we are in a state of immense neuroplasticity. Everybody is having to rewire their understanding of what's going on. So just to sort of put a, you know, kind of a bow of some sort on the speech and language thing, I don't think brain machine interface is going to be all about sticking chips in the head. But still, let's get back to the upspeak thing. Why does he think it's damage? Like, what is it about upspeak? Well, he just thinks that the map, which shows up kind of normally in – I mean most – this is probably the first time in human history people have used this up speak.

It's also the first time in human history people have typed with their thumbs. I was listening to two guys at the airport back when you can go to the airport. And these two guys at the airport were talking in up speak. And it was like as clear as day to me. Like they were letting each other know that they're in the tribe. Like as clear as day to me, like they were letting each other know that they're in the tribe. And, you know, I remember Jamie had a tech problem once and he was on the phone with this lady who was doing up speak when she was talking to him. And we both looked at each other like, ew, yuck.

It does kind of create a kind of visceral, like, like nauseous. I can't trust those people. I can't trust someone who talks like that because I know you're unoriginal like you not not what not what most of us are Clearly at least Mostly influenced by the people around us, but it's not just that it's like you've changed How you talk to fit in with this? There's a tech world. There's tech language. That's tech speak It's English, but it's tech speak English. It's letting you know. And there does seem to be a body response too.

There's a thing to it. There's sort of a spinal extensor. I don't trust them. I don't trust them. I think they're sneaky. Well, I'll try and get the data from Eddie. I'm being halfway joking here. If you're like an upspeak person, like, hey, man, I've always loved your show.

But then you said you don't trust people who talk like me. Joking. But also, stop doing that. Stop fucking doing that. I know what you're doing. I think Eddie would say that there's some distortion in the way they're using this map. But how did it start? I think it started with one really smart person who's probably a little autistic who talked like that because they

were trying to keep it together and then everyone else was like i want to be as smart as john and then they started talking like that and then it became a thing sort of like accents like i grew up in boston right they talk in a weird way and i i picked it up and then one time i heard myself on television i heard myself talk like that when i was 19 i was like oh my god i sound like a fucking idiot what is wrong with me like because i had only lived there at that time for like six years but i adopted it whole hog and i was like what what's wrong with me like why am i i wanted to fit in that's what it was i'd moved there when i was 13 and i tried to fit in and so i had adopted this speech pattern i didn't realize it until i heard it like you know you listen to a tape of yourself.

You actually find out what you really sound like. You're like, ew. Do you watch your performances these days? I have to watch stand-up. I have to watch some of those. Podcast, I try not to unless it's important, unless it's like something that I need to watch over again. Like I'll probably listen to this one over again because you're probably going to things that are, you already have that I need to reflect on and research. And, you know, this is a very interesting subject to me. It's very important to me.

And there's many different parts of this that I wanted to talk to you about, particularly how people respond to damaged brains and what can be done to repair damaged brains and, uh, stress. And what we're talking about earlier, states of stress and how they reflect on your ability to think and assess and, and, and resolve problems. Because it seems to me that me personally, um,

if I'm tired, if I'm like particularly working out, right? Like, uh, if I'm working out with like a, like a Muay Thai trainer and he has like a particular combination that he wants me to do if I'm exhausted it's like

my monkey brain can't put that combination together I'm like what do I do again left right low kick body knee to the body elbow clinch like what is it again? Like it's simple. It's very simple, right? But if I'm tired, it's not simple anymore So what's going on? Like why why? Does being tired have an effect on the way you perceive things and what memory and? Combinations of things that you have to put together and that's nothing that's just being tired That's not your life depending upon it, which is a huge factor. And for fighters, there are many, many fighters who do really well in the gym when there's no pressure. They're comfortable.

You look at them. You're like, wow, that guy's incredibly skillful. He must be incredible. Like when he fights, he must be amazing. Then you see him fight and they just lock up. Like for whatever reason, they can't rise to the occasion. They are dwarfed by the moment. And whatever it is, whether it's the way they're perceiving these threats,

the way their mind is just wired, or the way they have learned to handle situations. Maybe they have a series of bad memories that gets relayed every time they're in a situation and they start concentrating more on failure than on staying calm and trusting the process, which is a big factor. Your training is supposed to come out almost in a Zen-like state. And when you're fighting, the whole idea is to maintain calm and maintain this sort of center as much as possible and when someone's pressuring you and Attacking you and talking shit to you in particular what they're trying to do is weaken that center What they're trying to do is break that up, so you can't have a happy place There's no happy place for you, and then you see people fall apart

You see them fold and it's fascinating because it's not a physical thing like the the physical body is still capable of performing But there's something going on with stress where the brain can't send the orders to the body correctly. And you're so overwhelmed with anxiety or fear of failure or just the overwhelming reality of the consequences of making a mistake that you crumble. Yeah. Well, this is why we're obsessed with clear, common focus or sleep as a good jumping off point for, you know, because we eventually want to tackle all the states, but that's a good jumping off point. We're jumping all over the place, but let's get it.

We started with sleep. So let's get back to sleep. So sleep and stress make a good sort of counter examples. So, but if we're just going to focus on sleep, first of all, sleep is the only time that you're in complete relation to only one thing, and that's yourself. It's also a time in which there's a core operation of the brain in wakefulness. It's especially apparent in stress, but it's happening all the time, where your brain is trying to do two things in wakefulness. And I realize we're talking about sleep. time, where your brain is trying to do two things in wakefulness. And I realize we're talking about sleep, but most of what your brain is trying to do is pass things off to reflexive behavior. So I

don't have to think about picking up water. I don't have to think about walking down the hall. I just do it. I just breathe. I just move. I eat. I'm not conscious of it. There's another mental operation, which is very demanding, but extremely important. and this is encompassing a lot of different aspects of neural circuitry and function but the brain wants to figure out duration path and outcome how long something going to last what's the path to do it and how is it going to work out those are the two things that the brain is mainly managing during waking states and of course it's keeping your heart rate going and your breathing going, your digesting going, but that's all running in the background. When you go to sleep, your perception of space and time, not outer space, unless that's what

you're thinking about, but space and time becomes untethered. It becomes very fluid. So when you lie down to go to sleep at night and you're drowsy you stop doing these duration path outcome analyses and if you have trouble sleeping it's because you're still doing what's the duration what's the path what's the outcome your brain's looping in that so when you go into sleep it's the one time in which the brain can untether space and time like if this were a dream you know your dog could float in here and sit down on the table and then morph into somebody that you know from long ago. And we'd be okay with that because it was a dream. So that period of six to eight or ten hours, whatever you need, is essential for resetting neural circuits in the brain.

There's some chemical events too, but neural circuits so that during wakefulness, you can do duration path outcome, like learning a new martial art move. So it's the untethered aspect of it is crucial. It's absolutely crucial. And how do we know this? We know this. So when people come into my lab, we study these two states. We put them into VR goggles and we deliver very real, not cartoons and animation, but very real 360 video of things like claustrophobia, if you're claustrophobic, diving with great white sharks, if you don't like sharks, spiders crawling up you, we find your pain point. We bring you into a state of stress. And we find in everybody, and this is not necessarily a new phenomenon, that your pupils

dilate. When your pupils dilate, the optics of your world changes, and you are looking at the visual world, which is space, physical space, and you start slicing time differently. If you've ever been stressed, it feels like things are taking forever. That's because your body is sending your brain more signals per unit time. It's saying, like, my body's active, my body's active, my body's active, my body's active, my body's active. Think about when you're drowsy, your body is sending fewer signals to the brain per unit time. And what ends up happening is the brain uses physical space and use these signals from the body. We know this from neural recordings to start creating a space-time relationship. The space-time relationship really says, let's just take the jujitsu example, even though I've never done jujitsu. You're trying to figure

out where do I place my hand? Where's my grip? How do I move my leverage? What am I going to do when you're trying to sequence thing? It's duration, path, and outcome. In sleep, the forebrain essentially shuts off. There's some other things that happen too, of course. And the brain starts to drift and idle into these states where duration path and outcome analyses become impossible. We also put people into deeply relaxed states. So we're studying three different ways to do that. One is hypnosis, which is not like charm hypnosis, stage hypnosis, but medical hypnosis. My colleague David Spiegel in the Department of Psychiatry is kind of world expert in hypnosis for pain management, et cetera, trauma. You can put people into hypnotic states, which are very sleep-like. They're a little different than sleep, but they're like a shallow stage of sleep.

We also use particular patterns of breathing or respiration to bring people into states that are sort of like sleep. It's like a very shallow level of sleep, but they're completely immobile. Or in some cases, we've studied things like more traditional forms of meditation, although that's less the focus these days. What we find is that the brain can go into states where duration, path, and outcome, cognitive processing, physical activity is impossible, and the brain starts to show wave-like activity that's very similar to sleep. And what I didn't tell you is that we also have

people do a cognitive task. So while they're in a very stressful environment, like with heights, or they're being bombarded with snake experience, or we have a bunch of different experiences, they're required to do a cognitive task, which is a duration path outcome task. And then we put them into these states of pseudo sleep. And then we evaluate their ability to perform in these tasks again. And what we found is interesting. What we found is that first of all, these sleep-like states can be very restorative. I imagine that you mentioned the float tank earlier, like maybe float tanks. And we could talk about why the float tank would put you into a pseudo sleep-like state. Certain substances put us into sleep-like states.

Naps and just letting the mind drift can put us into sleep-like states. And those sleep-like states do two things that are very powerful. One is they reset our ability to do these very taxing, demanding duration path outcome kind of brain functions. As well, they allow people to access sleep more easily. So we want people to be able to get into deep sleep because nothing is as restorative as deep sleep because in deep sleep and in the states that I'm talking about, these deeply relaxed states, duration path outcome analyses are impossible.

And I think being able to toggle back and forth between these states is really where high performance emerges. So for the very stressed human being who's suffering from generalized anxiety, we study those types of patients. But in addition, for people who are doing well in life, but are high performers, so we do some work with elite military, with some athletes. We've had David Goggins out to the lab. We talk about it. You can't use him. You can't use him. So he's an extreme outlier, right? He's too far on the outside.

So what's remarkable about him is he has figured out how to tap into, he can force himself into duration path outcome. Now, I don't know his state while he's running, if he's relaxed, if he's aggro the whole time, I don't know. But he is a bit of a mutant in the sense that, but he's created, in his words, he's created. He's turned himself into that mutant. He's figured it out. He's figured it out. He was not born that way. We know that. Well, that's the most special thing about him, really, is that, and also that he's willing to share that he was, at one point in time, a large, fat, lazy guy, you know, and then he became this savage that you see. He forced his

mind into that particular state. Well, and the states that will allow people to go there often are fear states, anxiety states, things that are extremely high pressure because the adult brain especially doesn't want to change. You know, we're basically born, we get wired up by our experience, we get wired up by what we're exposed to. Brain plasticity is very passive for the first 25 years of life. You know, if you're a child, the things you hear and see and do are shaping you, right? Kids come home saying things they've never even heard before. It's amazing. And as an adult, you have to crack into that neural circuitry and reshape it. And as an adult, you have to crack into that neural circuitry and reshape it. But why is that?

What is it about adults? Because I have my own theory, and this is just a martial arts-based theory. Young kids learn so fast. They learn so fast. But I always feel like it's because they don't have jobs. They don't have a family to take care of. They don't have a girlfriend who's on their back. They don't have bills and the IRS breathing down their neck. They don't have a girlfriend who's on their back. They don't have bills and the IRS breathing down their neck. They don't have anything.

So they can just think about it. And their mind, like if they have a hard drive, right, and they have a one terabyte hard drive, they got like 100 gigs full. They have all this space. You could fill that space up with technique and movement. And it becomes their whole life because it's thrilling and it's exciting to learn and their body heals quicker so they can, they can force themselves into situations. With adults, it's extremely difficult to find the bandwidth, to find the amount of time to really completely focus on something because you have so many distractions. Does that make sense? Oh, absolutely. What you just described is a beautiful description of the top contour.

And below that, what's happening is in childhood, the whole brain is literally more plastic because there's more space for the neurons to move around and make new connections. The whole environment, the chemicals that are swirling around in there are set for plasticity because we were basically designed to come into the world and be customized to our experience. I mean, if the human animal is exceptionally good at any one thing, it's that. So if you're an adult, say if you're a 35 year old man with a family or a 35 year old woman with a family and a job, and you want to learn a new skill, what is the best way to force your brain to accept these new patterns and learn this quickly? By attacking two separate parts of a process. Neuroplasticity is not an event, it's a process and it has two parts.

The first one is if you want to learn and change your brain as an adult, there has to be a high level of focus and engagement. There's absolutely no way around this because so focus and intensity and that kind of the Goggins phenotype, right? I think Goggins is now a noun, a verb and a pronoun, right? It's like, it's amazing. So if you're going to Goggins this process, what you need to do is you need to, regardless of how agitated you feel, you have to lean in and focus extremely hard.

Now, the reason for that is that there's a neurochemical norepinephrine, also called adrenaline, same thing, that's released in the brain and body. Most people back off at that point because they feel this agitation. But we have to remember that that noradrenaline was designed to get us into movement. That's the purpose of noradrenaline,

to take us out of stillness and into movement. And then the other thing we have to do is we have to take that elevated level of alertness and we have to focus it. And there's a second neuromodulator called acetylcholine, which is secreted from this little structure in the base of the forebrain when we visually focus on something. Or in the case of maybe if you're doing auditory learning, when you focus with your auditory attention. Can I pause you there for a second? Yeah. So acetylcholine, you could take in a supplement. And norepinephrine, you can actually get from float ice tanks.

Like you can get it from cryo chambers. You can get it from cryotherapy. So using those strategies of taking like acetylcholine is actually an alpha brain. One of the supplements my company sells. Chlorine is actually an alpha brain. One of the supplements my company sells. When you take that along with float tanks and doing, or excuse me, cryo chambers and do some intense exercise or whatever you're trying to get good at with intense focus, can those things accelerate that process? Almost certainly increases the plasticity, the rate of plasticity. So you would recommend if someone was trying to get better at something, like a cryo chamber would actually accelerate the process of learning? Yeah.

So, yes. Wow. So the reason for that, but you don't necessarily need a cryo chamber. What you need are, so we have these requirements. We need urgency and focus to trigger plasticity. Right. That's one part of the process. I haven't mentioned the second part yet.

Neuroplasticity is triggered when urgency and focus combine. Acetylcholine is released for the aficionados out there. It's called the nucleus basalis, but that doesn't matter. There's a little compartment of neurons in the base of your forebrain that doesn't like to release acetylcholine on a regular basis. It's greedy. It's greedy. And it doesn't want to use that.

If you're a child, it'll drain your brain with acetylcholine. But as an adult, 30, 40, up to 80. Why is that? Because Mother Nature designed us to learn what we need to learn and then do that, reproduce and die. I mean, not to be dark about it, but I would say evolution is not about us. It's about the offspring. Yes. 100%. And then it's not even about us. It's about the offspring. Yes. Like 100%. And then it's not even about them. It's about their offspring. Exactly. Never ends. We are being manipulated from the inside.

Yes. I mean, that's what kind of drew me in neurobiology is that all these complex things you see in the world, it's all internal. So if you get urgency, it can come from – let's use David as a, he's a shining example of this, right? You can sit there and just ramp up your level of urgency through purely psychological means. You could take an ice bath. You could do high intensity breathing, anything that brings your level of alertness up. Can I ask you this?

If you were going to try to improve your ability to get better at something, when would you use that ice bath or the cryotherapy? Would you use it before? Would you use it afterwards? Definitely before. Before the learning. What we're talking about is a two-part process. The first part is the learning trigger. The learning trigger is gated by two things, adrenaline, which is also norepinephrine, same thing, and acetylcholine. And so you need that level of alertness up and you need acetylcholine released at the location in the brain that corresponds to what you're trying to learn.

So things like supplements and certain nutrition regimens can assist the process for sure. There's no question about that. Things like alpha-GPC, caffeine will bring up the adrenaline and kind of anything to raise that alertness. Doesn't nicotine as well? Nicotine has some sort of a nootropic benefit to it? Not encouraging people to smoke, but you know, you could take it in various forms, particularly gum. I know people take it in gum just for the nootropic benefit of it. Yeah, I'm not encouraging people to take anything. But there's a very, very famous Nobel Prize winning neuroscientist who I went to his office to visit him in New York and he chewed seven pieces of Nicorette during that half hour meeting.

And I was like, what is going on here? And he said, well, first of all, it increases plasticity. And second of all, he has the belief, and this is not a clinical study, but he thinks that it can also hold off certain forms of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Didn't Bertrand Russell, wasn't he like a famous smoker? Like wouldn't even- Dr. Michael Smith, Jr.: I don't know. Trevor Burrus, Jr.: I think he wouldn't even go on a plane unless there was a smoking section

because he couldn't imagine not having his pipe for a certain amount of time. Dr. Michael Smith, Jr.: Well, creatives, you know, when I think when smoking became less in vogue, I think creatives really suffered because it's very clear that, so Nicorette is nicotine and the acetylcholine binds to the nicotinic receptor. So when you take nicotine in cigarette form or in Nicorette form, you're actually increasing the release of acetyl, the action of acetylcholine in the brain. Yeah.

I don't smoke cigarettes, but I have. And the only time I have is before shows because I have friends that are comedians that would smoke and I'd be like, give me one of them things. Let me see what's going on. And I smoked. I was like, whoa, dude, you get high off these things. This is crazy. Particularly if you don't smoke cigarettes, you get this really weird high. Well, your receptors have never seen that level of nicotine before. They like that. It's exciting. Yeah. And so for those moments, your acetylcholine is like a spotlight. It brings your vision literally into this more kind of portrait mode where you can see more like a narrow window of what's going on.

There are behavioral ways to access this, too. Before a fight, you know, somebody's really ramped up. Their world is not – they're not seeing everything. They're probably – I've never done the walk, of course, but probably walking out to the octagon, they're not seeing all the color of the hat of the woman in the corner. They're not relaxed. They're hyped up. But that's a trigger for plasticity because the brain needs some way to cue this plasticity process to let itself know because it's a self-learning organ. Let itself know that something's really different.

That's adrenaline. Something's changed. Then there's focus. Something's changed. Then there's focus, what's changed. So in the jujitsu example you gave earlier, it's the ability to focus on what the sequence is, what happens when, and okay, I did that correctly or I didn't do that correctly, but that's duration, path, and outcome again.

And having acetylcholine and noradrenaline up, that sets the plasticity trigger. However, that doesn't guarantee that those synapses are going to change. It does not mean that you're necessarily going to learn. What guarantees that that process will be converted into literally the change in the connections between neurons, sometimes new neurons, but mostly the change in the strength of the connection so that eventually you don't have to do duration path outcome, you can just be reflexive about it, is states of deep sleep and any state where you're not doing duration path outcome. So we know from two recent studies, some of this was done by my lab, but by other labs as well,

in humans, which I think is important to distinguish between mouse and human where we can. A lot of the changes in these brain structures occurs after learning during deep sleep, in particular slow wave sleep. But it also occurs during periods of naps and shallow sleep or even just periods where people deliberately decompress, where they're not focusing on any one thing in particular. So if we were gonna kind of operationalize this process, it would be

focus intensely, have an intense period of urgency, and then access the deepest rest you can where you're not thinking about anything, where space and time becomes very fluid. So stress in that case, post exercise or learning session would actually hinder your ability to grow and get better. Absolutely. And elite performers like elite military, elite athletes, I'm sure you're familiar with this. They understand that the ability to toggle back and forth between these high alert, high attentional states and deep rest is not just the key to performing what you can already do. It's also the ability to get better over time. You know, I think Goggins, again, is such a remarkable example because it seems like

it's all gas pedal. But I'm guessing, I've never asked him about this, but I'm guessing that he has his ways of recovering so that he can remain in that heavy gas pedal all, you know, significant amount of the day, all the time. I don't know about that. Maybe he's just all gas pedal. I think he's all gas pedal. Could be.

I mean, he eats well. I mean, he does sleep, but he prides himself on his ability to just go, let's go, motherfucker, and just force himself to do it. It's so impressive because I think most everybody struggles to try and get themselves in action. I mean, we know that actions are the key to neuroplasticity. I mean, yeah, you can do some mental training and that can be powerful. You can do meditation. You can learn to access sleep and all that stuff.

But ultimately, to get better at anything, you got to get your reps in, whatever that is, neurosurgery or running. That's interesting you say that because that's what he does with his mind. He's getting his reps in and he describes it. calls it armoring your mind you have to armor your mind and you know like he he told the story once about being on a plane some football player said uh you know how do you you know you how do you keep that dog alive inside of you and he goes it is like a dog he goes my fucking dog if i feed my dog he goes and i feed him again that motherfucker's always hungry he goes he's always hungry he's never not hungry he's you got to be that dog you got to always be there so he's always there and this doesn't mean

he's not a pleasant guy i love the guy i love hanging out with him he's great he's great to have dinner with he's fun he's a good guy to be around he's not like an asshole or anything he's fun but when it's go time he's fucking ready david david goggins all the time 24 7 ready to go wake him up four in the morning time to run let's go motherfucker you know stay hard i mean that's that's what he does like all day long he is every bit as intense as that public persona when he came out to the lab it was kind of interesting because we just built this great white shark experience. And I'd gone down to Mexico. We had dove with these sharks.

And my friend Michael Muller, he's got this whole thing where we could leave the cages. And we did all this. And it was fun and crazy and probably a little stupid, frankly. But we bring it back. We build this VR stimulus. And he and a couple other team guys came in. And, you know, so I'm explaining what we're doing and we show the shark thing on the screen and and he goes i don't like sharks and i'm thinking okay well so we'll

give him something else and then we go through the whole thing and i'm explaining how we wire people in and we record from the brain and i said all right so um who would like to try the sharks david i'll go like just he just wanted to be first and I realized I was like okay he wasn't showboating that's just the way he is it's just if there's something that creates that sense of agitation that's a signal for him to go forward do you know what he does in the summers I don't he goes to Montana to fight forest fires does he really yeah he doesn't even make any money amazing he just goes there he's rich and he gets fucking dropped off in Montana in the woods, camps out there and fights forest fires with a bunch of other savages.

And he does it to keep his brain hard. That's fantastic. That's he's the real deal. He is the real deal. Can you imagine? You got millions of dollars in the bank and you're like, I'm going to go fight forest fires all summer. Yeah.

Just to stay hard. Yeah. Maybe I would have done that when I was a teenager to impress girls, but I don't, I don't think he's 40. He's doing it for him. Well, that's the thing is I think that's the, that authenticity is a real thing. I mean, there is a kind of a third kind of secret. There is a secret sauce in this whole mix. And this is kind of what brought me to some, my lab, you know, we do work with typical people, but we also do some work with people from David's former community

and domestic and foreign special operations who are interested in this process for obvious reasons. How can you leverage the nervous system to build better, longer lasting warriors? It's a really interesting question. And you could do that with brain machine interface. You could do that with, you can imagine doing that with drugs or with, you know, supplementation or nutrition, all of that. But since the nervous system sits at the foundation of any of those, we started to think about this problem. And there's actually another element to it, which is the reward pathways involving dopamine. So you asked about kids, like why they can learn all day long. So their brain is very

different, but it still needs some degree of focus and they still need to get their sleep. They still have to obey those two rules of this process, but they engage in something else, which is really powerful, which is play. A lot of their learning is through playful exchange, especially with the little kids, like in kindergarten and nursery school. And then as they get older, the social dynamics can be kind of harsh, but they can also be really pleasurable and fun. So the molecule dopamine is a really misunderstood molecule. We all make it from a location in the back of our brain. And people think of it as like reward, like, oh, I got a bunch of money or I, you know, did a great performance. Like, oh, I got a bunch of money or I, you know, did a great performance.

Dopamine is responsible for that feeling of feeling great. But in addition, dopamine is what's released anytime an animal or human thinks it's on the right path. And that's very subjective. So this is not and I want to be really clear that this is not positive thinking or, you know, the secret or telling yourself that you're performing well, even when you're not. Right. Like if you are a rioter and you break into a courthouse, but you feel like you're on the right path, you're going to get a release of dopamine. Heavy release of dopamine. Yeah. Even if you're committing a crime and you really probably shouldn't be doing that. Yeah. Mother nature built these systems, adrenaline, acetylcholine, dopamine, to be very generic in terms of what can activate them on purpose. You know, cocaine will cause a tremendous release of dopamine. So will methamphetamine. The problem is it sets a focus

on just getting more of that thing. So dopamine is evoked through play. It's evoked through humor, right? If you've ever just been working like mad or you see this in, you know, team guys know this really well that, you know, cause they tell me or you see this in – team guys know this really well because they tell me. You can be in the worst situation and somebody will crack a joke and all of a sudden it's like you have energy. Now, that couldn't have been glycogen. That wasn't because you're ketogenic. It wasn't because you're whatever. That's neural energy.

And that neural energy is dopamine. Is that what happens when you hear a great song and you get pumped up? Is that the same thing? Absolutely. And the reason dopamine is so powerful in this process of neural plasticity is that dopamine has the ability to buffer noradrenaline. So that stress that you feel when you're in effort, it's very hard for most people to keep that going. very hard for most people to keep that going. But when you get a, when I say a shot, I mean, internal release of dopamine through humor or through the sense that you're on the right path.

Let's take the fight example where it's stressful and you're getting beaten down. All of a sudden you land one or you do something properly and the other guy starts to timber a little bit or shuffle a little bit. You gain a chemical advantage and it comes in two forms. One is it triggers marking of the synapses that likely will change later. We rarely forget the events associated with dopamine for that reason, because they signal, oh, whatever's happening now, that was good. And in addition to that, they start pushing back on the level of acetylcholine, excuse me, noradrenaline in the brainstem. And this is crucial because there was a study that came out two years ago, not from my group, that asked, why do we quit? If you set 800 or even 500 pounds on the bar out

there, I can't lift it. So I'm not talking about that kind of quitting. I'm talking about a long run. Why do I quit? If I'm not injured, what actually causes quitting? When do we decide that something is futile? And it turns out that for every bit of effort, any bit of effort, lifting a glass of water or running up a hill or in a fight, there are little bits of noradrenaline, adrenaline that are released in the brain and body. And there's a counter. There's a cell type, which are called glia, which literally means glue in Latin. These cells are paying attention to how much norepinephrine is coming. And if it hits a certain threshold,

the brain stops voluntary control over the muscular. It just says, that's it, I quit. And there are these beautiful experiments where they manipulate the visual environment so that this isn't, they're certain that this isn't lack of muscle fuel or liver fuel. This is lack of neural fuel.

Dopamine pushes back that level of noradrenaline and it gives you more gas. It lets you go further. And you see this through teamwork, when you feel like you're supported, when you're in cohesion, humor, play. If you're in serious effort and it's just things are going terribly, maybe I've never done comedy, but you're trying to write a joke and it's just frustrating. And then suddenly you just kind of laugh at how ridiculous the process is. There's a kind of loosening or a lightening and you have more energy. That energy is reductions in epinephrine. And so I don't know how David Goggins has done it, but everyone does this a little bit differently, but it could be, and I'm speculating here, of course, never done the

neurology, but that David has somehow figured out that the leaning in process for him is the dopamine trigger. Like there is a kind of sicko thing about the way he talks about it. Like it's like a, it's a little bit masochistic. And for him, maybe it was that way. And it's rooted in his origin story. For other people, they find this in purpose, like that you're doing this for your kids or you're doing this for somebody else. You know, I think that the human animal has a capacity to push, has a capacity to focus, has a capacity to learn at all ages. But these gates on plasticity are set by certain requirements. And, you know, when I look out there and I see all the stuff about, you know, psychology andhelp and wellness stuff, I'm a neuroscientist, so I look at the lens of everything through neurochemicals and neuroscience. But it all kind of boils down to a couple basic chemicals and systems or what we call circuits in the brain.

What's the difference between noradrenaline and norepinephrine? Yeah, great question. So same thing. So adrenaline and norepinephrine, excuse me, adrenaline and epinephrine, same thing. So adrenaline and, um, and norepinephrine, excuse me, adrenaline and epinephrine, same thing, same thing, norepinephrine and noradrenaline. Those two things are the same thing. It was a naming war. So scientists are like, they have egos, um, some more than others. And, uh, there was a naming battle. And so if you go to Australia, they call it one thing in England, they called it another. And basically it was two labs discovered the same thing and it was a pissing competition.

Oh, well, how confusing for everybody else. Exactly. And you can find that over and over and over again in science because no one ever comes in with a gavel within like nomenclature committee and says, we're just going to call it this. Nor adrenaline is so much easier to say. It is. Stick with that. Nor epinephrine. Like I've fucked that up a hundred times.

Well, and it gets worse because like you think about the autonomic nervous system and they're like sympathetic, parasympathetic. Sympathetic sounds like sympathy, but it's actually the stress state. Do you think that you would benefit from data from real world situations in a much more comprehensive way than you would from these virtual situations you're putting people in? Because, you know, we have a VR thing out here. We have an Oculus, and it's pretty cool. There's one of them where you walk on a plank, and you really do feel like this plank is over, like it's on the 60th floor of a building, and it goes out a window.

And you really do feel like you're kind of, but you know you're not. There's a difference. You get a little bit of it, but you don't get the real thing. Right. Like, like being in the jungle and the leaves part, and there's a real tiger in front of you, the feeling that you would get would probably be, you, you probably wouldn't be able to recreate it with virtual reality. There's some part of your brain that knows this is bullshit. Yeah. So we have three have three laboratories to explore this. One is the virtual reality.

And virtual reality can give you what the scientists call presence, the sense that you're really in that environment. And that's mainly visually and auditory driven. My colleague, Jeremy Balanson, who's on the – I'm in the medical campus. He's on the other campus. He's studied this a lot, like what are the requirements for getting people to feel presence? So people who come to our lab, they don't think they're underwater with a shark unless they're afraid of great white sharks. And for that moment where one of these guys is coming in and it opens its jaws for that person, it's every bit as scary as the real experience. If you look at their auto,

well, we don't know because we don't put them in the water, but I just can't imagine. Well, here's the, here's the check close. can't imagine. Well, here's the challenge. It's probably close. I agree. I mean, here's the challenge. We needed to stress people and we needed to do it really well for a lab. And if you look historically, the experiments that came before ours were really lame. It was like a picture of someone with a knife in their arm.

For some people, that's gross. For some people, that's scary. But that's not really fear, right? Or they'd startle people. But I can jump out of, you know, probably not to you, but I could jump out in front of a typical person with a teddy bear and they'll get startled. Doesn't matter, it's a teddy bear. So that's different. That's not fear. So VR allows us to access states. The more sensory stuff that we can include, the better. There are some now that include smell. We have that. We're working with augmented reality, which is a little bit like the Star Wars thing of

projecting a chessboard, that kind of thing. We find people's pain points, meaning we find the places in which we can trigger their autonomic function. We also run studies outside the lab. So I have a large-scale study running right now with David Spiegel, my colleague in psychiatry, where people are equipped with whoop bands. So we're monitoring sleep. We're going to expand this to include some other devices that actually allow us to look at heart rate variability and body cavitation and some other things in some

interesting ways, but also body position. So we're tracking them 24 hours a day. And those people are reporting back to us levels of stress, life events, that kind of thing. So this is outside the laboratory, but we can do this in real world essentially. And those people were using interventions, which are mainly respiration based. So which are looking at specific patterns of breathing that trigger particular states in the brainstem that allow people to either sleep better or buffer their stress in response to life events better. So this isn't really breath work as much as it is teaching them specific patterns of breathing that capture these neurons that switch their brain states.

It really is fascinating that these periods of rest are crucial to learning and developing. They're absolutely crucial. They're every bit as much a part of the process as the actual trigger event. And the athletes, the people, the high performers that I've encountered are all really good at accessing those states also. Is there a desirable ratio? Right.

So you want to focus as long as you can focus well and then probably a little longer, because there's also plasticity of the circuits that control focus. So going back to your jujitsu example, as you get to the point where you're starting to not be able to do this duration path outcome stuff, which involves motor movements and mental thinking, you're saying you're getting tired. You're literally going into a sort of sleep-like state where space and time, duration path outcome becomes hard. really going into a sort of sleep-like state where space and time, duration path outcome becomes hard. What you can do at that point is to start buffering the noradrenaline, norepinephrine. Now, I don't know which one to say, but I'll just keep going with whichever is reflexive.

And you can start to buffer that through things like humor, through things like setting the urgency higher. That is not a time to relax and taper out. That's a time to ratchet up the intensity if you want to grab a stronger trigger. So, but that period can't last infinitely. And the question is how long? Well, we know that you can do more short bouts

of that each day than you could ever do one long, long bout. We know that. So you could maybe do two or three bouts of that a day, or if you are doing it several times a week, you basically want to dose it about twice as much as deep stress as you do the deep focus, excuse me, deep sleep as you do the deep focus. So if you're, I don't know how long these training regimes go, but part of that training is reflexive for you. I wouldn't count that in the learning process because it's dialed into your nervous system. But at the point where it becomes challenging, a clock sort of starts.

And when that period ends, I think at least double that amount of time of deep rest if you want to maximize learning. There's been a lot of work done on visualization and learning through visualization, and they found that you can get a similar benefit to actual physical training, obviously not with the endurance and the strength and all those other things, but in terms of skill learning, you get a similar benefit from an equal time of visualization. What do you attribute that to? How is visualization, how can you learn things through visualizing? Yeah. So visualizing is setting the brain through these duration path outcome circuitry loops. It's running the script essentially. And it's important to move the musculature.

It's important to say the words if you're, say, learning a motor skill or learning a movement – a language, excuse me. But at some level, the brain doesn't really know what's going on in the body. It's the command center except what signals it receives back from the body. And so if the visualization is intense, the brain isn't completely convinced, but it's pretty convinced that you're actually experiencing that thing and rehearsing it. It's a little bit of your own internally driven virtual reality is what you're doing. And so I think mental training is powerful, but there's no replacement for repetition. So what about – obviously physical training has its limitations in your body's ability to keep doing the movements. You're going to get tired and you're going to break down.

get more rest or would it be more beneficial to get rest but also spend a significant amount of time visualizing? We haven't looked at visualization specifically. The one thing that is very close to visualization, which is very powerful based on neuroimaging studies, so legitimate science, I should say, is hypnosis. Hypnosis is a really unique state. And this is of mind and body. Have you been hypnotized? Many times. Yeah. And I'm very interested in hypnosis because of the work with Spiegel and the incredible,

you know, success that he's had with pain management, smoking cessation, these kinds of things. Hypnosis is a state of deep relaxation, not unlike sleep, but also deep focus. So it's very unlike any other state of mind. You're either usually asleep or you're focused or somewhere in between, kind of drifting back and forth in between. But hypnosis is a deliberate narrowing of context. So the person or the audio script is bringing you into a state of mind that's centered around particular types of events, but you're in deep rest. And the idea is that you're taking that plasticity process of focus and urgency and then rest, and you're combining them into a single session. And so

hypnosis and deep hypnotic states are the place where neuroplasticity can be accelerated. So when you say hypnosis, what kind of sessions are you talking about and how often, like say if you're an athlete, like let's, let's say maybe you're a basketball player and you want to get better at basketball. You train as much as you possibly can, but there's limitations to that. You sleep as much as you possibly can. How often would you recommend someone doing some sort of a hypnosis session to try to improve their skills? Probably one, well, it depends on how intense their training is.

For some of the people I'm doing work with in athletics and in the military community, you might, they have extremely demanding lives, right? And certainly for the military folks, it's, you know, high risk, high consequence, you know, even when they're in non-deployment. So under those conditions, maybe every day, 30- Hypnosis every day. Yeah, 30 to 45 minutes as a replacement for some other standard form of nap or meditation. I mean, not necessarily lumped on top of that.

So the standard eight-hour sleep, and then on top of that, some sort of meditation for like 30 minutes? Yeah. There's a process of doing this. We have a script that we use in our lab. I'd be happy to send it to you that takes you into these deep sort of relaxation states. They're sort of meditative. Some people can self-hypnose by – some people call them intentions, but I don't like that because it sounds a little bit too much like an uncomfortable set of yoga classes I've taken where they start with the whole like i don't know really what that's about and they make you use

complete declarative sentences it feels weird to me um that's just my own bias um oh they mean they make you set your intentions like i am this this and this or say it out loud or oh no i would no no that would send me out of the room or, you know, even though I said it like this. Right. Well, if they combine the upspeak, then I'd probably. And intentions. That's a wrap. Then I'd then I'd file a complaint. But yeah, they even sometimes it's really bad. Sometimes they even make you work a pronoun into it. So you'd have to say, Joe, you know, anytime someone's. Can you have a fake pronoun like one of the new ones?

Joe, you know, anytime someone's... Can you have a fake pronoun, like one of the new ones? That's it. I don't know. You might... I don't even know how to go there. You stunned. You stunned me. Probably we're all going to be required to at some point.

Maybe not. Maybe not. Hypnosis is powerful. And I think stage hypnosis has done a great disservice, no disrespect to the stage hypnotist out there, to detract from the power of hypnosis as a medical tool and a high performance tool. Yeah, my own personal experience is that I didn't understand what hypnosis was. My first experiences with hypnosis were there was a guy named Frank Santos. It's a famous in the Boston area. He's a very famous comedy hypnotist.

And he was an actual hypnotist who would hypnotize people and get them to quit smoking and things along those lines. But then would do this comedy hypnotism show where he would get people on stage. And, man, like we would – me and a bunch of other comedians would go and watch it every week because it was crazy. He would put them under. They would definitely be under. And they would think they were having sex. They would think they'd be in a boat. They think they'd be in the water. They, it was weird. It was really weird to watch. And I always just thought it was like really weak minded people. My thought was, and obviously I'm 21 at the time, I didn't know anything, but my thought at the time was, okay,

there's certain people that are just, they have nine-volt brains and you can trick them into doing anything. And that explains cults and a lot of other shit and televangelists and all sorts of nonsense that should be like really obviously fake to people but they fall into it anyway. And so that's what I thought. I thought it was just really dumb people that he was tricking. Well, some people are more easily hypnotized than others. And it's actually pretty predictable. There's actually a test that we could do right now that yeah. So can you do it to me? Uh, yeah, I can use the one that, that Spiegel taught me, which is, so you look up at the ceiling and you're going to look and now

try and now close your eyelids. Uh, you're not very hypnotizable. How's that? Look up one more time and then close. Yeah. So probably not as hypnotizable. Why? So for people that are very hypnotizable. Is that a word? Yes, it is hypnotizable. At least if it's not, then I'm stamping it in. Nowadays, I just I'll put a Wikipedia entry. It'll be there. But no, I don't know. I've heard Spiegel use it before. Susceptible to hypnosis. Susceptible to hypnosis. I asked Spiegel how you measure this kind of back of the envelope, you know, curbside consult, as they call it. And people who are more hypnotizable, their eyelids will flutter in an attempt to go down. The reason is that a lot of hypnosis is anchored on the ability to go into these deeply relaxed states. And some people's autonomic nervous system gets locked in a state of more, excuse me,

of more attention and kind of higher levels of alertness or levels of sleepiness. So think about like a seesaw. So you can either be really stressed. So when you're really stressed, like you're analyzing time, you're analyzing space differently, duration path outcome, what's going to happen?

When's it going to happen? Real emergency. The other state would be sleep, right? That's the other extreme duration path and outcome are essentially non-existent space and time are fluid, whatever. The hinge in the middle of that seesaw for some people is very tight. They get locked over here or locked over there. They can't get the energy or they can't de-stress. Hypnosis involves taking somebody from a state of alertness like you and I are in now and bringing them into a almost sleep-like state. Now, for some people, their autonomic nervous system isn't that willing to do that. It's almost like the hinge on that seesaw is locked. It doesn't want to budge.

And this fluttering of the eyelids is reflective of a peripheral nerve, believe it or not, that originates in the brainstem. That's a central part of the autonomic nervous system. The other thing that they'll do, you ever see on the stage hypnosis where they'll have people look up at the ceiling and then they'll sometimes shine a light in their eyes or they'll like have them look at a light? I haven't seen that. light in their eyes or they'll like have them look at a light. They're looking at how, how we call it labile, but how rigid or labile, how willing to move the pupils are because autonomic arousal impacts the pupils of the eye. So it's an external read of what's going on in the brain. A lot of people don't know this, but your eyes are not connected to your brain. Your eyes are brain. They are central nervous system and their brain,

your neural retinas that you use for seeing things around you are part of the central nervous system. They are the way that you know when to be alert and to be asleep. And they are two pieces of brain that during development got squeezed out of the skull and placed outside the skull. Whoa. Yeah. They're the only two pieces of your brain that are outside your skull, assuming that you don't have some sort of damage. That is fucking crazy. Your eyes are a part of your brain. Yeah. And that's why when people tell me, oh, you know, the eyes are the window to the soul. I'm like, well, look, I don't know about souls, but they are definitely your brain. So when I look at you and now it's weird because I'm looking at, you know, we're not looking

at each other's pupils. Right. But when the hypnotist, I should say, looks at the pupils, they're saying, you know, the pupil size is a direct readout of how loose that hinge is. So when they shine light in someone's eyes and they take it away and they go. That's so weird that you can look in someone's eyes and there's something about, like, you can kind of tell what kind of a person they are in some ways or at least tell how they're thinking like if someone's uncomfortable being around you like you could see it in their eyes if you tried to write that down like what are you seeing you try to explain it to someone good luck good luck writing that down i don't know what that is like but i know when someone's full of shit right like if someone's lying to me or bullshitting me, I'm not always aware, but I'm aware a lot, you know? Well, and it's not just their individual eyes,

but it's also the way that they focus their eyes. So, you know, the myth of the Cyclops, right? One eye in the middle of the head. That myth has origins in the fact that the Cyclop was one dimensional anger. And it turns out that when we are experienced an increase in autonomic arousal So let's say we decide we're gonna fight we decide we're gonna learn or maybe even just we're gonna write something important Something's important our eyes the pupils change shape But because our eyes don't really move in our skull they actually do what's called foveate in a little bit There's an eye musculature reflex that gets triggered in and so you can see this sometimes in people that are getting ready to fight, their eyes are actually brought inward. That triggers another neural circuit to increase levels of autonomic arousal and starts deploying resources internally, fuel resources, fuel for bouts of intense stuff, whatever that intense thing is going to be.

When we're relaxed, like we view a horizon or we're just walking or we're in what's called optic flow when things are flowing past us, we go into panoramic vision. So in panoramic vision, you go out of that soda straw view of the world and you start being able to see the corners of the room, the ceiling, the floor. And that's a relaxed state. So sometimes we're even subconsciously perceiving how stressed or relaxed somebody is, not by necessarily their pupils, although that might play into it. It certainly has a role. But whether or not based on your prior kind of intuitive knowledge about that person, whether or not they're like cyclops or whether or not they're in panoramic vision.

Wow. And this is important because it changes the way we perceive time. important because it changes the way we perceive time. If we are in cyclops vision, soda straw view, that high intensity, we tend to do two things. One is we tend to be more in tune with what's going on inside us. We start, you know, the brain does this other thing, which is called interoception. It's like paying attention to what's going on inside us versus outside us. And when we're stressed, time outside us seems to go really slowly. It's like you're in the security line at the airport and you need to get your flight. It's a very different perception of the person in front of you and what they're doing than when you're relaxed and you got plenty

of time. And that's because outside events start to feel slower. This is why after a car crash, people will say, you know, oh, the, in slow motion. Or I've never actually looked at fighters, but I visited the UFC training center, Duncan French. I went out there and talked to him about this. Shout out to Duncan. Yeah, he's done some beautiful – his graduate thesis is like this beautiful work related to this, although not directly, has important implications for this, which is when you're in these high adrenaline states, you parse time differently. And when I hear about fighters, you know, say like being able to time the fight or they it's almost like they can see things coming in slow motion.

That's because their internal level of arousal is really, really high. But it feels like relaxation. So there's like sleepy, not feeling so good. Everything feels like it's going on really fast. I can't deal with life. Then you ramp up your level of intensity and everything outside you feels like it's going a little slower. Maybe you're matched to that. Like I'm a pretty high intensity guy when I'm in New York. I feel great, at least before the COVID thing. People walking down the street, I finally feel like the tempo is kind of matched between internal and external. Oh, is that why like high-functioning people enjoy Manhattan?

Yeah, why neurotic people like Manhattan. Is that what it is? You take a neurotic person, you put them in Manhattan, they're like, oh. Yeah. Yeah, they love it. Yeah, a lot of my friends that are neurotic, they love it there. Yeah. I come from neurotic lineage.

I'm constantly trying to get to the other part of the seesaw. But I get it. I get out of the subway in New York, and I'm like, the walking speed, the speed of everything, I finally feel like internal to external match. Does this thing that connects the fluttering of the eyelids to being able to be hypnotized more easily, does that coincide with a personality variable? Not that I'm aware of. I'd have to ask David. I don't want to throw something out there'm aware of. I'd have to ask David. I don't want

to throw something out there that's wrong. I'd have to ask him there. There's a whole set of personality traits and coping traits that relate to hypnotize ability. Um, there's a small subset of people that just cannot be hypnotized. You can't, you can't really force hypnotism on people. But is it, they cannot, or they are not willing to let themselves be? Because I've been hypnotized. My friend Vinny Shorman, he works with fighters. He hypnotizes. He calls it mental coaching. And I was like, I want to know what you're doing.

He's been on my podcast before. I'm like, do it to me. Let's see what's up. It was very weird. Did you find it beneficial? I think I did. I only did it once. But I was kind of stunned by it. I'm like, oh, this is a weird state where you're kind of there, deep relaxation is not a brain state that we can

access very easily without a hypnotist. I mean, there are other ways to do it. But that state would be super beneficial for people wanting to learn something because it would relax them much more deeply than it would just ordinarily everyday life while you're conscious. That's right. It's taking the two pieces of the plasticity puzzle and putting them in a same event. So I don't think it should be the only way to learn new things because there are things you can't do in hypnosis, like roll jujitsu, for instance. but as a tool for accessing faster learning, it's quite powerful, just like sleep. I mean, I think the work of Matt Walker and Bill Dement at Stanford and others has just shown like if you want to pull someone apart, you want to just make them insane and unable to do these duration path outcome, you know, mental operations, you sleep deprive them. you know, mental operations, you sleep deprive them.

There's a thing that people do, this sort of reductionist dismissive way of viewing meditation and viewing states of mind that is really weird to me because smart people do it occasionally. And there's a guy that I think is very smart and he was talking about it on Twitter, like mocking meditation. And I was like, man, this is a guy

who's probably never really meditated. Well, meditation, you know, man, this is a guy who's probably never really meditated. Well, meditation, you know, I guess growing up in Northern California and the whole mindfulness thing. That's the problem. So it's the stuff, it's the stuff around it often, you know, and I think this is why like, it's exciting that respiration slash breath work is now making a, you know, a big showing in the world. Cause I think it has tremendous value. I think that it's the stuff around it that causes problems and can get it pushed into the naming. I mean, I have nothing against yoga.

I mean, there's a lot of powerful tools in yoga, but it's the ashandas and all the stuff around it makes it sound a little bit like religion. And a lot of people in medical communities and other religious communities back off from that. Well, there's a problem with yoga that I actually had a conversation with my yoga instructor about because I do a Bikram class and they say things in the class like you're massaging your descending colon. I'm like, no, you're not.

You're definitely not doing that. You should probably stop saying that because that's not really possible. You're not massaging your fucking colon while you're stretching. That's nonsense. Are you increasing your flexibility? Yes. You're not massaging your fucking colon while you're stretching. That's nonsense. Are you increasing your flexibility? Yes. Are you strengthening your balance and your stability?

100%. But there's so much nonsense that goes with it that if you talk to a doctor, they're like, uh-uh. You're not doing that. Because I have talked to doctors. I'm like, okay, before I criticize this, is it even possible that this is going on? They're like, no. Right. And the medical community can be a little bit too one-sided as well. But, you know, I think Stanford's a very progressive place. The fact that Spiegel and I

have this study looking at respiration and its impact, I think is a sign that the times are changing. We're not doing this in any kind of mystical way. The fact that people in military special operations and athletics are starting to think about the mind and the tools to access the mind is a sign that there's been a tide change i had james nester on the podcast recently and we talked about his new book breath and just the the ability to control various aspects of your nervous system and even your immune system through breath work. It's very confusing because everybody breathes. So you and I are both breathing right now. We're not doing breathing exercises, but we're breathing.

So what is it about breathing exercises that accentuate these aspects of autonomic system and sympathetic system? What's going on? First of all, I think James' book is great. It's amazing. It sounds like I'm just shamelessly plugging Stanford constantly, but, you know, like most of the studies he was referring to were done by my colleagues, Paul Ehrlich, Sandra Kahn, stuff in my lab, Mark Krasnow. These are serious scientists and serious physicians who are saying, look, respiration has an important role in balancing

oxygen and carbon dioxide in the body and in the brain. And that has an important impact on states of mind and body. I think that's just no medical professional, presuming they're any good, could argue that. So take, for instance, Mark Krasnow's lab and a neighboring lab at Stanford discovered that animals and people periodically throughout sleep and throughout the day will do what's called a physiological sigh. These have been known about since the thirties, but it turns out there's a set of neurons in your brainstem and my brainstem that every once in a while, when the level of carbon dioxide in your bloodstream gets too high,

you do a double inhale and an extended exhale. So it's sort of like two inhales through the nose and extended exhale. Your dog does this right before it goes down for a minute. Yeah, to offload carbon dioxide. That double inhale, I don't think James talked about this. If he did, forgive me. The double inhale maximally inflates the little sacs in the lungs,

the ovulolive lungs. And that pulls carbon dioxide out of the bloodstream at a higher level so that you offload it more in the exhale. Now, these physiological sides are the fastest way that I'm aware of from work in our lab and with Spiegel to take that seesaw from too high level of stress to a little bit calmer. Double inhale, exhale.

So this is in breath work. This is a set of neurons that every kid and every adult has. They use periodically, but we can also consciously control through the diaphragm. So that's one way to bring things more calm. I think, you know, James talked about this in his book, but those breathwork of the sort where, you know, kind of tummo-type breathing of doing, you know, 30 inhales and really offloading carbon dioxide, that causes the release of noradrenaline, norepinephrine. And noradrenaline, norepinephrine are mother nature's way of buffering us against

infection and disease. Everyone thinks stress kills your immune system. It's the opposite. Stress activates your immune system. And that makes sense. If we suddenly had to forage or go out and find water, we need two or three days and we didn't know what we were going to do, you can't afford to get sick. This is why if you work, work, work, work, work, and then you finally rest, you're more likely to get sick as you go into that more parasympathetic, relaxed state because your immune system also gets shut off. Is that why people in prison are getting COVID-19 and not really getting sick? There's so many of them that are asymptomatic. Could be. I didn't realize they were asymptomatic. Or if you're very stressed for a very long time, eventually the immune system can't deploy these killer cells that it needs to deploy. So there's a certain amount of stress that's actually beneficial to you and your immune system. Right. But I get very, I start doing eye rolls and I get a little frustrated when people are like adrenal burnout. Look, your adrenals were designed to take you through two lifetimes if you need to.

The idea that your adrenals are just going to shrivel up into, you know. Somebody told me that their doctor told them that coffee is giving them adrenal burnout. Is that nonsense? I want to see. I mean, I teach neuroanatomy. Show me adrenal burnout. Show me an adrenals that won't secrete adrenaline anymore. So why are they saying that?

Like, where did that come from? Sounds good. Sounds better than parasympathetic sympathetic. Yeah. Yeah. That's like this doctor was telling my friend that drinking coffee is burning out his adrenals. Yeah. I mean, it may be putting them into a state of heightened activation and they can't take it down a notch in the evening. They don't know how to relax. They don't know how to turn on the parasympathetic nervous system without doing things like eating or something, which is one way to do it. But, and I think as a society, we're struggling to manage this seesaw.

I mean, we know that being in a chronic state of stress is bad physically. You don't want to do that, but you also don't want to do it for your mind. I mean, anytime you're stressed, you're also able to be recruited better by other people's stress. We know that. Recruited by other people's stress. Yeah. So my lab has also looked at like how stress spreads between people, how the autonomic nervous systems communicate. And we know that the best way to get what's

called emotional contagion is to get people into a heightened state of alertness. I'm guessing, and I have no knowledge of comedy whatsoever, but I'm guessing that the comedian that's less funny that comes out before the main person, I'm guessing they're trying to get them like ramped up. You can create a more emotional contagion. You comedians with them on the road so they look better. And it's like amongst elite comics, it's actually very frowned upon because you're setting yourself up to look like a hero. You rescue the audience from some terrible comedian that you had open for you. If you could judge the ego or the health of the ego of the headliner by what kind of comedians they consistently take with them on the road. I mean, you know, everybody has bad sets occasionally. But a lot of times these weak-minded guys will bring these terrible comedians on the road with them.

Interesting. Yeah. But the reason is because they don't want to be outshined. That's what it is. Makes sense. Yeah. Well, that's anchored in a neurobiological phenomenon. Forgive me.

This is all I think about. Oh, please. Called dopamine reward prediction error. So it's very simple, really. It basically says that the degree to which something feels really good or you experienced it as great could be a great meal or comedy set from the perspective of the audience, of course, is going to depend on how much dopamine you got before. So if I tell you we're going to go to a restaurant tonight, this is amazing. I got the most amazing steaks, amazing steaks.

And we get there. There's a higher probability that steak isn't going to taste great to you. Absolutely. Reward prediction error means that- But what if it's really great? It has to exceed the dopamine that you had and you can't bullshit people that's what you're saying you basically can't bullshit people right well there's something that does happen there's a contagion that does happen when people are funny where it's

contagious and everyone around you starts laughing more because there's more people around you laughing like if i'm in a room and there's a funny comedian on stage and there's a bunch of people to my left and right that are laughing really hard, I'm more likely to laugh. Right. There's something weird that goes on. And one of the things that I've always said about standup is I think it's kind of a mass hypnosis. It's not just funny, you know, because if it was funny, there's these comics that are doing these Zoom comedy shows. And I encourage them to all stop doing it immediately because it's fucking terrible. Because if it was funny, there's these comics that are doing these Zoom comedy shows.

And I encourage them to all stop doing it immediately. Because it's fucking terrible. Even great comics look fucking terrible. Because you're lacking that critical element of an audience. Stand-up comedy is one of the rare art forms you really can't do on your own. You have to do it in front of people. And I think what's happening is when it's not just when a person's on stage that's really good, it's not just that they're funny. It's not just their timing is excellent. It's not just they have these really insightful ways of looking at things that make you laugh.

It's also that you're around a bunch of other people that are experiencing it together. And when that person is good, you are allowing them to think for you. There's some weird – like if I'm watching a guy on stage and he's really good or a girl on stage, she's really good. When someone's killing, I'm allowing that person to think for me. I'm like sitting there just like, go ahead, take me for a ride. Let's go. And then they're making you laugh, but it's, you're also aware that you're in it with these other people. So you have this enhanced state because all these other people are around you

and you're all experiencing it together. This is, I don't know much about comedy at all, so forgive me, but comedy to me is very interesting because it's a, and I don't know how the comedy scripts are written, but I find them incredibly fascinating because it seems like almost all jokes

are a break from the space-time rule that the brain expects. Close contact card magicians do this very well too. It's like you're expecting something to happen and I think he's going there. So it's sort of duration path outcome like this. And then all of a sudden you get hit with something that's surprising. Yes. This is probably not funny.

Maybe it is to you or not. But there's a Steve Martin thing from way back when where he he basically does comedy for dogs or something. He brings out dogs and and and it's a perfect example of just breaking all the rules. The dogs are telling him what to do. And at first it's not funny. And then he keeps going with it. And what you realize is he's I don't want to use the word hypnotize incorrectly here, but he's bringing you into a reality where the dogs are setting the rules.

And it's hilarious because the brain, when it sees surprise, it could be a card that, you know, you pick and then I tear it up and then you suddenly produce it from my shoe or something like that, extreme magician type stuff or really funny joke. It's like the brain wants to go one place. And when something unexpected happens, dopamine is released. We know this. It's like surge of dopamine. And all of a sudden, it's like, I'm in a state where then you can take me further up the staircase. The one thing we know about dopamine, which is why it's so powerful, is not just that it can buffer these feelings of effort, but that it can take you into new ways of thinking about a problem.

I mean, this is why a lot of, and this isn't work that I'm involved in, but this is why a lot of the excitement about the therapeutic use of MDMA and things that increase dopamine are windows into modes of processing information that are very different. Now, on the dark side of that, if you think about cocaine or methamphetamine, you've got dopamine coming in artificially and it tends to create a problem. It tends to make people super focused on everything outside them and in pursuit of more stuff. That's what happens with really high dopamine. But dopamine appropriately dosed allows us to explore new realities of how, you know, what led to that joke, a new variation. Anyway, I'm sort of like parsing comedy. I don't know anything about it, but when I watch comedy, I'm always looking for that element of surprise. And sometimes I think you're laying out crumbs for me.

And then you'll hit me with something I had no idea. And that's twice as fun. And then you get that pop. That's the pop. That's dopamine. When someone does cocaine, do they wear out their dopamine receptors? So in short, yes. The dopamine receptors are very prone to saturation.

Remember, they're like parking spots. and you can fill those up very quickly. And there's actually changes that happen at the genetic level in cells when there's too much dopamine in the system for too long, like with dopamine addiction or crack cocaine addiction. The cells actually start modifying the way they work so that they become better and better at gobbling up dopamine. The whole system becomes a dopamine pursuit system. And, you know, in thinking about the brain for these kind of, you know, very top contour conceptual levels, we can think of addiction as just a narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure. And so what you want is to, obviously not use cocaine, what you want is to access the dopamine system through whatever process appeals to you, provided that it doesn't deplete that dopamine system.

You can maximize this to the point where things don't work anymore. And there is a kind of a little weird techie cult thing happening in the Bay Area they call dopamine fasting, which has no basis in physiology, where these kids are like, literally they're not looking at each other in the eye because like, oh, it's too much dopamine. And they're not, yeah, I swear it's a real thing. I get asked about this a lot.

Oh my God. And if anything, it would have the opposite effect that they're seeking. No wonder why there's bums just shitting in the street up there. Everyone's losing their mind. I have to be a little defensive of Northern California. It has a lot of problems.

But when I go down to Venice, which I love, and I love LA also. I'm not one of these Southern California hating Northern Californians. There's a pretty serious homeless problem down here too. Oh, it's growing. Yeah. Yeah. But San Francisco homelessness is it. It's on another level.

I mean, I don't go to the city anymore. You're the king. I don't go to the city. San Francisco either has the kings of the homeless people. Not a title we want. Gavin Newsom, you did it, you motherfucker. You started it. It's a, you know, I live in the East Bay side on the Oakland side and we have that problem there, but Oakland's always had a lot of problems. Well, it's one of the side effects of a really tolerant, progressive community for whatever reason. You're tolerant to drug addicts making

tent compounds, you know, and it's, it's very unfortunate because it ruins everything else. And so I get the idea behind it. I get it. But in practice, it just is not effective. It's not good for them. It's not good for you. Certainly not good for property values.

It's not good for safety. It's just not, it's not good for sanity. It's not good for sanitation. It's not good for anything. I mean, fucking downtown LA They're fun and typhoid Like they're bringing back middle-aged or a midi What is it not middle-aged? What's what it's word? I'm looking for I do this middle ages medieval I always made evil I fucked that up

Yeah, medieval medieval diseases. They're bringing out diseases that haven't been around for fucking thousands of years We're I don't know why that can't be solved. I just don't understand that problem. The homeless problem to me is so odd that they just let them camp out. Like I went to Venice the other day for dinner. And we're driving by this house. And there's a beautiful house to my left that's probably worth like $5 million. And in front of it, there's 13 tents.

I'm like, this is crazy. The last time I was down here was in March, right before COVID hit. Or around the time, who knows when it hit. But there's a block on Venice Boulevard leading down to that Erewhon market that was maybe one block. And I drove in the other night and it extends you know seven blocks yeah and they don't do about it and i don't know what they're gonna do every time you go into an underpass you're entering a homeless encampment now they've even the one over here on wanetka they put a porta potty there and a hand washing station like we give up here

in this bucket it's crazy like wow this is it's just is, it's just, I mean, I don't know. Maybe there's bigger fish to fry. Maybe there's more important things right now with COVID. I can't think of anything more important than making sure that citizens have health care and shelter. And the route to do that is not my expertise. I don't have any great ideas about that. But I just, the homeless problem to me is very bothersome. There are neighborhoods in Berkeley.

You go down towards the 4th Street, 5th Street. It used to be kind of an artist district. Get down near the skateboard park. They call it the Aaron Brockovich Park because it had all this like sewage and toxic waste seeping up and kids were getting infections and stuff. So down near there. Now everyone wants to go there, right?

But bus after bus after tent after tent. It's an entire city now of people living in the avenues back there. Yeah. I don't know what they're going to do about it. And there doesn't seem to be any solution. I mean, there's nothing on the table. No one's doing anything. They're just letting it grow. It's so weird. It's so weird. I mean, I don't want to be the person that engineers the solution. I've got shit to do. Aren't you fuckers? They're mayors and congressmen. That's your district. Go do something. Yeah. I mean, I'm I'm not a very political person, but I'm I'm very disappointed at, well, a lot of things.

But I see a lot of great things happening in the world. But I also see almost total failure, even in this on the part of the scientific community to communicate accurately what's going on right now. There's so much confusion and, you know, I don't want to get into the COVID thing because it's not my expertise, but the fact of the matter is that science has also, you know, there are a lot of people that don't believe in science, but science has also failed at some level to get out there and explain to people what they need to know. Who are the people that don't believe in science? Well, there are the anti-vaxxer flat earth people.

Yeah. Schizophrenics. And that's the most part. And I think the ease with which, you know, a celebrity can just decide that vaccinations work a certain way or don't work a certain way. And it spreads so quickly. And people love that idea that, you know, I try and look at it through the lens of neuroscience say, what is it about the mind where people can't seem to connect to logical ideas when it's inconvenient for them, but they can string together all these random dots into a theory that this was all caused by, you know, 5G or something that makes no sense at all.

So it tells me that, yes, people are challenged. But in addition to that, I do think that the scientific community has a responsibility. You know, let's not go after Fauci specifically, but why isn't there a team of scientists out there saying as a team, we figured out this, that and the other thing. for the show that someone was being criticized because they said we should have more experts to draw upon other than Fauci and this person who was interviewing explain what they were saying I was on CNN this morning it's just they were she just kept asking what's your problem with Fauci and he said well there's other why don't you talk to somebody at Stanford he named someone specifically I don't remember off the name but just talk to other people and she's like we have other epidemiologists coming on the program or whatever. But he's just like, why not try this person, this person, this person?

She just kept grilling him on Fauci. Why do you keep asking about Fauci? What's the problem with Fauci? It's very strange. That's not what the issue is. The issue is divergent opinions are important, particularly when it comes to medicine and science. Particularly when it comes to medicine and science, like there's different perspectives and also equally educated experts who vary on what they think the approach should be. And I think regarding this thing, the COVID thing is completely unique, right?

Because it is a novel coronavirus. So we really don't know. We don't know. And you go back and listen to what the World Health Organization was saying in January versus what Fauci was saying in March versus what they're saying today in July. It's very different. So clearly there's no one expert who has a fucking finger right on the pulse and like, I got this. This is what we need to do. Listen to Fauci. Listen to Joan over there or whoever the fuck it is. That's not the case. We need a panel of experts. When the space shuttle exploded, we had a panel of

experts. Now Richard Feynman was the one who was kind of the front runner and he's the most eloquent and he knew how to speak to the general public. And so he was the one that got all the attention for figuring out. It was a washer ring that heated up or got cold. I forget what it was. Feynman figured that out? Yeah, Feynman figured that out. In addition to doing so many other amazing things. And chasing chicks, playing the bongos. What he did then would have gotten him fired today very quickly.

Well, my dad's a physicist, so according to my dad it was bongo drumming naked on the roof of Caltech. So he took it to a whole other level. Also a guy who was very into float tanks. He really was into the float tank thing. I think anybody who tries them gets into them. I've never tried. No, we need to get you in one. But my prediction, my hypothesis is that it's dramatically changing that sensation piece of the equation so that your perception can now move and kind of float. No pun intended,

that it makes it hard to do this duration path outcome kind of rigid thinking in there. Because my understanding is that the salinity of the water and the temperature of the water makes it so that you kind of don't notice the boundary between yourself and the water. It becomes one environment. So Feynman actually talked about this as a way to access space-time relationships of the mind that he anchored to physics principles. And so he was a big proponent of the float tank, I think also because he was a little afraid to try psychedelics. I want to talk to you about the float tank, but I don't want to steer away right away from science and the responsibility of science because I don't think the responsibility is in science.

the responsibility of science? Because I don't think the responsibility is in science. I think the problem is, and this is a new problem, the newfound ability to communicate online and reach massive amounts of people without any expertise whatsoever. That's what this podcast is. I mean, I've said a bunch of stupid shit on here that's not accurate, and you can get away with it.

At least I'm ethical in it that if I do make mistakes, I will correct them, and I'll try to be as honest as I can about what I know or what I don't know but when someone's slightly schizophrenic or delusional and they're more prone to believing in conspiracies because conspiracies they activate some weird spot in your brain and maybe we could talk about that I don't know what that spot is but there's there's some weird reward mechanism that comes from discovering things that are hidden that people don't want you to find out that everybody else doesn't know about. And you could be the fucking Paul Revere of 5G and you could be the guy running

around, you know, 5G is coming, 5G is coming. You know, there's something about that, that really dumb people really gravitate towards and some really smart people with some mental tics some things that are off and it's it's a real problem because it's a giant distraction I don't think the responsibility lies in science because science is supposed to be about data analyzing these things coming up with cold hard facts that you could that are provable right things you could show this is repeatable this is this is what the situation is and this is how we know.

A spokesperson for science would be wonderful, but there are people like that. There's Neil deGrasse Tyson who does a fantastic job. About the cosmos. Yes. I mean, I love his work,

but there was this culture in the 80s and 90s around, and I grew up sort of in this because my dad's a physicist, we spent some time around a lot of physicists. The cosmos and astrology that gained immense popularity. Yeah. It's very exciting and very interesting and mostly irrelevant to what we're dealing with right now in 2020. Right now it's about biology, virology, epidemiology, and there has not been

a voice for that besides Fauci. And I think he's doing the best he can with what he's got. I do. I have to believe that. But I think a panel of experts who could appeal to different types of people through different types of mediums would assist in at least letting people know what the process is. You know, we've sort of said there are people out there who don't think COVID exists. You've got people that are just waiting for a vaccine. They're not going to leave their house until there's a vaccine. You've got people that are afraid of vaccines. There needs to be some structure of communication about what scientists are doing because there's incredible work happening in laboratories at Stanford, all over the world. You know, for the person that doesn't have a W-2 or regular 1099 income, this period of time is immensely stressful.

And the more stressful something, the more stressed a human or any animal gets, the easier it is to recruit them into some sort of delusional thinking. You know, it's, you know, psychosis is defined as ascribing meaning to something for which there's none. You know, if I suddenly tell you that the brick in that corner is sending me messages about what I should say next, that's breaking with our space time understanding what's allowed here. People are doing that in subtle kind of incremental ways. symbolical and evil. But what we know is that the more stressed people are, the better people are able to recruit them into ideas where they can connect dots that otherwise might not be connected. And it has everything to do with the way that the brain, you know, computes information. So I'm not saying a panel of experts would necessarily buffer us or inoculate us against those kind of forces. But I do think that there was a time in this country,

at least when I was growing up, I'm 44 years old, where at least there was some faith that the figures that you saw on a screen or that were talking to you were putting in a best faith effort. I mean, there might've been a lot of shady stuff going on behind the scenes, but I think that has completely fallen away.

And so now it's all, as you said very aptly, it's all about following individuals. Who can be most convincing in the moment? It's about capturing people in these highly dopaminergic, anxious states where you can start leading them down a thought path. And pretty soon there's no notion of science. Pretty soon you're talking about flat earth. And it's scary. And other countries aren't doing this.

China is not doing this. In China, they are working, chipping away. doing this. China's not doing this. In China, they are working, chipping away. In Europe, they are working and chipping away in a way that is in keeping with the reality that is been broadly presented to them. Here, reality is getting very distorted. There's also a problem with, and it's not because of Fauci, but Fauci represents to a lot of people a point of ideological loyalty, right? You believe Fauci because you think Trump's a moron, you know, or— I believe Fauci because I think he's a scientist who's got the best set of tools to look at the problem.

Right, but you know what I'm saying? So anything that opposes his perspective gets diminished, even if it's a legitimate scientist that has an altered perspective, you know, or someone who instead wishes that we focus the public on how to strengthen the immune system and the techniques for strengthening the immune system, which we are aware of. These are real things and you don't hear a peep out of this, which is to me very frustrating. Yeah, me too. I'm very disappointed. I guess that's what I was saying poorly before and you said much more clearly now, which is, to me, very frustrating. Yeah, me too. I'm very disappointed. I guess that's what I was saying poorly before, and you said much more clearly now, which is, you know, I'm disappointed

that he's the only person out there and the only voice, not because I don't believe what he's saying is valid, but because I think there are other things that are important. First of all, the stress problem has not been addressed. You know, I work in my laboratory, but one of the reasons I'm getting out there and trying to talk to people about stress and these systems and trying to provide

tools is because people are stressed. And for that person, whether or not they're wearing a mask and washing their hand 25 times a day and staying at home or going out, stress, there are tools for that. And we have an obligation to teach people those things. And there are tools for enhancing the immune system, and we need to teach people those things. Yeah, I wish that was a big part of the government, whether it's local government or national government, the focus of not just telling people to stay inside and be scared and wash your hands and wear a mask, do all those things,

but also exercise, drink more water, take vitamins, you know, teach people meditation techniques, give people some tools that can help them get the proper sleep that they need. Because I think these are all immense factors. I agree. I mean, the foundation of our wellbeing is through the very basic kind of almost boring stuff. It's hydrate, sleep, gratitude, social connection, nutrition, exercise. You start hearing about this thing and you kind of go, well, it's not exciting, it's not the magic pill.

But I think of all that as kind of the tide that comes in that's required to bring the boat out to sea. I think people think about the thing that's gonna trampoline them up to the highest position, that's gonna suddenly turn them into a high performer. And I'm doing some work with a former team guy, his name's Pat Dossett and Blake Mycoskie, who started Tom's Shoes.

So just full disclosure, because I have a position on their company board, I want to do full disclosure, it's not work in my lab. And they've got this company, this program, that's really about building foundational tools for people, like for the every person that it's great. But and I also feel like our government should be sending these messages out there, because we're really lacking that. And I think the instability of the situation that we see today has a lot the psychological response to all this has a lot to do with the fact that we didn't hit COVID prepared. We didn't hit the situation prepared. The world was, you know, that the United States is

badly obese. It's a real serious medical problem. I'm not even touching the psychology, just medical problem, badly obese and stressed. I'm going to send you, I'm going to send this to you, Jamie, so you can put this up on the screen because Bridget Phetasy sent me this today and it's fucking appropriate and hilarious. it's about uh what we're going through right now in terms of uh obesity and stress and all these poor people hold on a second give me a second here i'm gonna find it god damn i got a lot of text messages i can only imagine oh i can't even imagine i'm like what the fuck is this? Sorry. One more second. God damn, I have 150 new text messages.

Here. Here we go. I'm sending this to you right now, Jamie. A lot of dead air here, kids. Here we go, Jamie. Bam. Bam. Okay.

Well, I will say my physician friends tell me that one of the major threats to, you know, one of the major risk factors is obesity. Yeah, this is... you looking at a lady that weighs about 400 pounds in a scooter uh yelling at a fit woman put a mask on you're putting my health at risk and she's got a mcdonald's bag in her hand that's a lot of what's going on i was hoping that what this was going to do was it was going to be a wake-up call for people and we're i was going to see obese people really take their health seriously and go well while, while I'm alive, like what are the primary factors that lead to really bad results with COVID? Well, according to the doctors that treated patients in Manhattan, the number one factor was obesity. That was number one. And so there's older people that, you know, did way better than young people that were obese. So it's not just an age-related thing.

It's an obesity-related thing. But people, as long as they're okay, they can stay inside and wear a mask, they're fucking healthy. They'll just eat ice cream and watch TV and hope someone comes up with a solution. The daddy government comes along and fixes the problem. But it should be a wake-up call. It should be a health-related wake-up call for people. It should be a health-related wake-up call for people. It should. I mean, I think that we saw in the 80s and 90s, fast food and cheap calories became so prominent. And we see the effects of that now, right? That's here now.

The problem is now. I think the other problem that's happened over the last 10 years, and we're starting to see this emerge in much in the same way that we've seen obesity emerge, is the phone. And I love the phone. I'm born and raised in Silicon Valley. I use the phone, I love the phone, but it is a complicated device because we are bringing a ton of our attention to it. Social media is very complicated.

It has wonderful aspects, but there are ways in which it's converting and engaging neuroplasticity in the young brain, the way it's, you know, engaging our attention. Think about how much attention people will place on that little phone, but they can't read two pages of a book. That worries me. And not because I'm, you know, university professor and I need everybody, you know, doing equations or learning about neuroscience, not at all. I just worry about the neuroplasticity of learning to be defocused and scatterbrained. There is a time to put the brain into states of space-time fluidity to come up with new comedy routines or scientific ideas.

You know, you could take a walk, you can run, you can put the float tanks. There are a bunch of different ways to do this. But the phone is starting to gobble up all that dopamine and all that space-time duration path outcome stuff. And we are wasting our cognition. And we're wasting the most precious gift we were given by Mother Nature and evolution is a brain that can teach itself things and that can predict things and that can look at the past, can learn from elders and gain wisdom. I mean, all that stuff is what we were put here to do. And my dad said, you know, he thinks I asked him if he thinks there are other galaxies, you know, because he's more versed in the in physics and the cosmos than I am.

And he said, I don't know. But if there was, they they probably extinguish themselves with social media because it's like mental chewing gum, people just kind of throwing away their cognition. And the dopamine thing, it's not that they're getting so much dopamine from using the phone. It doesn't feel like a big win. It's that they're spending it out, like spending $5 bills all day long. Pretty soon you're broke and you're exhausted. And so I worry about our use of these devices and what it's doing to our neurology. But I also know they're extremely important. Alan Levinowitz, who was on the podcast recently, had a book called Natural. And it's one of the things that he talked about in the book was that what we're doing

is essentially the – it's – we're – and he talked about this on Twitter and that's how I engaged with him. We're taking most of our information and we're making it processed information by getting things off of Twitter, by getting things off of social media. You're getting this very weird interaction with people. It's boiled down to this very strange 280-character version that's not equivalent to an actual conversation with a human being or reading a book or watching a documentary or any of those things.

It's this weird thing that's most of the information that you're receiving. And if you look at human beings that are on processed food diets, you see the body behaves very poorly and it just reacts very poorly and it's terrible. It's just not good for it. It's unhealthy. Well, equally unhealthy is processed information. And this was his argument in his book. That's a great argument. It's a great argument.

I think we are in an adolescent stage of this technological intervention, and this will lead to whatever Neuralink is going to be and whatever the successor to Neuralink is going to be. I think things are going to get way weirder, I think, but there's potential for a beneficial aspect to it. And I think one of the potentially beneficial aspects is that it seems like all of technology is moving us through, at least in this virtual sense of using phones and computers, where the boundaries between people and information are becoming smaller and smaller. The problem is the boundaries between physical people are becoming greater. There's more separation, particularly with COVID, right? There's more physical separation between people,

but the boundaries between being able to access the thoughts of people is smaller. Right. So the beneficial aspects of what we talked about with even your immune system and your health and just overall mental well-being, community, love, friendship, all those things, you need to be right there. You need to be right there with it. You need to hug each other, all that stuff. That's crucial. That's everything. And hardwired into us.

Absolutely. With COVID, that's, first of all, everyone's scary because everyone could give you the bug and could kill you or kill your grandma. And then on top of that, you're engaging in this processed form of communication all day long. And most of it is toxic. I mean, if you're engaging with people on social media, then, I mean, I've talked about this multiple times in the show. There's people I follow that don't even know I'm following them because I just have them bookmarked because they're just so toxic. I go and just, I wonder what they're doing. I'll just go to them. I'm like, look at this motherfucker. He's on Twitter 12 hours a day yelling at people, arguing constantly. And I just imagine that their mind is a fucking chaos, just a wreck, just potholes and burning buildings.

Their head is just filled with shit. But it's effective. In a terrible way, it's effective. It's like in the engineers, you know, talk about signal versus noise. And the brain is essentially an engineered machine. It looks for where signal is high and above the noise. payoff nonetheless for being able to recruit people's attention, recruit their autonomic nervous system, get them into those modes of having to click and follow and scroll. Now, I agree that I think social media, like for instance, I teach some science on social media.

I've managed to make great connections through social media, but we have to be very judicious in our use of it. And that's hard for most people. And what I think is going to happen is that we're going to talk about signal noise. I think what's going to happen is we're going to start selecting for people that are very good at controlling their attention, are very good at separating themselves from technology as well as using technology. And so for people that are just rabidly consuming technology and information and thinking this is the way to live a good life or to get ahead, they're actually just falling into the noise. And the people that are, I think it's one of the reasons why a select set of individuals have been so effective at controlling the landscape,

the political landscape, the lots of landscapes, let's just say that. And I think that we need to think about whether or not we're in the noise or whether or not we're, you know, paying attention to these big peaks of signal and what's that we're getting recruited or not we're, you know, paying attention to these big peaks of signal. And what's that? We're getting recruited. We're getting, you know, kind of groomed by these things. And it is scary. And at the same time, I agree. I think that eventually we will break through this.

I do, because that's what the human animal is really good at. Yeah, I think we're in the technological dark ages. That's what I think. I think we're in just some weird thing where there's a lot of people going, this is not good kids. This is not good. But most people are like, fuck you. And just in the, just wading into the fray. Cause it feels kind of good. Yeah. Well, especially when you don't have real meaning or purpose in your life because you're unemployed and you're stuck at home because of COVID and you're scared. Well, that's, that's a way that people occupy their mind and engage. And you're seeing a big uptick yeah big uptick and well at least the people that i'm paying attention to and the toxicity of their

inner their exchanges it's just well this is kind of scary and i i um i sort of hesitant to just kind of flip to another research study but there was this guy in the 60s this guy robert heath who didn't need patients who had epilepsy he just got permission to record from the human brain. And so he put electrodes into their brains. And he let them stimulate any area of the brain that they wanted. This was like this, he just did it. And they'd stimulate one area, and they'd feel kind of drunk, or they stimulate another area, they'd feel sexual arousal, they stimulate another and they start laughing. The number one area that people like to stimulate created a sense of mild frustration and anger, which is totally perplexing on the face of it. You say like, why would people like that more than sexual arousal or feeling drunk or happy or giddy or whatever? It turns out that this dopamine system

we were talking about earlier is tethered to that. And it very likely explains not just the human animal, but all animals ability to lean into challenge in order to acquire more resources to fight and overcome that. You know, if you had a bunch of whole species where everyone just backed away from any frustration and challenge, that would be very problematic. And so right now I see us in the state of extreme anger and frustration or mild anger and frustration. And some people are going to drill through this and they're going to make things work. You know, they're going to Goggins it, you know, to make it the verb, you know. And a lot of people are just going to feed that frustration, anger, but in a loop. It's just a closed loop where they're just clicking and scrolling and clicking and scrolling.

And they're not building anything out of that. So this circuit is really important. It's actually part of the circuit that underlies the state that we would call courage. And my labs worked on it. And this relates to some of the stuff done with military groups. But those states of courage were designed to accomplish specific goals, you know, find food, find mates. And then in the world of military, you know, conquer this or learn that and, you know,

learn a new skill. Right now, the phone in many ways is hijacking some of that circuitry at a low level. And it's never the subtle stuff is the stuff that scares me. It's, you know, obviously I'm very disturbed when I see rioting and looting. But when I see a technology that is kind of gnawing away at our neurology little by little, and then we kind of go, oh, my goodness, we can't cope with life and what's being thrown at us. I think that's when I think, ah, we really need to look at what that neural circuitry was built for and start building new technologies to take us out of this mess. Yeah. That's what I'm hoping the future of these, whether it's Neuralink or some other sort of immersive technology that allows people to communicate in a very different way. You know,

when Elon is saying you're going to be able to talk without using words, what I'm really hoping, and this sounds really crazy, but I think what could help is if we could read thoughts and clear intentions, really understand intentions versus interpretation of intentions. Like someone could say something sarcastically and you could read it the wrong way and you can get upset at them. If you read it in text, it's even more easy to misinterpret what someone's saying or to purposely, deceptively frame what they're trying to say. Absolutely. But if you can just read someone's mind, we're going to have a much better understanding of each other and the rewards versus the positives versus negatives of holding on to these really toxic patterns that people are swimming in right now with social media. I agree. people are swimming in right now with social media. Yeah, I agree. And I do think that neuroplasticity in addition to brain machine interface, you know, so it probably will involve

machines that we put on our faces or whatever. But neuroplasticity is the way out of this, right? I mean, that's what the brain can do. It can learn new contingencies, new ways of relating. That's why I'm so adamant about understanding this process and really feeling so much importance on, you know, especially with kids because it's all so passive, like their brains are just passively shaped by experience. So that can be a little scary to people. It's also beautiful because it means that you set one proper intention or one rule that they should learn and adopt. And that can have a long lasting effect. The ability to de-stress themselves, self-soothe, the ability to

work through a hard tangle of a problem, interpersonally or academically, whatever problem, that can be done. It's just that we, I do think, especially in this country, we've learned to back away from that internal sense of agitation. And going back to what we were talking about earlier, that agitation is the first requirement for getting plasticity. There's no way around that. And we have this kind of obsession with flow states, which I think are great, and awe and all this stuff. And we think that's the portal to it. But I think, I'm certain actually, that it's not the portal. The portal to changing the brain is these high urgency, high attentional states followed by rest and just keep going, toggling back and forth and back and forth.

That is what's really important, right? That you cannot strive for a life of total relaxation because you're not going to get shit done. There's nothing there. It's not the active state of the human mind. It doesn't thrive under those conditions. But we're also concerned about stress and we're so concerned about the pressures of whether, you know, you're in some sort of a competitive environment or a job that you're involved in that requires an immense amount of your focus and your attention. We're all striving for that state where you're like a monk in a lotus position, not doing anything. That seems terrible to me because it's divorced from everything we know about competition winning in the brain.

Yeah. There's a cool set of experiments that I think you might especially appreciate given your background in martial arts, which is called the tube test, where they take two rats or two mice and they put them in a tube. Typically it's male mice, but also female mice. And they start fighting for position in that tube. One mouse pushes the other mouse out or rat inevitably. That one is the winner.

The one that got pushed out is the loser. We know that statistically, if you put those mice back into another tube test, even with another mouse, the winner has a higher probability of winning and the loser has a higher probability of losing. and the loser has a higher probability of losing. Even if you push the winner from behind, so you take a loser and you push it from behind with a stick and it wins, even if it doesn't win on its own effort, it becomes a winner. Now, this is totally weird. And for about two decades, this really perplexed neuroscientists,

and this was taught in psychology classes, but not neuroscience classes. So in the last five years, neuroscientists come in, we have a lot of new tools now that let us monitor the brain and look at the brain in real time as rodents or people are doing these kinds of things. And so they figured out that there's a specific area of the frontal cortex that becomes more active in the winner and less active in the loser. So much so that if you shut down that brain area,

the winner suddenly becomes a loser. You increase activity in the loser, it becomes the winner. So you ask yourself, what in the world is this brain activity or brain area doing? It turns out it's taking the feeling of stress and arousal, which both of them are experiencing. It's a battle. And it converts it to more steps of forward movement per unit time. It's just forward movement. And so one animal is feeling stressed and is pausing more or is backing up. The other animal

is feeling the same level of stress and is moving forward just physically. And it's wild because you can even take an arena, make it really cold, which mice don't like, put a warm heat lamp in the corner. And the animal that won at the tube test gets the sweet spot every single time. And so what this says is that, you know, those are mice, we're humans. My lab's been looking at this. We had a paper a few years ago identifying the area in the brain that actually leads to forward movement and rewards it with a dopamine reward. This was a paper we published in Nature. The area of the brain is interesting only because it maps exactly to that brain area that Robert Heath found people like to stimulate frustration

and anger. So frustration and anger were designed to get us to move forward adaptively. Now, I don't know how this plays out in the octagon where you're seeing somebody get beat up and, you know, but, and then they're all of a sudden they're winning and it's switching back and forth. But, you know, my dream experiment would be to record from the brains of those guys in real time. We don't have the tech to do this right now, but someday we will. And I bet you that every forward step or perception that you have an advantage over the other guy or gal leads to a dopamine increase, lowers that norepinephrine and allows them to keep moving forward.

They get energy. It's not gassing at the level of can't breathe or gassing at the level of conditioning. It's something's happening neurally. So as a society right now, we are stressed and this is not the time to back off, go into the lotus position. And people come at me sometimes,

I do think we need tools to buffer stress. I want to be clear about that. I don't want people stressed all the time or seeking stress. But goodness, we were given and we were endowed with this amazing neurology that allows us to do this. We did it in famine. We did this with foreign invaders. We did this with animals and storms. And we did this. And here we are, we've got severe challenges, but forward movement balanced by rest is the solution that's worked for us for tens of thousands of years. And it's what's going to work now. And it, it all comes back to just a few select brain areas. Cause this is a primitive situation we're in. It's not a sophisticated situation. Yeah. That's a, that's a uncomfortable reality for a lot of people, that the struggle is good, right?

That there's benefits to it, particularly if you're looking for growth and also if you're looking for stimulation and a sense of meaning. I think people, for whatever reason, are hardwired to try to figure things out, to try to get better at things, and to have a purpose. to try to figure things out, to try to get better at things, and to have a purpose. And a lot of times the purpose that they feel, other than family and loved ones and friends and things along those lines, there's a purpose of success in their chosen field, success in whatever endeavor, even if it's a hobby, you know, like whatever the thing is that they obsess upon, that's what gives people this sense of meaning. And I think that's why there's buildings. That's why there's cities.

That's why we figured out the wheel. There's something about people that need a problem to solve. And then once they've solved that problem, they need a new problem. Right. And that's what the nervous system was fundamentally designed to do. That and make sure our offspring make it to the next. So when you see like riots and looting and you see people pushing against the building and let us in, do you look at it from that perspective? Like, oh, there's a sort of a battle going on

here and there's a problem. Like they're trying to win just like the mouse in that tube. When you see those protesters in Portland are trying to get into the courthouse, like, what are they doing? They're trying to get in there because it's locked. And they have this idea in their head that that's going to be the conquest. But you saw like what Chaz, remember that? That zone in Seattle. Six blocks. They let them have it.

And then what happened? They fucked it up. It fell apart. It fell apart. It fell apart because there was no end goal then. Once they have it, like, what are you going to do? Are you going to sustain it? No.

People started leaving. Murders took place. They started beating people up. They were filming things. They were behaving like the police. It was crazy. That's crazy. They put boundaries up.

They essentially turned it into a far worse version of the United States. But in their mind, they thought, if we just take this over, this right now is not ours. But if we take it, there's a police precinct there. If we storm the precinct and occupy it, then we're going to win. Yeah, we're in. But then once they're in, they're like, now what? Well, there's no resistance. Once there was no resistance, they didn't have a fight. There was no battle. It was very primitive.

And actually, I hadn't thought about it. It's a perfect example of real life example of the two tests, these two opposing forces pushing back and forth. And we know that the more, we call it autonomic arousal, but the more stress you get, the more your mental and visual landscape becomes that sort of straw view where all you can think about is the adversary. You know, now in a fight in an octagon or a boxing ring or jujitsu match, that's great because that's, everyone's agreed to that, but it, that's not designed to be played out in society over these micro wins. It's not even clear that they're wins because what's really changed. I think that working through legislation, working through top-down legislation, identifying specific things to go after. I mean, that was the beauty of the civil rights movement, you know, in the 1960s, you know, Brown versus the Board of Education. Like, what a beautiful thing to create openness in schools, you know, where anyone could attend, going after specific legislation.

That's far and away a different way of looking at a problem and solving a problem. And, you know, I don't have a lot to say about the situation in terms of the protests. I saw a lot of looting where I live in Oakland. I'm the first house in on a commercial district, drove a car through the window, looted the place three times, pharmacy three times. I mean, it was right up next to me. So, you know, I think that. But that seems to me to be just opportunists taking advantage of the chaos. It was clear it was not the protesters. There's many things going on simultaneously and to kind of conflate them all together seems disingenuous.

Well, this is a problem. In science, we have a phrase. You're either a lumper or a splitter. The lumpers like to kind of lump everything together and push forward a grand theory. Now, today I'm using some generalizations because I don't want to get too far down in the weeds, but I'll stand behind anything I've said because it has detailed background to support it. But the splitters, as annoying as they can be when they come to meetings, no, but this, but that, you need a certain number of splitters. This is why I think like a panel of people is good. You get a lumper, a lumper, and a splitter. And then pretty soon,

the splitter is annoying everybody because you just want to go for coffee or you want to just break and the lumpers are done. But the splitter says, no, we're actually not thinking about this problem in a nuanced way. And this is where I think maybe it's not specific scientific information, but a scientific training and ability to think about a problem and be comfortable knowing you may not solve it today or ever, but you're going to lathe into this thing over and over and over. That's the kind of training that a scientific thinking will give somebody. You don't even have to want to be a scientist to do it. I don't know if anyone wants to be a scientist nowadays.

I certainly hope so. But we need to have more nuance. We need balance between the lumpers and splitters. And as you point out before, social media is all about lumping and high emotional states. And that's the worst combination. Yeah, I think what you just said is perfect. I mean, that's really what we're dealing with today is this inability to recognize nuance and to accept nuance and to be rigid and committed to your position. And your position is something you defend because your position

essentially is you, right? This is one of the problems that people have with ideas, that they marry their mind to these ideas. And if these ideas prove to be, even if objectively, they know that this idea has holes in it, they will still defend that idea tooth and claw because that idea represents their ego or represents them as an individual. And that's unhealthy for everybody. But it's also, it's part of being a human being, this instinct to do such a thing. Absolutely. There's a paper that came out recently in the journal Neuron, excellent journal, that was all about the dopamine system being attached to beliefs. So beliefs and thoughts we think of

as kind of these vague, you know, like what are thoughts? You know, I have thoughts all the time, but I can also deliberately have a thought. Beliefs are almost like actions in the sense that they can recruit dopamine release. What this paper showed is that people just believing, thinking more and more about what they already believe leads to these dopamine increases. It literally reinforces the belief they have from the inside. That presents a certain particular type of problem for trying to convince people how to change their opinion. It means I have to take your mind or the person's mind into a completely different state in order to change it. Maybe it's hypnosis, maybe it's proper landing of media ideas. I don't know what that form would take. But changing people's minds, provided that

they are older than 25, has to be done by the person themselves. I can't change your mind unless you're a child. A child can, you can impact them. But once you're an adult, only you can direct your own plasticity. No one can do it for you. So we are becoming more and more polarized. And because of the nature of the AI bots that drive social media, the information that you're getting and that I'm getting, well, hopefully that's more aligned than some of the ideas that I'm getting and other people are getting where we fundamentally disagree because social media and media in general is designed to bring us into these high amplitude aroused states, but we're getting different information. We're not reading the same newspaper. And so our beliefs are actually diverging and being reinforced by dopamine.

So we are creating a bigger and bigger conceptual divide through the hijack of these neural mechanisms. I wonder if that's one of the really attractive things about these protests is this internal recognition somewhere, even if it's subconsciously, that we don't connect with people enough and that there's no greater connection than a group of 50,000 people that are supporting an individual cause. And working towards a common goal. Yeah. We know this. If you really want to build team, build a sense of community, you can have them all watch a concert, bring them into a peak state, or you can all have them fight the same fight.

I wonder if there's like a yearning for that because of the separation of, I mean, think about the coinciding factors, right? You have social media, which separates us. You have COVID, which separates us. And then you have these protests, which unites us. And it must be like incredibly satisfying for people that have been locked up and are constantly on social media to be in this mass movement. And you'll probably alter your own perceptions and beliefs to fit in better with this movement. So people that would never be violent may be violent.

People that would never use graffiti or start smashing the windows of Starbucks might be so inclined because of the mob mentality to join right on in just to be accepted and be a part of this group and just to feel something, just to be excited by this gigantic movement. And when it's so undeniable that the cause is worthy, like the George floyd murder when you you see that and you go well fuck this man this is wrong this is injustice and then everybody's on the street and they're chanting together you're like it it's it's perfect it's a perfect combination of things it is the perfect combination and and it is a combination you know up until now i've been talking about what's like just frustration or just winning but you're talking about group cohesion yeah you're talking about fighting a fight you're talking about group cohesion. You're talking about fighting a fight. You're talking about being locked up before. So all these forces, you know, pulling on the same neurochemical forces, there aren't many neurochemical ingredients. There are

a lot of ways to access them. And I look at the, what's happening now. And I sort of go on sort of like the inverse of Burning Man. I've never been to Burning Man. I'm probably the one person in the Bay area. I haven't been to Burning Man, but you know, going out to the desert, no money, everyone's going to get along. There's going to be a lot of sex and like, everyone's going to get along and everything's great. You know, no rules basically, except be kind. And now we're seeing the exact inverse of that. And so there needs to be something that can satisfy this yearning for connection and that can make us feel like we're building. And, you know, looking back in the last century's history, I mean, you know, the build after the war was a, you know, everyone community building, there were a lot of problems with the

way that was played out, of course, was not done equally among race, racial groups, etc. But a common goal, a common battle, a common fight is very good at recruiting these systems in the brain. And I don't know how that's going to come about. I keep hoping I have this 14 year old niece, and I just keep hoping that like her generation is looking at all this. And they're just like, we're going to work this out. Well, I think what's going to happen with places like Seattle and Portland, unfortunately, I sense a mass exodus of rational people from the area. I think they're probably going to go, OK, people have lost your marbles. We're going to get the fuck out of here.

And we're going to take our tax dollars with us and leave you with your Marxist mayor, and congratulations, you fucked the whole city up. And then there needs to be some sort of a recognition of the mistakes and then a correction. And that's probably what's going to happen. You're probably going to see more and more of this, more and more chaos,

and then what's going on today in Portland. And now you've got Homeland Security troops, which, I mean, I don't even know what branch of the military they're a part of. I have no idea. So weird. They're all wearing camo and they don't have badges on. They just show up in minivans and pull people in their cars and everybody's like, what the fuck is this?

Like, what is going on here? Well, there'll probably be a correction because of that as well. It's most likely that what we're experiencing is just a lot of chaos and then lessons will be learned. And unfortunately for a lot of people, victims will be made. You know, they're going to make victims out of a lot of people and a lot of people are going to lose their businesses and their livelihoods and even their lives along the way. Well, and we saw this in the 60s, you know, the civil rights movement movement was incredible movement, but we also had like the whole hippie movement. There was like a lot of the same parallels were happening in the last 20 years. I was watching this, you know, because I grew up in the Bay area, people think of Silicon Valley is like very

conservative, but I remember a time growing up, you know, at least in my house, you know, like the, the way that my dad talked about hippies was like, you know, every doesn't lead anywhere. It's bad for everything, you know, the counterculture movement. My mom was the opposite. So I think neither was correct. But, you know, they had crazy stuff going on like this. There was this guy Uli Geller that was, you know, he thought he could bend spoons with his mind, you know, spoonbender. That was the joke. Don't be a spoonbender, you know, like whatever you do, don't be a spoonbender because it's like state attached to facts and things that are designed to move human progress forward. That's really important. At the same time, you had the whole counterculture thing going crazy.

And I feel like in the last 20 years, we've seen some spoon benders. We've seen the explosion of access to all things, you know, and people being so hungry to have everything that everyone else has. And there's been a gradual decline, at least in some sectors, for an appreciation for hard work ethic. That's why I think David, I have a deep appreciation in this for the work with people in the military, but people who, that whole American thing that I grew up with of you get up, you pick a vocation, you grind away at it, whether or not it's garbage man or scientist, doesn't matter. You're just building.

The same circuits are underlying all that. And I think right now people are feeling like they don't know which way is forward. We talk about moving forward and pushing against the stream, but I think a lot of people just don't know which way is forward. So what's ever thrown in their face, they go that direction. Yeah, well, they think they have a sense of what's forward and they're moving in that direction. And a lot of them are very young, too. And so their version of the world is not, again, to use the word, not particularly nuanced, which is, you know, they're imitating their atmosphere. They are a part of this, what they think is a very valid and worthy movement, and they're pushing forward. And it's very attractive again it's it's uh it's one of those things that I think ultimately we're gonna get

something out of this I think ultimately will probably be good and I think racially to be fantastic I think this big explosion of tension is gonna be awesome when it all settles down because we're going to realize how ridiculous it is to look at people and base how you treat them or how you feel about them based on their appearance because of what part of the world their ancestors came from. It's just as stupid as looking at someone because of their hair color or their eye color. I mean, imagine a world where all blue eyed people were devils. We hate them all. It's crazy. It's fucking stupid.

Imagine a world where all blue-eyed people were devils. We hate them all. It's crazy. It's fucking stupid. Things that are completely outside of your control should have absolutely nothing to do with how a person values you as a human being. And I think most people haven't experienced this, but there's something out there. Maybe it's on the internet, but my colleague Jeremy Balanson built this VR experience called Walk of a a thousand, a walk of a thousand cuts or 10,000 cuts. So you put the VR on, you see yourself, a reflection of you, and then you, they turn a dial or you turn a dial and then your skin, if you're Caucasian, becomes black, African-American. And then you walk down a city street and it's very interesting.

I've done this experience and people look at you out of the corner of their eye and you're like, oh, I've never experienced that before. The virtual people do. The virtual people looking you out of the corner of the eye. Can you beat them up? Can you beat up virtual people?

And there isn't that option in there. There's a different VR experience where you can beat people up. There is? There is. You should come up to the lab. You should come up to the lab. But you don't feel anything.

I have a VR boxing game and it's weird because when they hit you, like you get a flash and it gives you, it gets you a little nervous. Like you don't feel anything. I have a VR boxing game, and it's weird because when they hit you, like you get a flash. And it gives you – it gets you a little nervous. Like you really do feel like you're sparring. But when you hit them, there's no satisfaction. Well, you're used to the real thing. There's nothing like that real impact, right?

There's no replacement for real sparring. For hitting things. For real sparring, getting hit. Or even hitting a bag. I mean, it would be nice. I mean, you don't really have to hit a person. I mean, it would be nice. I mean, you don't really have to hit a person.

But if you hit the thing, like if they could figure out a way to make a robot, you know, that was interacting with the VR program that understood where the footsteps of the VR. So it's in the correct position. So, like, as you hit it, that's where it should be. And you could actually push off of it and it would back up a little. And then you could hit it. So you could combine. I bet it is. It's be. And you could actually push off of it and it would back up a little and then you could hit it. So you could combine. I bet it is. It's coming.

And I should be clear. Like, I'm not a total technophile. I think we're using the tech that we have now because it's the best we've got. And I hope that in five years with all these amazing engineers I'm surrounded by and elsewhere that we won't be using that tech and we'll be doing something completely different. So I'm sorry to interrupt you. completely different. So I'm sorry to interrupt you. So the, the, when you are in this different race and you're walking down the street, you get this, this feeling, is there overt racism? Yeah. So you go to a job interview and you're standing there next to somebody else. You're actually seated down. And then the interviewer comes in and says, hello, nice to meet you. And they put out their hand and shake the person's hand next to you, white guy. And then you put out your hand and they don't shake it. They go, nice to meet you.

They do the nod, they make eye contact. And then you go into a different set of experiences. It takes you through about 10 minutes of these experiences. And what's interesting about it is none of them is so overwhelming that you're like, oh my God, this is what it must be like. But what's interesting is I did that experience three years ago. Every time I walk past a black person on the street, I now, it triggers a frame of mind. I'm thinking about how I react. I'm thinking about it. Whereas before I wasn't, I've never considered myself a racist person. I don't now, but it fundamentally changed the way that I experience interactions with people on the street. And that was a 10 minute or so or 20 minute or so VR experience. And that's just the tip of the

iceberg about what's possible. I think we really, what it tells me is that because of how stringently gated plasticity is, plasticity is vaulted by these chemicals. We need to bring those chemicals into play if we want people to change the way they feel. I don't think watching a protest on the street can do it. I think the George Floyd thing absolutely did it. That was a very dramatic, terrible example. It was visceral to watch that. And I think that's why it had the effect it did. It underscores essentially everything we've been saying about neurochemicals being the gates to changing the brain. Without that, it's not going to happen. Talking about this VR program highlights one of the reasons why I don't like cities like Manhattan. I'd like them to visit, but I don't want to live there because you don't say

hi to everybody. You can't. Yeah. You're just in the optic flow. You'd be like, hey, hi, how are you? Hey, what's up? Hi, lady. It's the human safari. I always say New York is like a human safari, but it's like, again, signal the noise. Like a person has to have a cat on their head naked and on fire before you're like, oh, wow. It's just that it's very impersonal. There's this sort of weird thing that happens when you get around large numbers of people where they don't become, they're not as valuable because you're overwhelmed by them. There's so many of them. Whereas if you're in a small town, you know, of 20,000 people and you walk down the street and there's a guy walking towards you, you look at each other, go, Hey man, how you doing?

I like that too. I always, what I liked about New York is I felt like it's, you had Italians and Irish and black people, white people in Puerto Rican people. And so there's a, you also experienced them, right? You see that. And, you know, the Bay Area, I love the Bay Area, but one of the problems I have with the Bay Area is it's become, you know, people are hidden away a lot more. There isn't that in a lot of the- It's a car culture as well. It's a car culture and every place has its challenges. But I think New York is such a beautiful experiment in putting a bunch of people with different genetic and ethnic backgrounds together, putting them together and saying, you know, you may not all get along, but at least you will hear those accents.

You'll get cursed at in five different languages. And I think there's a real beauty to it. I wonder how much that's going to change because of COVID, because obviously people are terrified of being jammed into a subway now with strangers. Because obviously people are terrified of being jammed into a subway now with strangers. And that was one of the cool things about New York is that you did all walks of life, poor and rich would interact with each other on the street. In L.A., there's virtually none of that. And there's this weird sort of separation between people and where they live. And then also the car thing.

Car cultures, it just you're in your own little environment you set up your own little world and that's your car and you're driving around and these other people that you interact with that's a little segment of their world that they're taking with them on the 405 and because of that you don't have the same sort of um melting pot aspect that you do get in new york new york really uniquely i mean i grew up in boston it doesn't have it you You know, Boston has like, there's public transport. There's the T, you know, you can ride the train, shit like that. But it's not nearly as prevalent as the subway system in New York City or the walking in New York City. Everybody's walking. Yeah. And you have to be right up next to it. You know, I think martial arts has this

a bit as well. I grew up skateboarding and that was my sport. And what I loved about it is, first of all, it's like all ages. It's sort of a weird sport in that way. You got little kids hanging out with grown men and girls. Yeah. And so you get this big mixing pot, but also ethnically so diverse. It wasn't always like that, but you've got Vietnamese, Mexican, black, white kids, everything. Right. Hanging out together.

Whoever can get their tail down, drop in and go. Yeah. That's great. Science is making a an effort. And I think now, especially after the recent events in the world to try and bring in more diversity. And it's a desperate need because you want that diversity of opinion. You want that diversity of outlook, etc. cetera. We're fortunate to have an African-American colleague in our department, which is actually a small department. And there's an immense need for that. I think science is going to be more diverse in the years to come. It's a focused effort now that the National Institutes of Health is going to put money and energy into this, thankfully. But there can always be more done. But I think when thinking about kids and neuroplasticity, like whenever I'm not skateboarding anymore, it wasn't very good at it anyway, but, um, I did

enjoy it. And I loved the community around that. I think more of that, please, for the next generation, more things like that. I think martial arts is great. You go into gym and it's like, it doesn't matter really where you're from, especially if you're in a spa, if you're going to get in and, you know, start boxing rounds, you have to be able to take it, you know? And it's not about background. It's about what you can do. Yeah. That is really important. I mean, and it's, it's just more of those things where people can interact with all kinds of different people gives you a more balanced perspective. It gives you a, it gives you a broader perspective, right? You get to see, and bringing it back to

the way the brain functions, the more variables that you have in terms of when you see a person, you know, you know so many different examples of human beings that you have more to draw upon. And I hope that one of the things that comes out of this George Floyd thing and then the Black Lives Matter protests is people have a more open-minded approach towards just human beings in general. And I think these things, like they happen in these big explosive events and then shifts. And I think we're absolutely experiencing like a global consciousness shift. And it's very chaotic and scary in some ways for a lot of people right now but i think ultimately we're going to come out of this the better and if you look at like say steven pinker's work where he covers you know the history of human

beings and interactions we are in the best time ever and it's hard to say that because you know there's still poverty and there's still violence and there's still crime and there's still racism and sexism and rape and all sorts of awful shit. But it's way less and way better than it was just 100 years ago or 200 years ago. And it seems to constantly be moving in that trend. And I'm hoping that that's going to be what comes out of this. out of this. This is going to be another event that as the dust settles and as the lessons are learned and as we kind of get our feet back on the ground and we understand what went wrong and what happened, particularly because of this coronavirus situation that we're in, everything's in chaos. Everything's thrown up in the air. 30 something percent of people can't pay their rent right now.

It's crazy. It's nuts. It's terrible. Unemployment rates through the now. It's crazy. It's nuts. It's terrible. Unemployment rates through the roof. It's crazy. It's terrible. It's terrible. And every time I, you know, I think being able to take someone else's frame of mind or reference just as an exercise, it's so hard.

I mean, we become kind of autistic in our way of just feeling like our experience is the one experience and just being able to try and think about what it must be like over the last three months to not have any income, you know, to see your gym or your business open then shut again, at least here in California. Incredibly stressful. It's pulling on all the levers that create internal tension and outward physical explosion. And we, yeah, I am optimistic in terms of the long arc of this. But right now we are in the pressure point. Yeah, it am optimistic in terms of the long arc of this, but right now we are in the pressure point. Yeah, it's rough. To bring it back to your work, one of the things that you talked about was eyesight and regaining eyesight or dealing with people that have weakening eyesight. My eyesight is going to shit, man.

Do you have a retinal condition? No, I'm just old, 52, and just there's a, you know, macular degeneration. Like I can, I mean, I can read my phone. I can read all these text messages that are coming in, 14 new ones since I put my phone down. But what I do know for sure is that my vision is not as good as it was 10 years ago and certainly not as good as it was 20 years ago. What can be done? Okay. So there's what can be done now and where we're headed, but I suspect you want to know what can be done now. Fix my eyes. Okay. So we do have a clinical trial in my lab right now through my affiliation with ophthalmology where people put on VR goggles,

very separate from the fear inducing thing. It's actually a very pleasant experience. from the fear-inducing thing. It's actually a very pleasant experience. And we use a particular pattern of stimulation that activates the cells in the eye that are most vulnerable and create vision loss. It stimulates those in a way that reinforces their connections with the brain. That's the logic.

So every cell in your eye has a different function, but some of them, their job is to transmit visual information to the rest of the brain. They're called ganglion cells. We know what patterns of activity make them healthy and what reinforce regeneration. Back in 2016, my lab published a paper showing that that particular pattern of stimulation combined with a particular pattern of gene therapy. So this is one injection into the eye of a gene that triggers growth of these cells. In mice, that allowed regeneration of neurons that were damaged and it actually reversed slightly, but it reversed blindness.

Completely blind mice were able to see again. So that was in mice. We then took that, built a human clinical trial using just the VR part. However, some people in this trial are receiving injections. It's about once every month, very painless injection into what we call the vitreous of the eye. They shoot it right in the eyeball? Yeah. Just a little insulin syringe, go right in. You look that way, boom. A skilled ophthalmologist can do this without any pain or anything. I know

it sounds terrible, but it's very straightforward. Okay. To inject something called CNTF, ciliary nootrophic factor. And the combination of this growth factor plus the visual stimulation, we believe is going to protect cells that would normally be lost from getting lost. So offset vision loss and potentially restore vision. Now, the results of this trial aren't done, but we are recruiting people for this trial. Jamie, you're in, right? My eyes are good. They're working just fine right now. What about prisoners?

Get some prisoners that are really bad people, but they can't see that good. The injection part, provided it's done by a skilled ophthalmologist, it's a cinch. You've been through way worse this morning on your way to work. Trust me. So it's nothing. The other thing is that there was a paper published just recently, a couple weeks ago, not from my lab, but from a group over at University College London, looking at the effects of red light on mitochondria in a different cell type, which are the photoreceptors of the eye. So you've got the cells that connect the eye of the brain called

the ganglion cells, then you've got the photoreceptors, which take all this photon information, turn it into this incredible thing we call vision, which itself is a whole galaxy of information, but is amazing. And those cells degenerate over time, the photoreceptors. They don't do very well in part because as we age, the mitochondrial function gets disrupted. This study was preliminary. It wasn't very many subjects. I think it was only 20 subjects.

Maybe it was 12, but getting red light therapy, just viewing a very bright flashes of red light of a particular wavelength. So I don't want people going out there and blasting their eyes. Improved vision on vision tests almost immediately. And that's a very non-invasive approach. And I'd be happy- I have one of those red light therapy machines. One of those sheets that you use?

Yeah. It's probably a little different than this. If you're interested in doing this, let me know and we can potentially plug you into this. What would be the difference between that red light therapy and the other kind of red light therapy? Because I really like that juve thing. I'm not exactly sure what it does. It's supposed to regenerate collagen and do a bunch of different things. It helps you, but it feels good.

Yeah, it feels good. It feels good to stand in front of it. And the bright, one of the things is, remember, we're saying that the eyes are actually a piece of brain. Your brain needs to know when to be awake and when to be asleep. One of the best ways to wake up your brain is to view bright light. And, you know, there are all these people that are fanatic about blue light out there. Viewing bright light in the morning from sunlight is the best thing. Like in Southern California, you go outside two to ten minutes of getting bright light.

And then you want to avoid light from like 11 PM to 4 AM. Actually, it's been shown to suppress melatonin. It can disrupt sleep. It has a lot of problems. You don't really want to be looking at any bright light in the middle of the night. A lot of people get obsessed with blue light being bad. You want bright light during the day and you don't want any bright light at night, really too much of it.

And people come after me, they're like the blue blockers. You know, I call it like the blue block and East does have been coming after me recently, because I'm out there saying like, it's like, what about the, it's like, look, the blue blockers will help filter some light. It'll make things less bright. It's hard to see with sunglasses in your house. So be my guest and wear them. But really what you want to do is dim the lights in the evening, deeper sleep, melatonin suppression isn't, won't be a problem. That'll that's all good. Get bright light first thing in the morning when you wake up. And then the bright red light is probably

having a dual effect. It's probably increasing mitochondria in the photoreceptors if the study is right. And I do believe this study, it looks really good to me. And the person who did it has been in the game a long time, so I trust him. And in addition to that, it's going to wake up your system and get the balance of these hormones like you want cortisol high in the morning and melatonin coming up about 16 hours later before sleep. It's going to put all that into the right rhythm. So I say go ahead and do the red light thing. But if you want to pursue the red light flashes or the VR and maybe even the CNTF injection, we should talk about that. CNTF injection, you mean the bacteria?

They squirt it right in your eyeball? That's the growth factor, yeah. But I'm scared of that. CNTF injection, you mean the bacteria, they squirt it right in your eyeball? That's the growth factor. Yeah. But I'm scared of that. Well, the good news is that the VR, we do have a condition in the study where it's just VR. So it's a daily, you're essentially, neurons like to be active. And these cells that connect the eye to the brain are the most, above all others, the

most active neurons and cells in your entire body. Do you know of anybody who's done this where they had the injections in the eyes? Well, oh yeah. Many people now in the study have had the injections. And what are the benefits of the... Well, so I want to be careful here. I can't talk about the results of a clinical trial, but I can say they're promising.

And this isn't human. Just wink. Wink if you think i should do it uh wink if you can fix my eyes well i think if you if you qualify for the study i definitely think you should do it okay um but i i can't reveal that uh the results of the study because i actually don't know in the name of good science i'm blinded to the conditions no pun right like i just don't know but we have we have subjects or patients that are as young as 17, as old as 80. And the beauty of this is that if you decide not to get the injection, it's completely non-invasive. Okay.

How many injections do you have to have? I think it's like once a month for a period of about six months. So would I have to go to the Bay Area once a month? No. So there is another version of this where there's a slow- polymer capsule that's, that's placed into the eye. It just kind of sits there. That sounds even worse. Just inject me and get it over with.

Well, someday we will have drops that will get through the vitreous and down there. Cause they're like, like we work on glaucoma in my lab, people for glaucoma take drops for eye pressure. But getting things into, you know, remember it's brain.

And so there's a reason why you have this tough sclera. I'm not going to be able to think that way. The brain thing is really fucking my head up. The fact that your eyeballs are your exposed brain. Two pieces of the brain. That is so nuts. Two pieces of the brain. And so visual repair is soon going to go the way of two other strategies. And I think we're going to see this in humans in the next couple of years, meaning two years, because I hate the 10 years thing. We've been hearing the 10 years thing forever. One is the work of someone that you've had on here before.

David Sinclair. Love that dude. It's great. He's terrific guy, both for sake of his work on combating aging and also just really have to tip my hat to him because he was really first man in in terms of doing public facing science education through podcasts and things like that. Yes. And, you know, I'm starting to do that and others are starting to do science education through podcasts and things like that. And, you know, I'm, I'm starting to do that and others are starting to do it and he deserves credit for that. It's, it puts scientists in a vulnerable place and I think he's doing it with a lot of integrity. He's also got a fun personality. So it's a great guy. Yeah. It's easy

for him to get the point across. So David's not typically known for doing vision research, but he paired up with another guy's lab, a guy named Zhigang He at Harvard Children's Hospital, someone I know very well. We worked together on a number of things. And they took advantage of what are called these Yamanaka factors. Yamanaka won the Nobel Prize for finding these four factors that could essentially allow a cell to turn into anything, any other cell type, kind of create stemness in these cells, make them pluripotent stem cells. The problem was that tends to induce cancers in these cells. So David's lab has combined an

anti-cancer gene. I think these work are still not published, but he's talked about them, so I feel comfortable doing this. Suppresses cancer while turning these cells young again. And at least in mice, they see some very encouraging results. So that would be a sort of one injection kind of thing where you go in once, you get the injection, and then never again. If I did an injection once a month, how long are we talking? How many months do I have to do it for?

So the study would probably run for about six months or the embedded capsule, the CNTF capsule combined with the VR. Now you have to put those VR goggles on for 20 minutes a day and watch this. That's easy. You can listen to music,

do whatever you want. It's a very passive thing that triggers activity of these cells. The activity is key because we know that neurons, you know, you hear fire together, wire together and all this other stuff.

But the fact of the matter is neurons that are quieted, even if you cast an arm, the neurons that support movement of that arm very quickly start to turn off and eventually they can die. So keeping neurons active

and alive and healthy involves keeping them literally active electrically. And so that's what the VR component's about. So there's the Sinclair kind of turning back the clock stuff. And then colleagues of mine at Stanford are doing incredible work with neural prostheses, so little robotic retinas, as well as stem cells that are injected into the eye

that settle down into your eye and give you the cells that you've lost. And we're not quite there with the human trials yet. But there's a group, the Retinal Repair Initiative, I'm part of this thing, it has a kind of funny name, but it's called the Retinal Dream Team, which is a bunch of people brought together to cure blindness, to solve blindness in a particular disease called neurofibromatosis. So there are dozens of labs working extremely hard on this problem. This is one place where I can say there's been tremendous progress in the last five years. There are clinical trials now, for instance,

the one in my lab. And in two or three years, you're going to start seeing people who would normally go blind. You're going to halt that. And you're going to see people who are completely blind. I think eventually those people will see again. Wow. Yeah. That's intense. That's amazing. It's amazing. And you know, blind people, the mental real estate, but like the visual real estate in the brain gets taken over by other functions. There's this guy, Dan Mancina. He's a skateboarder. He's completely blind. He's an amazing guy. He- He skateboards blind? With a cane. Whoa. Rides up to curbs and handrails,

always onto him, kick flips out, this kind of stuff. What? Regularly, yeah. And I've talked to him a bunch of times because he was having some issues with his sleep because one of the issues that blind people have is because light is controlling when to be alert and when to be asleep.

He was having some issues with this. So he contacted me. We're also in touch because we're trying to, he's trying to build skate parks for blind kids so that they can- Oh, there he is right there. Oh yeah. Check out Dan. Wow. That's insane. He's such a beast. I mean, most people would be afraid to do this without, yeah.

That's crazy. Yeah. And what's so great about Dan is he also, you know- That is nuts. He's in graduate school. I mean, he's in graduate school. He's, I mean, he is such a, he's tapping things. So he knows where they are, but how does he know the scale of the ramp or the pitch of the ramp? He has an internal representation of it. Wow.

That's bonkers. He's from Michigan. I wish he could see how cool it is. There he is. Yeah. Yeah. He's, uh, he teaches blind kids like what's possible basically. Wow.

Because talk about COVID and being indoors. Blind people. I spent a lot of time with blind people because of the visual restoration stuff. And there are people like Dan who are out there trying to get blind people to come out of their rooms to get into society. If you have a dog, you're better off. Right. Because the dog, you outsource your vision to the dog. There are now glasses that blind people can wear and walk down the street and it communicates with somebody in a, like a dispatcher

who says, oh, you know what? There's someone sketchy over there to your right. You might want to cross the street. And it works really well, but it's very expensive. And of course, privacy is an issue. You get home, you start undressing, you know, you don't want the person like looking at you in the mirror, you know, or maybe people do, but that's a whole different business, you know. But people like Dan are amazing. And I do believe, you know, the hope is that people like Dan will eventually see again. Wow.

But that's going to require new cells. And actually for him, he's going to need new eyes. So Dan actually has had, because he had this Coates disease that led to a retinitis pigmentosa, he had his eyes removed. So whenever people are like, sometimes you'll see on social media, people will say, I don't believe he's blind.

It's like, the guy doesn't even have eyes. Anyway, that's a whole universe of stuff. But if you would like to explore visual repair and visual restoration, offsetting vision loss more, I'd be happy to further the discussion. Yeah, I would love to. Yeah, I'll be a guinea pig. Let's get the party rolling. Dude.

We just did three hours. Oh my. No crazy. Oh, sorry. No. Okay. Apologies.

It was awesome. Great conversation. I really appreciate it. Um, if people want to get ahold of you on social media, what's your Twitter? You have Twitter, Instagram.

What do you have? I have a Twitter, but I don't use it. I'm on Instagram. It's Huberman lab. H U B E R M A N L A B. I teach neuroscience it. I'm on Instagram. It's Huberman Lab, H-U-B-E-R-M-A-N-L-A-B. I teach neuroscience there. I'm big on public education.

Beautiful. And we recruit subjects to the lab for studies every now and again. I will announce them there. And yeah, that's the deal. Eventually, I'm supposed to write a book, but I've been too busy doing science. But listen, man, this was so much fun. And I think we could probably do 100 of these. So let's do it again.

Great. Thank you very much. Thank you. Really appreciate you. All right. Bye, everybody.