Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,

where we discuss science

and science-based tools for everyday life.

I’m Andrew Huberman,

and I’m a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology

at Stanford School of Medicine.

For today’s podcast,

we’re going to talk about the parts list

of the nervous system.

Now that might sound boring,

but these are the bits and pieces

that together make up everything

about your experience of life,

from what you think about to what you feel,

what you imagine, and what you accomplish

from the day you’re born until the day you die.

That parts list is really incredible

because it has a history associated with it

that really provides a window into all sorts of things

like engineering, warfare, religion, and philosophy.

So I’m going to share with you the parts list

that makes up who you are

through the lens of some of those other aspects of life

and other aspects of the history of the discovery

of the nervous system.

By the end of this podcast,

I promise you’re going to understand a lot more

about how you work and how to apply that knowledge.

There’s going to be a little bit of story.

There’s going to be a lot of discussion

about the people who made these particular discoveries.

There’ll be a little bit of technical language.

There’s no way to avoid that.

But at the end, you’re going to have in hand

what would be the equivalent

of an entire semester of learning

about the nervous system and how you work.

So a few important points before we get started.

I am not a medical doctor.

That means I don’t prescribe anything.

I’m a professor.

So sometimes I’ll profess things.

In fact, I profess a lot of things.

We are going to talk about some basic functioning

of the nervous system, parts, et cetera,

but we’re also going to talk about

how to apply that knowledge.

That said, your healthcare,

your wellbeing is your responsibility.

So anytime we talk about tools,

please filter it through that responsibility.

Talk to a healthcare professional

if you’re going to explore any new tools or practices

and be smart in your pursuit of these new tools.

I also want to emphasize that this podcast

and the other things I do on social media

are my personal goal of bringing

zero cost to consumer information to the general public.

It is separate from my role at Stanford University.

In that spirit, I really want to thank

the sponsors of today’s podcast.

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So let’s talk about the nervous system.

The reason I say your nervous system and not your brain

is because your brain is actually just one piece

of this larger, more important thing, frankly,

that we call the nervous system.

The nervous system includes your brain and your spinal cord

but also all the connections between your brain

and your spinal cord and the organs of your body.

It also includes, very importantly,

all the connections between your organs

back to your spinal cord and brain.

So the way to think about how you function at every level

from the moment you’re born until the day you die,

everything you think and remember and feel and imagine

is that your nervous system

is this continuous loop of communication

between the brain, spinal cord, and body,

and body, spinal cord, and brain.

In fact, we really can’t even separate them.

It’s one continuous loop.

You may have heard of something called a Mobius strip.

A Mobius strip is almost like one of these impossible

figures that no matter which angle you look at it from,

you can’t tell where it starts and where it ends.

And that’s really how your nervous system is built.

That’s the structure that allows you to, for instance,

deploy immune cells, to release cells

that will go kill infection

when you’re in the presence of infection.

Most people just think about that

as a function of the immune system,

but actually it’s your nervous system

that tells organs like your spleen to release killer cells

that go and hunt down those bacterial and viral invaders

and gobble them up.

If you have a stomach ache, for instance,

sure, you feel that in your stomach,

but it’s really your nervous system

that’s causing the stomach ache,

the ache aspect of it is a nervous system feature.

So when we want to talk about experience,

or we want to talk about how to change the self in any way,

we really need to think about the nervous system first.

It is fair to say that the nervous system

governs all other biological systems of the body.

And it’s also influenced by those other biological systems.

So if we’re talking about the nervous system,

we need to get a little specific about what we mean.

It’s not just this big loop of wires.

In fact, there’s a interesting story about that

because at the turn of the sort of 1800s to 1900s,

it actually was believed that our nervous system

was just one giant cell.

But two guys, the names aren’t super important,

but in fairness to their important discovery,

Ramon y Cajal, a Spaniard, Camillo Golgi, an Italian guy,

figured out how to label or stain the nervous system

in a way that revealed, oh my goodness,

we’re actually made up of trillions of these little cells,

nerve cells that are called neurons.

And that’s what a neuron is.

It’s just a nerve cell.

They also saw that those nerve cells

weren’t touching one another.

They’re actually separated by little gaps.

And those little gaps you may have heard of before,

they’re called synapses.

Those synapses are where the chemicals from one neuron

are kind of spit out or vomited into.

And then the next nerve cell detects those chemicals

and then passes electricity down its length

to the next nerve cell and so forth.

So really the way to think about your body

and your thoughts and your mind

is that you are a flow of electricity, right?

There’s nothing mystical about this.

You’re a flow of electricity

between these different nerve cells.

And depending on which nerve cells are active,

you might be lifting your arm or lowering your arm.

You might be seeing something and perceiving that it’s red,

or you might be seeing something

and perceiving that it’s green,

all depending on which nerve cells

are electrically active at a given moment.

The example of perceiving red or perceiving green

is a particularly good example

because so often our experience of the world

makes it seem as if these things

that are happening outside us

are actually happening inside us.

But the language of the nervous system is just electricity.

It’s just like a Morse code of some sort

where the syllables and words and consonants

and vowels of language,

it just depends on how they’re assembled, what order.

And so that brings us to the issue

of how the nervous system works.

The way to think about how the nervous system works

is that our experiences, our memories, everything

is sort of like the keys on a piano

being played in a particular order, right?

If I play the keys on a piano in a particular order

and with a particular intensity, that’s a given song.

We can make that analogous to a given experience.

It’s not really that the key, you know,

A sharp or E flat is the song,

it’s just one component of the song.

So when you hear that, you know, for instance,

there’s a brain area called the hippocampus,

which there is, that’s involved in memory.

Well, it’s involved in memory,

but it’s not that memories are stored there as sentences,

they’re stored there as patterns of electricity and neurons

that when repeated give you the sense

that you’re experiencing the thing again.

In fact, deja vu, the sense that what you’re experiencing

is so familiar and like something

that you’ve experienced previously

is merely that the neurons that were active

in one circumstance are now becoming active

in the same circumstance again.

And so it’s really just like hearing the same song,

maybe not played on a piano,

but next time on a classical guitar,

there’s something similar about that song,

even though it’s being played on two different instruments.

So I think it’s important that people understand

the parts of their nervous system

and that it includes so much more than just the brain

and that there are these things, neurons and synapses,

but really that it’s the electrical activity

of these neurons that dictates our experience.

So if the early 1900s

were when these neurons were discovered,

certainly a lot has happened since then.

And in that time between the early 1900s and now,

there’s some important events

that actually happened in history

that give us insight or gave us insight

into how the nervous system works.

One of the more surprising ones was actually warfare.

So as most everybody knows, in warfare,

people get shot and people often die,

but many people get shot and they don’t die.

And in World War I,

there were some changes in artillery, in bullets

that made for a situation where bullets

would enter the body and brain at very discrete locations

and would go out the other side of the body or brain

and also make a very small hole at that exit location.

And in doing so,

produced a lot of naturally occurring lesions

of the nervous system.

Now you say, okay,

well, how does that relate to neuroscience?

Well, unlike previous years

where a lot of the artillery would create

these big sort of holes as the bullets

would blow out of the brain or body,

I know this is rather gruesome,

when the holes were very discrete,

they entered at one point and left at another point,

they would take out or destroy very discrete bits

of neural tissue of the nervous system.

So people were coming back from war

with holes in their brain

and in other parts of their nervous system

that were limited to very specific locations.

In addition to that,

there was some advancement

in the cleaning of wounds that happened.

So many more people were surviving.

What this meant was that neurologists

now had a collection of patients that would come back

and they’d have holes

in very specific locations of their brain.

And they’d say things like,

well, I can recognize faces,

but I can’t recognize who those faces belong to.

I know it’s a face, but I don’t know who it belongs to.

And after that person eventually died,

the neurologist would figure out,

ah, I’ve had 10 patients that all told me

that they couldn’t recognize faces

and they all had these bullet holes

that went through a particular region of the brain.

And that’s how we know a lot

about how particular brain regions

like the hippocampus work.

In fact, some of the more amazing examples of this

where people would come back and they, for instance,

would speak in complete gibberish,

whereas previously they could speak normally.

And even though they were speaking in complete gibberish,

they could understand language perfectly.

That’s how we know that speech and language

are actually controlled

by separate portions of the nervous system.

And there are many examples like that.

People that couldn’t recognize the faces of famous people

or, and that actually brings us to an interesting example.

In modern times, many, many years later,

in the early 2000s,

there was actually a paper

that was published in the journal Nature,

excellent journal,

showing that in a human being,

a perfectly healthy human being,

there was a neuron that would become active,

electrically active,

only when the person viewed the picture

of Jennifer Aniston, the actress.

So literally a neuron that represented Jennifer Aniston,

so-called Jennifer Aniston cells.

Neuroscientists know about these Jennifer Aniston cells.

If you can recognize Jennifer Aniston’s face,

you have Jennifer Aniston neurons.

And presumably you also have neurons

that can recognize the faces

of other famous and non-famous people.

So that indicates that our brain

is really a map of our experience.

We come into the world

and our brain has a kind of bias

towards learning particular kinds of things.

It’s ready to receive information

and learn that information,

but the brain is really a map of experience.

So let’s talk about what experience really is.

What does it mean for your brain to work?

Well, I think it’s fair to say

that the nervous system really does five things, maybe six.

The first one is sensation.

So this is important to understand

for any and all of you

that want to change your nervous system

or to apply tools to make your nervous system work better.

Sensation is a non-negotiable element

of your nervous system.

You have neurons in your eye

that perceive certain colors of light

and certain directions of movement.

You have neurons in your skin

that perceive particular kinds of touch,

like light touch or firm touch or painful touch.

You have neurons in your ears that perceive certain sounds.

Your entire experience of life

is filtered by these, what we call sensory receptors,

if you want to know what the name is.

So this always raises an interesting question.

People ask, well, is there much more out there?

Is there a lot more happening in the world

that I’m not experiencing or that humans aren’t experiencing?

And the answer, of course, is yes.

There are many species on this planet

that are perceiving things that we will never perceive

unless we apply technology.

Best example I could think of off the top of my head

would be something like infrared vision.

There are snakes out there, pit vipers and so forth,

that can sense heat emissions from other animals.

They don’t actually see their shape.

They sense their heat shape and their heat emissions.

Humans can’t do that unless, of course,

they put on infrared goggles or something

that would allow them to detect those heat emissions.

There are turtles and certain species of birds

that migrate long distances

that can detect magnetic fields because they have neurons.

Again, it’s the nervous system that allows them to do this.

So they have neurons in their nose and in their head

that allow them to migrate along magnetic fields

in order to, as amazing as this sounds,

go from one particular location in the ocean,

thousands of miles away,

to all aggregate on one particular beach

at a particular time of year

so that they can mate, lay eggs,

and then wander back off into the sea to die.

And then their young will eventually hatch.

Those little cute little turtles will shuffle to the ocean,

swim off, and go do the exact same thing.

They don’t migrate that distance by vision.

They don’t do it by smell.

They do it by sensing magnetic fields, okay?

And many other species do these incredible things.

We don’t, humans are not magnetic sensing organisms.

We can’t do that because we don’t have receptors

that sense magnetic fields.

There are some data that maybe some humans

can sense magnetic fields,

but you should be very skeptical of anyone

that’s convinced that they can do that

with any degree of robustness or accuracy

because even the people that can do this

aren’t necessarily aware that they can.

Maybe a topic for a future podcast.

So we have sensation.

Then we have perception.

Perception is our ability to take what we’re sensing

and focus on it and make sense of it,

to explore it, to remember it.

So really perceptions are just whichever sensations

we happen to be paying attention to at any moment.

And you can do this right now.

You can experience perception

and the difference between perception

and sensation very easily.

If, for instance, I tell you to pay attention

to the contact of your feet, the bottoms of your feet

with whatever surface they happen to be in contact with,

maybe it’s shoes, maybe it’s the floor.

If your feet are up, maybe it’s air.

The moment you place your,

what we call the spotlight of attention

or the spotlight of perception on your feet,

you are now perceiving what was happening there,

what was being sensed there.

The sensation was happening all along, however.

So while sensation is not negotiable,

you can’t change your receptors

unless you adopt some new technology.

Perception is under the control of your attention.

And the way to think about attention

is it’s like a spotlight, except it’s not one spotlight.

You actually have two attentional spotlights.

Anyone that tells you you can’t multitask,

tell them they’re wrong.

And if they disagree with you, tell them to contact me.

Because in old world primates, of which humans are,

we are able to do what’s called covert attention.

We can place a spotlight of attention on something,

for instance, something we’re reading or looking at

or someone that we’re listening to.

And we can place a second spotlight of attention

on something we’re eating and how it tastes

or our child running around in the room

or my dog.

You can split your attention into two locations,

but of course you can also bring your attention,

that is your perception, to one particular location.

You can dilate your attention,

kind of like making a spotlight more diffuse,

or you can make it more concentrated.

This is very important to understand

if you’re going to think about tools

to improve your nervous system,

whether or not that tool is in the form of a chemical

that you decide to take,

maybe a supplement to increase some chemical in your brain.

If that’s your choice, or a brain machine device,

or you’re going to try and learn something better

by engaging in some focus or motivated pursuit

for some period of time each day.

Attention is something that is absolutely

under your control, in particular, when you’re rested.

And we’ll get back to this.

But when you are rested,

and we’ll define rest very clearly,

you are able to direct your attention

in very deliberate ways.

And that’s because we have something in our nervous system

which is sort of like a two-way street.

And that two-way street is a communication

between the aspects of our nervous system

that are reflexive,

and the aspects of our nervous system that are deliberate.

So we all know what it’s like to be reflexive.

You go through life, you’re walking.

If you already know how to walk,

you don’t think about your walking, you just walk.

And that’s because the nervous system wants to pass off

as much as it can to reflexive action.

That’s called a bottom-up processing.

It really just means that information is flowing

in through your senses,

regardless of what you’re perceiving,

that information is flowing up

and it’s directing your activity.

But at any moment, for instance,

let’s say a car screeches in front of you around the corner

and you suddenly pause,

you are now moving into deliberate action.

You would start looking around in a very deliberate way.

The nervous system can be reflexive in its action,

or it can be deliberate.

If reflexive action tends to be what we call bottom-up,

deliberate action and deliberate perceptions

and deliberate thoughts are top-down.

They require some effort and some focus,

but that’s the point.

You can decide to focus your attention and energy

on anything you want.

You can decide to focus your behavior in any way you want,

but it will always feel like it requires some effort

and some strain.

Whereas when you’re in reflexive mode,

just walking and talking and eating and doing your thing,

it’s going to feel very easy.

And that’s because your nervous system basically wired up

to be able to do most things easily

without much metabolic demand,

without consuming much energy.

But the moment you try and do something very specific,

you’re going to feel a sort of mental friction.

It’s going to be challenging.

So we’ve got sensations, perceptions,

and then we’ve got things that we call feelings

slash emotions.

And these get a little complicated

because almost all of us,

I would hope all of us are familiar with things

like happiness and sadness or boredom or frustration.

Scientists argue like crazy,

neuroscientists and psychologists and philosophers

for that matter,

argue like crazy about what these are and how they work.

Certainly emotions and feelings

are the product of the nervous system.

They involve the activity of neurons.

But as I mentioned earlier, neurons are electrically active,

but they also release chemicals.

And there’s a certain category of chemicals

that has a very profound influence on our emotional states.

They’re called neuromodulators.

And those neuromodulators have names

that probably you’ve heard of before,

things like dopamine and serotonin

and acetylcholine, epinephrine.

Neuromodulators are really interesting

because they bias which neurons are likely to be active

and which ones are likely to be inactive.

A simple way to think about neuromodulators

is they are sort of like playlists

that you would have on any kind of device

where you’re going to play particular categories of music.

So for instance, dopamine,

which is often discussed as the molecule of reward or joy,

is involved in reward.

And it does tend to create a sort of a upbeat mood

when released in appropriate amounts in the brain.

But the reason it does that

is because it makes certain neurons

and neural circuits, as we call them,

more active and others less active, okay?

So serotonin, for instance,

is a molecule that when released

tends to make us feel really good

with what we have, our sort of internal landscape

and the resources that we have.

Whereas dopamine, more than being a molecule of reward,

is really more a molecule of motivation

toward things that are outside us

and that we want to pursue.

And we can look at healthy conditions or situations

like being in pursuit of a goal

where every time we accomplish something

en route to that goal,

a little bit of dopamine is released

and we feel more motivation, that happens.

We can also look at the extreme example

of something like mania,

where somebody is so relentlessly in pursuit

of external things like money and relationships

that they’re sort of in this delusional state

of thinking that they have the resources that they need

in order to pursue all these things

when in fact they don’t.

So these neuromodulators can exist in normal levels,

low levels, high levels,

and that actually gives us a window

into a very important aspect of neuroscience history

that all of us are impacted by today,

which is the discovery of antidepressants

and so-called antipsychotics.

In the 1950s, 60s, and 70s,

it was discovered that there are compounds, chemicals,

that can increase or decrease serotonin,

that can increase or decrease dopamine.

And that led to the development

of most of what we call antidepressants.

Now, the trick here or the problem

is that most of these drugs,

especially in the 1950s and 60s,

they would reduce serotonin,

but they would also reduce dopamine,

or they would increase serotonin,

but they would also increase

some other neuromodulator or chemical.

And that’s because all these chemical systems in the body,

but the neuromodulators in particular

have a lot of receptors.

Now, these are different than the receptors

we were talking about earlier.

The receptors I’m talking about now

are sort of like parking spots where dopamine is released,

and if it attaches to a receptor, say, on the heart,

it might make the heart beat faster

because there’s a certain kind of receptor on the heart,

whereas if dopamine is released

and goes and attaches to muscle,

it might have a completely different effect on muscle,

and in fact, it does.

So different receptors on different organs of the body

are the ways that these neuromodulators

can have all these different effects

on different aspects of our biology.

This is most salient in the example

of some of the antidepressants that have sexual side effects

or that blunt appetite or that blunt motivation.

Many of these, which increase serotonin,

can be very beneficial for people.

It can elevate their mood, it can make them feel better,

but they also, if the doses are too high

or if that particular drug isn’t right for somebody,

that person experiences challenges with motivation

or appetite or libido because serotonin

is binding to receptors in the areas of the brain

that control those other things as well.

So we talked about sensation, we talked about perception.

When we talk about feelings,

we have to consider these neuromodulators,

and we have to consider also that feelings and emotions

are contextual.

In some cultures, showing a lot of joy

or a lot of sadness is entirely appropriate.

In other cultures, it’s considered inappropriate.

So I don’t think it’s fair to say

that there’s a sadness circuit or area of the brain

or a happiness circuit or area of the brain.

However, it is fair to say that certain chemicals

and certain brain circuits tend to be active

when we are in motivated states,

tend to be active when we are in non-motivated, lazy states,

tend to be active when we are focused

and tend to be active when we are not focused.

I want to emphasize also that emotions

are something that we generally feel

are not under our control.

We feel like they kind of geyser up within us

and they just kind of happen to us.

And that’s because they are somewhat reflexive.

We don’t really set out with a deliberate thought

to be happy or deliberate thought to be sad.

We tend to experience them

in kind of a passive reflexive way.

And that brings us to the next thing, which are thoughts.

Thoughts are really interesting

because in many ways they’re like perceptions,

except that they draw on

not just what’s happening in the present,

but also things we remember from the past

and things that we anticipate about the future.

The other thing about thoughts that’s really interesting

is that thoughts can be both reflexive,

they can just be occurring all the time,

sort of like pop-up windows

on a poorly filtered web browser,

or they can be deliberate.

We can decide to have a thought.

In fact, right now you could decide to have a thought

just like you would decide to write something out

on a piece of paper.

You could decide that you’re listening to a podcast,

that you are in a particular location.

You’re not just paying attention to what’s happening,

you’re directing your thought process.

And a lot of people don’t understand

or at least appreciate that the thought patterns

and the neural circuits that underlie thoughts

can actually be controlled in this deliberate way.

And then finally, there are actions.

Actions or behaviors are perhaps the most important aspect

to our nervous system,

because first of all,

our behaviors are actually the only thing

that are going to create any fossil record of our existence.

After we die, the nervous system deteriorates,

our skeleton will remain,

but in the moment of experiencing something very joyful

or something very sad,

it can feel so all-encompassing

that we actually think that it has some meaning

beyond that moment.

But actually for humans, and I think for all species,

the sensations, the perceptions, and the thoughts,

and the feelings that we have in our lifespan,

none of that is actually carried forward

except the ones that we take and we convert

into actions such as writing, actions such as words,

actions such as engineering new things.

And so the fossil record of our species

and of each one of us is really through action.

And that in part is why so much of our nervous system

is devoted to converting sensation, perceptions, feelings,

and thoughts into actions.

In fact, the great neuroscientist or physiologist,

Sherrington, won a Nobel Prize for his work

in mapping some of the circuitry,

the connections between nerve cells

that give rise to movement.

And he said, movement is the final common pathway.

The other way to think about it

is that one of the reasons that our central nervous system,

our brain and spinal cord, include this stuff in our skull,

but also connect so heavily to the body

is because most everything that we experience,

including our thoughts and feelings,

was really designed to either impact our behavior or not.

And the fact that thoughts allow us to reach into the past

and anticipate the future,

and not just experience what’s happening in the moment,

gave rise to an incredible capacity

for us to engage in behaviors

that are not just for the moment.

They’re based on things that we know from the past

and that we would like to see in the future.

And this aspect to our nervous system of creating movement

occurs through some very simple pathways.

The reflexive pathway basically includes areas

of the brainstem we call central pattern generators.

When you walk, provided you already know how to walk,

you are basically walking

because you have these central pattern generators,

groups of neurons that generate right foot, left foot,

right foot, left foot kind of movement.

However, when you decide to move

in a particular deliberate way

that requires a little more attention,

you start to engage areas of your brain

for top-down processing,

where your forebrain works from the top down

to control those central pattern generators

so that maybe it’s right foot, right foot, left foot,

right foot, right foot, left foot,

if maybe you’re hiking along some rocks

or something and you have to engage in that kind of movement.

So movement is just like thoughts,

can be either reflexive or deliberate.

And when we talk about deliberate,

I want to be very specific about how your brain works

in a deliberate way because it gives rise

to a very important feature of the nervous system

that we’re going to talk about next,

which is your ability to change your nervous system.

And what I’d like to center on for a second

is this notion of what does it mean

for the nervous system to do something deliberately?

Well, when you do something deliberately, you pay attention,

you are bringing your perception

to an analysis of three things,

duration, how long something is going to take

or should be done,

path, what you should be doing,

and outcome, if you do something

for a given length of time, what’s going to happen.

Now, when you’re walking down the street or you’re eating

or you’re just talking reflexively,

you’re not doing this, what I call DPO,

duration, path, outcome, type of deliberate function

in your brain and nervous system.

But the moment you decide to learn something

or to resist speaking or to speak up

when you would rather be quiet,

anytime you’re deliberately kind of forcing yourself

over a threshold, you’re engaging these brain circuits

and these nervous system circuits

that suddenly make it feel as if something is challenging,

something has changed.

Well, what’s changed?

What’s changed is that when you engage

in this duration, path, and outcome type of thinking

or behavior or way of being,

you start to recruit these neuromodulators

that are released from particular areas of your brain

and also it turns out from your body,

and they start cueing to your nervous system,

something’s different,

something’s different now about what I’m doing,

something’s different about what I’m feeling.

Let’s give an example where perhaps somebody says something

that’s triggering to you, you don’t like it,

and you know you shouldn’t respond.

You feel like, oh, I shouldn’t respond,

I shouldn’t respond, I shouldn’t respond.

You’re actively suppressing your behavior

through top-down processing.

Your forebrain is actually preventing you

from saying the thing that you know you shouldn’t say

or that maybe you should wait to say

or say in a different form.

This feels like agitation and stress

because you’re actually suppressing a circuit.

We actually can see examples of what happens

when you’re not doing this well.

Some of the examples come from children.

If you look at young children,

they don’t have the forebrain circuitry

to engage in this top-down processing

until they reach age 22, even 25.

But in young children, you see this in a really robust way.

You’ll see they’ll be rocking back and forth.

It’s hard for them to sit still

because those central pattern generators

are constantly going in the background

whereas adults can sit still.

A kid sees a piece of candy that it wants

and will just reach out and grab it

whereas an adult probably would ask

if they could have a piece

or wait until they were offered a piece in most cases.

People that have damage to the certain areas

of the frontal lobes don’t have this kind of restriction.

They’ll just blurt things out.

They’ll just say things.

We all know people like this.

Impulsivity is a lack of top-down control,

a lack of top-down processing.

The other thing that will turn off the forebrain

and make it harder to top-down processing

is a couple of drinks containing alcohol.

The removal of inhibition

is actually a removal of neural inhibition

of nerve cells suppressing the activity

of other nerve cells.

And so when you look at people

that have damage to their frontal lobes

or you look at puppies or you look at young children,

everything’s a stimulus.

Everything is a potential interaction for them

and they have a very hard time

restricting their behavior and their speech.

So a lot of the motor system

is designed to just work in a reflexive way.

And then when we decide we want to learn something

or do something or not do something,

we have to engage in this top-down restriction

and it feels like agitation

because it’s accompanied by the release

of a neuromodulator called norepinephrine,

which in the body we call adrenaline

and it actually makes us feel agitated.

So for those of you that are trying to learn something new

or to learn to suppress your responses

or be more deliberate and careful in your responses,

that is going to feel challenging for a particular reason.

It’s going to feel challenging

because the chemicals in your body

that are released in association with that effort

are designed to make you feel kind of agitated.

That low-level tremor that sometimes people feel

when they’re really, really angry

is actually a chemically induced low-level tremor.

And it’s the, what I call limbic friction.

There’s an area of your brain that’s involved

in our more primitive reflexive responses

called the limbic system.

And the frontal cortex is in a friction.

It’s in a tug-of-war with that system all the time,

unless of course you have damage to the frontal lobe

or you’ve had too much to drink or something,

in which case you tend to just say and do whatever.

And so this is really important to understand

because if you want to understand neuroplasticity,

you want to understand how to shape your behavior,

how to shape your thinking,

how to change how you’re able to perform in any context.

The most important thing to understand

is that it requires top-down processing.

It requires this feeling of agitation.

In fact, I would say that agitation and strain

is the entry point to neuroplasticity.

So let’s take a look at what neuroplasticity is.

Let’s explore it not as the way it’s normally talked about

in modern cultures.

Neuroplasticity, plasticity is great.

What exactly do people mean?

Plasticity itself is just a process

by which neurons can change their connections

in the way they work,

so that you can go from things

being very challenging and deliberate,

requiring a lot of effort and strain

to them being reflexive.

And typically when we hear about plasticity,

we’re thinking about positive

or what I call adaptive plasticity.

A lot of plasticity can be induced,

for instance, by brain damage,

but that’s generally not the kind of plasticity

that we want.

So when I say plasticity, unless I say otherwise,

I mean adaptive plasticity.

And in particular, most of the neuroplasticity

that people want is self-directed plasticity

because if there’s one truism to neuroplasticity,

it’s that from birth until about age 25,

the brain is incredibly plastic.

Kids are learning all sorts of things,

but they can learn it passively.

They don’t have to work too hard or focus too hard,

although focus helps, to learn new things,

acquire new languages, acquire new skills.

But if you’re an adult

and you want to change your neural circuitry

at the level of emotions or behavior or thoughts

or anything really,

you absolutely need to ask two important questions.

One, what particular aspect of my nervous system

am I trying to change?

Meaning, am I trying to change my emotions

or my perceptions, my sensations,

and which ones are available for me to change?

And then the second question is,

how are you going to go about that?

What is the structure of a regimen

to engage neuroplasticity?

And it turns out that the answer to that second question

is governed by how awake or how sleepy we are.

So let’s talk about that next.

Neuroplasticity is the ability for these connections

in the brain and body to change in response to experience.

And what’s so incredible

about the human nervous system in particular

is that we can direct our own neural changes.

We can decide that we want to change our brain.

In other words, our brain can change itself

and our nervous system can change itself.

And the same can’t be said for other organs of the body.

Even though our other organs of the body

have some ability to change, they can’t direct it.

They can’t think and decide,

oh, you know, your gut doesn’t say,

oh, you know, I want to be able

to digest spicy foods better.

So I’m going to rearrange the connections

to be able to do that.

Whereas your brain can decide

that you want to learn a language

or you want to be less emotionally reactive

or more emotionally engaged.

And you can undergo a series of steps

that will allow your brain to make those changes

so that eventually it becomes reflexive

for you to do that, which is absolutely incredible.

For a long time, it was thought that neuroplasticity

was the unique gift of young animals and humans,

that it could only occur when we’re young.

And in fact, the young brain is incredibly plastic.

Children can learn three languages

without an accent reflexively,

whereas adults, it’s very challenging.

It takes a lot more effort and strain,

a lot more of that duration path outcome

kind of thinking in order to achieve those plastic changes.

We now know, however, that the adult brain can change

in response to experience.

Nobel prizes were given for the understanding

that the young brain can change very dramatically.

I think one of the most extreme examples would be

for people that are born blind from birth,

they use the area of their brain

that normally would be used for visualizing objects

and colors and things outside of them for braille reading.

In brain imaging studies, it’s been shown that,

people who are blind from birth, when they braille read,

the area of the brain that would normally light up,

if you will, for vision, lights up for braille reading.

So that real estate is reallocated

for an entirely different function.

If someone is made blind in adulthood,

it’s unlikely that their entire visual brain

will be taken over by the areas of the brain

they’re responsible for touch.

However, there’s some evidence that areas of the brain

that are involved in hearing and touch

can kind of migrate into that area.

And there’s a lot of interest now in trying to figure out

how more plasticity can be induced in adulthood,

more positive plasticity.

And in order to understand that process,

we really have to understand something

that might at first seem totally divorced

from neuroplasticity,

but actually lies at the center of neuroplasticity.

And for any of you that are interested

in changing your nervous system,

so that something that you want

can go from being very hard or seem almost impossible

and out of reach to being very reflexive,

this is especially important to pay attention to.

Plasticity in the adult human nervous system is gated,

meaning it is controlled by neuromodulators.

These things that we talked about earlier,

dopamine, serotonin, and one in particular

called acetylcholine are what open up plasticity.

They literally unveil plasticity

and allow brief periods of time

in which whatever information,

whatever thing we’re sensing or perceiving or thinking,

or whatever emotions we feel

can literally be mapped in the brain

such that later it will become much easier

for us to experience and feel that thing.

Now, this has a dark side and a positive side.

The dark side is it’s actually very easy

to get neuroplasticity as an adult

through traumatic or terrible or challenging experiences.

But the important question is to say, why is that?

And the reason that’s the case

is because when something very bad happens,

there’s the release of two sets of neuromodulators

in the brain, epinephrine,

which tends to make us feel alert and agitated,

which is associated with most bad circumstances,

and acetylcholine, which tends to create

a even more intense and focused perceptual spotlight.

Remember earlier, we were talking about perception

and how it’s kind of like a spotlight.

Acetylcholine makes that light particularly bright

and particularly restricted to one region of our experience.

And it does that by making certain neurons

in our brain and body active much more than all the rest.

So acetylcholine is sort of like a highlighter marker

upon which neuroplasticity then comes in later

and says, wait, which neurons were active

in this particularly alerting phase of whatever,

you know, day or night,

whenever this thing happened to happen.

So the way it works is this.

You can think of epinephrine as creating this alertness

and this kind of unbelievable level of increased attention

compared to what you were experiencing before.

And you can think of acetylcholine as being the molecule

that highlights whatever happens

during that period of heightened alertness.

So just to be clear, it’s epinephrine creates the alertness.

That’s coming from a subset of neurons in the brainstem,

if you’re interested.

And acetylcholine coming from an area of the forebrain

is tagging or marking the neurons

that are particularly active

during this heightened level of alertness.

Now that marks the cells, the neurons, and the synapses

for strengthening, for becoming more likely

to be active in the future,

even without us thinking about it, okay?

So in bad circumstances,

this all happens without us having to do much.

When we want something to happen, however,

we want to learn a new language,

we want to learn a new skill,

we want to become more motivated.

What do we know for certain?

We know that that process of getting neuroplasticity

so that we have more focus, more motivation,

absolutely requires the release of epinephrine.

We have to have alertness in order to have focus.

And we have to have focus

in order to direct those plastic changes

to particular parts of our nervous system.

Now, this has immense implications

in thinking about the various tools,

whether or not those are chemical tools or machine tools,

or just self-induced regimens of how long

or how intensely you’re going to focus

in order to get neuroplasticity.

But there’s another side to it.

The dirty secret of neuroplasticity

is that no neuroplasticity occurs

during the thing you’re trying to learn,

during the terrible event, during the great event,

during the thing that you’re really trying to shape

and learn, nothing is actually changing

between the neurons that is going to last.

All the neuroplasticity,

the strengthening of the synapses,

the addition, in some cases, of new nerve cells,

or at least connections between nerve cells,

all of that occurs at a very different phase of life,

which is when we are in sleep and non-sleep deep rest.

And so neuroplasticity,

which is the kind of holy grail of human experience of,

you know, this is the new year

and everyone’s thinking New Year’s resolutions.

And right now, perhaps everything’s organized

and people are highly motivated,

but what happens in March or April or May?

Well, that all depends on how much attention and focus

one can continually bring

to whatever it is they’re trying to learn,

so much so that agitation and a feeling of strain

are actually required

for this process of neuroplasticity to get triggered.

But the actual rewiring occurs

during periods of sleep and non-sleep deep rest.

There’s a study published last year

that’s particularly relevant here that I want to share,

it was not done by my laboratory,

that showed that 20 minutes of deep rest,

this is not deep sleep,

but essentially doing something very hard and very intense

and then taking 20 minutes afterward,

immediately afterwards,

to deliberately turn off

the deliberate focused thinking and engagement

actually accelerated neuroplasticity.

There’s another study that’s just incredible,

and we’re going to go into this

in a future episode of the podcast not too long from now,

that showed that if people are learning a particular skill,

it could be a language skill or a motor skill,

and they hear a tone just playing in the background,

the tone is playing periodically in the background

like just a bell,

in deep sleep, if that bell is played,

learning is much faster

for the thing that they were learning while they were awake.

It somehow cues the nervous system in sleep,

doesn’t even have to be in dreaming,

that something that happened in the waking phase

was especially important,

so much so that that bell is sort of a Pavlovian cue,

it’s sort of a reminder to the sleeping brain,

oh, you need to remember what it is that you were learning

at that particular time of day,

and the learning rates and the rates of retention,

meaning how much people can remember

from the thing they learned,

are significantly higher under those conditions.

So I’m going to talk about how to apply all this knowledge

in a little bit more in this podcast episode,

but also in future episodes,

but it really speaks to the really key importance

of sleep and focus,

these two opposite ends of our attentional state.

When we’re in sleep, these DPOs,

duration, path, and outcome analysis are impossible,

we just can’t do that,

we are only in relation to what’s happening inside of us.

So sleep is key,

also key are periods of non-sleep deep rest

where we’re turning off our analysis

of duration, path, and outcome,

in particular for the thing

that we were just trying to learn,

and we’re in this kind of liminal state

where our attention is kind of drifting all over.

It turns out that’s very important for the consolidation,

for the changes between the nerve cells

that will allow what we were trying to learn

to go from being deliberate and hard and stressful

and a strain to easy and reflexive.

This also points to how different people,

including many modern clinicians,

are thinking about how to prevent bad circumstances,

traumas from routing their way

into our nervous system permanently.

It says that you might want to interfere

with certain aspects of brain states

that are away from the bad thing that happened,

the brain states that happened the next day

or the next month or the next year.

And also I want to make sure

that I pay attention to the fact that for many of you,

you’re thinking about neuroplasticity,

not just in changing your nervous system

to add something new,

but to also get rid of things that you don’t like, right?

That you want to forget bad experiences

or at least remove the emotional contingency

of a bad relationship or a bad relationship to some thing

or some person or some event.

Learning to fear certain things less,

to eliminate a phobia, to erase a trauma.

The memories themselves don’t get erased.

I’m sorry to say that the memories themselves get erased,

but the emotional load of memories can be reduced.

And there are a number of different ways

that that can happen,

but they all require this thing

that we’re calling neuroplasticity.

We’re going to have a large number of discussions

about neuroplasticity in depth.

But the most important thing to understand

is that it is indeed a two-phase process.

What governs the transition between alert and focused

and these depressed and deep sleep states

is a system in our brain and body,

a certain aspect of the nervous system

called the autonomic nervous system.

And it is immensely important to understand

how this autonomic nervous system works.

It has names like the sympathetic nervous system

and parasympathetic nervous system,

which frankly are complicated names

because they’re a little bit misleading.

Sympathetic is the one that’s associated

with more alertness.

Parasympathetic is the one that’s associated

with more calmness.

And it gets really misleading

because the sympathetic nervous system sounds like sympathy

and then people think it’s related to calm.

I’m going to call it the alertness system

and the calmness system,

because even though sympathetic and parasympathetic

are sometimes used, people really get confused.

So the way to think about the autonomic nervous system

and the reason it’s important for every aspect of your life,

but in particular for neuroplasticity

and engaging in these focus states

and then these defocus states

is that it works sort of like a seesaw.

Every 24 hours, we’re all familiar with the fact

that when we wake up in the morning,

we might be a little bit groggy,

but then generally we’re more alert.

And then as evening comes around,

we tend to become a little more relaxed and sleepy.

And eventually at some point at night, we go to sleep.

So we go from alert to deeply calm.

And as we do that, we go from an ability to engage

in these very focused duration path outcome

types of analyses to states in sleep

that are completely divorced from duration path and outcome

in which everything is completely random and untethered

in terms of our sensations, perceptions,

and feelings and so forth.

So every 24 hours, we have a phase of our day

that is optimal for thinking and focusing

and learning and neuroplasticity

and doing all sorts of things.

We have energy as well.

And at another phase of our day, we’re tired

and we have no ability to focus.

We have no ability to engage

in duration path outcome types of analyses.

And it’s interesting that both phases are important

for shaping our nervous system in the ways that we want.

So if we want to engage neuroplasticity

and we want to get the most out of our nervous system,

we each have to master both the transition

between wakefulness and sleep

and the transition between sleep and wakefulness.

Now, so much has been made of the importance of sleep

and it is critically important for wound healing,

for learning, as I just mentioned,

for consolidating learning,

for all aspects of our immune system.

It is the one period of time

in which we’re not doing these duration path

and outcomes types of analyses.

And it is critically important to all aspects of our health,

including our longevity.

Much less has been made, however,

of how to get better at sleeping,

how to get better at the process

that involves falling asleep, staying asleep,

and accessing the states of mind and body

that involve total paralysis.

Most people don’t know this,

but you’re actually paralyzed during much of your sleep

so that you can’t act out your dreams, presumably.

But also where your brain is in a total idle state

where it’s not controlling anything,

it’s just left to kind of free run.

And there are certain things that we can all do

in order to master that transition,

in order to get better at sleeping.

And it involves much more than just how much we sleep.

We’re all being told, of course, that we need to sleep more,

but there’s also the issue of sleep quality,

accessing those deep states of non-DPO thinking,

accessing the right timing of sleep.

Not a lot has been discussed publicly

as far as I’m aware of when to time your sleep.

I think we all can appreciate that

sleeping for half an hour throughout the day

so that you get a total of eight hours of sleep

every 24-hour cycle is probably very different

and not optimal compared to a solid block

of eight hours of sleep.

Although there are people that have tried this.

I think it’s been written about in various books.

Not many people can stick to that schedule.

Incidentally, I think it’s called the Uberman schedule,

not to be confused with the Huberman schedule,

because first of all,

my schedule doesn’t look anything like that.

And second of all,

I would never attempt such a sleeping regime.

The other thing that is really important to understand

is that we have not explored as a culture

the rhythms that occur in our waking states.

So much has been focused on the value of sleep

and the importance of sleep, which is great.

But I don’t think that most people are paying attention

to what’s happening in their waking states

and when their brain is optimized for focus,

when their brain is optimized for these DPOs,

these duration path outcome types of engagements

for learning and for changing,

and when their brain is probably better suited

for more reflexive thinking and behaviors.

And it turns out that there’s a vast amount

of scientific data which points to the existence

of what are called ultradian rhythms.

You may have heard of circadian rhythms.

Circadian means circa about a day.

So it’s 24-hour rhythms

because the earth spins once every 24 hours.

Ultradian rhythms occur throughout the day

and they require less time, they’re shorter.

The most important ultradian rhythm

for sake of this discussion is the 90-minute rhythm

that we’re going through all the time

in our ability to attend and focus.

And in sleep, our sleep is broken up

into 90-minute segments.

Early in the night, we have more phase one

and phase two lighter sleep,

and then we go into our deeper phase three

and phase four sleep,

and then we return to phase one, two, three, four.

So all night you’re going through these ultradian rhythms

of stage one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four.

It’s repeating.

Most people perhaps know that, maybe they don’t,

but when you wake up in the morning,

these ultradian rhythms continue.

And it turns out that we are optimized

for focus and attention within these 90-minute cycles

so that at the beginning of one of these 90-minute cycles,

maybe you sit down to learn something new

or to engage in some new challenging behavior.

For the first five or 10 minutes of one of those cycles,

it’s well-known that the brain and the neural circuits

and the neuromodulators are not going to be optimally tuned

to whatever it is you’re trying to do.

But as you drop deeper into that 90-minute cycle,

your ability to focus and to engage in this DPO process

and to direct neuroplasticity and to learn

is actually much greater.

And then you eventually pop out of that

at the end of the 90-minute cycle.

So these cycles are occurring in sleep

and these cycles are occurring in wakefulness.

And all of those are governed by this seesaw

of alertness to calmness

that we call the autonomic nervous system.

So if you want to master and control your nervous system,

regardless of what tool you reach to,

whether or not it’s a pharmacologic tool

or whether or not it’s a behavioral tool

or whether or not it’s a brain machine interface tool,

it’s vitally important to understand

that your entire existence

is occurring in these 90-minute cycles,

whether or not you’re asleep or awake.

And so you really need to learn

how to wedge into those 90-minute cycles.

And for instance, it would be completely crazy

and counterproductive to try and just learn information

while in deep sleep by listening to that information

because you’re not able to access it.

It would be perfectly good, however,

to engage in a focus bout of learning each day.

And now we know how long that focus bout

of learning should be.

It should be at least one 90-minute cycle.

And the expectation should be that the early phase

of that cycle is going to be challenging.

It’s going to hurt.

It’s not going to feel natural.

It’s not going to feel like flow,

but that you can learn.

And the circuits of your brain that are involved

in focus and motivation can learn to drop in

to a mode of more focus, get more neuroplasticity,

in other words, by engaging these ultradian cycles

at the appropriate times of day.

For instance, some people are very good learners

early in the day and not so good in the afternoon.

So you can start to explore this process

even without any information

about the underlying neurochemicals

by simply paying attention,

not just to when you go to sleep

and when you wake up each morning,

how deep or how shallow your sleep felt to you subjectively,

but also throughout the day

when your brain tends to be most anxious

because it turns out that has a correlate

related to perception that we will talk about.

You can ask yourself, when are you most focused?

When are you least anxious?

When do you feel most motivated?

When do you feel least motivated?

By understanding how the different aspects

of your perception, sensation, feeling, thought,

and actions tend to want to be engaged

or not want to be engaged,

you develop a very good window

into what’s going to be required

to shift your ability to focus

or shift your ability to engage in creative type thinking

at different times of day, should you choose.

And so that’s where we’re heading going forward.

It all starts with mastering this seesaw

that is the autonomic nervous system

that at a course level is a transition

between wakefulness and sleep,

but at a finer level and just as important

are the various cycles,

these all trading in 90 minute cycles

that govern our life all the time,

24 hours a day, every day of our life.

And so we’re going to talk about

how you can take control of the autonomic nervous system

so that you can better access neuroplasticity,

better access sleep,

even take advantage of the phase

that is the transition between sleep and waking

to access things like creativity and so forth,

all based on studies that have been published

over the last hundred years,

mainly within the last 10 years,

and some that are very, very new,

and that point to the use of specific tools

that will allow you to get the most

out of your nervous system.

So today we covered a lot of information.

It was sort of a whirlwind tour

of everything from neurons and synapses

to neuroplasticity in the autonomic nervous system.

We will revisit a lot of these themes going forward.

So if all of that didn’t sink in in one pass,

please don’t worry.

We will come back to these themes over and over again.

I wanted to equip you with a language

that we’re all developing a kind of common base set

of information going forward.

And I hope the information is valuable to you

when you’re thinking about what is working well for you

and what’s working less well

and what’s been exceedingly challenging,

what’s been easy for you in terms of your pursuit

of particular behaviors or emotional states,

where your challenges or the challenges of people

that you know might reside.

As promised in our welcome video,

the format of the Huberman Lab podcast

is to dive deep into individual topics

for an entire month at a time.

So for the entire month of January,

we’re going to explore this incredible state

that is sleep and a related state,

which is non-sleep depressed.

And what they do for things like learning,

resetting our emotional capacity.

Everyone’s probably familiar with the fact

that when we’re sleep deprived,

we’re so much less good at dealing with life circumstances.

We’re more emotionally labile.

Why is that?

How is that?

But most importantly,

we’re going to talk about how to get better at sleeping

and then how to access better sleep,

even when your sleep timing or duration is compromised.

We’re also going to talk about the data

that support this very interesting state

called non-sleep depressed,

where one is neither asleep nor awake,

but it turns out one can recover

some of the neuromodulators

and more importantly,

the processes involved in sensation,

perception, feeling, thought, and action.

It’s sure to be a very rich discussion back and forth

where I’m answering your questions and providing tools.

And I’m certain you’re also going to learn

a lot of information about neuroscience

and what makes up this incredible phase of your life

where you think you’re not conscious,

but you’re actually resetting and renewing yourself

in order to perform better, feel better, et cetera,

in the waking state.

If you want to support the podcast,

please click the like button and subscribe on YouTube.

Leave us a comment if you have any feedback for us.

And on Apple, you can also leave a review

and comments for us to improve

the podcast experience for you.

And as mentioned at the beginning of today’s episode,

we are now partnered with Momentous Supplements

because they make single ingredient formulations

that are of the absolute highest quality

and they ship international.

If you go to livemomentous.com slash Huberman,

you will find many of the supplements

that have been discussed on various episodes

of the Huberman Lab Podcast,

and you will find various protocols

related to those supplements.

Please also check out our sponsors and thank you so much.

And we’ll see you on the next episode next week.