🎁Amazon Prime 💗The Drop 📖Kindle Unlimited 🎧Audible Plus 🎵Amazon Music Unlimited 🌿iHerb 💰Binance
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.
Our first sponsor is Athletic Greens.
Athletic Greens is an all-in-one
vitamin mineral probiotic drink.
I’ve been taking Athletic Greens since 2012,
so I’m delighted that they’re sponsoring the podcast.
The reason I started taking Athletic Greens
and the reason I still take Athletic Greens
once or twice a day is that it helps me cover
all of my basic nutritional needs.
It makes up for any deficiencies that I might have.
In addition, it has probiotics,
which are vital for microbiome health.
I’ve done a couple of episodes now
on the so-called gut microbiome
and the ways in which the microbiome interacts
with your immune system, with your brain to regulate mood,
and essentially with every biological system
relevant to health throughout your brain and body.
With Athletic Greens, I get the vitamins I need,
the minerals I need, and the probiotics
to support my microbiome.
If you’d like to try Athletic Greens,
you can go to athleticgreens.com slash Huberman
and claim a special offer.
They’ll give you five free travel packs
plus a year supply of vitamin D3 K2.
There are a ton of data now showing that vitamin D3
is essential for various aspects of our brain
and body health, even if we’re getting a lot of sunshine.
Many of us are still deficient in vitamin D3
and K2 is also important because it regulates things
like cardiovascular function, calcium in the body,
and so on.
Again, go to athleticgreens.com slash Huberman
to claim the special offer of the five free travel packs
and the year supply of vitamin D3 K2.
Today’s episode is also brought to us by Element.
Element is an electrolyte drink
that has everything you need and nothing you don’t.
That means the exact ratios of electrolytes are an element,
and those are sodium, magnesium, and potassium,
but it has no sugar.
I’ve talked many times before on this podcast
about the key role of hydration and electrolytes
for nerve cell function, neuron function,
as well as the function of all the cells
and all the tissues and organ systems of the body.
If we have sodium, magnesium, and potassium
present in the proper ratios,
all of those cells function properly
and all our bodily systems can be optimized.
If the electrolytes are not present
and if hydration is low,
we simply can’t think as well as we would otherwise,
our mood is off, hormone systems go off,
our ability to get into physical action,
to engage in endurance and strength
and all sorts of other things is diminished.
So with Element, you can make sure
that you’re staying on top of your hydration
and that you’re getting the proper ratios of electrolytes.
If you’d like to try Element, you can go to drinkelement,
that’s element.com slash Huberman,
and you’ll get a free Element sample pack
with your purchase.
They’re all delicious.
So again, if you want to try Element,
you can go to elementlment.com slash Huberman.
Today’s episode is also brought to us by Thesis.
Thesis makes what are called nootropics,
which means smart drugs.
Now, to be honest, I am not a fan of the term nootropics.
I don’t believe in smart drugs
in the sense that I don’t believe
that there’s any one substance or collection of substances
that can make us smarter.
I do believe based on science, however,
that there are particular neural circuits
and brain functions that allow us to be more focused,
more alert, access creativity, be more motivated, et cetera.
That’s just the way that the brain works,
different neural circuits for different brain states.
Thesis understands this.
And as far as I know, they’re the first nootropics company
to create targeted nootropics for specific outcomes.
I’ve been using Thesis for more than six months now,
and I can confidently say that their nootropics
have been a total game changer.
My go-to formula is the clarity formula,
or sometimes I’ll use their energy formula before training.
To get your own personalized nootropic starter kit,
go online to takethesis.com slash Huberman,
take a three-minute quiz,
and Thesis will send you four different formulas
to try in your first month.
That’s takethesis.com slash Huberman,
and use the code Huberman at checkout
for 10% off your first order.
I’m pleased to announce that the Huberman Lab Podcast
is now partnered with Momentus Supplements.
We partnered with Momentus for several important reasons.
First of all, they ship internationally
because we know that many of you are located
outside of the United States.
Second of all, and perhaps most important,
the quality of their supplements is second to none,
both in terms of purity and precision
of the amounts of the ingredients.
Third, we’ve really emphasized supplements
that are single ingredient supplements,
and that are supplied in dosages
that allow you to build a supplementation protocol
that’s optimized for cost,
that’s optimized for effectiveness,
and that you can add things and remove things
from your protocol in a way
that’s really systematic and scientific.
If you’d like to see the supplements
that we partner with Momentus on,
you can go to livemomentus.com slash Huberman.
There you’ll see those supplements,
and just keep in mind that we are constantly expanding
the library of supplements available through Momentus
on a regular basis.
Again, that’s livemomentus.com slash Huberman.
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.