Everybody Kevin Rose here. Welcome back to another episode The Kevin Owens Show really excited to have dr. Human on today's show because the brain is important and you all know that but for me, it's it's been a few things that have hit home one. I just know that as a minute going into my 40s. I want to keep my mind sharp as possible and my mom sadly has some dementia. It's not horrible. She still knows who I am, but she has a hard time remembering names and it's
sad to watch if anyone has I'm sure there are people that are listening to have gone through this or going through it. Now. It's crushing. It's crushing as a child to watch your parent start to forget certain things and have the same conversations. So it's really tough but love my mom glad that she's you know, still here and with us and and we're working through that but for me, I realize the brain is a very important thing to address early on and get in front of any potential problems. So that long term as
We extend life and prevent things like cancer and cardiovascular disease and other things we keep hold of our brain and we're sharp going into our 80s and 90s and Beyond because it doesn't matter how good your muscles look and how flexible you are if your brain is not there with you. So anyway, that's a big focus of mine. And also I would say on the emotional side as well. Like I think that I want to really go deep on meditation I have been going deep and I've turned it into a real practice because for me it's the best thing that's come out of covid-19.
And covid really put me in a situation where I realized that I just needed something really healthy to do and there was so much downtime meeting. I wasn't traveling anywhere all my meetings were done over Zoom. Not that I wasn't busy. But I had the time to sit I could make this a serious practice. It wasn't seeing friends at night. There were extra hours that I could fill with really positive things. So I decided to pretty much transition out of apps not using apps any longer and started.
Studying in a limit lineage called Sambo's n and Henry Shipman at the mountain clouds Ensign are fantastic introductory courses on Zen if you're looking to sign up for one and do something like that, but then has been a wonderful practice that I've incorporated into my life starting in October I think of last year. So that's that's been good on the emotional side meaning that you know, since I've been practicing I've noticed that I'm just a little bit more at ease. I'm comfortable with being bored and
And I can sit there without feeling the anxiety to get on to the next thing and for someone that bounces around and has so many different ideas. And so many things that I want to go pursue professionally. It's not that at that is turned off but it is it is subdued a little bit in a way that I think is really healthy because the creativity is still there, which is great and I love exploring new ideas and thinking through potential new businesses with entrepreneurs but things out
The underlying little background chatter that you get is just been cut out and a lot of that is gone away. And I just find that my Baseline is just a few notches down and it not that it's ever been really bad, but it's been ever present and kind of constant if that makes sense. I always have to be moving always had to be working on something on to the next thing on to the next project on to the next idea and that's that's exhausting. So anyway,
Meditation is helped and and it's really done a lot to show me out on that front now onto today. So dr. Andrew huberman is a neuroscientist in tenured professor in the department of neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He is made just numerous important contributions to the field of brain development brain plasticity neural regeneration and repair and the list just goes on and on he's a rock star we talked about some crazy stuff in this episode we get into future brain interface.
Is stimulating the vagus nerve the importance of bright light in the morning and not just bright light like inside your house but actually getting outside and why you need to do that and it's changed my daily habit. I'm now going outside its cold. It's just fine. I like the cold but I'm getting outside to get the sunlight and he'll the co go into why that's that's important. Also. I always thought you know, I heard over the last few years put the blue blockers on put those Blue Block in glasses on their good for you at night. He doesn't think so and I
I tend to believe him because he's a scientist studying this stuff. He talks about why blue blockers just aren't the best option at night and actually sunglasses and other things could be a lot better. So we get into that. We have a relaxing breathing exercises that have proven efficacy, which I've been big into breathing lately. We're going to have some links in the show notes around this book breathe that I absolutely love highly recommend you get it on Audible listen to it or just you know does not be audible can be the physical book to buy just just tend to do audible. I will shit sponsored by the way if you're listening
In would love to have you sponsor and of course we get into supplements. We talked about a whole slew of different brain supplements for a variety of different reasons. I will say though, none of this is medical advice. Neither of us are MDS. We're not doctors even though he's a PhD, he's not a prescribing doctor if anything on this show sounds a little bit interesting take this information treated as just information purposes and take it to your doctor and talk to your doctor before you do anything crazy. All right, all that said this is dr. Andrew Huber.
Owen Andrew thank you so much for being on the show. I appreciate
it. Great to be here. I've been looking forward to it.
I'm excited to talk about all things Neuroscience, you know for me, you know my 40s, I think a lot about okay, how can we protect and enhance the brain and so from that's exercise and supplementation. It's meditation. It's a whole slew of things. But as someone that's kind of like living and breathing in this space day-to-day. I mean, this is your career. I'm just an observer from the outside that depend upon people like yourself to give me advice.
What's going on in the world of Neuroscience? What's new and hot and exciting and what do you currently looking at and studying?
There's a ton going on in the world of Neuroscience. I would say to just take a little bit of a running start these little things we call neurons were first described in the turn of the last century fast forward to the 50s where there was a lot of interest in lesioning like removing parts of the brain mainly in animal models, but also in humans because of World War One and World War Two
improvements in basically bullets and guns allowed very restricted lesions so bullets passing in one side of the head and coming out the other and then neurologists working with people that had certain deficits and then after those people died taking out the brains and tracing those deficits to particular brain regions that tickets to the 70s and 80s when tungsten electrodes so wires he could lower into the brain mostly of animals, but also a lot of work done in humans so pretty experiments that
would never be approved but like stimulating deep brain regions and seeing rage in patients or happiness or feelings of drunkenness that took things into the 70s and 80s and then you got more ethical and institutional review boards involved which was a good thing frankly and a lot of antibodies to look at different chemicals in the brain and say, oh these are where the dopamine neurons are and a lot about chemistry is they like what is dopamine and that took us to the 90s and the
and the so-called decade of the brain where fmri functional magnetic resonance imaging joined up with things like CT scans and pet and all that to say. Oh, you know, there's a bunch of brain regions that do different things and look at the Dynamics and then I would say the last 10 to 15 years have really been dominated by two technologies or I should say three one is the huge influx of genetic tools to modify the genomes mainly of small animal models.
Like mice some interest in doing that in monkeys by a number of labs, but that hasn't really taken off we could talk about what's happening with that mostly abroad complicated ethical issue. I just want to acknowledge that right people always think about genetic modifications in humans, but genetic modifications in large animals models is very complicated from a variety of standpoint. I have strong feelings about that that might surprise some people but we could say genetics and molecular biology computational methods.
And then the doors have just swung open on the inclusion of psychologists computer scientists and Engineers physicists. So this field that we call Neuroscience used to be physiologists anatomists and some people that did modeling and stuff like that and the fields were kind of discrete actually people talk about neurochemistry neurophysiology. Are you a neuro when I started people today? Are you a neuroanatomist or a neurophysiologist now you look at any major laboratory neuroscience and chances are they?
Rate molecular Tools in anatomical tools computational tools. So it's been a wonderful time to see all these other fields kind of just rush in and the field of Neuroscience is dominated by inclusion of these fields rather than exclusion. So the big centers for Neuroscience have a lot of diversity of thought diversity of background and I would say the big the big excitement right now is AI and machine learning. Yeah.
And how you know people won't understand like what is this meat in our heads actually doing what are the computations ETC
what a crazy like 10 years the you'd imagine that you know, you went to Trent let's just say you went to school for Neuroscience. You graduated a decade ago or more and all of a sudden it's like no actually we want you to be an engineer and understand machine learning and AI like right so it's like a whole nother
skill set, right? Yeah and work with these people and talk to them, right? You know, the AI engineer folks probably say the same thing about the biologists like we have to actually try and
Stan one another and it is dizzying that the other thing this is more of a kind of inside ball thing. But I think it's worth knowing about for most people is that papers in great journals used to be pretty short for five figures six figures. We're talking the science nature sell the big, you know, kind of Super Bowl rings of publishing but a few years ago when electronic publishing in journals really took off this thing called supplemental data and movies and just an open the field so that you don't reviewers could ask for 30
figures or 30 more experiments. And so now what's happened is every manuscript includes tons of data. It's fair game to ask somebody who works on human Imaging for instance to say. Well that's an interesting result this piece of the brain lights up when people see that picture of their loved one for instance or somebody that's deceased. Why don't you develop a computational model for that? And then maybe this paper will go through so Neuroscience now is drawing from all these backgrounds. It's all fair game and I think
It's great. I mean at some point. I hope that there's more of a an eye towards conceptual leadership. No one is stepping forward and saying look this is what the field needs. There's a kind of there are a lot of random walks. But right now I think the field really should sit back and enjoy the fact that there's so much inclusion of all these different tools and techniques and I think only great things are going to come from this it's a harder field to get into I'm glad I got in early when it was pretty
Small because I think it would have been overwhelming for me. But it also means that somebody who knows very little biology can come to neuroscience and make a great contribution. Those people are looked at as Assets Now not as barriers and that's different that the community is huge. I wouldn't even know where to draw the boundaries around what we call Neuroscience, but everyone wants to understand how the nervous system works and I would say the other thing that's really exciting our tools to not just read from neurons not just measure activity.
Even neurons at whatever scale individual neurons all the way to whole brain Imaging but also manipulate neurons and I think this is just a prediction. I think where the general public is going to benefit from this most in the near term is going to be the manipulation of peripheral nerve Pathways, you know getting inside. This thing is tough. You need to have a reason to pop off a piece of the skull the neurosurgeons. I know like my buddy Matt MacDougall who's at neural link. He came up through my lab. I was at Stanford, he views things kind of like most neurosurgeons they say,
Say oh, you know skull is actually not as good as a titanium plate titanium plates actually more durable. Now, it's just a little hole or will drill a hole behind the ear, but that's how they think right. Yeah, but they acknowledge that there's all this peripheral nerve Pathways that the Vegas has a pathway just behind the ear for instance that can generate a common response when it's stimulating and particular frequency almost sounds like wacko Instagram ad type stuff, but that that's right. Those are real Pathways and getting to peripheral nerve Pathways diaphragmatic.
Control, you can imagine having a little dial or a measurement of frequency of breathing. So at the end of the day, you get some sort of coherence reading that's kind of like heart rate variability from your diaphragm movements that stuff can all be measured through the skin and groups. I do some work with military and groups within the military or thinking about this first folks like neuro-linker thinking about it, but we think about neural augmentation everyone always thinks oh, you know deep in the brain or getting in the brain and we need to be realistic for the general public. It's going to be non-invasive Technologies and the peripheral nervous system.
Which means everything outside the encasement of the skull and spinal cord that stuff is pretty accessible because it runs pretty superficial.
Yeah, it's funny. You mentioned it a couple of those things that I've actually tried. I tried some devices that sit right behind the ear and they do this like slow vibration and to try to kind of kick that off and create this kind of calming effect. It's not on the market yet, but was one of the startups that that we've backed a true Ventures and and it's really interesting neurosciences scientists working on that problem of how do you know?
Do you know apply voltage to the brain like are there are other ways that you can get at some of the same responses that are less invasive out of out the papers that have been published in the last five years. Like are there any trends that are emerging or really interesting kind of things that I always think about scientist is being you know, five sometimes ten years ahead of every physician and like your doctor always tells you things that are super dated. So I always love picking the brain of like, what do you see on the horizon or things that people can Implement right now that are really promising.
Well, I have my
turrets and I would say so some of the results I'm most excited about they don't come from my lab. Although I'm excited about some results from my lab. I would say one of the highlights is a guy that some people probably heard of it by the name of Karl deisseroth. We're actually postdocs at the same time Carl's a bioengineer. He's also a psychiatrist at Stanford. He runs a big lab, he developed this technology of Channel options. These are genes that are expressed in algae and other you know, it's stuff that doesn't have a brain that is
I was light-sensitive gating of ion channels. So that what that means translated in English is Shining Light on cells allows those cells to be activated or shut off that technology has been put into viruses that are not bad viruses. These are adenovirus has so now these viruses can be injected into say the human eye and then by shining a particular wavelength of light that's invisible to the person those neurons can become active you can selectively activate our silence those neurons. Now, why would you want that to do that?
At what you might want to do that in a human that has all the light sensing neurons of their eye degenerated like in retinitis Pigmentosa. And so they can't translate light individual signals. So they're blind but you could put that Gene into the other cells that connect to the brain we call these ganglion cells stimulate those and the person sees now that's an extreme example and as a kind of aspirational example an example, however, that Carl has actually in done he is engaged
It's a patient is to put such light-sensitive channels on to the vagus nerve. This is the tenth cranial nerve. It's involved in a lot of things. This is a huge pathway from the brain to body and from the body back to the brain when you're full from a big meal it signals the the common response. This is why being full just tends to make you feel lethargic the distention of the gut is carried up toward the brain that information signals of the calming response. Can
you talked a little bit about what that nerve is? Exactly. Like what does it look like word is it?
In exactly that you hear a lot about it and everyone's always talking about this is stimulating the vagus nerve but I've never I've never really liked got a real firm definition around
that. Yeah. Well, this is fun. So I teach and direct the neuroanatomy course for Med students at Stanford, which is only to say that maybe sometime if you're in the Bay Area we can figure out a way post covid to go. Look at a Vegas as we were lay it out on the table in front of us. What you would see is that there are a bunch of nerves that exit the brain stem. So everything outside the casing of the skull
And the spinal cord is considered peripheral nervous system, except for these two goodies in the front which are the eyes are actually part of the brain their part of the central nervous system. They're the only part of your central nervous system that is outside the skull we talked about why that's important and interesting and when you think about it, it makes sense, but everything else is peripheral nerves and the Vegas this tenth cranial nerve has what we call sensory Pathways. So that's like neurons that sit in our gut or in other viscera and tell the brain
And what's going on they sense how fast the heart is beating and they inform the brain and then the brain sends signals back to either slow or increase the heart rate the diaphragm the gut so if we were to take out the Vegas you would your first response to be. Oh my goodness. This thing is huge its enormous. It's almost like its own nervous system. Hmm. It's not just one little nerve pathway one little bundle of axons those wires that connect neurons to one another you would say. This is like its own nervous system and it's got sensory stuff that goes
Up to the brain and it has motor pathways that then control it the best example, actually that can give of this translates to a practical tool, which is that when we inhale so when we inhale like that our diaphragm actually moves down the diaphragm is the skeletal muscle control by it's only called a friend of here. It moves down and our heart actually gets a little bigger because there's more space because the diaphragm move down when the heart gets bigger the rate of blood flow.
Goes down a little bit the the amount of blood per unit volume goes down and there's a couple neurons in their sinoatrial node. That sends a signal to the brain and then the brain sends a signal back and speeds up the heart. So you make sure there's a regular blood flow. So when you inhale you're increasing your heart rate, so if you were to inhale for 10 seconds, you would be increasing heart rate the whole time now when you exhale the diaphragm moves up the heart gets a little bit smaller blood flows a little bit more slowly and as a
Points the neurons there. Sorry that heart gets hello smaller blood moves more quickly. I misspoke blood moves more quickly a signal is sent to the brain and then the brain sends a signal back down to slow the heart down. So if you do long exhale breathing or you intensify your exhales, you're slowing your heart rate heart rate down. What I just described is a vagal pathway that also relates to the heart. That is the basis of heart rate variability what we hear in heart rate variability HRV.
Is that acceleration of heart rate and deceleration of heart rate is controlled by the diaphragm. So the Vegas that's just one little corner of what the Vegas does. The Vegas is also involved as I mentioned before in informing us when our gut is full or empty if we have something, you know in our gut like sugar for instance. There's a labeled line for measuring sugar content of food that's independent of taste that goes up through a little ganglia called the NoDoz ganglia just means lumpy and then into the brain stem to the
Put me in Center. So when you eat something sugary, even if I were to blunt your taste you would want more of that if I put out a bunch of food and you're just eating and you didn't couldn't taste anything. Wow, you would want more of the sugary stuff because you have sugar sensing neurons that signal that so the Vegas is the brain-body connection. And as you can probably tell from this description, there are a lot of different pathway sugar got distension heart rate. It's really what regulates the brain-body connectivity.
So, why do we want to stimulate it exactly like
Like is it right stimulating it? What does that do when you say stimulate? What does it actually mean?
Right and which branch to stimulate right? So what Karl's lab has done is and what he's done in a clinical setting is to put stimulators of particular vagal Pathways. So they select one branch because it looks like the branches of a tree if you took a tree in just inverted it you would if that's what the Vegas would look like. It would look kind of funnel out of the brain and then Branch out very extensively.
So it's yeah, it's more like a root system that it is like when you say like a nerve you think
Like maybe old maybe it's just like one big nerve that goes all the way, you know to got to brain but it is more like just Roots all spanning out and spreading out quite a bit more so than just one straight direct
line. That's right. When you look at the thing, it's chaos, but neuroanatomy is about sorting out that chaos and each one of these things has a distinct name and a distinct function and not all the functions are known currently. So everyone's is the
same meaning like if you look at two individuals, like you'll see more or less see the zigzag.
Same structure. Yeah
provided they have the same viscera. They have all their you know, they haven't had a you know, an organ removed. They are going to have the same Vegas more or less on average that it's like the brain the major areas are going to be similar and in the same position, but there's going to be some variation from person to person. So you ask what what would one want to stimulate? What would that look like one example that's been described from Carl's lab is a patient who's clinically depressed. I mean truly
I do major depression and with a vagal stimulator on a particular Branch. There's a beautiful description of her actually describing her symptoms and her Outlook and she saying I don't want to live I just don't want to continue. I can't get the energy to do anything, you know, classic depressive symptoms and then ramping up the stimulation on the vagal nerve o certain branch of the vagus and her in real time. She describes, you know, I could imagine trying to apply for a job this year I could imagine trying.
Trying to find a relationship and then they ramped it up and she's like, you know, I actually feel pretty good. And what's incredible is she's aware that these changes are happening. But these are real time changes in her basil affect that change her entire Outlook towards everything in life.
So how are they doing that
simulation that was electrical stimulation and the goal is to move from electrical stimulation to these light-based stimulators. I want to be clear that this isn't light to the eyes or light to the skin. You know, there's a lot of quackery.
They're especially on social media about and now I'm probably going to piss somebody off and you know, forgive me but send me the peer-reviewed paper and then maybe we'll have a you know, a healthy debate, you know light alive knows or yeah, you know or towards before the pandemic hit, you know, people were talking about something all sorts of orifices of the body was showing up on social media and you know, I'm not going to say these things don't have validity or do have validity. But what we do know is that light to the eyes has a critical role in organising circadian rhythms when we talk about light stimulation
Action of these other nerves. I just want to avoid errors in Translation here. What we're talking about is inserting a particular gene into the cells. So going in without a single injection and then being able to titrate and really closely control the levels of activity may be across the day or across the year right now electrical stimulation is kind of where it's at. So that's one I think really incredible example that exists in our field now and has been demonstrated and repeated where you're not boring down into the
Goal, it's using modern technology and understanding of neuroanatomy and it's directly targeting a clinical syndrome and one couldn't make real-time adjustments because we always think about going in and you know, like with a drug you can play with dosage but you have you know affinities and and you have all sorts of side-effect things. It's very confusing when the idea right now is to be able to Target specific nerve Pathways for which we know what they do and that's the beauty of the periphery also is that you know, we know what
These Pathways do whereas when you get into the brain sure hippocampus is involved in memory and prefrontal cortex and planning but it's a complicated landscape and the different areas of the brain are working in such Dynamic fashion more like keys on a piano. It depends on the order of their played. And so I think we're there for the periphery and there's a lot of excitement about this and then for the for the central stuff for the brain stuff, I think frankly, I think one of the most exciting areas is this issue of neuromodulation.
Things like dopamine serotonin acetylcholine being involved in Fairly discrete categories of behavior. What these molecules do is they bias the probability that certain behaviors thoughts and emotions will occur and they reduce the probability. The other ones will occur. So for instance dopamine at least at modest levels tends to increase the positivity of mood it tends to make us more outward goal-directed and it tends to place our
D into a state of action that's because the molecule adrenaline is actually created through a couple biochemical steps from dopamine dopamine makes us want to move it makes us motivated and it makes us think about what's outside us that we want to pursue. It's not just about reward whereas serotonin tends to activate circuits in the brain and body that tend to make us feel rather Placid kind of blissed and feel pretty good about what we've got in the present. It tends to restrict our goals toward things that are already in our
Immediate experience or possession so when you hold your child and you feel Bliss like this is amazing what an amazing experience that's not dopamine and a lot of people focus on oxytocin, which is a cousin of Serotonin more or less. But that's really the serotonin effect and it explains why drugs like Prozac and Zoloft which we don't want to demonize because in some contexts can really help people but they their side effect profile tends to be things like blunted appetite blunted libido because they essentially give the person the
thing that they have enough whereas drugs like cocaine antidepressants like Wellbutrin, which are more on the dopamine stimulating side as opposed to serotonin tend to make people feel kind of agitated anxious. Like they want to pursue things. They feel make them and so we're starting to see an organizational logic kind of fall out of the last hundred years of neurochemistry and circuit biology and it's certainly not all worked out but we're starting to see some themes and some silos emerge that make sense.
Across animal studies from you know mice too, you know human work all the way up gotcha.
And then one thing I want to jump back to real quick is on when you talking we were talking about the brain stimulation side and that that particular patient that was sitting there and having these, you know, like I could get a job I could go do these things are those directly tied to that one individual stimulation or is that something that the effects are lasting over time? And then is that not just
Really kind of putting a Band-Aid on the underlying issue and not really getting at the heart of what's causing those feelings to begin with
you're hitting on the two most important themes here. So the idea is that these stimulators whether night light based jeans like the channel options or electrical stimulators will give more real-time control and certainly more spatial specificity. I mean the issue with drug side effects is that you've got serotonin receptors all over your body and brain and so while taking a serotonin augmenting drug might help you sleep better. It might also blunt your appetite for
Obvious reason that it's affecting lots of different things at once. The stimulator is definitely give more spatial specificity. So that's good. It does appear that they are short-term, you know this kind of thing about stimulating neural Pathways dates back to the 60s. There were examples by a guy named Robert Heath of stimulating braid centers of someone just sitting in a chair of the an electrode in their head. They didn't have epilepsy back then you could actually do these experiments someone volunteer say I want to be in the experiment you come in they take a little piece of skull Keith would lower an electrode in
Late and people would say I feel like I want to you know, I'm in Rage, you know, those patients say they want to kill everyone in the room or something like that. Then they turn it off move the electrode over a little bit and they'd say, you know, I feel like I want to take a nap. I'm feeling kind of sleepy so they are very short-lived now. So if there's going to be a tail on the effect it's going to be because of the release of these neuromodulators neuromodulators work quite slowly think of neuromodulators again serotonin dopamine these kinds of things. There's sort of like a genre of play.
Less, you know, it's like when you go on Spotify or something and you like third wave Punk or something you put that in and you're going to get you're going to get a little bit of this and a little bit of that and then it's gonna throw some other things your way classical you'd get something else. So there's sort of of that output and the time scale of about seconds to minutes. Whereas we think about fast actions of neurons. It's on the order of seconds on off on off and I should just mention that there are some slow effects of certain neurons and Pathways and those tend to be hormones.
You know hormones are released from one organ and in general unless it's adrenaline their actions tend to be pretty slow. And so some of these pathways are going to stimulate the release of things like oxytocin, which is more of a hormone for slow bonding things, you know for oxytocin involved in milk letdown, which is a slow event nursing is a slow event, you know, prolactin and oxytocin. So there are some close relationships of hormones neurotransmitters and neuromodulators. And when you start to think about the mathematically in this way, you can say okay, you know,
Peripheral nerve stimulation could provide some really quick results but maybe could set a longer tail on some of the other things but the goal would be that some would have an implantable device and depending on their mood maybe they'd have my matching this as an app on their phone. We're there they wake up and they're feeling panicked anxious or calm and they could adjust the simulation accordingly throughout the day and maybe AI machine learning tool would learn the person's patterns if they didn't sleep that well the night before
Maybe it would you know recognize that the last you know, eight out of ten episodes like that led to an anxiety attack in the afternoon and would adjust the stimulation
the abuse on this is going to be really interesting right because you can imagine you're like there's going to be some you know, the equivalent of jailbreakers for the iPhone that go on and say okay turn me into drunk mode 24/7 or whatever. It may be
right, you know, we always think of these extreme examples, you know, but you think about aggression and rage is a governed by a center.
Brain, and it's gated by rational thinking and but as we know it can be Unleashed under a variety of contexts and those contexts unleash that behavior in that mindset because the dominance of one neurotransmitter nor modular system just goes way up. We see this with drugs, like for instance methamphetamine, which sends dopamine and epinephrine through the roof. It tends to put people in pursuit of things. They're not sitting there feeling blissed out. You'll get somebody on math and they're kind of like, you know, they're moving around.
And they actually talk on their always outward focused their pupils are like this big and it's all what we call extra reception focus on the outside world people who take drugs that focus more on the serotonin system things like high doses of THC or they tend to be in this mode where they don't want to go anywhere opioids, right? They they're very happy being stationary so much so that they don't pursue anything.
Yeah exactly. I'm curious, you know, this sounds really promising sounds awesome and it's a you know neural link and some of these other Technologies
You have to imagine like we're thinking like deck a dish like or longer until we see some of the stuff like it means dream. What do you recommend for people to come to you today and are like, I want natural things that I can go after to you know, improve my mood make me feel more productive like all these things both in terms of I'm curious around like, you know, the exercise front like a high intensity interval training your thoughts on that zone to cardio your thoughts and that you know ice bath sauna usage like where do you that those
All seemed to be really hot topics right now and all the rage like where do you stand on all that stuff or there's certain ones that you like better than
others. Sure happy to talk about this because I don't know if it's a consequence of growing up where I grew up or because I have a love of kind of fitness and augmentation stuff, but I spent a lot of time in thinking about this and my lab works on zero cost almost zero in most cases Euro technology tools that are built into our nervous system for the specific purpose of ramping up attention and
Focus or calming down or in fact, I have a collaboration with our vice chair of Psychiatry David Spiegel, who is the world expert in the zmd in medical hypnosis. So, you know David's lab has spent decades working out medical hypnosis protocols that allow certain brain centers to be activated more than others allow people tremendous control over pain management sleep augmentations. We have a lot of studies going on right now with people in the general population doing the various practice that I'll mention in a moment, so I think
Think if I were to break these down into you know categories what I first we'll just say is that everything I'm about to describe Is Anchored in biology that exists in everybody right? Now. These aren't tools or things that that capitalize on neural plasticity is like everyone has these so for instance. I'm a big proponent based on 25 years of quality peer-reviewed work of viewing Bright Light Within the four to six hours after waking but I
A lie within the first hour after waking the reason for this is that you have a set of neurons in your eye these so-called melanopsin ganglion cells if people want to read further that don't convey information to the brain about shapes and images but convey intensity of light and they set the circadian clock and it breaks down to something very simple when you view bright light first thing in the morning within an hour of waking or so whether or not it's from sunlight or artificial light depends on where you live if you have access to sunlight sunlight is best because it turns out it's not blue light that will stimulate it.
It's the contrast between blue and yellow that Coral if you ever watch a sunrise, you'll see this blue yellow contrast. So provided the light isn't so bright. That's painful. You want to get as much bright light in your eyes early in the day as possible. What that does is that triggers a healthy release of cortisol. We know this and it sets a timer on the duration. It's actually sets a timer that quiets melatonin until 14 to 16 hours later. Then your pineal will release melatonin, which allows you to a transition into sleep if
You delay your light viewing or you don't get enough light early in the day. What happens is you get a shifted cortisol Rhythm and that correlates with anxiety and depression and people start feeling jittery. They don't fall asleep. Well, there's all sorts of problems. So I would say view bright light early in the day for about 2 to 10 minutes ideally from sunlight even through cloud cover. There's some good apps out there like light meter free apps where you can measure the brightness and what you'll notice is that an indoor light. That seems very bright will be about you know, 400.
Luxor a hundred Lux and then outdoor even through cloud cover in Oregon is going to be a thousand looks and so that outdoor light is really key for setting these hormone rhythms in place.
Can I ask you a question with what you what does that look like for you? So that means let's just say you wake up at 7:00 what you do immediately just go to the window and sit for a few minutes. Do you go outside and take a 10-minute walk? Like how do you recommend getting that that initial
light? Yeah, great question through window. It's going to take
Fifty to a hundred times longer to trigger this healthy setting of The circadian clock. So I recommend not using a window windshield or side window not using sunglasses provided you can do that safely. It's fine to wear glasses are prescription lenses. People always say well, why is that fine but looking through a window isn't what you can play with light meter and see how much cloaking of the of the intensity shows up when you close a window. It's pretty dramatic. But the reason is that the lenses that you put on your face because the glasses or contacts are designed to focus the light onto your
Retina, they're designed specifically to bring the light to the cells that I'm referring to. The other ones are just designed to filter light out. So for me, I wake up I try and get outside within an hour for two to ten minutes in that case. You know, it's remarkable the huge number of papers that have support this everything from reducing believe it or not. The frequency of depression reducing the the development of myopia or nearsightedness and kids they found the kids that get outside even with cloud cover for
Two hours a day. Now. That's a lot of a lot of time outside. You essentially change the way the Optics of the eye develop so and myopia is really a that image on the red Falls in front of the retina. And that's why you wear corrective lenses to bring that image onto the actual retina. It's actually blue light and the blue yellow contrast coming from sunlight. That's great. If you don't have access to that some of the light boxes and things are pretty good. But the ring lights that people use for selfies frankly are just as good and they cost a fraction of that a good Target is to try
Try and get that 10 minutes of light and I could list off a huge number of effects, but the flip side of this it will I should just say that early in the day these cells require a lot of light to set the clock the kind of diabolical thing is that late at night. It takes very few photons to disrupt the clock and there was a study published by Scimitar who's the head of chronobiology unit at the National Institutes of mental health and David Burson at Brown University a very high quality.
Study showing that bright light exposure between the hours of about 10 p.m. And 4 a.m. If it's chronic, if you do it more than every once in a while triggers a suppression of dopamine that leads to deficits and learning deficits and mood and a whole host of other problems including a connection to the pancreas that starts dis regulating blood sugar. So it turns out that these cells in the I connect to this little brain region for the neuro Geeks out there. It's called the
huh Ben Eula and it's the it literally suppresses cabanyal activation suppresses dopamine this feel-good molecule. It's the punishment signal in the brain actually neuroscientist refer to the habenula as the disappointment nucleus because if you are expecting something great to happen and it doesn't happen the habenula fires like crazy when you view bright light or even not so bright light in the late hours. What ends up happening is you trigger activation of this depressive pathway
and when you say not so bright light then dimming your lights like if you have dimmers at home, that's not going to do it you need like
The blue light blocking glasses
so you don't need to block blue light necessarily. It's really about lowering the overall intensity of light in your environment. And there are a couple other things that you can do that don't require blue blockers and I should just mention since blue blockers came up the whole thing around blue blockers has gotten a very confused. It turns out you want a lot of blue light early in the day. So wearing blue blockers early and throughout the day is exactly the wrong approach right setting your circadian clock properly people have just decide blue light is bad and nothing could be further from the truth.
Truth for all sorts of reasons of improving mood metabolism the myopia thing I mentioned earlier so blocking blue light later in the day meaning between 10 p.m. Probably even 9:00 p.m. And 4 a.m. Is going to be beneficial unless you have to be up for work. We're talking about a standard schedule now not gen lag or shift work, but if the lights are bright enough, it doesn't matter if you're wearing blue blocker. So the key is to dim screens dim the lights in your environment. And the other thing that's kind of cool. That's essentially a zero cost wait.
Work with this is the cells that bring in the circadian clock setting information sit in the lower half of the retina that because of the Optics of the eye view the upper visual field, which makes sense. They were placed there to view the Sun. So if you have lights in your home and you want to do things this way, you can have overhead lights on during the morning and day and then move to table top lamps very few people are going to put floor lamps like you would, you know, kind of row lights on it like you would see in a theater. It's true that redshifted light is going
To have lesson an impact on shifting your clocks, but that also means red light in the early part of the day might not be beneficial operating off red lights late in the day might be better. But at some point one's home becomes a little bit of a laboratory. And so if you want to just do this with what you already have dim the lights in the evening and try and set them a little bit lower in your visual field. And there's one other thing. I should just mention it's pretty essential to get some light in the afternoon as the sun is heading down again. You don't need to see the sun rising in the morning.
And setting like crossing the Horizon but it's the light that comes through when it's so called Low solar angle, which is just geek speak for our circus sunrise and circle circus Sunset. That's when you get this yellow blue contrast activating the cell type and there's a beautiful paper that showed that viewing light Circa Sunset adjust the sensitivity of the the cells in the eye such that it buffers you again some of the negative effects of light late at night. So I call it sort of my Netflix vaccination.
And you know so I can watch some late-night movie or TV or be on my screen a little bit later provided. I got some sunlight right or right around Sunset it tends to adjust. I don't want to go too deep into the neural circuitry, but it tends to adjust the sensitivity of the adaptation mechanism in the eye and so I would say viewing Morning Light try and see evening light and avoiding Bright Lights blue lights and all other colors of light from about 10 p.m. To 4 a.m.
I would say that's one of the three most important practices that anyone could do to really shift their mental and physical health in the right direction. It provides a kind of vector toward Wellness if you will,
so one question on to wrap that up would sunglasses be appropriate for for around you know, nine PM put those on
yeah, so some glasses work great frankly and I you know, nothing against the blue blocker manufacturers, but those are going to work better for the purpose of protecting your circadian clock mechanism.
Isms in all this mood.
They definitely give you more options to write because of the blue blockers are so ugly like you got some of the really bad ones. So
they're pretty bad. Yeah, you're
saying that that wearing sunglasses at night is like, okay and cool for the first time. Normally. It was just like, you know, not the thing to do.
It is provided that you can you need to be able to function and some of them are quite dark and it's hard to watch a movie with or something so I can see why the blue blockers might have some utility. And again, these are averages, you know, if you wake up in the middle night go to the bathroom.
It's really bright lights it you're not going to get thrown off. Sometimes people ask. You know, how is it that my rhythm even stays where it's at? Well, most people are getting some light early in the day and some light late in the day. And so their circadian rhythm stays more or less what we call phase Advanced and phase delayed. So it stays more or less the same if you start drifting if you sense that you're going to sleep later and later and feeling tired and having a hard time waking up or sleeping in where you're getting up earlier and earlier. Well, then there's a very simple rule which is take your wake-up time count back to ours.
Let's say the last three days you woke up at 7 a.m. 6:30 a.m. And 645 we'd say, okay, you're more or less a 6:30 a.m. Wakeup guy. I know that average isn't exactly right, but you're kind of in that zone. So 4:30 a.m. Is when I can almost certainly predict that your temperature is Louis that's called your temperature minimum. So two hours before your typical wake up time whether or not use an alarm clock or not. If you view bright light deliberately in the four to six hours after that temperature minimum.
Um, which you could go measure if you wanted but that that two hours before wake up. Your circadian clock is going to shift its going to advance so that you're going to want to go to bed earlier the next night and wake up earlier. Whereas if you were to view bright light in the four to six hours before that temperature minimum. So in this case, it would be 4:30 a.m. Before 4:30 a.m. If you viewed live at like 2 a.m. Or 3 a.m. It's going to delay your clock. So you're going to want to feel like you want to sleep in and go to sleep later. And there's a study from my colleague Jamie's I'd serve from the sleep lab.
Stanford that showed that and then you've got kids so this might come in useful at some point that even if shining bright light through the eyelids, you don't want to use dangerously bright light, but turning on the lights in the room 45 minutes before adolescents wake up as provide. They're not under the covers and that light gets in. It stimulates these cells and the following night. They will naturally want to go to bed 45 minutes earlier. Wow, and they get more deep sleep. They've actually measured the amount of deep slow-wave sleep. So
these light effects are very powerful in their anchored in a lot of very firmly established biological mechanism.
That's awesome. What are the other two pillars? You said you have outside of light.
So the other ones relate to breathing and general practices around Stress Control. So earlier we talked about exhale emphasize breathing of any kind. I don't care if it's well box breathing is even inhales and exhales. So it's going to tend to stabilize your heart rate where it's at if I do a breathing protocol where I inhale and then
Excel for 10 seconds. I'm going to naturally calm myself down. But the one thing that we know from the scientific literature in the physiology is this phenomenon of physiological size. This is the fastest way that I'm aware of that's anchored in real known biology to calm oneself down and it works. The cool thing is it works the first time and it works every time it takes about a second or so and the it involves something that you do naturally in sleep and that people do in claustrophobic environments or after.
Crying, which is it's an inhale through the nose and that's another inhale at the top and then a long exhale.
That's the fastest way to slow your heart down and calm down. And the reason is that as we get stressed the little sacs in our lungs our lungs aren't just two big bags. There are these little sacks of are they have Yoli of the lungs they collapse and when they collapse, we're sort of getting mildly asphyxiated and carbon dioxide levels are climbing in the bloodstream. When we do that double inhale. It's like blowing a balloon open and kids parties at that second one pops. Those open doesn't explode them pops those open and then when we exhale we offload,
A lot more carbon dioxide. So there's beautiful literature showing that these double inhale exhales really reduce the stress response in the anxiety response quickly and my lab and Spiegel's lab or running a study now and hundreds of people who are doing this for five minutes a day as a practice. But any time somebody gets stressed that the real-time tools are the ones that I'm really interested in because if you have a meditation practice great, but let's say something throws you off or you start, you know, you start spiraling out this double inhale exhale brings the
Nami nervous system toward a more calm to respond to very very fast. So even just one or two of those cycles of double inhale exhale. Ideally the inhale through the nose exhale through the mouth is the fastest way to calm. So I think people should have that and then this is still in category two, that's a real time calming tool but it's very clear that things like ice baths cold showers and things that many people will see as kind of Wim Hof type reading which is actually to mow breathing is the opposite the idea is not to calm yourself.
He has to learn to be comfortable in a state of stress. So if you get into an ice bath or cold shower, or if you do for instance, 25 deep inhales and exhales really fast, what happens is adrenaline is deployed from your adrenals and then by deliberately trying to calm yourself in that state what you're doing is you're you're changing the relationship to having a lot of adrenaline in your system. So this is distinct from calming oneself. This is preparing you for states in which adrenaline is deployed and it's like learning how to drive at 80 miles per hour in fog if you've never done it before
For and you have to do that to keep up with traffic. It's scary as hell. But if you've done it a few times it's scary, but you've been there and so you're more comfortable there. So this is more of a stretch yourself stress inoculation practice using breathing and you don't need the ice bath or the shower. That's wonderful. If you want to do that, but simply doing 25 or 30 intense breaths, it'll make people anxious people with generalized anxiety don't like doing this and Matt want to avoid it and then exhaling all your are just sitting calmly you're learning to calm the mind while the
In the state of agitation and that can be powerful to this is effectively the tools that special operations used for screening people as they're saying who can manage their internal real estate while the conditions are under some other control. So as Spiegel says he says it's not just about the state you're in it's about how you got there and whether or not you had anything to do with it, so people can teach themselves to be calmer in storm. So to speak and then the third one is a practice that I have to say if you
No of all the practices that I've done over the years and that I've explored and my lab is studying this now and there's some good science on it. The one that has had the greatest effect on everything from ability to buffer stress learning and memory Etc is a practice that a lot of people will think of as Yoga Nidra Yoga Nidra literally means yoga sleep you lie down and it involves directing your attention towards exhale emphasize breathing and a bit of a body scan there a lot of scripts for this on YouTube in my lab. We study in a
The length version of this that we call NSD our or non sleep depressed. I was drawn to this this practice because I'd heard about Yoga Nidra and even though there are a variety of scripts out there. I think they all have the following three or four benefits. First of all, you're following a script. So unlike meditation. You don't really wonder if you're doing it right. It's very mechanical exhale through pursed lips or focus on your right knee this kind of thing. You don't have to wonder or worry about your mind drift.
Shifting second of all there's a study that was published out of University of Copenhagen in Denmark. That showed that this Yoga Nidra practice resets levels of certain neurotransmitters and neuromodulators in the basal ganglia, which is an area of the brain involved in action execution and planning and there was this lure in The Yoga Nidra community that oh, you know 30 minutes of Yoga Nidra is equivalent to four hours of sleep. Frankly. I don't think there's any evidence for that specific statement, but when I started doing this practice and exploring it, I found that I would come out of
Thirty minute you'll get intersection feeling like I'd slept five six hours or longer. And so I think it's a great practice for people to do any time of day or night frankly and it also teaches them to engage the parasympathetic response. So it's great at teaching people to fall asleep and stay asleep. So if I wake up at 3:30 in the morning, I do one of these scripts there again, you just search for one on YouTube. There are different voices and different people like, I don't know there's a guy named Liam Dillon who has a very pleasing Irish voicemail voice.
If you like that there are other ones that you know, if you like one a woman's voice or you have to find the ones that work for you, but in a very short amount of time there I think they're just a huge number of benefits and my lab has been exploring this for stress mitigation. So I would say that practice given that it's zero cost and takes about 30 minutes. I do it five days a week religiously. I find the time. Do
you have any favorite YouTube videos that you could send me for the show notes or anything that I could think up there?
There's one that I've probably now done thousands of times that
Particularly, like I'll just a warning to the listeners who are a little bit more on the computer science engineering side. There is some language in there that involves intentions and this kind of thing. I soon will put out on the web a version of this that's kind of like the lab version where we strip away all the discussion about Third Eye Centers and intentions not because I don't think that that stuff is wonderful and obviously the stuff dates back thousands of years, but to study something like the scientifically we have to break it down into some standardized.
McCall's and for some people the language around intentions and all that stuff is a barrier to entry sure and one of the goals of my laboratory is you know, I'm not trying to prove anything right or wrong. But to as we test these hypotheses to point people in the direction of practices that they might not otherwise find themselves doing because they have names like Yoga Nidra, right which doesn't even imply anything about what I just described. So I would say that that tool is immensely
helpful great. That's fantastic a cure.
Is to know on the breathing side. I've you know, read a few books part of the most recent one was breathe the emphasis on nostril breathing versus mouth-breathing. Are you a Believer one way or the other
there? I am, you know, I think that there are there are times to breathe through the mouth eating speaking and certainly when one is in kind of fourth gear fifth gear mode and exercise just breathing through the nose is is going to limit performance and I'm happy. I'm friends with Brian Mackenzie and you know, and I Nestor and
Those guys I'm happy to chat with them and we could have they might disagree a little bit but I think the people I know who are most skilled in applying breathwork during movement would say that there does come a time when you want to go Max effort and not just breathe through the nose, but for most of our waking day breathing through the nose has been shown in two studies. Both published in the Journal of Neuroscience is a quality Journal showing that breathing through the nose actually improves learning and memory retention of in one case olfactory memory. So
It was for odors in the other case. It was non olfactory memory. So cognitive material related to I think it was a spatial memory task. So there does seem to be something about oxygenating the brain and body through the nose. That's beneficial. And then there's a James's book breath is excellent as you know, and then another one is that came out earlier was from my colleagues Paul Ehrlich and Sandra con both at Stanford with a forward by the one and only Bob sapolsky and Jared Diamond wrote something for it. It kind of went unnoticed because
Academic Press but it's called Jaws. Hmm and it's about the hidden epidemic and it's that book pointed to the benefits of nose. Breathing shows some twin studies that are just remarkable. I can send you these images if you like you look at to two kids and one of them had an inclusion of the nose due to an environmental factor or something and the entire shape of the jaw and face changes as James pointed to in his book as well. But that book was was really pointed towards the benefits of nose breathing and then a recent result.
That I think most people aren't aware of that came out in cell reports or to sell Press Journal. Excellent Journal showed that the nose just like the gut has a microbiome and that microbiome and this was done in humans. I forget the particular micro bacteria, but that nasal microbiome is supported by oxygenation through the nose and protects against a number of different bacterial and viral Invaders. And so now that we know of three major microbiomes, there's the nose the gut and in
Females there's the vagina as a microbiome environment, right? And so those have tons of effects on General Health and well-being. And so I think that's a third reason to oxygenate through the nose most of the time.
Yeah. That's a I've just recently switched to it's amazing when you when you read the book and then you realize you catch yourself doing the mouth breathing and I'm just like whoa, wait a second I switch back. I feel like it actually is like building some muscle strength there because I'm not
Used to doing that that nostril breathing but I do feel quite good especially when I couple that with a very long extended exhale. It's a very relaxing before bed.
A lot of times feeling of illness will start with a throat tickle, you know, the feeling that like something's going on, you know, my friends who work on Immunology tell me that the mouth is the major site of entry and growth for bacteria and viruses early on and there is this one other study that unfortunately, it's not the one that's normally sighted when people talk about the Hof method
Wim Hof method which involves these intense breaths followed by exhales and holds which is that it does increase adrenaline and adrenaline actually or it's also called epinephrine same molecule actually protects us it buffers us against illness and infection and that's seems on the face of a little paradoxical because you think wait I thought stress makes us more vulnerable actually this short-term stress response deploys immune cells when we breathe very fast or we have a really rough day.
Or something's really boring down on us and we're stressed. We rarely get sick during the event because there's a nerve pathway that innervates the spleen and then the spleen deploys all these natural killer cells. It's when we Rest Post stress that the infection can root its way in now that doesn't mean you want to be chronically stressed it sort of maps nicely to heart rate variability. You don't want your heart rate to be very high all the time. We know that hypertension nor do you want it to be too low all the time what you want is variability and some
All over that variability so nasal breathing most of the time having some times of the day when you're breathing very hard and very intensely through nose and mouth is going to buffer you against infection and not of all kinds of course, but a lot of forms of Invaders and the you had mentioned hit earlier, I think one of the great benefits of hit it's sort of a naturally were easily induced form of intense breathing.
Yeah. That's great. We are wrapping up our getting a little bit long here, but I wanted to go and touch on one more thing that we
Trading emails about you mentioned this glymphatic watch out there this rinsing of this neural debris can tell me a little bit about
that sure a few years ago. There was a system discovered in the brain that's called the glymphatic system some people refer to as kind of a sewer system, but that makes it sound bad. It's really a sewage clearance system and during sleep. There's a rapid movement that doesn't of the cerebral spinal fluid and some other lymph like fluids that don't occur in the waking.
Dates and this tends to occur during slow-wave sleep. So not REM sleep not the sort of associated with dreaming states of sleep, but slow-wave sleep. It's very clear that this glymphatic clear judge clearance system is involved in removing debris that might otherwise lead to generation of neurons and certain forms of dementia that it's involved in recovery from things like traumatic brain injury and just standard day-to-day repair of the brain and nervous system and the glymphatic system can be activated couple what
Ways one is this deep sleep all the more reason to do the sorts of practice. We were talking about earlier and really conquer the Sleep space for oneself.
The other reason is that this the system is seems to be very important for setting the overall longevity of neurons. And so one can sleep very deeply but there's some and I want to really highlight that this is newer emerging data. Okay, so not yet peer-reviewed and published but there's some very interesting data that come from military communities and other communities that where people get a lot of head injury that shows that the low-level steady state cardio the stuff that now everyone thinks you don't need to do because
Is so popular the kind of walking five miles
like Zone to basically Zone 2 or even lower than that or you
even lower. Yeah, like the 3/4 mile jog a couple times a week kind of thing seems to activate the glymphatic system. And may I want to highlight May improve outcomes after certain forms of traumatic brain injury. Now, of course people have to take care of that injury. You don't want to exacerbate the injury with another injury. If you're being told to bed rest bed rest, you know, I'm not a physician. I'm a professor right? But but the data say
that when movement is allowed that that low-level movement can be good for increasing the rates of clearance through this glymphatic system, and then there's some speculation from people who are quite smart, but this is now we're getting out off the the you know off the university landscape and peer-reviewed papers that some of the stuff that that you may have seen of, you know, like people doing hydraulic type stuff where they're bouncing off the bottom of pools and then grabbing gulps of are this kind of
Can also lead to increases in glymphatic clearance the sauna space has not yet been explored. But there's some lore about that. One thing that actually is solid. That one doesn't need a pool for it does appear that sleeping with feet slightly elevated or napping with feet slightly elevated can improve the rates of this glymphatic system clearance and there's a long history of people in military Community saying that you know legs up rest on the back for a few minutes is
You can reset it kind of brain and body and some forms of cognition more quickly or more thoroughly than just say sitting in a chair and having a chat and this is probably why sleeping on a plane is never really good sleep there. Probably a number of reasons for that including travel fatigue and jet lag but also when your feet are really below your head, you're not getting the same degree of glymphatic clearance. So because I kind of play with this stuff in my own life. I started sleeping with a thin pillow, but beneath my feet usually wakes up,
Place else
in the room, you know, but at least when I fall asleep, I'm trying to do that and certainly during naps all elevate my feet for a little bit while I do Yoga Nidra Just a Touch just and that's just a personal practice. That seems pretty low risk that people want to explore
great in terms of supplementation. Are you a fan of like micronized turmeric? Are there any like brain supplements? Do you take choline like magnesium? What do you look at? And what do you personally take and I know not obviously.
I'm prescribing anything or medical advice, but I'm just curious as someone that is so well-versed in this stuff. If you think there's any anything to the data there on on supplements that people can readily
by yeah, there's some great supplements or the ones that I would say, I found very beneficial. I have spent a lot of time in this space meaning. I've been taking supplements and experimenting with them since I was in high school, I'm 45 now. So I understand not everybody is that into that so I'll break it up by so for sleep. I'm very anti melatonin even at low doses, huh?
Doses, I mean melatonin is what suppresses the onset of puberty by suppressing gonadotropin-releasing hormone in younger years and the idea that people are taking even you know, a MIG of melatonin. That's a lot of melatonin for the system
300 micrograms like knocks me out. Like it's like crazy how powerful that stuff
is it is and people are taking three milligrams. I know I know it's a not good. I mean, I mean if people and doctors prescribe, you know suggested I
you know, I don't recommend it and it has all these effects on the you know, on the what they call the HPA axis and the pituitary to go now taxes in men and women and if kids have been taking this or you've been taking this, I don't want people to freak out, you know, those systems are pretty resilient. But I avoid melatonin the three things that have been amazing for my sleep falling and getting deeper sleep and shortening. My sleep need one is magnesium glycinate or three and eight those forms of magnesium are helpful for real.
Acts in the mind and falling asleep, maybe possibly cognitive enhancing. Although the one really good study on it was sponsored research not from my lab. So you have to look at that with a grain of
salt you met on the three and eight side not on the kleiss glycinate side,
right? That's right. Nothing on glycinate just yet three and a there's some emerging evidence and I think it's promising almost everybody. I've mentioned that to who's taken. It has gotten good benefit. Some people get some gut effects that aren't that aren't happy. They get ya a laxative effect, but magnesium citrate is gonna have a major laxative.
Act that's what you know, so if you want that effect citrates the way to go but it's not going to help much with relaxation and sleep and then in terms of other things for Sleep 200 to 400 milligrams of theanine is activates the Gaba system. We know this now and this is all taken. What I'm describing is 30 to 60 minutes before bed. A lot of people are taking Fenian throughout the day because if they think it provides some Anxiety Relief and it probably does but it's you know, it's activating Gabba Gabba being an inhibitory neurotransmitter Gaba is
Buy alcohol alcohol this kind of thing. It's the
same calming effect compound that you find in green tea,
right? Yes. Yeah, and it's now showing up in a lot of energy drinks, which I don't consume but so some theanine if you have intense dreams or a sleepwalker or you have epilepsy stay away from theanine because of the Gaba relationship there and then there's one that not a lot of people have heard of before which is called apigenin a pige ni n, which is for me has been wonderful in making it really nice.
A smooth transition to sleep about 50 milligrams of that before sleep Swanson makes it I have no relationship to Swanson. It's otherwise pretty hard to find it's a derivative of chamomile and it works through for the Nerds out there who want to know it works by activating a chloride conductance. So it hyperpolarizes neurons a little bit and you get a net effect of increased Gaba relaxation. So that kit has been very helpful. I stay away from 5-HTP and tryptophan when I take those I plumb it into sleep and then three hours later. I'm like wide awake and
It's just too much.
I'm in the same camp III try some of these things that the 5-HTP and some people swear by it and I'm sure it works for them. But they are all of our bodies are so wildly different that it's a it's not for
me. Yeah. Yeah. I think the 5-HTP thing got really popular when there was how shall I say? There was a lot of experimentation with MDMA going on out there and then people would say and I am not suggesting people take MDMA. I want to be really clear. I hope that it will pass into law.
Clinical trials or I think it's going through clinical trials now, but the fatigue after MDMA in my assessment is very unlikely to be due to serotonin depletion. It's pretty likely due to a rebound in a hormone called prolactin which anytime you get dopamine real high prolactin than rebounds actually prolactin is responsible for the refractory period for erection and orgasm in males after after sex. It's actually the prolactin goes up and it is
Create a refractory period and create actually, it's the theory is that's involved in stopping males. So there's a pair bonding experience and there's some interesting data from animals about dopamine and prolactin we talk about some other time, but the interesting thing about 5-HTP is it does create these very blissed-out States, but it's a sledgehammer and then in terms of things away from sleep, you know, I been long interested in the role of I used to work on hormones and neural systems, and I've been
Interested in androgens and estrogens and all this stuff and how they modulate brain and behavior and there are a lot of guys out there now because of the internet who are really curious about things like trt and all this. There are a few things that increase testosterone moderately without going into the extreme Zone and the two that I've seen great benefit from so we're talking about Point increases of anywhere from a hundred to four hundred in testosterone are Tonga Ali, which is Indonesian ginseng and what Tom golly
Pause is Tonga Ali is there's a molecule called sex hormone-binding globulin. So there's testosterone and free testosterone. The free testosterone is responsible for most of the actions out there and Tonga Ali displaces sex hormone-binding globulin from the testosterone molecule freeze up testosterone and the other one which is a little bit unusual. And again, I'm not recommending people take these. I'm just describing what I know is called Fado Gia aggressiveness and it's not as nothing to do with aggression. This is a Nigerian herb that actually
stimulates the release of luteinizing hormone, which then stimulates the gonads to produce more testosterone and those two taken in combination for you know, 12 or 16 weeks does lead to fairly significant increases in testosterone that at least by Blood charts and stuff to my blood shards hasn't given me any issues, but other people really need to be careful, especially if they have some Androgen sensitivity and then the final one here that kind of translates across kind of hormone modulation and cognitive stuff is it's pretty clear that about 5 grams of
Of creatine can have some Pro cognitive effects, but for people that are prone to hair loss creatine does seem to facilitate the conversion of testosterone to dihydrotestosterone which will increase beard growth but will also strip hair off the scalp because the DHT receptors are on the head and on the face and they have opposite effects on head and face and a lot of what how much into the what extent is dictated by genetics, but some people take creatine and they lose hair other people take creatine and they don't lose hair. So anyway, that's just a little sample.
Appling of the space and here I guess this is kind of a male oriented thing. I will say apigenin. I don't think women should take it somewhat of an estrogen a suppressor which males might want although you don't want to plummet your estrogen, you know, a lot of the complicated stuff people get into is by like slamming estrogen down and ramping up testosterone, you know, the the gym effect, you know, who these you see these guys at the times when Jim's were open
estrogen is important for brain health to is a not
brain health
You know the way their way to get people in that community and pay attention is when they start to realize the estrogen is important in males for brain health and for libido the plot take your estrogen too low then libido is going to going to go bye-bye. And actually one thing about turmeric that relates to this turmeric is a very potent DHT inhibitor. A lot of people don't realize is I think to Burak in moderate amounts it might be okay, but if you don't want DHT too low because
Has DHT is the major Androgen in humans? It's the one that's going to have the most action in terms of strength recovery from exercise libido Etc. So a lot of people taking so now you can see a scenario where somebody's taking a lot of turmeric to avoid inflammation their crushing their DHT, they might be doing a number of other things and then all of a sudden the hormones start to drift kind of out of whack. So obviously if you don't supplement and you know, there's no need to do any of this stuff but things like melatonin and turmeric you have to produce
With some caution. Yeah, gotcha anything on the kind of cognitive enhancement side, like on the choline or any other things you're looking
at? Yeah. So when people ask about smart drugs, I always say, you know, if this were Fitness we would never get away with that because you're talking about strength endurance and you know explosiveness suppleness flexibility in smart. What does that mean? Right? I mean and you know for a programmer means one thing and for an artist, it means another creativity and is one brain.
Function and then action implementation is another so I think we can reliably say a few things things that increase the transmission of acetylcholine will increase focus and alertness. Now, I don't necessarily recommend these I don't take them but I have friends who are really into Nicorette they dip Nicorette and when I say friends, I don't I want to be clear to the scientists out there too. I'm not talking about like gym goer guys or guys I swim with I'm talking about Nobel prize-winning.
That I know have been chewing immense amounts of Nicorette to maintain cognitive function.
I've heard that has downsides for the heart though. Absolutely. I'm yeah, you have
nicotine receptors all over the heart and so nicotine has a receptor for acetylcholine. So I'm not recommending that so I'm actually quite surprised that some of my colleagues is not a Stanford colleague choose so much Nicorette and there are people that that do this because I want to talk about this stuff people think oh, it must be like the Bro Science guys. Now, we're talking the complete
opposite. Do you know you and I both know?
These I know these people as well. They've been yeah exactly like or does the Nick read for a little like
boost? Yeah. Yeah, and I think this is what people used to get from cigarette smoking. But of course that has all the other bad effects. I think things like choline and Alpha GPC have their place every once in a while. I will rely on 500 milligrams of l-tyrosine, which is the precursor to dopamine and noradrenalin. You don't want to do it sleep-deprived, but it really enhances Focus.
Attention and I do think I'm going I'm not recommending anyone do this, but I would rather see people dabbling in that space then going straight to Illegal Adderall or you know, a lot of people taking modafinil. Now, let's be honest modafinil our modafinil their amphetamine. They were designed for the treatment of narcolepsy.
Oh my God, I tried those once and they just cracked me out. It was like the worst jittery kind of like I just could not like I don't know apparently some people just love that stuff. It's not for me. I'm not an
upper kind of person though. So I think
that's yeah well and I think knowing, you know the work you've done and we're not you know, really good work comes from that sweet spot levelers Agawam. It does not come from like just raw action implementation. And in fact, we usually regret the things that we do or they're a total mess when we're unless
you're organizing your closet or something like that something that we need to
drive all night in your sleep deprived to save somebody's life right in that case. You could do this. So tyrosine has a crash
Sure, but l-tyrosine and a you know, and I y'all come clean that everyone so I'll take 500 milligrams of l-tyrosine to pull an all-nighter and finish for a deadline but these days I'm trying to do the other things that buffer me against the need to have an all-nighter which isn't the kind of the bigger conversation.
Yeah. Awesome. Well before we wrap up I want to talk about you know, where would people can find you your podcast things like that. Like what were you at these
days? So my lab is very active running studies. I do want to be clear about that, but
I'm very involved in doing public education about neuroscience and Neuroscience related theme. So I do that in two places one is on Instagram. Huberman lab is my Instagram handle and there I do little everything from 15-second to five-minute IG TV type videos about different aspects of nervous system function often times. I do they relate to tools and practices, but just trying to build some scientific literacy and communicate with people that way and then I have a podcast which I just launched recently, which is the huberman lab.
Asked to find it on Apple Spotify YouTube and that podcast is a little unusual because every month I stay on one topic for the entire month. So one episode per week it recently it's been sleep jet lag shift work at dreams lucid dreams and then I pivot to a new topic. So it has a little bit of a university lecture feel. In fact every third episode I do what are called office hours. I distill the comments from the previous episodes and I try and clarify some misunderstandings and have some what is kind of like discussion although you know,
It's just basically designed to eliminate the shouting into the tunnel kind of format where people can get a voice and so people can find me there and I'm supposed to be writing a book, but frankly, I've been so busy with research and public education online. I'm just I don't know when that's going to happen. But at some point
yeah, what a cool way to do it though. I there's so many podcasts where you'll have someone produce it and it's fantastic information. But you want to go back and ask questions and the fact that you're doing that over the course of a month and you have a place where people can ask those questions and get them answered also in the
Gases is pretty awesome. I love
that. Yeah, thanks away was in full disclosure. It was a little bit because you know, the comment section can become an interesting gallery for abuse or it can become a place for a lot of growth and I think we get the occasional, you know, whatever in there but it really gives people the voice. I think they're craving. I think people want to be in dialogue with people and so we do read all the comments.
That's awesome. Well, thank you so much for doing that and thanks for being on the show. This has been a great discussion lots of
The show notes are going to be packed with information. So I'm excited for that.
Well, thanks for having me on I'm a long time fan and this where I get to say that when the invitation came through. I was really thrilled and now especially throughout though. So thank you
awesome. We'll have to do this again
would love that.
All right that is it for this episode. I wanted to remind you if you haven't already signed up for my newsletter make sure to do so it comes out only once a month. You can find it at Kevin rose.com put in your email address and I will send you updates podcast Lords books. I'm reading
Apps I'm checking out all kinds of stuff have covered in the past from weird bone broths two different exercise or fasting regimens that I'm doing. It's a it's a truly wide assortment of different topics, but I don't hit you up all the time only once every four to six weeks or so, but it's always packed with really good information. So sign up on over at Kevin rose.com. Thanks so much be well.
