The human animal is amazing at making plans at modifying its brain if it wants to but the human brain and the human animal are also dreadfully bad at doing what's best for us. Right? What I think it comes down to is the fact that our reward systems are not designed for things that are just good for us. They're designed for things that optimize the progression of our species, but they're also they will grab onto and Ratchet into any behavior that
Makes us feel good. And so the human brain is really not optimized for making best choices. Right? But I think we need to get comfortable as a culture in trying to understand our species and how we work that the early stages of hard work and focus are going to feel like agitation stress and confusion because that's the norepinephrine and adrenaline system kicking in none of us would expect to walk into the gym and do our PR lift or
Performer go do something without warming up. The brain also needs to warm up and start to hone in which circuits are going to be active and it's unreasonable for us to think. Oh, I've got an hour. I'm going to plop down and write beautifully for an hour or my best work. We need to accept that there's a period of agitation and stress that accompanies the dropping into these highly concentrated States our feelings and our thoughts and our memories and our all that is very complicated. But behaviors are very concrete and they are the control panel for the
The rest of it I don't want to relegate feelings feelings are extremely important. I don't want to relegate perception. They're extremely important, but when it comes to wanting to shift the way that you function to get better or to perform better to show up better or to move away from things like addictive behaviors. It's absolutely foolish for any of us me included to think that we can do that by changing our thoughts first Its Behavior first thoughts feelings and perceptions follow.
That's dr. Andrew.
Superman and this is the Retro podcast.
The Rich Roll podcast.
Hey people welcome to the show. Today's episode is brought to you by calm the app designed to help you ease stress and get the best sleep of your life 2020 has been a lot to say the least and I think we can all benefit from a little bit less stress and more sleep in our lives. It's so important to take care of ourselves and to invest in our well-being during this.
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Roll. So we all know the old saying you can't teach an old dog new tricks that past the age of something like 25 that we're all essentially set in our ways. So throw out the idea of learning anything new a new language a skill a thought pattern. It is not happening.
But what if I told you that that's simply not true. What if I told you that you have the power to actually change your brain and reprogram your perception irrespective of age. Well, this is the life's work of Stanford neuroscientist. Dr. Andrew huberman and just one of the many many fascinating topics explored in today's episode as an appetizer to the forthcoming meal. We're going to start today by checking in with my
Karsh ambedkar the ridiculously talented musician rapper actor basically Experts of all things linguistically dexterous that you might recall from episode 373 about two years ago. The occasion is the premiere of we are freestyle Love Supreme, which is this extraordinary documentary shot over the course of something like 15 years, and it's a really moving.
Portrait of a very talented group of young artists of which utk is a member alongside lin-manuel Miranda that began in this bookstore basement and over time. We kind of see the honing of this incredible talent that would ultimately go on to create in the Heights and Hamilton and freestyle Love Supreme, which just ended a run on Broadway. It's an incredible story. It's a
Beautiful movie I strongly urge all of you guys to check it out. It's streaming on Hulu food. Karsh told some of the story in our original podcast and I personally was privileged to see freestyle Love Supreme on Broadway last November. It's an experience. I will never forget and I really just wanted to help amplify this movie and this incredible story. So I asked you to K to drop in and share a few. Well, it's good to hear your voice.
As my friend love you, man. I really miss everybody. It's been a weird time and even though I haven't seen you in a while. I still feel very connected to you and everything that's going on in your life right now. It's been an unbelievable Journey. We were just talking before recording that when you did the podcast that was almost exactly two years ago episode 373 and so much has happened in your life when we sat down you were getting ready to go to New Zealand to film lawn and you couldn't even
And publicly announced that on the podcast but you went there you were there for how many months six months in New Zealand six months shooting in New Zealand for Mulan incredible experience and met my now wife. You know, I've gotten married since we last chatted. I have a five-year-old stepdaughter. I have a three-month-old son who was born in our bedroom during the pandemic which was a
The astounding thing to witness and you and I had spoken you had come to the Brittany runs a marathon Premier, right? But we were talking about Parenthood and I was asking you about it and it's been a trip man to have children during this time young children has been wild and you know, what's crazy is I went to New Zealand I learned how to ride a horse. I did stunt training. I was you know in a lead in the movie and I ended up I don't know if I told you this I couldn't tell you that I
In Mulan then but now I can tell you which is so funny. I got cut out of the movie. I'm totally cut out of it. So I got what is the story behind that? I mean you're there for 6 months shooting and then you you end up on The Cutting Room floor. It's unbelievable. Yeah. I mean, I don't know they just a my role was meant to be comic relief and I think that when they saw the Final Cut of the movie, they really wanted to lean into a more Epic.
Lord of the Rings type of energy and I think that the comic relief had to go right it was a tonal thing and Niki Caro the director and Jason Lee the producer they were super loving and gracious and Disney as well. They Sean Bailey over there. They've taken steps to sort of ensure that at least on the business end of things. We're still taking care of which they didn't have to do and which hello Paula and I are like greatly appreciate. I mean it hurt at the time.
It I just sort of also told you all the things that I gained from the experience. So when you look at the totality of it, it's like who am I to really complain? You know, you met your wife you inherited a stepdaughter, you know have baby boy. Bumi. You've been sober for your coming up on six. Yeah coming up on six. Yep, and then you banged out a ton of movies and then you're on Broadway all in a span of two years. Like that's a sober Arc if
I've ever heard one my friend and that speaks to like this incredible show. So I had this opportunity to be in New York. Like I'm coming to see your show. You made sure that you got a couple seats for me. I took bird my literary agent and I have to say and I've told you this in person before that is the most entertained I've ever been in a theatrical production. It was so Divine like the whole experience of witnessing you
This friend of mine perform this passion that is inside of you and to do it with this tribe of brothers that you love and to create something out of whole cloth in front of this audience on Broadway. I mean it was it was a very memorable experience for me. I've never seen anything like that before and just the sheer utter genius and joy of watching, you know, all of you guys up there doing what you do.
Like sharing this Incredible Gift that's so difficult for me to even comprehend was an unbelievable experience and then last night Julie and I watched the movie which is why we're talking now freestyle Love Supreme documentary that just premiered on Hulu yesterday was the first day that it went up right? Yes, and it was I mean, I texted you a brought me to tears like it was such a moving and Powerful experience watching The Arc of you know, what you
I have created dating all the way back to when everybody was just kids and what I took away from it was that this is really like a love story. It's a story about friendship. It's like this beautiful meditation on creativity and fearlessness and being in the moment and what it means to be an artist devoted to authenticity and just the purity of the expression in this particular art form. I'm so glad that that's what you got from it. I mean
And I can't really expound upon it more. All I can do is say as somebody who looks up to you and who really deeply respects you and what you do. Just thank you. I really appreciate your support and you know being able to be here and talk about it with you is it's a real gift and privilege. So thanks for watching it. I really appreciate it. I mean it's an incredible movie, you know to everybody who's listening what you've got to watch this. I immediately texted like a bunch of friends and I was like stop what you're doing. You gotta see this movie.
Another thing that was really impactful for me was you know, we all know who Lynn is and and like this incredible, you know what he is created and all of that but what I was struck by was just how little has changed like he's doing it and all of you guys together are doing this for really just the joy of it like the fact that these guys when they were doing in the Heights after the show would go and do freestyle Love Supreme. It's like yeah, we have to keep doing this. We got a flex this muscle like this is what brings us.
The most joy and even seeing everybody at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. I think that was like in 2005 or 2007 or something like that and they're like looking at a bad review. They're reading a bad review and like nobody cares because it's not about that right? It's about them being authentically who they are and trying to just get to the core of the truth of that expression. Yeah, and the journey has been
Difficult in terms of this group. I mean it's it's full of joy and you know, we stayed true to the art but I guess on the outside. It's like there have been so many obstacles along the way and I think Hamilton and in the Heights is, you know, a huge sort of motivator for why we all got back on Broadway together why we had the opportunity to get on Broadway together, right? But the fact is is like it's grounded in a real sense of like Whoa We have
Banged our head against the wall a lot to get to this point and the fact that nobody fell off. Nobody quit. We all stayed together. Nobody got jealous. There was I mean there were some discrepancies or some disagreements that energy shifted we grew up we grew old, but we've stayed strong and we all still have an fls tattoo on our body which is true. So that's pretty amazing. We've all been branded with the love, right?
It's cool. It's really it's been interesting the documentary for me because you know on your podcast two years ago was the first time that I had ever talked about this experience with Hamilton and my sobriety at that time and that was a huge platform for me and still is you know, I told you I was in New Zealand in somebody at the tower was like, hey, I know you I heard you on the ritual podcast last week and I was like, I'm across literally across the world.
And people are following you and as a result following me in my story, but having sort of the Journey of sobriety be told in the movie has been interesting because a lot of people have reached out with their own stories as I'm sure you're used to this. I'm not really used to it yet, but people being like it's my first day sober. I've got 13 years my husband this like your journey that and
It's been interesting to navigate it because the Journey of sobriety is so subjective. It's never finished. It's not a goal. It's an experience and I feel uncomfortable celebrating it if that makes sense. Well, it's delicate and it's not for public consumption. And so when you are outwardly facing about it like you now
our there's this sense that perhaps you're putting it in Jeopardy or Peril by sharing it and I know what that feels like there is a discomfort with that because also you don't want to be looked at as the Paragon of sobriety or somebody who has it all figured out because this is a constantly evolving thing that requires, you know tenacious attention in order to maintain so when that Spotlight gets put in your direction
And people are looking to you for perhaps answers. That's not the dynamic that is optimal for you maintaining that sobriety. Right? And that is the fear. The fear is like in sharing about it. It will somehow be lost or the potency or the effectiveness of my daily routines will be diminished and there's also even a bigger fear and you probably run into this you use the word Paragon, you know, sobriety being seen as a success story when it's
Really just a survival story and it's not like we magically become incredible. I don't know Superstar individuals. Like I have a skill set and I have a heart and a spirit and a soul and I have a dedication and commitment to my family my children my wife those things are very special to me. And as you know, like they're ever evolving, you know, we're like the in the documentary. I'm four years sober and in the year before
Between four and five has been humongous the amount of change in growth and just new sense of responsibility. I have so like your way Farther Along on this path than I am. So it's pretty appropriate that I get to talk about this with you and I hopped on the Marc Maron podcast and talking about it with him as well was really helpful. But like but yeah, man, I don't know how you navigate it because you're like a role model to a so like hundreds of thousands of people and
I can imagine sometimes it can be difficult to stay centered in that amongst even though the noise is all praise. It can still be quite difficult. I imagine right? Well, I think you always have to come back to grounding it in just your personal experience and you know, people are always like oh you overcame addiction like now your this other and it's like no I continue to attempt to overcome it like this is an ongoing thing. Like I'm always bringing it back.
To that to disabuse people of this idea that it's something that lives only in a Pastime line because it's very much part of my present time line exactly the idea of like you climbed Everest you licked it. It's not like a mountain you climb to the top of it's like a desert. It's a flat line and you just got to keep moving towards the horizon, right? That's just it there's nothing to overcome as it were. You know what I mean? Well that speaks directly to a big theme in the documentary. I mean the whole
He opens up with Lynn basically articulating that very sentiment by saying this is a story about friendship and you know life is not linear. And Orson Welles said it best when he said, you know, if you want a happy ending it depends on when you decide to end the story like this is a constantly evolving thing whether it's your sobriety or the relationship that you have with these guys and this particular art form. Where by you guys express yourself. Yeah, and it's
Cool, man. I started talking about the first time I ever wrapped about being sober on stage this captured in the documentary. And the reason that I did it I had always shied away from it because it's very personal and precious to me but jelly donut Andrew Bancroft who is a member of the group his father who has since passed away. He was sober for 40 years and I
You that and he came to the show and I saw him like in the sixth row or whatever it was and I was just sort of inspired by him to be honest and share the truth during the song that we do called true. And if you watch the documentary, you can see the exact moment that I'm talking about right now, and it was amazing because like he passed away a couple of months ago and before he did he got me on the phone and we
Talked for a little while, which was a kind of difficult for him and he sent me his 40-year sobriety coin like sort of a gift to say goodbye and he told me that you know, when I hit 40, I should give it away to someone else and he said this in a letter and sort of that story that you don't get in. The documentary is sort of I think encompasses the love and affection deep gratitude and connection that
Our group has that I think is captured in many other ways in the documentary. Yeah, that's really beautiful. I mean, I was glad that you had a moment in the documentary where you address this and you talked about your sobriety and how the drinking and using impacted your relationship with these guys in your career trajectory, which is what we explored in depth when you did the podcast two years ago, but I wasn't sure.
Whether that was going to be part of the movie like I thought this is who curses private thing, you know, maybe this isn't going to make it into this narrative, but I was really glad to see it's not like you Linger on that subject matter, but it is addressed. Yeah, it's pretty wild to see that but it's so cool man. We've stuck together a long time. The Broadway run was a huge gift and you know, there's a documentary called Mucho Amor about Walter Mercado and this
We are freestyle Love Supreme. There's a you know, John Lewis who just passed away rest in peace. He's got a documentary on him called good trouble and in a time, that's really challenging right now. These little documentaries are sort of popping up that are not substance less, but they're full of love and compassion and striving for the truth is sort of at the core of all of them and people are really responding to them because I think
They're sort of speaking to our better angels and I'm sort of blessed and just really grateful to be a part of it a hundred percent. I mean, I think that it's impossible to watch the movie and not feel inspired to cultivate your creative voice and it's also speaks to possibility like what can happen when you just devote yourself to something that you love dearly and you're resistant from ever abandoned.
Sing it like it's just a I think you know the movie if there's one sort of blind spot. I'm not sure it really tracks enough of just how difficult all of this was. Like there's a lot of success that's portrayed and you go down a couple tangents to better understand some of the difficulties but all of this, you know evolved over a very long time by a group of people who just were dedicated to their craft and we're doing something that they loved it started very humbly in this bookstore base.
That and the fact that you know, now the art that you guys create is enjoyed by people all over the world and is celebrated. So broadly is, you know, it's just it's incredibly inspiring and mode. Thanks Rich. I really appreciate it. And you're right. I feel the same way. I when they asked us for notes the main note I gay was like, can you please let people know how hard this was? Right? Well Lin does say you know, he's like, I you know, I knew that Hamilton was my best work, and I also knew that it was
It's going to be a really long robe like it was still very far away from what he wanted it to be and you know what I think that process took 7 years, right? Yeah. I remember when we started sort of hearing Snippets of it and getting a sense of what was going on. And when he was like I got something I got something and then three years later would be like, where is it? He was like, yeah, you know coming but right, you know without freestyle Love Supreme for all of us like games Monroe doesn't win a Tony for playing the genie in
Didn't like Shockwave doesn't end up being an educator of children on the electric company like Anthony even in Seattle. He doesn't start speechless where he goes into Google and goes into corporations and teaches interpersonal relationships using improv like Tommy and Lynn. There's no in the Heights. There's no Hamilton like I don't get pitch perfect because I'm not rapping like I don't get on The Mindy Project because I'm not at drawing from the source. So like Bill Sherman doesn't do Sesame Street which then
You know has molded the mines musically of a generation of children. Like, you know, we are all indebted to one another for the sort of the source that we've kept pure in order to come back to and refill when we need it. Yeah, it all goes back to that basement. You know, the purity of that experience was the laboratory from which all of these other gifts emerged in the fact that all of you continue to
Appreciate that and take care to protect that and to continue to express that speaks to this shared value that you guys all have like this reverence for not just the art form but the Genesis that created the engine that is given all of you, you know flight and careers and and lives that have extended Beyond those humble beginnings. Yep. We all have fairly middling to okay Credit Now
now which is great. Well, I love the movie. I just wanted to have you on I wanted to hear a little bit more about it. I love it. I think everybody should check it out immediately. We are freestyle Love Supreme on Hulu right now streaming into your homes. Yep. Thanks, man. What else are you what you have stuff that's coming out soon. I think the main thing I would love for people to be able to check out if they have time is my music. You can search it karsh ambedkar on iTunes Spotify.
Amazon music whatever you use it's available and I'm coming out with new music pretty much every month every two months. So all the time. Yeah, it's sort of my thing that I can sort of contribute to both myself artistically, and I guess the world creatively, so if you have the time a few minutes here and there feel free to listen while you're doing the dishes or vacuuming or, you know, hopefully staying safe and enjoying life. Thank you, brother.
Love you. Thanks, man. I love you, bro. Thank you so much for having me.
I love that man. Utk is a gift. Okay, dr. Huber meant a neuroscientist and tenured professor in the department of neurobiology at Stanford University School of Medicine Andrew specializes in something called neuroplasticity, which is basically the brain's ability to reorganize and repair itself by forming new neural connections throughout life his groundbreaking work and the huberman lat
At Stanford has been featured in Science magazine discover magazine Scientific American time and the New York Times to name just a few. This is an incredible conversation about many things neuroplasticity. Of course, the brains incredible ability to modify itself based on experience and how we can all use it to our advantage to shift. Our thought patterns enhanced focus and improve sleep. It's also a conversation about his research in
ation and how we can hijack our dopamine systems and optimize stress to move forward and difficult situations. It's about the inner workings of our nervous systems leveraging our physical bodies are diaphragms and visual systems to access certain states of mind, which is really fascinating and it's also about dr. Hubermanns personal transformation and is very unlikely path to becoming the celebrated scientist. He is today.
More than anything this is really a conversation about simply how to better self regulate ourselves as animals. And I think this conversation is really important right now because as a society we have become literally biochemically addicted to many things including entrenched all-or-nothing thinking and myopic perceptions of Life simply put emotions.
Cloud our judgment and it's vital that our society learns to understand the powerful role cognitive bias and dopamine and adrenaline play in affirming our worldviews and ultimately shutting us down to the opinions and experiences of others Andrew teaches us that to shift the way that you function changing. Your behaviors is the first step. I interpret this as simply the science that backs up my favorite.
Entre mood follows action. I'm super impressed by Andrew his story the work that he is doing and very grateful for the Practical tools that he
provides all of us with today. My
hope is that you use them to better your experience of life and expand your world view. So here we go. This is me and dr. Andrew hubermann.
First of all, thanks for doing this. I appreciate you coming out. Yeah, my pleasure. Long time coming. I'm glad we're doing it in person and I go out remotely and I think what I want to do is start with your origin story because your path is very unlikely your path to becoming a scientist and I think it actually also kind of contextualizes some of the things that I want to talk about with you today. So maybe start there sure.
So on the one hand, you know, maybe I was fated to become a scientist.
I guess the the two things that are relevant there are I always loved animals and I've always been obsessed with animal behavior. Like just could watch Cousteau shows growing up, you know underwater life or animals hunting animals doing anything is just so fascinating to me because I'm I think even at a really young age, I've always just been intrigued and sort of what drives different animals to behave in the way they do and how body form matches to I don't know what it was but brains and how
that all works. So I've always been obsessed with animals and then my dad's a scientist. So he's a physicist. I was really early in the chaos theory and so growing up in our home, you know, we had scientists over for dinner and graduate students would come over for barbecues and things like that see a Stanford Professor. He was at Stanford. He was mostly at Xerox Parc which is kind of famous. If you read the Steve Jobs book is for the development of the GUI interface the graphical user interface and server.
Days of the computer so he had a lab there and you know lab in Applied Physics at Stanford and something called symbolic systems, which is a Stanford degree and kind of ecology and computation that kind of thing. So I grew up in this family where science was very prominent and we had lots of discussions in our home that I would over here and I didn't understand about physics and we'd spend summers at the Aspen Center for physics, which was like hard times. Yeah, so, you know and we were and to be clear, you know, you hear the word Aspen, you know, we were middle class family.
Yeah, but they have the SAS concern for physics. So the Fineman Richard Fineman was there Murray gell-mann like all these luminaries of physics Peter cows and my dad was really good at telling me the stories about these guys and then I'd always want to meet them. It was mostly guys back. Then there weren't many women in physics. So I'd you know, I was kind of immersed in science from a young age, but right about age 13 my parents split up and he moved overseas. He moved to Denmark and my mom was really
Dealing with the breakup and I wasn't in contact with him anymore. So I had this really unusual childhood where you know, we can talk about sports we talked about science and I had this close relationship with science and the people around science, but then all of a sudden the structure around family like it instead of dinner together every night. It was just like me and my mom and I was an adolescent I was hitting puberty. So, you know, there was bound to be some shifts in my world landscape and internal landscape anyway, but basically what happened was
Was I stopped really paying attention to school and I got really heavily in the skateboarding and kind of punk-rock music and I found my pack or my community Through like packing community of kids that also just were kind of parentless. So this was like late 80s early 90s. Yeah, and so at a pretty young age, I started taking the I grew up in Palo Alto was actually born at Stanford hospital and start taking the 7f bus up to San Francisco and hanging around Embarcadero for the skateboarders out there. The list is this is the the now
Famous EMB crowd. So this was the birth of a huge movement of skateboarders that became professionals like so you'd see the young Danny Way would come through town and you had Rob Dyrdek. I remember when he came through and so so all these names that eventually became popular during the kind of X Games era and the but at that time it was really underground and so is this pack of maybe a hundred guys and it was run like a little city and it was chaos. It was like there was
As fights and there was drinking and there was lawlessness. There was also a lot of amazing skateboarding. Yeah. There are a lot of amazing people and there were some older guys like one in particular a very famous skateboarders. This kid might Carol his older brother was kind of like the older brother to everybody kind of kept us all in check. So it had its own unique organization and it's actually interesting because the same thing was happening at that time in Washington Square Park in New York and at Love Park in Philadelphia. There were all these like communities of kids that were basically
Us and so in that time I saw some interesting things. First of all, I learned what it was to be parentless growing up in Palo Alto. It was like soccer games and AYSO and you know swim swim club and all of a sudden I realized, you know, I don't have to be home at any particular time or you know, none of these kids are going to school. And so we all it was a kind of big group of truants and it was interesting because it gave me a perspective that I had never had in Palo Alto and I was drifting further and further away.
Away from any kind of academic rigor, right? I think I would go to school every once in a
while. What's mom doing? Does she have any idea that you're going up to the city every day? So
she was totally checked out. Well, I think she was just devastated by a bunch of things that were happening and she lapsed into a pretty serious depression. And then in that Community, what was interesting is I started seeing that you know, some guys were clearly faded to becoming professional skateboarders. They were really good at it. I just want to say for full disclosure. I was not particularly good
I kept getting injured. I just I was not fated to be you know, exceptional or very good at it. But I love the camaraderie and I love the community. But I also noticed that you know, some people were drinking all day and other people got in the hard drugs and people started to you know, some of the dysfunction really started to show the fracture. Yeah, the fracture again is exactly and so I started seeing that a lot more violence, you know, people start getting their girlfriends pregnant. They know money.
At those kids, you know, it started becoming apparent to me that there was a lot of dysfunction as well as a lot of incredible people in that community and so about that time. I got a girlfriend and the other thing was I got removed from high school. So I went to kind of the famed / Infamous High School in Palo Alto gun High School. Are you into gone? I went to gun which is famous because it's the one of the most academically rigorous schools in the country. Maybe the planet people move to the area just to send their kids there, but it
So has this very complicated reputations the high suicide rate of any school in the country that your child is real about this. So, you know, I would come to school every once in a while, but I could tell you far more about the curbs in the front of the gun high school parking lot that I could have anything that I learned at. Yeah, so I
can they say they've you were removed. I mean you got you are
expelled. No, I basically they just said you need to either start coming to school or you know, or you're done so I got shifted to another high school and that was same story as this was it.
Was a mess it was fell apart. And so at one point I was brought in kind of vague recollection of this by was brought in to have a discussion with a school counselor and we were told this story before and there was someone sitting in the corner this guy was sitting in the corner and he didn't introduce himself and pretty soon. I realized I was like, I think they're going to take me away like I started realize because they realized my mom wasn't really able to control me wasn't really in a place to support me. Uh-huh.
At that time and certain that's what they did. They took me away. They took me to a place up the peninsula which was not a jail and it wasn't the hospital. It was just sort of a place where they put kids that were like,
sometimes we wear hat where housing
situation a lot of psychologists a lot of a lot of locks on doors lot of lot of kids that there were 12 of us in there at any one time. It was locked down and the first night there. I remember I had a roommate who
was like really into cutting on himself that kind of thing and he told me he's like look if you just do what they say here. You'll be out of here in like a month. Uh-huh. And if you don't you're gonna be here a very long time and I remember being pretty frightened for the first time and at that point I was like, oh my goodness like this is bad. He like this is bad. I'm a long way
for me to imagine. I know I know and it's given you know who you are and what you do
I know and you know, and it was literally like the kind of one phone call.
Holiday kind of things. Actually I called I was skateboarding for a company in San Francisco. I think they put me on out of sympathy and I called this guy up and I said look, I've you know, they lock me up. I don't know what to do. Can you help me and he kept and I'll never forget I want to say his name because you're the most normal guy. I know
what he's like it was Ice likely of that crowd exactly happened.
So in any event, I was permitted to go back to school eventually provided that I went to therapy. And so I started going
Going to weekly therapy which in the early 90s was kind of a weird thing. You wouldn't admit it to your friends. But Sweet Skateboard around Stanford campus. I was doing my thing and then twice a week, I would go in and see this this therapist. He's a remarkable guy because a he had deep training in the mind, right and we started talking about what was going on and he really picked up on the fact that there was essentially no structure no home life for me, but that I had a strong drive and I was really interested in learning. I mean, I was I was I was enthusiastic
To can motivate enough to you know, skateboard as hard as I could even though I wasn't going to go anywhere with it. So at that point and the fact that I had a girlfriend I started looking for something that I could do and I started at one point. I thought I joined the fire service because it seemed like the camaraderie was good at that point. I started strengthening my body a bit because I didn't want to keep getting hurt. So I started running. I started lifting weights a football coach at gun. Actually. Turn me on to Fitness actually an interesting guy. He wrote the
Ripped for that movie. Mr. Mom, Mighty God. Yeah, because his wife bet him that he couldn't do what what she could do, which was stay home with the kids and he was this big strong football coach and so he made her bet and they and he lost and so he wrote that script Michael Keaton played the yeah, so he taught me he was like look, you know, you can't even do a pull-up you need to start doing your pull-ups and you start running, you know, and and he said the fire service might be good for you. So so I was spinning out but there were people that were willing to kind of, you know point me in the right direction. So what ended up happening
Was my high school girlfriend went off to college and I didn't you know, I didn't know what I was going to do. So I actually went in and I lived in the parking lot outside her dormitory. I just want to be near her. She was my family at that at that point the college
locally or she was at UC Santa Barbara. So you just
drove down and I just drove down. I just can't out in the parking lot and people and and I was starting to get into some martial arts and Thai boxing then so I think I was teaching some Thai boxing self-defense stuff on campus and doing this kind of thing.
And by the end of that year, I realized that I should probably apply to college. So I applied to UCSB and somehow I got in Lord knows how I got in I did because I did eventually graduate high school barely got in and then after a year, I just completely flailed it. You know, I wasn't going to class. I was getting into fights a lot of that kind of kind of mischief and kind of wildness was still in me. And what ended up happening was I got into a physical altercation.
Altercation on July 4th 1994. We're like a bunch of guys and at the end of that I walked back to the place. I was staying and of course I wasn't paying rent because I learned in those years like you can just squat in an empty house. So, you know, it's Isla Vista, California, you know, so I was really running wild and went back and just I realized I was like this picture is really bad, you know at some point this isn't going to be like a kid who had some problems. This is going to be
truly a cute and it's not Q knowing No One's Gonna make excuses.
Uses about your upbringing or the lack of parenting you it just becomes you just you're going to end up being a ward of the state. I mean you were it sounds like you were you're almost a feral animal
totally for them actually and I was in close friends that that's how they refer to me the really pharaoh and it's funny even to this day. I mean, I'll get to wear this eventually took me but even to this day when I go into a home where it's clearly like a loving home where there's kids are happy and there's good food.
Then it's warm and cozy. I always feel this thing. Like wow, like amazing. Like I sort of want to be adopted by them immediately. But you know, I'm 45 years old. So that's not appropriate at this. It's
so interesting. I keep thinking about David Epstein's book range. Did you read this book which is basically this thesis that some of the most successful people are not, you know, we suspect that, you know, the great talents of the world across all disciplines are the people who
Who discover their passion at an early age and practice it voraciously for many many many years. But in fact, it's people more like yourself who have dabbled in all different kinds of things who end up being ultimately, you know, the most proficient at their selected skill set. And when I look at your experience, I see trauma. I see Adventure I see, you know, all these obstacles that you've had to face and overcome and and manage on your own essentially right and all of those
Really inform perfectly the things that you're interested in and what you explore today in your lab.
Yeah. It really did. You know, I think that I'm so grateful for those years. I wouldn't wish them a on any kid because I think having a secure loving environment at home is so key and you know, I should say about a third of the kids that I grew up with and that environment that whole skateboarding punk rock culture about a third of gone on to found companies or professional skateboarders about a third just kind of drifted off in about 1/3 or dead or incarcerated. Yeah, you know a huge number and
And so there's real value in having a support system that's clear. But he exposed me to all these things like addiction schizophrenia rage like all of these incredible elements. Like I was never really into drinking and drugs I could drink or not drink. It just was I wasn't drawn to it, but other people they took one Sip and it was like that was their thing right like the magic Elixir for them. And so I you know, I was observing what was happening and then after that, you know that July 4th 94 incident was I realized this is it, you know, it's now
Never it really was one of those moments, you know, you hear about those moments, but it was me realizing I'm living in the squat when I got a pet ferret. My girlfriend's gone. She broke up with me. She was smart enough to break up with me. You know, I'm getting in fights. I'm working at a bagel shop. I'm barely making ends meet and at that point. I just made the decision. I just said, okay. Look I'm I'm not going to be professional athlete. I think I'm pretty good at memorizing things. I think I have an interest in people. I'm going to just
aside I just decided to do school I decided that was that was the track and so like some people pick the military because it's like if you know what to expect at least in terms of the you know, the passages that you're going to go through and for me that was school. And so I had decided to get back in school. I moved into a studio apartment by myself. I quit parting completely. I didn't go to parties. I got really serious about Fitness. So I just started running and lifting weights.
And I studied you went like Henry Rollins style. I did. Yeah, I did. I did not have self-awareness. You know, I mean people go into the military because on some level. I mean some people do because there's some yearning for having that structure imposed upon their lives, but you you constructed that that kind of structure for
yourself. Yeah. I think I was really afraid I think I was like, you know, and I and these days, you know, because my lab studies fear and I get into this whole thing around mindsets people always ask me like is it better to do?
From place of Love or fear like depends and at that point fear was the best motivator for me and I just basically worked like crazy.
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It's
interesting because I didn't have a mentor someone to bring me to that but there is one professor in particular who got took note. He was like, oh, you know you seem really interested in the stuff and I was like, yeah because he was teaching me about depression schizophrenia neurochemicals. I thought I was totally turned on by the world of Neuroscience it it was even called Neuroscience back then but this one guy Harry Carlisle, he's teaching me about thermal regulation and how the brain works and how receptors in the skin relate to Perceptions in the mind and and he also had
Add a deep sensitivity to mental disease and I'd seen a lot of that. You know, I'd seen a lot of depression and anxiety and my own family. I'd had a friend commit suicide another friend become schizophrenic. I think he still walk in the Mission District of San Francisco now seems to friends become addicts and so here was it someone explaining that there's actually an underlying basis for this and I just poured myself. And
is that the same guy who who, you know would smoke underneath
The vacuum hood and stuff like that like a bit of an
iconoclast. Yeah. He was amazing. So he was a favorite teacher of many students. But if you could get into his lab then you've kind of one of the chosen ones I guess is
like the perfect Mentor at the perfect time for you.
Yes, he used to drink coffee and lab which you're not supposed to do. He's to smoke cigarettes and lab crying in the fume hood and they used to come and yell at him and he would do it anyway, and I thought you know, this guy's you don't even know what it is. But you know, he's punk rocker. He doesn't even know and so
So he gave me an opportunity to work in his lab and at some point he told me if you go to graduate school, they'll actually pay you to do science. And what ended up happening that point was I hit a brick wall because I was I had a lot of resentment toward my dad. I felt you know, here's my dad. He was a scientist he had, you know, left us all this kind of thing. And I realized if I didn't do this if I didn't take this opportunity it was gonna be the most foolish thing ever. You know, what am I going to spite my you know, my parents because you know, I was 20 years old at that point.
Just made the decision. I'm going to get a PhD and become a professor. I'm gonna get tenure and be like this guy, you know, this guy who is look like he had a pretty good life to me. And so that's pretty much how I spent the last 25 years of my life is do an experiment worked out. It worked out because it a lot of work. I mean I didn't have the power of concentration. I hadn't read all the good books that gun high school students read growing up. I had to learn how to speak properly. I learned how to learn how to think properly and really learn how to
To commit to something that was very linear and at times was very painful and and I went to some pretty extreme things. I you know, I actually used to set a timer and I won't allow myself to get out of the chair until I was the timer went off, right so and I would experience extreme agitation, but over time I got pretty good. And now I can do long stints of work without any brakes and
yeah, it worked out it developed that that neural plasticity in your favor ultimately.
You're always a reader though, right?
I loved books. So I would you know, I would hide in the tower books section in the evenings. I would read everything about Fitness psychology anything I could I've always devoured information. My favorite book when I was a kid was the encyclopedia or the Guinness Book of World Records. So I would like when I was a little kid I'd walk around the Aspen Center for physics and I would tell anyone I didn't even ask them if they want to hear about like that. What's the world's smallest eutherian mammals, you know, I would like you could tell you all these facts that were kind of me.
Meaningless at the time but I've always been fascinated by the inventory of different animals on the planet and they're different behaviors. And so yeah voracious reader and still now. Yeah, I love I love him formation. Well as a
neuroscientist, I mean your your your your own patient, I mean the fact that you were able to, you know, turn your life around in such a dramatic fashion and do it essentially through sheer will and you know setting up practices that would feel you and that right direction.
And then being available when those mentors showed up from that from the you know, the early therapist sounds like that guy almost save
your life. He absolutely saved my life. He gave me the book wherever you go. There. You are Jon kabat-zinn book and he said no pressure. But if you can develop a mindfulness practice where you can sit still for like 10 minutes a day, it'll serve you very well. So I started doing that like he could have he could have told me to hang out of a window by my house. I would have done it. I think there was a there was a self-preservation thing was kicking in.
For me, so I got very interested in mindfulness meditation. He also said it was I think quite smart and saying look there's a whole world of psychedelic drugs that are powerful in influencing the mind. He said if your explore those wait until your brain has already developed which I think is a controversial statement in and of itself. He said he actively discouraged me to go down that path which I think was the right thing given I was a minor, you know,
And nowadays there's all this discussion now about psychedelics and their power and I think they are very interesting compounds, but he really steered me towards behavioral practices. Like what could I do each day from waking up to going to sleep that would serve my mental health and my productivity. Well, yeah, I owe him a tremendous amount and especially because it wasn't just in the psychoanalytic theory. He also was like cognitive behavioral. He understood the power of practices not just discussing issues.
He had to begin a meditation practice at that age and the
Mid-90s, that's pretty
radical. Yeah, I felt it was funny because I thought if I didn't sit in the Lotus position, like I wasn't doing it properly, you know back then there was all this stuff around it was very mystical and in my family because my dad's very conservative and my mom is a little bit more of a free spirit. I was taught that anything that related to hippie culture was doomed to fail and cause problems and that anything that was related to like conservative culture was fated to advance the progress of humanity, right it turned.
Neither one was true, of course, so I but I needed people to push me in those directions lift weights run meditate do your schoolwork do your homework? And so I think you know now I have a good relationship with my parents, but I think I had to go out into the world and find those, you know, sort of paternal and maternal figures because they weren't in my home. I need to do you find
those you look back on your upbringing with gratitude. Like how do you reflect on
At experience and how it informs. You know, how you think about what you do
now? I'm immensely grateful for it because you know where I'm at today, as you know, my lab works on a number of issues related, you know, sort of Hardcore neurobiology of regenerating the brain trying to fix basically cure blindness and repair visual systems, but also things related to you know, fear courage mindset stress anxiety trauma Etc and the early seed of seeing how science is done. Definitely gave me an advantage. I
Why you know I seeing how scientists interact and behave and understanding that they are just people because a lot of what was discussed in my home was about the people not just the signs. They do that really gave me an advantage and then seeing all that dysfunction and realizing that the human animal is amazing at making plans at modifying its brain if it wants to but the human brain and the human animal are also dreadfully bad at doing what's best for.
For us right because of this what I think it comes down to is the fact that our reward systems are not designed for things that are just good for us. They're designed for things that optimize the progression of our species, but they're also they will grab onto and Ratchet into any behavior that makes us feel good. And so the human brain is really not optimized for making best choices, right? And so those years of seeing all that dysfunction fighter that yeah. It's
And and it's a I wouldn't trade those years for anything and I still have great friends in that Community. I mean, I think you know any had I joined a different Community I would have found the right people as well. But to be with a, you know, a huge pack of feral kids at that age and to see the function and dysfunction and also is wild it was a lot of fun I can imagine it was a lot of fun. Yeah, that's a
whole set of story that movie mid
90s mid-90s and the movie kids the lair.
Barks me when I saw that movie. First of all, I had a lot of friends that were in that movie because he used actual skateboarders heads. Yeah. I actually knew a couple of those kids and you know, it's a movie but there were a lot of things about that. Maybe they're very accurate. Yeah, and when I saw that movie I was like, yeah, that's like right pretty much a day in the life and Washington Square Park and you know, I mean, it was a little extreme on on some pain some men but you didn't know where you're going to end up each night. That was a unique experience, you know, so yeah.
And mid-90s was really good. I think it captured the essence of what it is to be a kid. That's just looking for some some group of people to join and skateboard is a unique sport because you get young kids and grown men and now women and girls do it as well didn't happen so much then but now there are a lot of great awesome skateboarders that are female but they're all hanging out together. You wouldn't find that in soccer. You're not getting a little kids playing with grown men. So you get exposed to a lot because everyone's a developed different developmental stages. But yeah it
Is amazing thing I wouldn't change it
for anything cool. Well, let's let's segue into talking about the brain and maybe we could start with you know, how you think about the brain specifically like what is the brain? What does it do? What does it not? Do you know it helps us survive? It's our portal into trying to make sense of the world. Like what's the starting point in the discussion around the
brain? Yeah, so the brain and nervous system, which so it's like brain spinal cord.
Actions with the body and back again. I don't distinguish between brain and mind. I think that's like an 80s discussion or earlier and I think it would take us down the wrong track. So brain or mind to me is interchangeable mind body is kind of interchangeable because the brain is connected to the body and the body is connected to the brain, right if I you know pinprick my hand and it hurts my brain registers it where it happens. It's kind of irrelevant discussion, and I think we really need to just appreciate that. The nervous system is designed to orchestrate all
All the processes in the body not just thinking and not just behavior and really can be divided into five things. So there's sensation and sensation is really bound or restricted by The receptors in the body. So receptors in the eye that perceive photons light energy precip receptors in the skin that perceive pressure touch receptors smell taste peering etcetera and the interesting thing about sensation and the fact that the nervous system needs to pay attention sensation is it's non-negotiable.
nervous system of humans is designed to extract physical phenomenon from the universe that are non-negotiable photons of light. I can't see in the infrared with my eyes and I can't see ultraviolet light with my eyes and I can't perceive that because I don't have the receptors for it. So, you know other animals can perceive some of those things but that leads us to the next thing which is perception, which is which Sensations are you paying attention to so all the time you're sensing things like right now your feet are sensing the contact with your shoes, but
you're not thinking about it until I say that then you shift your perception. So perception is like the spotlight. So the brain wants to constantly bring in sensation non-negotiable what's coming in? It's just depending on your environment perception is negotiable. You can control that because I just said shoes and you thought about your feet and there you are. Then there are feelings which can be a little bit nebulous. But feelings are a link between our emotion and generally invokes The Body Sensations in the body and Concepts in the mind of what those Sensations
About that's really what emotions are animals definitely experienced them. I'm kind of appalled to think that ten years ago people like doing animals have emotions. Of course, they have emotions, right? Because those are bodily Sensations merged with some perception. So, of course they do and then there's thoughts and thoughts are interesting because thoughts happens spontaneously think about like a web browser that's constantly giving you pop-ups but thoughts can also be deliberate so you and I can decide right now that we're going to think about a plan for something we're going to think about what's going
on in the world. So thoughts happen spontaneously and they can be deliberate and then the final thing is behaviors and actions. So the nervous system is responsible for sensation perception feelings thoughts and behaviors. And what's interesting. I start to think about that as you like. Okay, that's a lot. But what is the nervous system really trying to accomplish like on any given day or at any moment What's it trying to accomplish and it's really trying to accomplish one thing which is to take perceptions of the outside world and
Urge those with perceptions of the inside world what we call interoception and to link those in a way that's operating on an environment in the appropriate way. So what I mean by that so if I'm feeling anxious and I'm in a very calm environment, I'm going to perceive that rapid heart rate and kind of feeling of agitation in my body as inappropriate for the moment, right and my goal then as an organism is to adjust my level of what they call autonomic arousal or alertness down if I'm at a at a
Great party, or I'm at a wedding or it's a celebration or I'm at a protest or you know, then I might feel that my level of alertness is appropriate for my environment. So the nervous system is in this constant Dynamic interaction with the outside world and trying to figure that out one way that this can be kind of conceptualize as there's an emerging idea. That's kind of interesting about impatience. So we've all had the feeling of being impatient some people are far more patient than others, but if you've ever been in line at the store,
And you feel like something is going very slowly, you know, the person in front he is taking a long time. They're doing some returns you're getting kind of impatient maybe breathing in a mask and you're like like you're you know, what's the idea is that if you're getting a certain frequency of Pulses from your body and if those pulses are coming in quickly, like you're perceiving your yourself that interoception quickly. It's like pulse pulse pulse pulse. You're going to be more geared towards your internal representation. And then you're seeing what's going on in the outside world and it seems like it's going
I'm very slowly but there are other times when you're in line at the store. Someone's getting some returns in your texting on your phone or you've had a great day. You've had a great run your family is in great shape and you're fine. Why? Well, the frequency of those pulses that interoception is matched pretty well to your outside environment. And so impatience is really when your internal sort of metronome ticking tick tick is not matched well to the external environment. There are other times when you're feeling like
Internal metronome is tick tick tick and you've got a million things coming at you through email or text. You got a bunch of things and you're feeling overwhelmed and tired. Well in either case, there's nothing right or wrong. It's just your body and your brain are trying to say what's going on in the outside world how well matched am I to it? Right? So
If you think about some of the the sort of core practices of mindfulness and self-regulation of focusing on breathing or focusing on on you know state of mind a lot of that is trying to bring more awareness to your internal state, but what our brain is normally doing when our eyes are open and we're interacting the world is we're constantly trying to update our internal state to match external demands of the world and this Harkens back to a you know, like a really early design of all.
Uh systems which is how do you take an organism that need certain things food water mates reproduction shelter. How do you move that organism? How do you create a system that will do that in best relation to the environment? And so what Mother Nature has done is designed a system a series of systems. Let's just take agitation and stress for one if an animal or a human is very thirsty. You feel kind of agitating my get up and get a drink of water. If you're very thirsty. It can put you into a state of
of panic if you're extremely thirsty and water is a limited resource, you might even resort to violence to get it or negotiation of some sort that you wouldn't if you were calmer so that stress and agitation were designed to actually mobilize the body to take us in a direction of something that's adaptive. So you can start to see these kind of core elements of what the brain and nervous system do sensation perception feeling thought and action and this constant challenge of trying to match our internal state to the
Colonel real estate the outside world and you start to see that the sensations that we call stress or impatience or calm are really the result of that those attempts that the nervous system is trying to perform.
That's a lot to take in and super interesting and and it you know, it's prompting in me this you know attempt to try to wrap my head around.
what within the brain is mutable which is kind of you know, what your work is all about versus what is immutable like you were talking about thoughts like pop-up windows on a browser, you know, sometimes our brains are just doing what they do and that there are things that we can do like mindfulness and breath work and the practices that you're talking about hypnosis, which is another thing that you're you know involved in to help, you know, help us like take better manage better that process to kind of
Take the reins and be more in charge rather than be prey or victim to these kind of things that just occur without our conscious awareness.
Well, I think that you know, in terms of value of understanding the nervous system and where it can be steered. It's absolutely clear that the nervous system can change in response to experience. So this thing we call Neural plasticity is really that it's the brain's ability to modify itself in response to experience and I think it's important to understand that from birth to about age 20
I've the brain is extremely malleable in a kind of almost passive way where kids are exposed to things in the brain is just wiring up. I mean the brain is really designed to adjust itself in order to be in concert with its surroundings and to optimize that just the
way we describe them in like a way that a child can learn a language very quickly or three
languages guitar or something. Yeah without an accent, you know, three languages without accent. It's remarkable and try and do that after age 25. It's very challenging and so
The brain is basically designed to be customized in the early part of life and then to implement those algorithms and that circuitry for the rest of your of its life. And so the brain can change in adulthood and it can change provided that there's an emphasis on some perceptual event. So in other words, if you want to change your brain as an adult, let's say you want to be less anxious you want to learn a new language. You want to be more functional in some way presumably the key thing is
To bring Focus to some particular perception of something that's happening during the learning process. And the reason for that is that there's a neurochemical system involving acetylcholine and it comes from these two little nuclei down in the base of the brain called nucleus Alice all day long, you're doing things in a reflexive way. But when you do something and you think about it, very intensely acetylcholine is released from bacillus at the precise neurons that were involved in that behavior.
ER and it marks those for change during sleep or during deep rest later. So for people that want to change their brain, the power of focus is really the entry point and the ability to access deep rest and sleep because most people don't realize this but neuroplasticity is triggered by intense Focus, but neuroplasticity occurs during deep sleep and rest and we can talk about how to optimize those different brain functions. One of the things that's really important also to think about how the brain works in terms of plasticity and all this stuff is
What the brain really wants to do is also pass as much of what it does off to reflexive Behavior as possible. Uh-huh. So yeah, so when we're talking about Focus, I think I can get a little bit vague, but it might be useful thing about like what exactly is focused and what triggers plasticity so the brain loves to be able to just do things pick up coffee cups and drink and walk and talk and do things and not put much energy into it when we decide to focus what the brain really does is switches on a set of circuits then brawl the front.
All cortex and nucleus but Solace and some others and it's trying to understand duration how long something is going to last path. What's going to happen and outcome what ultimately is going to happen? So duration path an outcome, you know, the events of early 2020 are good example of this one of the reasons why it's so exhausting to be alive in 2020 is because we are now having to pay attention to duration path and outcome. How long is this thing gonna last winter? You know, when are they going to open up all businesses? Did I touch that?
Or handle does it matter, you know, right who are the experts are there any experts you know, there are a lot of questions. Whereas normally we can just move through life without having to do all that analysis. So if it's a simple example, I trying to learn a new language or a new motor skill or a new way of conceptualizing something maybe somebody's in a therapeutic process and they're trying to work through a trauma or something like that duration path and outcome is built into the networks of the brain we can do that very easily, but it takes work.
And it almost has a feeling of underlying agitation and frustration and that's because of the circuits that turn on before acetylcholine are of the stress system. So when you were I decide we're going to learn something and really dig in norepinephrine, which is adrenaline is secreted in the brain stem and in the body and it brings about a state of alertness then our attention, which is mostly a diffuse light is brought to a particular duration path in outcome analysis. This would be thinking about what somebody is saying, what are they?
Really trying to say a hard passage of reading a hard, you know set of math problems, you know a challenging physical workout. When you do that these two systems have to work very hard and the adult brain doesn't really want to change the algorithms. It learned in childhood. But if you do those two things you have alertness and focus the acetylcholine and norepinephrine converge to Mark those synapses for Change and Sodor. So the way to think about neuroplasticity if one wants to change their brain is bring about
Out the most intense concentration, you can to something and then later bring about the least amount of concentration of that thing. So I'll talk about that in a second but there are some studies that were done at Stanford by guy named Eric Knudsen that showed that plasticity in the in the adult brain. Any age can be as robust as it is in childhood as fast and as traumatic provided the focus is there and it's all contingent on this acetylcholine molecule coming from nucleus.
So you say well, how do you do that? How do you write you get it? You know exactly. Well. I've got friends that you Nicorette thinking that's going to get them there because Nicorette is a nicotinic acetylcholine Agonist, but that's gonna globally increase acetylcholine. So I always tell them that's not the right approach. The right approach is to bring as much Focus to a behavior or to a thought or to an action pattern and there has to be a sense of urgency. So what Knudsen lab showed in another Lab at UCSF Mike Mirza next Lab showed is that if there's a serious
This contingency like in order to get your ration of food each day. You have to learn this thing. The degree of plasticity is remarkable. Right? But if there isn't an incentive, it just isn't going to happen. So the circuits in the brain that mother nature setup are designed to be anchored to a real need and people always say to me. Well should I do something out of love and a real desire to learn or should it be out of fear, but either one works the sense of urgency is just acetyl choline. It's norepinephrine. That's all it is.
It doesn't the brain doesn't have a recognition of whether or not something is pleasure for not until later. Once you start accomplishing your goal the reward systems like dopamine start kicking in but I think if people are interested in modifying their brain for the better at least some, you know, top Contour understanding of how urgency and focus must converge for that to happen can be useful because I think there's a lot of attention paid to whether or not something feels like flow or whether or not see what I call highly desirable.
Durable, right or whether or not you can you can eat a plant out of the ground that will magically put your brain into a state of plasticity and the answer is yes such plants exist, but what's missing is the focus component if that work is not done with a particular end goal in mind you'll get plasticity, but you'll get plasticity in a kind of across the board. It's like learning nine length learning a little bit of nine languages. All at once is not going to make you speak coherently in any one of them. So focus is the key.
I mean this idea of flow is so much in the vernacular now and you know, my sense is that people are trying to measure their their level of Engagement against some sort of theoretical idea of what it's like to be in that flow State and if they're not experiencing it they feel like they're doing it wrong or there or they feel guilty or they beat themselves up and for me it's a lot of it is just hard work like right now.
I'm trying to finish this book and I should have been working on this book for like the last nine months. Right and I just couldn't couldn't get it together. Like it's a collaborative project. So there's a lot of different people that are involved in this and they've been working diligently sort of daily, you know putting this thing together and I've just been focusing on the podcast and been unable to immerse myself in this project because I know from past book projects when I go in I go all in like the addict in me kicks in and it's like
Just becomes my universe and I've been completely paralyzed from taking that on and so I've gathered away most of the quarantine without being productive on this project and then about 10 days ago. We had a meeting and we established this deadline at you know, July 10th to turn this thing in and it was like a switch got flicked and I went all in and it's all I can think about now and and in fact everything else feels like extraneous and a distraction. I just want to get back.
So I can focus on this thing and 10 days ago. I couldn't get myself into that position and it's made me think about like what is going on in my brain that you know, it's such a drastic State change. And what did I do to switch that well a deadline was imposed upon me and whatever happened neurochemical e with that set in motion like a chain reaction of events that got me into the chair. And once I began the project for me, it's all about like momentum.
Right. It's like this start getting to the starting line and beginning is so hard. Like I will just go forever without doing it and then I'm in and then I'm all in a hundred and ten percent and I'm like, why can't I just why can't I be that person who just worked on it, you know an hour and a half every day for the last three
months, but I can offer some potential explanations. I kind
of late and none of it involves a flow state right? It's all
hard. Yeah, and you know, I'm friends with Steven kotler. I think Flo and I think
the cheeks of mahai who originated the state thing and flow is really annoying but I say right now the most we can say about flow and mechanistically is backwards. It spells wolf. We don't really understand flow people have come up with these theories. It's like how you know, hypo hyper frontality. I haven't seen the data and I'm not picking on anybody. I'm putting that out there as a prompt for people to discover this I think that and to work on it. I think it's a really interesting highly desirable state, but I think we need to get comfortable as a culture.
In trying to understand our species and how we work that the early stages of hard work and focus are going to feel like agitation stress and confusion because that's the norepinephrine and adrenaline system kicking in none of us would expect to walk into the gym and do our PR lift or you know performer go do something without warming up the brain also needs to warm up and start to hone in which circuits are going to be active and it's unreasonable for us to think. Oh, I've got an hour. I'm going to plot.
Op down and write beautifully for an hour or my best work. We need to accept that there's a period of agitation and stress that accompanies the dropping into these highly concentrated States now in terms of the reward that accompanies the feeling that were funneling into that that groove of being productive in in one regime like for you writing this book The dopamine system is really important to understand. So we've talked about norepinephrine kind of gets you going acetylcholine is the spotlight of attention the dopamine system.
Mother Nature's hardwired ancient system in all animals including humans to put us on the right path. Now. It's a lot of people talk about dopamine as this thing that you get when you publish the book or when you get the book deal or when something wonderful happens like your child's born and that's true but dopamines main role is to be released any time you achieve a milestone or you think you're on the right path and when the dopamine system is Tethered to a particular pattern.
A turn of focus remember duration path and outcome. So it's like okay sit down. Maybe you don't get much text out. But then the next day you get 800 words of really solid text and you feel good. Like I'm into this. What does that dopamine system do the dopamine system takes the norepinephrine, which is normally rate-limiting like at some point. There's so much norepinephrine that you quit and we can talk about that. It's actually the substrate for quitting dopamine can push that noradrenaline back down that adrenaline back down and give you more room.
More space to do duration path an outcome work highly focused work and I'm making duration path outcome synonymous with highly Focus work. Why would this happen? So let's think about an animal it's thing about a deer that wakes up and is thirsty and it's wandering out looking for water that animal needs water. It doesn't know that it needs water. It experiences agitation the same way that a baby feels agitation when it wants food, but it doesn't know it needs food. It just feels agitation and cries and caretaker comes hopefully.
Dear is now foraging for something that it needs and let's say it smells water because dear can actually do that and arrives at a stream and takes a sip of water. There's dopamine release then that puts it on a path to maybe a larger Lake or something of that sort or to be able to go cheap food. So when we are on the right path and we hit a milestone dopamine is released and it tends to tighten our focus more for that activity. So the dopamine this is why drugs of abuse and
And why alcoholism and some you know process addictions which are behavioral addictions are so dangerous because they a lot of those drugs of abuse our dopamine so it becomes this cyclical Loop where there's no other behavior that can evoke the same level of release right? In fact, I sort of Define addiction as a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure and I say that because it really is the way that the dopamine system works. Normally the dopamine system is designed to be generic. It's
To get me to do lots of things social quality social interactions, you know work exercise all those things just like the stress system is designed to get me out of bed in the morning of cortisol pulse is what gets me out of bed in the morning. It's also what leads me to or led me to pursue a career in science out of fear initially and eventually pleasure. So the dopamine system is Tethered to those states of focus and it's what Mother Nature designed so that neural plasticity would occur and you would want to continue those behaviors again.
Again in the future that dire needs to know and remember and create a memory not just of where that stream is, but the process of oh when I feel that agitation, I'm gonna get up and go down this particular path. And so people think of the dopamine system as this kind of like catch-all for reward. Oh you get likes on Instagram and it makes you feel good. That's not really how it works. And the important thing to understand is when you start getting a convergence of norepinephrine so that level of agitation duration path,
Come acetylcholine and dopamine now you're starting to wire in the behaviors that make people really good at certain things now in a functional view of this so not addiction what this means is that for any of us success in any Endeavor is very closely related to how much Focus we can bring to that endeavor and the reward system you start to realize is entirely internal no one's coming along and cramming dopamine in your ear or dripping it in your brain. It's all internal.
And this starts to bring us into the kind of like discussion around mindsets because so my colleague Carol dweck who popularized the same growth mindset. It's again a very misunderstood concept. It's the idea that we can change. So that's built into that. But the discovery of growth mindset was of these kids that actually really enjoyed doing problem sets that they knew they couldn't get right, but for them, they would get this like dopamine release from just focusing on the problem. They like doing puzzles. They couldn't get right it sounds crazy but in
Really those kids are very good at puzzles and very good at math and on these kinds of things so growth mindset is I believe it was our inner except Neuroscience lens on growth mindset would be that the agitation and stress that you feel at the beginning of something and when you're trying to lean into it, you can't focus is just a recognized gate you have to pass that through that gate to get to the focus component. And then if you can reward the effort process you really start to feel Joy and low levels of excitement in the effort.
Process that's that buffering of adrenaline. That's that feeling like yes. I've got a lot of adrenaline my system, but I'm on the right path. It feels good to walk up this hill so to speak and when you start to bring those neural circuits together, you really start to create a whole set of circuits that are designed to be exported to any Behavior you want. So if it's writing a book great if it's podcasting great if it's building a business great if it's if it's you know building a terrific relationship.
Kinship great, then the circuits that Mother Nature has designed our incredibly generic so that we could adapt to whatever it is that we need to do and I think the misunderstanding around how these circuits work has led to this idea that there's some secret entry point may be marked flow on the door and there's a trampoline up to that door and you just open that door and you're going to be in it, right and nothing could be further from the truth. And anyone who's done. Well in any career or athletic Pursuit knows this, but unfortunately, there's a
of obsession with the idea that it's all supposed to feel good and it does feel good. But there's a whole staircase in which it feels kind of
lousy. Yeah. I mean the the the the feel-good aspect of that experience is very subtle and I think you know in a kind of global way. What you're talking about is falling in love with the process like you have to push this gate open which might require, you know more effort than you're comfortable with but once you push through it is about, you know, that daily the daily rigor and the time
Winds that you get from that rather than you know, it's easy to say, you know, you set a goal but that goal becomes very abstract. Right? And it's those tiny little things that you're getting done every day that bring you that internal satisfaction that are like calibrating that and plasticity. Is that what you're
saying? Yeah, absolutely. And what's incredible is the extent to which the mind and thoughts remember earlier we are talking about how thoughts are spontaneous. You can't control them negative thoughts traumatic thoughts bad thoughts trying to suppress those is
Futile if there's one message I can send people it's just don't even work at that but work at the process of introducing thoughts as almost like you would introduce actions because we can introduce thoughts and you know, Carol dweck has talked about this that positive self-talk is not the same thing as growth mindset because positive self-talk is almost always linked to the ultimate outcome if I'm losing badly in something and I tell myself I'm doing great. I know that I'm lying. There's no dopamine release from that and
A lot of the self-help Wellness culture of the 80s and 90s was like it's impossible to be in a bad mood. If you're smiling, we won't have any depression on the planet if that's true. There's probably some feedback from the face of the brain, but it's not that simple but the idea that you can self reward the effort process is extremely powerful because what it means is that if you can recognize agitation stress and confusion as an entry point to where you eventually want to go. I do think that just that even just mental recognition can allow people to pass through
it more easily. They think they're doing something wrong and then rewarding yourself when you achieve any Milestone like, you know, running to a particular location, if you're trying to run a long distance and then registering that as a partial win, what we know is that the dopamine that's released in response to that suppresses the total amount of adrenaline and gives you more room more time more energy to run in things in the running example, and this is anchored in a real scientific result. So last year there was a paper published.
Wished that essentially was asking why any human or animal quit at any Behavior now certain behaviors. Like I can't lift a car less is a very small car can't lift a car. But if it's we're talking about running or we're talking about long bouts of work question is why do we quit like, what is that? It turns out that every time we exert effort a certain amount of noradrenaline in the brain is released and there's a sort of a counter in the brainstem and at some point enough nor adrenaline is released.
Least and it shuts down cognitive control deliberate control over the motor circuitry and we quit that's it. But the thing that can restore those levels or it can sort of reset those levels lower and give us more gas more mileage is dopamine and it makes perfect sense because our species had to move against very challenging things in nature. And in terms of in culture at every stage of our Evolution including now 2020 is a good example of this and when a good example would be
If you're really slogging it out and things are miserable just think like the worst family vacation. Everything is a disaster or a very hard physical event and someone cracks a joke. You're almost immediately feel a sense of relief. You see this in the team that wins the Super Bowl both teams slogged it out. You have to believe they were both at Max effort the entire game. Look at the team that went they have extra energy. They're jumping all over the place. So it can't be physical energy can't be glycogen related. It's not
Tone related. It's nothing in the body in that sense. It's dopamines ability to take that level of norepinephrine and smack it back down. And so we can learn this right. I'm at the I think this is where there's real power like in your story or the story that I'm familiar with from your book like the the ability to push through those pain points is something that we really can export to other aspects of life because it's the same neural chemicals that are involved so when you get to a particular location in your maybe your
Recall, you know portion where you're just you're feeling lousy, you know, you're injured or you feel like you're hurt and you can reframe it mentally and think I'm actually still on the ladder. I'm still holding onto a run. I know that least that much. I'm still breathing. I know that much and the lift that we get is not some psychological pump up. It's a neurochemical thing. It's dopamine suppressing norepinephrine and saying you're on the right path, you can keep going. It's a permission to keep going and we grant that permission to
Selves no one grants that permission to us. I think one of the other kind of misconceptions that we want to dissolve is this idea that were external rewards can actually Propel us to down long past of success in the high performance. They can't that's its
internal relatable fuel source. Yeah. I
have a friend from the SEAL Teams and somebody asked us recently. We were given a talk and somebody said how can I make sure that I continue to self reward and I'm not driven by these?
External rewards, how can I continue to have that drive and his answer was very good. He said give away all the external rewards, you know now not everyone can afford to do that
just about you and you it's just you
and you and the more attached there's a famous Stanford study done it being Nursery School. Probably not far were from where you were in the dormitory. There's a little Nursery School in Escondido Village and they did a study where they looked at kids that like to playing during their recess, but it's all recess in nursery school, but they're drawing and
They took the kids that really like to draw and they started giving them little gold stars on their drawings and then they like the gold stars for a kid. That's an extrinsic reward, and then they stopped doing that and the kids stop drawing. They just they Associated the good feeling of doing it with the external rewards. We have to be very cautious about how much of our internal dopamine we attach to external rewards if we want to continue to grow and pursue and focus and work hard if you just want to get to
Some place in cash in then fine, but most people find themselves in a pretty miserable place because their dopamine was so attached to external rewards they need more and
more of well the Y has to be deeper than that. I mean the thing that that I kind of always default to when I hit that breaking point or you know, I'm training arm racing or whatever and I'm at that stage where it's just like I can't go any further. The first thing I do is I reflect in word on why I'm doing this to begin with like what is the
What is the value system that I'm trying to tap into? What is it that I'm trying to express like what got me to this point? So it's a reminder and then I just set like I just say well I'm just going to get to the next Lamppost or I'm going to you know, get to the next intersection or whatever it is. I break it down into the tiny. I'll quit after that like the more I can just root myself in the present moment and and distill it down into the tiniest of digestible chunks. That's the only way I can you
no continue to move forward and I've learned over time that the more I do that then, you know suddenly all find myself in a different mental like it will shift right just because I feel that way in that moment is not determine itive of how I'm going to feel 10 minutes later.
Absolutely. There's an interesting process that that occurs when people start to realize that rewards are all internal and what they start to do is they start linking this duration path outcome thing.
To their internal rewards and so to put this simply one of the most powerful things that any person can do is to learn to control this idea of duration path and outcome and attach an internal sense of reward just that you're doing well to reward yourself mentally just say I'm doing well. I'm actually on the right path to do that inside of the demands that come from the external world the more often that we can self reward some aspect of the process provided in the right direction.
Erection of what we're trying to achieve the more energy. We're going to have for that the more Focus we're going to have for that and remember the north. The reason I say energy. I don't throw that around Loosely is that limiting amount of noradrenaline is constantly being kept at Bay. You're literally buffering the quick response. And so when people start realizing that if they set the goals inside of the larger goal and self reward each one of those they essentially have an infinite amount of energy to pursue those goals.
They have an infinite amount of focus to pursue those Falls. You see this most in the Special Operations community and people that are selected essentially for this process. So one of the things that's been intriguing to me, I have some friends from the SEAL Teams and I don't begin to you know, really understand the real work that they do deployed because I've never done that kind of work, but I've always been intrigued by the selection process the so-called buds process right because carrying logs and getting in cold water and all that. That's not really how the work is that
really not what the work is about. So the selection process is interesting because everyone shows up fit motivated and convinced that they're not going to quit I think like there might be a couple of just show up to show up but everybody is absolutely convinced and then a very small subset of them make it through and I'd be willing to bet that the ones that make it through of course their gritty and resilient but they all are essentially right. So that's necessary but not sufficient. Obviously. Otherwise, they everyone would make it through the people that make it through
Somehow are able to tap into a process. Maybe it's a reward process. Maybe it's through self-punishment. Maybe it's through self reward in the positive sense, but they're able to control something inside an environment that is not controlled by them. It's controlled by the by the instructors and I've always been struck by the fact that in order to and to not in order to get through. You just have to not quit remember people aren't being deselected. They're not saying get out of here. You're not good enough. You're not people are deciding that for themselves.
Elves and so it's interesting because it brings about a real-world experiment of people who are quitting and I believe they're quitting because they can't manage these neurotransmitters and the people and when I say manage, I think that the people that get through knowing some of these people quite well had an internal process by which they could reward themselves for doing something that might have just look trivial to everybody else but it gave them more gas more energy. Right? Right. And what's interesting is the process the kind of unconscious.
Genius of the buds process is that they've picked to sensory events that are across the board challenging for everybody one is cold water, which is great because it most of the time it can't kill you. Right? It's not like heat which can kill you. It's cold water and sleep deprivation. And so the ability to do these like what I'm calling dpos this duration path and outcome steps and procedures is great on when you're rested, you know.
No, you know when you have a when you well fed, well slapped you can do anything. You can be in any hard conversation. You can work through anything. So what they do is they start taking the autonomic nervous system, which is these deep reserves of the nervous system that when our autonomic nervous system is off. It starts making us pay more attention to how we feel then the demands of the world around us. Remember that. Yeah basic challenge in the nervous system. And so sleep deprivation is the best way that you can pull somebody down.
From their ability to analyze duration path and outcome and reward themselves sleep deprivation is the way in which you essentially pull apart the nervous system and the way that it wants to function because it's very easy again rested to do all this. But so what they do is their sleep deprived people that put them in cold water. They're trying to get them more in touch with the way that they feel inside then what they need to do in response to the external demands, right everyone. I know that's made it through that process. Did it slightly differently.
But I'll tell you how they didn't do it. They didn't do it through sheer grit and determination. They did it through attaching a sense of meaning they did it by micro slicing the day or slicing the day into a series of meals that they just need to get to and then rewarding themselves for getting to that next Milestone. So they don't know I mean most of them, you know probably had very low concept of dopamine and norepinephrine but that's the process. That's also the process. I think that allows someone to finish an ultra. I've never run an ultra but
I think that process of self reward is grit and resilience in a kind of neural chemical definition. Yeah, and I think it's the thing that anybody can tap into and I think it's therefore. I think it's so key because I think people think that it's just Okie that people understand scuse me that these circuits are not unique to people who run Ultras or people that make it through, you know, stringent filter Special Operations Command these yeah, it's the same thing that
it anyway.
Stan yeah, the the the ultimate determinant isn't your physical conditioning and yet that's what everybody focuses on it's what's going on in you know, internally mentally neurochemical e that's making the difference in the people that are able to best calibrate that and find these, you know strategies for managing that are the ones that get through whether it is an ultra or Buds and buds is like this perfect. It's almost like its own lab right for studying human resilience in a certain respect, but you have actually
Taking some of these people and tested them in your lab including David Goggins, right? So what do you do when you when these people visit you and you're like, I'm gonna deconstruct you here figure out what makes you
tick. Yeah, so I had the Good Fortune of meeting David at a Consulting event a few years ago. And I guess I should just say David you probably know this already but he is every bit as intense as he comes
across. Yeah. I mean what you see I - oh no.
Yeah, it's exactly what you see is what you
get really wonderful and obviously extremely impressive human being so David anecdote. So the night before we had this event, he came out to the lab my lab we do we study fear we study courage we say resilience and we say the underlying neural chemical substrates for those so we had a bunch of guys there a couple Team guys some other folks and we bring them in this little room and we do virtual reality there and one of the things that we
To scare people or to generate a sense of autonomic arousal is this experience of diving with great white sharks, which of course you're not in water in the laboratory, but it's very immersive and for people that are afraid of sharks. It can be quite scary not always but we also have Heights we have claustrophobia. We got something where you can feel spiders crawling all over your body if you're on track info, we you know, if you have a pain point we find
it. So spend time trying to figure out what that pain point is we
do and we do it through some very
vert methodology that involves a i and some someone tools
bunch of weird questions that right.
We're let's just say this from the moment you step in our laboratory. We're studying you so the and I know and yeah exactly. So what was fun was, you know, so I sort of explained what the platform was and what we were going to do and and David said was I don't like sharks and I was like, alright well, and so then you know, this was not a
People experimented in the lab. So I just kind of at one point and finish describing what the tech is and how we're going to wire people in and then I said so who wants to go first and he's like, I'll go right of course and and what was funny to me at that moment. I realized this is interesting because he was very explicit about the back to eating like shark seems very explicit about the fact that he was going to be first, you know first man and I mean, it would be inappropriate for me to describe his data, right and we didn't do a full-blown experiment. But what I can say is he's whatever it is that David has figured out how to do it clearly in
Involves taking whatever adrenaline pulse he feels and understanding something fundamental to biology which is that adrenaline response was designed to move us not to keep a stationary. He uses Behavior as the way to shift sensation perception feelings and thoughts. He understands how to run that program in the right direction. Whereas most people when they don't like what they feel they start negotiating sensation, which will never work. They start trying to control their perception, which is hard right that I like. I'm not
Think about that or I'll think about it differently very hard to control the mind with the mind. He knows that's a tough one. Yeah feelings. Lord knows what those are and how to control them. I mean, we will eventually figure that out as a field but thoughts are complicated. So he just goes immediately to
action for it immediately charge it so when he says just for clarity when he says I don't like sharks. He's basically saying put me in the Shark Tank like he's queuing you to say, this is the thing. I'm afraid of and I'm going to be the first one to volunteer and I know
going to put me in the Shark Tank if I tell you
that exactly and I think and I obviously can't speak for him. But one of the things I think is very clear is that he's tapped into this neuroplasticity process through the door through the portal of agitation and stress. He's figured out and this is really the Holy Grail of Neuroscience is how can I modify my brain? Well, you modify it by placing yourself into discomfort and using that as a propeller to move you into
You know a couple of years later when David was working on his book and I heard the book was coming out. I think I saw a pre-release announcement. I texted him and I just said look, I'm really excited to see her book. I'm he said, oh, that's great. Thank you. You know, it'd be great. If you write something bad like an endorsement I said, well, I'd be honored to him Happy tune. He said but but I need it tonight. Right? And this was Saturday it I think was like 10:30 at night when I texted him. So it's a great. Well, I'd be happy to I won't do it now. He said I needed by midnight.
Right, so sit down and start writing this thing and these are short blurbs, but I kind of realize that you know, you want to get it right David and you know, my name is next to it and wanted to do it justice. So I'm seeing down I'm working on the saying I text him. Look I'm gonna be a few minutes late. No problem. No problem. Finally. I send them the thing at like 12:30 at night and he's like, oh bro. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I promise I'll send you a copy this and I was a grateful, you know, thank you. And then I realized that that time he was living in New York and I said, wait a second. Where are you? He said New York, and I said, it's
3:30 in the morning and goes. Yeah, I'm going
running before and I
realized at that point I was like, okay, you know, there's its undisputable, you know, this guy lives the Persona that he projects into the world and even that day that Consulting gig, you know, there was a 4 o'clock lag and he was like no, let's keep going. So he's figured something out and I think that his enormous popularity is it's earned because he's figured out that it really doesn't matter if you come.
um at something from a place of joy and love and that would be wonderful but there's a whole other set of ways to approach this that involve slogging through the discomfort the doubts the wish for things to be different and starting with behavior and it's incredible because if you think about sensation perception feeling thought and behavior actually the way to control our nervous system and feel the way we want to feel is to run that backwards Behavior thought
So if you change your behavior, then generally your thoughts your feelings and your perceptions change. Yeah, and everyone tries to come at it from the other end, but he's figured out through whatever process led him there and incredible life circumstances how to run it in this direction of behavior first. Yeah. I really think that if Neuroscience has anything to offer its some understanding of what the underlying chemicals in neural circuits are but the sooner that the human animal the human species can start to understand.
That our feelings and our thoughts and our memories and our all that is very complicated, but that when behaviors are very concrete and they are the the control panel for the rest of it. I don't want to relegate feelings feelings are extremely important. I don't want to relegate perception. They're extremely important, but when it comes to wanting to shift the way that you function to get better or to perform better or to show up better or to move away from things like addictive behaviors. It's
absolutely foolish for any of us me included to think that we can do that by changing our thoughts first Its Behavior first thoughts feelings and perceptions follow
mood follows action mood false is like been my Mantra forever and you know, I swear by it and David's example illustrates that that act first he's developed so much neural plasticity that it's reflexive for him to just move towards the hard thing or the challenge or
The discomfort right? And now the science establishes that this is indeed the case and yet our programming our default hardwiring is to you know, put us in this place where we want to ruminate on all this stuff and wait until we feel like doing something before we do it or check our motivations for it. But anytime I'm in a funk or I want to change my state. I have to move forward I have to do something with my physical body in order to shake things up and
You know rearrange whatever is going on mentally so and it and it works every time
it works every time because the the brain circuits meaning sets of connections and chemicals there there from birth there your whole life and they were designed for that. So in 2018 graduate student my lab published a paper in nature showing that in the face of a physical threat
There are three options you can obviously fries you can Retreat or you can move forward and the moving forward response actually triggers activation of a connection in the brain to the dopamine circuitry of the brain and makes it more likely that you're going to be able to move forward in the future. Now what was interesting to us was that not only is forward action rewarded at a neurochemical level which then sets you up for more forward action, but the highest level of agitation and
Dress was associated with moving forward. We always think well if I just call myself enough, I'll be able to move forward right but its exact opposite, you know, and so people who are paralyzed in fear or that have a hard time initiating. Sometimes the key is to raise the level of stress and agitation. This is my deadlines are so affected. Right? This is why fear is so effective. This is why that deer gets up out of its, you know, nice little den and starts to move because it feels a certain level of agitation if that agitation isn't High Enough.
We will not move forward. And so especially in the US we have a culture in which stress has been created, you know, these ideas around stress or that is that it's terrible for us when in fact stress is designed to move us forward towards these action steps that are rewarded which then move us forward and so
on. So what is the process of combating that you know, monkey mind that is you know, running whatever narrative that's keeping. You stuck like it's easy to say like just move you got to take the action but a
People still despite understanding that intellectualizing that are unable to you know, basically
act as if yeah, I think we're dealing with two general categories of people who have problems with motivation and focus and I think we've failed to decide. Excuse me. I think we failed to describe the fact that there are two groups and not one. We think well, I need to calm myself enough to move forward I think.
Then other people say well no, you need to kind of ramp yourself up to move forward. Here's the way I conceptualize it based on the data that I'm aware of. Some people are just hypo aroused they're just not motivated enough and those people would benefit greatly from cultivating practices like super oxygenated breathing. So this is something along the lines of like to mow type breathing so rapid and we look at this in the lab. We're actually running a human study on this now so 25 or 30 deep breaths through the nose and out through the mouth.
Then exhaling the breath and holding learning to how did self-generate adrenaline that's what you're
doing you doing some version of the Wim Hof
technique. That's what that is. Brian Mackenzie talks about right and ice bath is doing the exact same thing stimulating adrenaline response. It actually improves the immune system. There's a published paper on this releases adrenaline which buffers the immune system against infection, but getting good at taking yourself from low low energy to higher energy.
And then learning how to compress your focus and I'll talk about the focus thing in a minute. Some people are so agitated the monkey mind. They got too many things going on in there thinking. Okay, they're trying to sit down and write I suffer from this and I'm feeling like wait. I've also got this person. I need to connect with and I'm kind of dropping drawn off course by not being able to put the blinders on for people that have that issue. I think learning how to calm the nervous system is very powerful and the best way that I know how to do that is based on two studies one published in nature one published in cell reports.
Suddenly showing that physiological sighs. There's actually a thing in the literature called physiological size are one of the fastest ways to bring our overall levels of autonomic arousal down and a physiological PSI is a to inhales followed by an extended exhale. So it's like it's not just a deep breath. It's to inhales followed by an Excel. Okay, and what that what that does and this has been shown several times now in humans and
other species as well as it dilates, the the little sacs of the lungs and that second inhale dilates them a little bit more and it pulls a little bit of carbon dioxide out of the blood stream so that when we exhale we offload the maximum amount of carbon dioxide and it perfectly adjust the ratio of carbon dioxide and oxygen in the bloodstream and lungs and sometimes it only takes one of these double inhale exhales. Sometimes somebody needs to do two or three, but that's the fastest way to bring the autonomic nervous system down.
A lot of people need such a tool because I think we talked a lot about meditation and tools for calm and you know, I can go to a salon for a weekend and get a massage. I'm going to feel very good. But then when I'm thrown back in real life, I need something that's going to work in real time. What I call a real time tool and most people don't know how to control their autonomic nervous system because it's complicated. I can't control my liver function I can eat that will calm me but that has complicated, you know issues with it, too. If I'm just eating the car myself.
So the diaphragm is the one skeletal muscle organ that was internally right? We've got obviously skeletal muscles designed to move things. It's a skeletal muscle organ. Unlike the spleen the liver the heart etcetera. It was designed to be moved voluntarily and these physiological size are actually occurring fairly regularly during sleep to adjust our levels of carbon dioxide and oxygen and there's a recent study showing that in claustrophobia. This is the breathing pattern that people do
Fault to try and offload that carbon dioxide. So whereas there are a lot of really interesting breathing technique swim Hoff Brian Mackenzie does great work Patrick McEwen, you know, the Laird and Gabby the tons of people doing really interesting things out there. My lab has been focused on what are the neural circuits that are designed to achieve particular states that happened to impinge on and capture diaphragm function. And so the reason I think breathing is so powerful is that everyone has a diaphragm and it's
The immediate link to the body a lots been made at the vagus nerve, you know or the Vegas is the path between the body and mind but the Vegas is very slow. The vagus nerve calming is what you experience when you eat a really rich carbohydrate Rich meal or your you've had a long day and you're and you put your feet up and you're finally relaxing it takes minutes to hours to kick in whereas the diaphragm is real-time control over a brain state. So the brain knows what the body is doing by how fast the diaphragm is moving.
Knows its overall activation state. So when you breathe quickly those 25 or 30 breaths the brain says, oh I must be alert. I'm going to start secreting some noradrenaline. And when you re slowly that level of noradrenaline drops down so it sounds so simple, but I think it's only in the last two or three years that my lab and Mark Cruz knows Lab at Stanford and other labs elsewhere in the world have started to identified the neurons in the brain that are linked to breathing and how those two things relate to one another and I think everybody should have a kit of tools.
Yes, yeah that they can use to bring themselves down and wrap themselves up. I'll just say one other thing about Focus. So when we're in a high alert State something very powerful happens that I think partially explains your your ability now to drop into this book writing when there's a certain amount of adrenaline in our system our pupils dilate. Remember the eyes are not connected to the brain. Our eyes are actually two pieces of central nervous system. They are two pieces of brain outside the skull that were designed to control our own.
All
Rozell State and so we can talk about this as it relates to sleep and Sleep Quality, but when I bring up the level of adrenaline in my body through breathing or let's say I see a troubling text or let's just say I just use a very Goggins type approach and just figure out the most painful inspiring for me reason to do it, you know, it sounds vague because obviously David I don't know what goes on in your head but a tremendous respect for your ability to do this, but he just ratchets himself out of that ditch and puts himself in motion.
The pupils dilate and when that happens our visual system actually enters something that's a little bit more like portrait mode on our phone. Mmm. There's a process called accommodation and your ability to focus on one thing visually actually becomes better and your ability to see everything else blurs away. And that's the ability to just see that screen of text or that if you work on you know patterned paper to just see that pad and paper and then as you start writing what people don't realize
Is that mental focus follows visual focus on blind people at slightly different it follows auditory Focus, but in in most people your visual Focus as you bring that into really sharp relief that image of your book and you stare at you're going to feel some agitation in your mind's going to be jumping all over the place. But if you wait just a couple minutes the rest of the world will disappear. I think this is sort of like the Flow State people are looking for but remember the Gate of Entry is one of which you have to Wade through some
um sewage before you can swim in Clear Water rights the way I always think about it, but the visual focus is what brings the rest of the brain into cognitive focus and people in the martial arts understand this you've probably experienced this running when you're feeling exhausted and you can just concentrate on one Milestone and get there. You can almost bring that into like you what you're doing is you're linking that to the dopamine circuitry, you're saying that thing is the Milestone not winning.
Race not some other thing outside this this immediate environment that thing and when you're able to start capturing these peripheral circuits, meaning the body the diaphragm the visual system, then you start getting past this whole idea of mindsets and it really becomes about the body setting the mind and this is where I think when you say action leads the rest, right? It's that's a what you're saying is a is grounded in real neurobiological data.
There's also a shift
Often your perception of time when you're in that state, you know, suddenly your relationship with time becomes completely different. So I'm really weathered and and I'm not like, you know, it's easy to say it slows down or it speeds up to me. It's neither you're in this weird liminal state where it's almost like it doesn't exist. It's not it's not a relevant like vector in your in your emotional experience.
I'm really glad you brought this up because of one of my obsessions is time perception.
Shannon and you know having spent the last 20 years or so studying the visual system what you start to realize is that space meaning physical space not outer space but physical space around you and your time perception are absolutely linked and when our focus is very narrow time starts to feel thin sliced so it so you're right. It's not that it's going fast or slow. Its that you're perceiving more events per unit time, so
Oh, it's like a metronome that's going faster. Mmm when our gaze is dilated. So when we're relaxed, there's actually a what happens is the pupil kind of relaxes a bit. It doesn't always get bigger or smaller. But what happens is we really when we're relaxed. So if you view a horizon for instance, or you go into what's called panoramic Vision, so even though I'm looking at you right now I can dilate my gaze without moving my head or eyes so I can see the corners of the room and the ceiling I can see myself in the environment when we do that our perception of time.
And we feel like we have more time and what we're doing when we do that Focus versus defocus as I call it or focal Vision versus panoramic vision is your toggling on and off the autonomic nervous system for alertness, you're turning on and off that is that norepinephrine circuit and so it's conscious control over a brainstem circuit and this is why I don't like the phrase autonomic because that means automatic. It's a misnomer. I can control my autonomic nervous system. I can breathe I can control my own and I burner system. I can eat a big meal.
Real I can control my autonomic nervous system. I can focus or defocus and if we really look at the realm of high-performance, what you start to realize is people who are very good at their respective sport or career or in the Special Operations committee. What they do are exceptionally good at turning it on and off these systems. So they're highly functional at achieving their Milestones, but they're not spending out extra energy because when you go into panoramic Vision, you start to uncover
All the space-time thing and you get some rest and relaxation the way to think about this is so we go back to duration path and outcome. That's the most stringent High Focus regime for the brain the way to get better at duration path and outcome is to engage in activities that are low duration path an outcome where your brain is not in modes of analyzing duration path and outcome. What's the one phase of our life when we're not thinking about duration path and outcome at all?
Sleep and so the reason why you can pull somebody's mind apart their ability to think rationally and analyze duration path and outcome by Sleep depriving them is because sleep despite all its neurochemical complexity is really when we restore our ability to analyze duration path and outcome. Now you think about Buds and you go no wonder they sleep deprived them. They're trying to figure out who has the ability to control these mechanisms and who doesn't most
Fail so when I think about how to recover I've I actually don't think about recovery as its own thing, I think about recovery as giving buoyancy or improving my ability to focus. So sleep is a turning off of these brain circuits that are thinking about what's happening next. So some people experience challenges and falling asleep. They need to learn how to turn off thinking and there's actually a way to do this. We're doing a study on this now it relates to hypnosis.
That would be fun to talk about and we can if you like the other thing is that just merely going into panoramic Vision say between a meeting instead of looking at your phone more focal Vision. We're working hard on your book. Maybe you walk to the kitchen just two seconds of delete what I call deliberate decompression where you just kind of let your mind go broader will allow you to reset your focus much more intensely. When you return to that book as opposed to if you look at your phone, we're engaged even in some other kind of deep duration path outcome.
Function of the brain. So when you start thinking about meditation, it's also valuable because a lot of meditation involves focusing on your breath. I actually think a lot of people are spending out this ability. They're they're working too hard in their the activities that are designed to reset them. So the two ways to reset yourself in
wakefulness being just very adamant about my meditation practice. That's right because it's a it's a letting go it's not. All right. It's
You know, it's it were so programmed to like force ourselves to do things or to like dive in with intentionality. But so much of this is more elusive than that.
I think that we can all do ourselves a great service and perform a much better and what we're doing by taking little micro recoveries in the form of dilating are gays in between meetings just for a second viewing a horizon is the best way to do it because it naturally brings the eyes into defocus we're doing this in
We are because we can control the visual environment completely when you go into this D Focus mode, you turn off that brainstem circuit, you're conserving norepinephrine for your next bout of focus and activity. Otherwise, you're spending it and the brain doesn't care how you spend it doesn't care if it's on Instagram doesn't care if it's watching the news but learning how to defocus very and then refocus very quickly can get you through a race that you wouldn't otherwise have been able to get through it saves you energy and it
Builds energy. The other thing is we talk a lot about sleep and sleep is extremely important, but there are other modes of and brain states that can allow you to recover one of the ones that I'm a huge proponent of in that my lab has been studying and other labs are studying is what many people call Yoga Nidra where you have done no Yoga Nidra a lot. It's a wonderful practice, you know, just lying down and focusing enough of your attention so that you don't fall asleep and enough of your attentions on and moving it around so that you're not
Really concentrate on any one thing I fall asleep every time I do too I do too but we know so I fundamentally disagree with respectfully though with the idea that we can't recover sleep that we've lost because what are we really talking about there for me? It's the ability to perform these duration path outcome analyses. So in my lab, we have people do a cognitive task and then we place them into these very deep states of relaxation through things that are kind of like you're going to drum and people can find you again interest groups out there. They're everywhere and YouTube elsewhere.
R. Or we have the new a hypnosis script hypnosis is very similar deep relaxation wondering sort of attention fairly narrow context but it brings the brain into these unique states where you're neither asleep nor awake and for people that have trouble falling asleep or trouble relaxing themselves. These kinds of practices are extremely useful because they're really teaching you how to turn off those modes of focus. So, you know, we live in a stress
Some people are stressed because they're overwhelmed but other people are stressed because they just don't know how to turn off their brain and fall asleep. And so if you want to learn how to turn off your brain and fall asleep, these practices are
immensely use, how do you practice hypnosis by yourself though?
So there's some scripts I would recommend people go to one of the scripts on YouTube or there's some good ones. I've never met him. I don't have any relationship to but Michael seal, esea Ellie why Australian guy has some really good hypnosis.
Oops are just audio programs. Yeah, you just listen to them and
these he's not going to make you walk off a cliff or
anything. No, so stage hypnosis is very different. So I have a very close collaboration with a guy named David Spiegel who's in our Psychiatry department at Stanford. We're now looking at how daily breathing exercises can impact people's sleep and levels of stress. He's done a lot of work on addiction and Trauma and Pain Management through hypnosis and most all of hypnosis that's clinical involves bringing one's
Into one of deeper relaxation not full sleep and then thinking about some behavioral change that one wants to make these are ancient practices really and I think that they were developed by people that understood that rewiring of the brain requires focus and depressed. What's interesting about hypnosis. Is it brings those two things together at the same moment. So normally you'll work really hard on something work really hard then you'll sleep and that's when the plasticity occurs but hypnosis likely.
It's that whole process by having people enter a state of deep relaxation and focus at the same time and allows those circuits to reshape themselves. And there's some published data from David's lab to support that that's fascinating. So I think these practices are really useful and I think that if you want to get better at performing everyone now knows thanks to Matt Walker's book and others like sleep more sleep better, but what if you have trouble sleeping well or falling asleep? Well, we want to Define what that is. Some people have a hard time turning off their thoughts.
It's really hard. Remember you can't do it. What you can do is to learn to control that perceptual window and distribute it so that your sense of time starts to kind of drift off and you end up in sleep more easily and it's a practice that most people find if they do it for 10 minutes a day or so, they start sleeping much better within within a week or two or more, you know, and sometimes more they sometimes people need some other help like not drinking caffeine late in the day etcetera, but that brain state of no duration path an outcome analysis is going to be the most
restorative and you can get it in wakefulness to so taking a walk where you're just letting your mind go is very powerful and the other thing that's powerful is optic flow. So self-generated optic Flow by walking running or cycling.
Shifts the brain into a state of relaxation that's not seen when you're stationary. This is welded. Well described in the Neuroscience literature for some reasons not well described in the wellness literature, but it's a real thing when you move through space your active your there's a natural calming of the brain circuits involved in threat and threat detection. This is the basis for EMDR eye movement desensitization reprocessing the lateralized eye movements. They have people doing the clinic that
Kind of goofy-looking thing while they had County
talk about that to overcome fear and
Trauma that lowers stress. And the the the rationale is that by coupling a low stress state to the recall of the trauma. It's going to allow people to reshape their relationship to the trauma tolerate that the discomfort and it EMDR might clinical colleagues. Tell me works best for Fairly well-defined traumas. It's not going to be like my childhood or you know a whole series
He's of events but for single event traumas or trauma that's repeated. But of the same sort, it seems to work best. It's not going to work best to completely reshape all relationships to all traumas, but it does seem to be powerful for a certain.
So basically an example would be if you got into a car accident and then you're afraid to get in a car or something like that. Right? So you take this person and and you submit them to this therapy where they move their eyes back and forth laterally, which seems absurd seems goofy, right?
So this is supposed to help them get over their their fear their
blockage. Yeah, so, okay, so my lab studies vision and we study stress and states of mind and people used to talk to me about amdr and asked me about EMDR. I was like, this is crazy. This is a music genre. This is absurd right or drug makes no sense. Why would moving the eyes from side to side have any impact on states of mind that's ridiculous. But then what happened was in 2018, 2019 and 2020 five quality.
scripts came out in very good journals from groups that were studying eye movement, not studying stress or trauma that found that these lateralized eye movements, not up and down but lateralized eye movements quiet the activity of the amygdala the limbic structure in the brain that's primarily responsible for threat detection and stress and I was like, oh my goodness this thing might actually be real then I started to dig into the backstory of this and there was a woman named Francine Shapiro who
Came up with this idea actually walking behind Stanford in the Stanford Hill. She was a therapist and she figured she had this idea based on the fact that she didn't feel as upset about certain things when she was walking that this might be useful and she was smart enough to know that these lateralized eye movements or what reflexively occur anytime. We're in optic flow. We don't realize it because they're subconsciously generated and they're very subtle, but she realized she couldn't really take people walking on their therapy sessions. I suppose she could but it's not really practical training etcetera.
Ha. So what she decided to do was to bring the eye movement component to the clinic and had them move their eyes from side to side while they would recount these traumas and people experience tremendous benefit. And in fact now there's a lot of evidence to show that these lateralized eye movements really do quiet the stress of the nervous system and allow people to continue to move forward. This is probably all anchored. I go back to that story of that deer and need something and as its feeling that agitation and gets up and starts moving.
Having the movement feeds back onto the brain to quiet that Stress and Anxiety so it can be observant of its environment and that panoramic mode is what we are in when we are in a position to be very situationally aware when we're stressed. We are going to have a soda straw through the world Ryan one thing this relates directly to addiction because I've spent some time at Edition treatment clinics and talking to people in that community and it's very clear that of course, there are a huge number.
of factors that play into why people come become addicted and relapse etcetera, but if you can get at people's ability to control their anxiety and their feelings of peak States and happiness you you don't guarantee but you helped reinforce the possibility that they're going to get sober and stay sober as an addict gets more Tethered to the idea that some substance is the thing they need the progressive narrowing of the things that bring them pleasure and everything else kind of Falls away like
Portrait mode on the phone. They're essentially in a state of high stress trying to meet that dopamine need all the time and they don't see other possibilities. The reason I mention not just stress and treating stress to get out of addiction, but also pleasure is that we've also seen this when do people relapse when they're feeling really good when they're feeling really lousy and stressed and when they're feeling really good. They've been sober for five years we hear about this in the news usually from you know, celebrity examples people been doing great all of a sudden
when they're back in treatment, you know, like what happened what happened was the dopamine circuit from other things may be a great life event or things are going well or stress the loss of a job everything crashing puts our visual system and the rest of our brain into a myopia. We become new we literally become near-sighted and the dopamine system says, that's the only thing that's going to get me out of the mode that I'm in. They literally don't see the other possibility. So some of the work that I'm starting to get involved in now.
Is to try and inform the addiction treatment Community the trauma community that there are ways to use action in the body to move people out of states of myopia or nearsightedness. And this is kind of a cognitive nearsightedness and allow them to start parsing their time perception differently it heart, you know, it goes right back to time perception when an addict needs something their sense of time is fixed to the retrieval of that thing or the, you know, reaching that thing and then when
They can dilate their sense of time. They realize they have time for other options. But until you can dilate that there's really no chance. Frankly. You can't find a way and can't find a way you can tell somebody you're going to lose your kids and they'll do it. Anyway, that just tells us we need another route to it. And so one of the things I think is powerful is to think about how can we leverage the visual system? How can we leverage the diaphragm system in the same way that you would tell a you know, somebody who's in you know has cancer or needs a
We have a certain sort like we need to leverage certain Technologies. Well, we need to leverage certain inborn Technologies of respiration and vision to be able to access states of mind that will allow us to make better choices for the addict in that really nearsighted view fixated. There is no other choice and I think those early years of skateboarding and being you know Farrell, it showed me that these the people I knew that became addicts and frankly. I know some adults who have been coming out. It's even who have very cold.
Quote functional lives it wasn't just them those people, you know, we like to think they're making a bad choice and they had their making a bad decision. It's unclear to me whether or not they have a choice in those highly myopic states of mind. And so what we need to do is we need to dilate their perception of the world around them. We need to dilate their perception of time. We need to learn they need to learn how to relax themselves so they can actually see other options and it
All
relates to how the visual system in the breathing system relate to autonomic function addiction is the is the perfect sort of laboratory to do this and it's so important I think because if it were simply the case that people just needed family support and which they do and they needed, you know encouragement and they need discouragement about making the wrong behaviors. Then this we
wouldn't even be having this discussion more complicated so much. I mean the thing I think all of those are
Are you know really powerful tools and important things to look at with respect to the addict mentality or that disposition there has to be a level of self-awareness in that addict that the decision to pick up the drink or to use the drug begins so far in advance of the actual Behavior by the time they actually pick up that drink. There's no getting in the way of that like that decision has so much momentum behind it that it's almost impossible to reverse.
A breathing technique or any technique at that juncture is unlikely to be successful. So it's about recognizing, you know, when that state is starting to shift in that direction, whether it's days or hours or weeks before the behavior choice to intervene at a position at a place and time when you can actually have an impact,
I agree. I think that it's always an uphill battle with addiction at least at first, but even you know, just given that the numbers on relapse the you know,
I think everybody what was it that someone once told me I don't know if this is actually true but for most people but he said recovered addict told me, you know, you know that every day he tells himself no matter how far I drive I'm always the same distance from the ditch. He you know, I mean the addiction Community has there's so many awesome. There's so many great takeaways from yeah, the what's interesting is there's a some verbiage around the yoga community that is very valuable. I can't recall it off the top of
I had but they talk about the great support that one can get from learning to access brain states of timelessness sleep being very restorative wakeful deliberate disengagement being very restorative maybe meditation maybe through Yoga Nidra, maybe through simple quick breathing techniques, but being able to dilate and contract one sense of time and not being locked to one kind of space-time regime the ability to recognize
Yeah, I'm that. I'm not seeing clearly right? I see what I see but I don't know what I don't see the ability to introduce that understanding for somebody can be very powerful and I think we need to give them tools that they can look to very quickly. I don't think we're ever going to have a treatment for addiction that's in the form of a pharmaceutical like one pill because if you start tapping into the dopamine system itself, you start degrading other aspects of life. So I think one of the reasons why addiction treatment is so complicated is that you need many
Elements, but the elements that come from the person themselves are ultimately the most important ones of course and I think physiology in Neuroscience does have some tools that can lend support to that.
Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, I think that every couple of years you see new science emerge on addiction and there's some new protocol and you know, 12 steps constantly getting thrown under the bus and you know, 12 steps what got me sober and I'm very rooted in that community.
I remain open to other, you know, modalities and protocols and super interested in seeing where all of this is going. But I think it is important to appreciate how complex it is. Like there's a trauma element to it. There's a you know behavioral modification element to it. There's a emotional like, how do you how do you find a way to Anchor this person to a path a life path that has meaning and purpose and all of these things inform is complex, you know.
Soup that's going on in their head. That's dictating whether they're going to pick up a drink or
not. Yeah, and you know and I love the Neuroscience Community with you know, it's been my family and home for many years now and the people working on addiction or you know motivated from the right place and they are working exceedingly hard. They're a lot of data now that show you know, for instance. There are complete genetic changes in the cells that can you know, and that Pathways that control dopamine and reward and that's all wonderful to understand but meanwhile I
There are enough tools out there that they need to be aggregated in a way that's structured and that addiction treatment communities can can leverage one of the things that would be of great use is the idea of a biomarker. So you describe that you know and its really a beautiful example of how when some early on you might be able to intervene but later it gets much harder. We need biomarkers that are going to tell us for some people or their family that somebody is at risk. So what you have biomarkers some kind of whoop device, right? Well, I think it's going to come from
Once you know how well somebody is regulating their own autonomic nervous system You can predict pretty well whether or not they're going to succeed or fail and making good decisions. And so I do think a loop type device or other sensor device could be tremendously beneficial in detecting and telling people whether or not they are veering off course, right? And I think it's getting very Minority Report though. It is. I mean, I think machines are going to help us make a lot of
of decisions that were actually pretty poor at making but the simplest of those that we might see in the next two or three years is saying look you've been working extremely hard on your book you're doing very well, but you're going to need an extra hour of sleep. I mean, that's essentially what we're doing for you or 12 hours. You're going to make a bad decision 12 hours. You're going to make that decision or even killing you or interest or insert might in there, right? You might make a bad decision so that you're more aware and you're going to devote a little more mental energy to the kinds of decisions.
You're making I think that as I always pull a lot of all nighters still do unfortunately my career writing grants and so forth and I have this rule that I learned my gosh about 15 years ago, which is I don't trust any of my thinking that occurs between 3 a.m. And 7 a.m. If I've been up all night. I just don't trust it because I start to think the world's falling apart. I started thinking the word the is misspelled. I mean, I really know I'm sleep-deprived when words like the look misspelled and then I'm like what's going on? That's that
that duration path outcome circuitry starting to trying to starting to fall apart. So I think that that's an extreme example, but I think that short of having people buffer their lives with tons of activities and perfect nutrition and perfect social interactions people learning to control their autonomic nervous system. I think is really the next step in our species Evolution. I really believe that what we are seeing now in the world is a call to arms if you will or
Best for mother nature to have everybody learn how to control their autonomic nervous system a little bit better or ideally a lot
better. Yeah. It's absolutely critical. I think me right now, you know irrespective of what's going on with the pandemic and the political climate and the protests and all the upheaval that we're seeing as a culture. We're experiencing an extraordinary Poverty of attention and focus. We're so distracted by our devices where
more anxious and stressed and depressed than we ever have been before this is not going in a good direction and to the extent that we can commandeer a little bit more control over these things and understand that we have some level of agency and we can reverse this sort of automatic pattern that we're on of just scrolling endlessly and you know doing what we're doing that we know is not leading us in a good direction is critical if we're going to find our way forward.
To to speak a little bit to what's going on right now. I think you know and it's related and I'm interested in your thoughts on you know, the the Neuroscience that that is, you know, I think relevant to this is that we've lost the ability to have civil discourse. There's a real breakdown in communication right now culturally and socially and it's fractured our society and
it's not it's not good,
right?
Right. So what is going on neurologically with human beings that are attaching themselves and ISO self-identifying with certain narratives that it's polarizing our population and preventing us from being able to just be together or United or agree upon. What is true and what is not true and share a value system so that we can see our way through the challenges that we're facing right now which many of which are
An existential threat to the future of humanity and the planet
it's a huge problem. You articulated it beautifully and I think Neuroscience can offer a couple insights into why it's happening and perhaps what we might do about it. So one of the scientific results that I'm very intrigued by is in the 1960s a guy named Robert Keith recorded from the human brain. These are people you can do this experiment nowadays, but skull popped off when neurosurgery friends told me that snow.
Big deal electrodes lower deep into the brain all over the brain and people can stimulate wherever they want and they just report with and feeling so press one lever. They feel drunk. They press another lever. They feel happy. They press another lever. They feel sexually aroused and they're reporting all this like when was this done in the 1960s early 1960s several times actually and and published twice essentially the same data different populations in the journal science, which is sort of our Super Bowl science and nature sell. Those are the big ones journals are at that.
So the number one brain area that people want to stimulate they finally hit this lever where they go. Oh, I like that and they just keep hitting that thing and hitting that thing and hitting that thing frustration and Mild
anger. Uh-huh. I saw that result choice and if he drunk I could be happy. I could be I'm gonna choose frustration and anger
exactly. It's about what that told us is it's clearly tapped into the dopamine reward system. It feels like a hit.
Dopamine to them more than anything else. So we need to put that on the shelf and keep it visible as we kind of March into this sort of answer to your question. The other thing is in understanding that and there's some recent data on this that are really impressive not from my lab, but from another lab, which is that beliefs and information that supports our prior beliefs also increases the activity of these reward systems. So the more I see stuff that verifies what I already think
or feel that they are bad and they are good or that we are good and they are bad the more dopamine and adrenaline is released into my system, which we now know from our discussion a few minutes ago changes the way I view the world. It actually changes the way I view the world. It means that I'm going to see certain things and not see others and this also relates to the auditory system. I'm going to hear certain things and not hear others the things that verify my beliefs are. I'm going to feel rewarded for the things that are counter to my beliefs. I'm not going to be its
Before so we have all these barricades to empathy and to really listening and to really hearing what the other side is trying to say and we have all these support networks in our body in our brain which are building a bigger and bigger divide and that's all very depressing. So the question is what's the boat that's going to get us across that divide and I believe and I am not just defaulting to this because it's what my lab works on but I fundamentally believe that the
the boat that's going to get us to the other side is our ability to control our internal state to be able to ratchet down our level of autonomic arousal just enough so that I can dilate not just my vision of what's happening in my immediate environment, but I can dilate my cognition my thinking to the possibility that there may be a kernel value in what somebody else is saying, even if it's about me and I don't like what I'm hearing now for as somebody who spent time in the addiction treatment Community you you probably know this is a lot of what
You get good at as you learn to move through something that to you feels very good. And you know all the reasons why it would probably be good to change it. But you know what you don't want to because it feels so good. So we're talking about an addiction to entrench thinking we're talking about an addiction and neurochemical systems that support lack of change my refusal to change and stubbornness and I actually think just like in for treatment of addiction and Trauma the key is to get
get people to learn to tolerate progressively higher levels of stress and maintain dilation of sensory experience of thought experience. We've got to create some small little portals through which information can come in a lots been made a mirror neurons. I hate to break it to the crowd but the data in support of mirror neurons in humans is not that impressive and now the mirror neuron people are going to come after me but fine there are circuits in the brain.
The control emotional contagion and those are what's powerful. My ability to recruit you into stress is much more powerful than my ability to recruit you into empathy for something good. That's a well-established neurobiological fact or empathy
for for for someone's perspective that I'm you know, that I'm fundamentally going to disagree with
right. So I think there are three gates to getting there and buy their I think we're you know, I'm
Vaguely to the idea that we need to increase our level of understanding at least our level of discourse so that we can hear other really hear other people's ideas, even though we don't like the way it feels and we love the way that we feel this is what that result said. We love the way we feel we don't like the way other people feel. The first thing is to bring the level of urgency that we feel internally down. We need to learn to calm ourselves in order to really have the information start to come in now the system right now and people
Everyone's in a frenzy and you can see it. Our collect. The collective conscience is is kind of losing its mind. It's kind of out of its mind. We need to learn how to turn off those amygdala circuits. So are we all going to get together and do EMDR? Probably not. Are we all going to get together and do breathing exercises? Probably not not at scale we need to do is start to figure out how we can I think especially for the next generation of kids how to teach them to regulate their nervous system so that they recognize that pulse of adrenaline as place.
Seeing them in a compromised position like we have to leverage the idea that being able to hear and listen hinges on the ability to be calm. So therefore the ability to be calm is crucial to hearing and listening and hearing and listening is crucial to our advancement as individuals and as groups, the problem is everyone's been trying to do this backwards. They've said we all have to get along we have to cancel cancel culture. We all have to you know, listen to one another and I think again we have to start from the inside we have to teach it.
Logically now, I don't have a master plan on how to do that. But one of the reasons I'm here and one of the reasons I'm so you know teaching Neuroscience on Instagram and not just in my laboratory is until we can learn to regulate the self. I don't think we're going to get where we want to go as a culture. I think it really does start with our in own individual ability to do that. And so, you know, David's a really good example for instance of somebody who learn how to deal with his own internal mess and build something.
I'm beautiful out of that and he continues to do that and everyone's got to find that process for themselves and whether or not you have a perfect family or whether or not you consider yourself the most inclusive and accepting person in the world or not. Everyone needs to learn how to do that for themselves and everyone thinks we do it pretty well, but I think it's clear that none of us do it well enough so we want to know Mike arousal autonomic arousal autonomic control. I think those are the entry points for addiction for trauma and for really empathic hearing
Listening and until we do that. I think our species is going to continue to go around this Merry-Go-Round. Yeah, where every fifty or a hundred years we crash right up against the same general set of issues. Only now social media has made it slightly more a lot more complicated. It's a little bit
similar to what you were talking about in terms of the seeking external validation versus finding it within yourself, like essentially the protocol the prescription that you just gave has a strain of
Buddhism in it in the sense that the world is going to change when we change ourselves like the best most impactful way that you can make a difference for the world is to focus on being the best version of yourself. How can you comport yourself in a way that allows you to be more receptive and objective and empathetic and able to listen and hear and and I think that's true. It's a hundred percent true. And then I think about the person losing their shit.
And you know Target or whatever Over The Masks or whatever and you know insane video clip of the day. I happened to see on social media and I think we're doomed like is this person going to do that? No, I can't control that. I can only control myself and I worry that when the onus is on the individual to solve the problem that that we're not going to find our way through it. Right? Like we obviously need organizational institutional and systemic changes. We need to change the way.
Way these social media platforms work all the way in which were delivered information and the way in which we're siloed, but I don't have any control over any of those things. The only thing I have control over is my own internal mechanism. So what other choice do we have?
Well, I think we need people in positions of power and Leadership who are very good at internal control. You know, I think emotions are great. I experienced them often intensely, but congratulations. Thank
They're not always wonderful to experience but I think it's clear that the level of autonomic arousal that's associated with emotions either very high or very low very happy or very sad very anxious or very angry clouds our judgment. It's very clear and I think the sooner the
give them too much Credence to they're just feelings man. Like we don't have to allow them to overtake us and monopolize everything that we do
they
were designed to push us along certain behavioral paths, but they they've grown in importance in the last few years and you know, we could get into a discussion about how you know, social media marketing or designed to capture these very deep limbic aspects of ourselves and they are but what's amazing is an important is that everybody has a forebrain some people some it seems there's more developed than others, but everybody has one and we have this capacity for what we call.
Down control, which is the ability to intervene and our own feeling States and our own action States and to set some some rigor and some some real clear marks for that. We're out to achieve and I think it's going to start with the generation. That's very plastic right now. Yeah, you know most parents are afraid of stressing their kids because they don't want to you know, again, I went to a high school where kids literally gun High School in the last 10 years kids have you know, they've been over a dozen
No train track suicides. So those are kids that are committing suicide for different reasons. But a lot of them is because they just feel too much pressure. So obviously we can't, you know, we can't pressure kids beyond their capacity to regulate but the idea that all of our internal State should be driven by external things. That's that's a foolish misstep also, so I think we need to operationalize what we're going to teach the Next Generation, you know, maybe our generation isn't really
Rescue herbal, but maybe the next generation is and if they understand that there's some Concepts that sound a little mushy like gratitude or mindfulness or these kinds of things but it's long as they understand that for instance gratitude, which we didn't really touch on involves a whole other neurotransmitter reward system in the brain the serotonin system which buffers us against injury. It can improve wound repair. It can allow us to lean back into these high stress regimes learning.
And you know kids learning how to toggle their nervous system back and forth between highly you know duration path outcome Focus states of trying to improve and learn and then learning how to really relax and chill out and enjoy and be socially connected because it will allow them to ratchet back in and focus with extreme depth I think in doing that we might not get every child to learn how to do that. But if we can distribute that information widely enough and there's so many brilliant examples and beautiful example yours David's many
There's of people that have been able to tap into those systems intuitively if we can get that information out there. I really believe that at least a subset of those kids will grow up to be the leaders that are species really needs in order to get through this next filter. And right now we're feeling the stringency of that filter and I think our level of autonomic dysregulation as a species the fact that we're there were here right now says, okay. Here's the here's the task.
You guys going to figure yourselves out you got this for brain. My dog doesn't have the forebrain. I've got he can't figure it out, but we can work this out and it'll involve Technologies like devices to measure how we're doing. Maybe some machines to guide that that's a different discussion, but I think it's entirely possible and I think that's the evolutionary pressure that we're in right now and I think that the Next Generation if they can hear about it and learn about it is going to meet that demand our species is done it for every other
demand. I toggle back and forth between
Queen extreme optimism and and you know dystopian despair because on the one hand, you know, you described the experience of going to therapy and you know how that was kind of, you know novel at that time, but we're not in that place anymore and everybody's got a smartphone and there's you know, headspace and calm and waking up and all these incredible apps and mindfulness is part of the mainstream modern vernacular like these kids are growing up not only aware.
Of these practices, but Amina bubble and you know, they're there it's being done in the households in which they're being raised which I find to be you know, that's an amazing thing. I think there is a Consciousness, you know, that is emerging out of these young people that hopefully we can rely on to solve some of these problems and then you know, I just think about the endless scrolling and the associate. Yeah. I'm just like oh, yes, we're
fucked. Well, I think it's clear that most people young or old are.
And to be passive consumers and spend out their dopamine doing essentially meaningless activities and consuming food and consuming air and light that is basically damaging to themselves and they I don't think they care. I think there are species. Let's be fair. Our species is non-essential it well. No. No, I didn't say that our species although sometimes I think it'd be interesting some other species around the Earth where the curators of the planet so I think that our species is probably divided into
to those that are really going to try and maximize on this gift of neuroplasticity. Right? We're the only species that as neuroplasticity throughout the lifespan and that neural plasticity in childhood last as long as it does as a function of our total lives, that's incredible. So we were gifted this and I think some people leverage it and take advantage of it and other people don't and I think we need to accept that we're not going to get everybody but what we need to do is attach the reward systems of Society financial.
Comic etcetera to the kinds of behaviors that are going is going to give rise to people that can lead us into the next hundred years and 200 years. Now that is not saying O do away with monetary systems or do actually the opposite. I think that once people start to realize that your high performing military Elite military your high-performing athlete your high-performing academics your high-performing business people. They actually have practices that they use to regulate themselves to in order to not just perform better, but
Sleep better. Not just a sleep better. But to listen better not just listen better but incorporate ideas that allow them into states of creativity and states of mind that really lead to new and exciting ways that humans can interact and the many people just be consumers of everything. They yeah
produce. Well, all of the what's great about New Media is that we've democratized access to this information and we're able to realize that that these people are not just freaks of nature.
But that they have a methodology and they've created this cannon this toolkit and these practices are available to everybody and you have people like David who are explaining this in very plain terms that it is within your power to take advantage of these things to take better control of your life. And we've never seen anything like that before in the history of humanity and I think that that you know, that bodes well for the empowerment of the Next Generation as
well, I do too I as you can probably tell I'm
I'm I'm optimistic. Yeah, I have to be because otherwise I can't justify the work that we're doing but I think that there's so much interest now in Psychology and the brain and the self in physical fitness which you know, I think it's fair to say is inextricably linked to mental Fitness and the fact that people are so curious about what other people are doing and what are the paths to success and you know, what are the resources for trauma and addiction? I think there's been in it.
Kind of swarm of information. It's been hard to sort through but I think 2020 is are you know, as our sort of call I can find a call to arms and I because I guess I do feel that way. It's a very serious this is this is serious business and this is the time for us and the next generation of Step Up and you know, and to lead people toward a place where they can function better and where the next generation will reflexively function better. That's that beauty of Early Childhood is that
If some of this stuff is taught and passed off it's not going to be perfect. But there will be a generation of people coming up that will naturally understand stress and agitation is taking them off their game and leading to bad decisions will make the appropriate adjustments and there are people that will that read David's book and your book and we'll see the possibility of doing something differently with it with a terrible childhood or a brutal addiction and you know, I think we need more stories of success. I
It's easy to look out there and see all the things that are going wrong and we need to keep paying attention to those but we need these beacons that draw people forward and I say that from a place of experience. I mean, I used to have to find it in books in the bookshelf. I'd there was no online back then or in mentors and you know, you have to forage, you know, I think kids they have to have that foraging capacity. They can't just sit there and wait for it to rain on them or for a parent to dump it on them, but I trust that they're out there and they're going to figure it
out just like you're doing on Instagram you're dropping these videos.
Those basically every day right like more little little lessons on Neuroscience.
I'm trying I'm trying to show people that I have a kind of no acronym rule. So I don't like embedding things in a lot of complex language sometimes after use an acronym but yeah teach people a little bit about how their brain works how it interfaces with psychology. Everyone's got different goals and and purposes in the world. But you know that scientists are normal people and hopefully science has something I think really science has something to offer but it's not going to happen if I'm vaulted in my life.
Of my papers are read by the 12 people that care enough to read the paper start to finish. So I'm doing it. There are others out there. Of course Davidson Claire's doing it such and pandas doing it. I'm trying to recruit more people from the scientific Community do this. I think it's our responsibility you paid for it. It's your tax dollars, you know, there's a tremendous cost to doing science that is not often discussed, but I don't really consider it an option. I consider it my obligation and I'm going to keep going
well keep doing it, man.
I appreciate the work that you're doing. I think it's really important work. We need it now more than ever and it's cool that you're getting out there and sharing your wisdom with everybody. It's super empowering. So
thanks man. Thank you date. It really appreciate the
chance. If you're digging on Andrew best way to find him is Berman Ram. You are Huber and lab huberman Lab cool. All right, man coming by. I made all these notes all the stuff. I want to talk to you about. We got through like 10% of it. So
Combine parties I can run like this great Rambo's. Yeah. I just I just was getting out of the way man to you know, listen to what you have to say. Appreciate it. Thanks, man. Thank you. Peace.
Well, I think it's fair to say that that should give you a few things to ponder. I appreciate dr. Hubermanns Brilliance. Hope you guys took some notes and do me a favor. Let Andrew know what you thought of today's exchange. You can find them at huberman lab on Twitter and Instagram where he also shares lots of really cool videos on Neuroscience. So give him a follow. We also have another role on AMA coming up this week and we set up a voicemail for
Guys to leave your question. So if you'd like your question considered and potentially even aired during the podcast leave me a message at four two four, two three, five four six two six. That's four two four, two three, five four, six two six super excited about this new series. If you'd like to support our work here on the show subscribe rate and comment on it on Apple podcast on Spotify and on YouTube Share the show or your favorite episodes with
ends or on social media and you can support us on patreon at Rich world.com forward slash donate. I want to thank everybody who helped put on today's show Jason camiolo for audio engineering production show notes interstitial music by Curtis for videoing. Today's program, Jessica Miranda for graphics, Georgia Whaley for copywriting Hallie Rogers for portraits dk4 Advertiser relationships and theme music as always by Tyler pie at Trapper pipe and Harvey Mathis. Appreciate the love you guys see you back here.
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