Andrew Huberman on the Similarities in Brain Chemistry Between Mating and Aggression

the jurgen experience the course of a lot of these drugs and how they hit market is super interesting i've been learning more and more about this because one of my colleagues who works on aggression and mating behavior which fascinates me has identified some peptides that can really reduce anxiety they put these to the pharmaceutical industry pharmaceutical wasn't interested in them at all even though the safety margins are huge so you say why why wouldn't they want this well turns out these same drugs failed in a schizophrenia trial a long time ago so no one will go near it with a 10 foot pole so what the way the pharmaceutical industry generally approaches drugs is they love to remarket drugs for which there's already fda approval because then they don't have to go through all the safety stuff and when they do that they can renew the patent this is crucial right because if you can get the generic version now with things like goodrx and these like little apps you can get them you can go into a pharmacy you hit goodrx and it'll say oh yeah we've got some stuff that's about to expire this 300 a month drug is ten dollars i've had this happen it's you know amazing if they can keep it out of the generic market that's huge and the way to do that is to find a new clinical use so i don't know which one came first narcolepsy or these these focusing adhd uses but or as a performance enhancer but if the pharmaceutical industry the people that own the patent to that drug can find a new legitimate use they just bought themselves i think another 10 years on the on the patent so this was originally prescribed for schizophrenia and then they were going to use these peptides for mating yeah so here so in terms of the aggression this is really interesting this is the work of a guy at caltech named david anderson and he works on mating and aggression and the relationship human beings in well he has work related to humans and the neighboring lab works on humans but in mice and in humans but these areas of the brain are really conserved this this we can talk about which brain area but what he discovered is observed meaning um sorry that in mice and in humans these brain structures look identical and that the same classes of neurons exist that if you were to stimulate them because neurosurgeons have done this people go into a rage or in animals if you stimulate them the animals go into a rage in fact there are these videos online they're incredible where this is diulin's work when she was in david anderson's lab so you take two mice a male mouse and female mouse and they're mating right as it were and then they stimulate these neurons because they can do that now in a you know using light believe it or not and those and the male immediately tries to kill the female you can even just put him in a cage alone with a glove filled with air he's walking around you stimulate these neurons and he just goes into a rage right just just trying to destroy this glove but here's what's super interesting and no one understands if you put this animal into a cage alone and stimulate it looks pretty normal it doesn't do anything so it's not like it attacks itself and you know and every time there's this you know horrible news event like the school shooting thing or something like that i always think you know like what's going on in the there's a certain brain here it's called the ventromedial hypothalamus this is a brain area that's really interesting because it has a population of neurons that control mating you stimulate them and animals will just start trying to copulate with basically whatever's around if you give them a choice of their usual preference of you know females if they're male males if they're female because that's the way my mice go one or the other they will just try and start mating you stimulate the other group of neurons and they will try and kill the other mouse is so these are like switches in the hypothalamus i mean are these like very distinct like when you we talk about like neurons and switches like how do you distinguish between the one can you see them like what is the difference great question so for many decades it was known that if you stimulate this brain area you could get aggression this is actually nobel prize winning work of a guy named whose last name is hess and what they found was if you stimulate this brain area cats would go into either two kinds of of aggression it was either defensive aggression kind of with with you know hair up right or you would stimulate a little bit more and they would do the you know predatory aggression right i'm probably doing this wrong but you know like ears forward and you know you're you're the hunter last time i'm still learning about you know animal behavior in this way but what's really interesting is that for years no one could understand why if you also stimulated this brain area and you used a different pattern of stimulation you get mating behavior and it turns out that the neurons are mixed in there like salt and pepper david anderson's lab figured out that these are molecularly distinct neurons and what makes them distinct is really interesting if they stimulate only the neurons that have the estrogen receptor they become aggressive and this again goes back to this thing that we talked about a while ago which is that testosterone aromatized converted into estrogen has these incredible effects on aggression and masculinization of the brain and a lot of people think in fact people heard me say that last time and said oh you're trying to say that estrogen is doing everything testosterone is doing no it's that things like testosterone and estrogen control gene expression and so the fact that it's estrogen or testosterone it doesn't really matter it's the fact that these are molecularly distinct neurons they can trigger these neurons and they can get very distinct outputs of behavior but what's crazy is you stop stimulating the animal just goes back to doing whatever and then goes oh man i think i'll try and mate again now eventually the female's like hey this is getting confusing but this it's clear that these sorts of things are also happening in humans but normally we have kind of a weighting of aggression versus mating behavior right some people choose to combine those right there's kind of extremes of that rape there's rough sex there's all sorts of you know it's it's uncomfortable for people to think about that but there's a continuum between a aggressive versus approach type behaviors and for whatever reason this drove me to start looking at different mating behaviors of animals online like if you watch ferrets mating it's like he's biting the back of her neck she's squealing all over the place like this is uncomfortable for some people see some people probably like watching this stuff but you look at animals mating and there's a kind of a a balancing act between you know what looks it's not you wouldn't call it love making let's put it that you'd call it mating that's pretty aggressive and that's very common in the animal kingdom so is it coming in the animal kingdom because for in order to have strong genes that pass on you need a strong animal and so they express themselves in this aggressive way to prove to the female that they're strong enough to mate and and procreate like what is the reason for for that sort of aggressive is there a reason well it's a great question so there's this theory called hydraulic pressure theory this was developed by conrad lorenz which is another nobel prize winner who studied animal behavior and here's the idea is that all of these just different populations of neurons are in the hypothalamus this is a little tiny tiny thing i mean it's the size of like a little gobstopper candy like a little gumball and you've got neurons for aggression neurons for mating neurons that turn on to make sure that you that animals don't try and mate with the wrong species right we take this for granted like how come a cat doesn't try and mate with the dog no the dog might hump but that's a different thing altogether so it's all harbored in there and this hydraulic theory is that all of these things are kind of weighted probabilities so there's never zero probability that any of this will happen unless they're in sleep but maybe it's 10 aggression 80 mating while they're mating maybe another male enters the arena and now they're sort of like the confusion like am i gonna have to fight or can i keep mating these kinds of things because oftentimes these animals are communal in some way and so the way that anderson explained this to me and we had a conversation about this recently is that the brain might actually get confused in certain moments that you know and there's also a kind of opioid pain relief thing that gets released during sexual activity pain threshold goes way up right and we were talking about this in the context of fetishes because you know if you look at fetishes they're not random true fetishes are like can be pathologies where people actually require the presence of something in order to become aroused and those things almost always if you look at true fetishes are things like feet dead bodies feces animals things that are all very infectious exactly your facial expression illustrates it perfectly my facial expression for those listening is yuck exactly so you know that's disgust and you have circuits in your brain that are for discuss that are about getting you away from that thing because it's infectious putrid disgusting and out of context and then you think about sex and food appetite and all that and it's it's all repetitive as they call it it's moving towards it it's bringing in more of those molecules as opposed to trying to get away from like vomiting right but the feet thing isn't like guys like pretty feet it you know we're very visual animals and so it may cross over into visual perception and what arouses people differs obviously people have their different proclivities but true fetishes are a kind of a confusion of this circuitry right where people confuse or learn arousal associated with something that's actually quite dangerous i mean you take the extreme one like dead body it's like incredible is that normal no no no no no excuse me not normal like the dead body one not common not common common enough that you brought it up though well i've been reading up on this because i'm i'm fascinated by the primitive as a in addition to the more evolved parts of the brain so the way anderson describes is you know you'll see animals mating and then all of a sudden you know he'll bite the back of her neck or sometimes she'll bite him and the theory is that some of the neurons and they've seen this in brain imaging in real time because they can do that in animals some of the neurons that are responsible for aggression will just suddenly you know spike up there right and and will kind of overtake the other behavior and then they'll go back to mating now when you're talking about studies on animals and they're doing this it's kind that there there's these ethical questions if you're going to do a study on humans if you wanted to stimulate those same neurons and try to incite aggression or hostility or even arousal but has anybody done it they have they have they have so a good friend of mine eddie chang he's the chair of neurosurgery at ucsf he's spends his life and he makes his living probing around in the brain of people who have epilepsy looking for the site where if they stimulate the person will have a seizure so they can burn that area out or make some other manipulation and he's told me that he's been poking you can't poke around at random right you can't you know every scientist would love to just do that experiment just go in and kind of search but there are sites where they'll stimulate thinking they might evoke a feeling of pleasantness or no feeling at all and the person will go into a rage in the in the or in the operating room because they're wide awake you've probably seen these things of people with neurosurgery and they're playing the violin or things of that sort occasionally they'll hit an area where the person will say i'm feeling super angry right now and they'll say let's back off a little bit from there and they'll chart where they were in the brain that is wild so there's just like a spot yeah there is and we have switches right i mean we have switches for rage switches for all these things i mean that's like the psychologist carl jung you know this idea that we have all things inside of us i mean people vary in their propensity for rage or for love or for anything but at some level we do have all things inside of us we have the circuitry within us and do you think that feel like that variation is neurochemical that there's i think it is neurochemical and i think it is learned as well this peptide that we were talking about earlier becomes relevant in in this context so david's lab discovered there's a peptide called tachykinin it's related to another molecule that's involved in pain relief called substance p that we all make tachykinin has a bunch of different forms but in humans there's tachycardia one and tachycon in two in mice or humans that are socially isolated for a period of time tachycardia levels go through the roof this is very relevant to the recent past around the pandemic in my opinion it goes through the roof and what happens it creates anxiety anger and in particular aggression and so there are drugs that are tachycardian inhibitors and i asked david i said well why aren't we giving tachycardia inhibitors to people that are feeling anxious and and aggressive and you know kind of tamp that down and we just had yet another school shooting and we could talk about what that's about but or not but and he said this drug is actually approved it's very safe when you stop what do you say what are you saying there's a drug that can understand but you're saying what that's about but we're not oh sorry the the the tacky kind and i mean is was it elevated and for instance the kid that went in and shot all those kids and how could they find that out post-mortem i think they could do what's called mrna and situ hybridization they could see how much of the gene for tachycardia was being made i think they should do postmortem i don't know how he was killed if his brain is still intact um i think like most people there's very little concern about him and more concerned about the victims as it should be but just like with ct and football players you want to know where the damage was and also whether or not there was a brain thing there and if that brain thing was there it doesn't mean necessarily that he was born with a bad brain he might have been born with a dysfunctional brain but social isolation increases anxiety and aggression there's no question and actually i was in social isolation increases aggression absolutely really absolutely feelings of aggression and kind of friction with the world us them kind of thinking okay i was in new york uh this is a few months back and it was it was the most eerie experience because we were there recording some podcasts and something came over the news that you know there was literally killer loose and it was that guy in brooklyn went into a subway released some smoke bombs and shot people right they found him in the lower east side walking around someone found so like killer on the loose in new york became a real thing for the time we were there it was super weird because we're staying down near the lower east side and they get the guy and what do they say they say the same thing they always say about these guys he was a loner he was really socially isolated then you find the angry posts you find the things online but it's never like oh this okay you've got crazies like the btk killer and people who are like in their church and stuff but we're so you know sociopathic killers on on the sly but these kind of random at what seemed like random acts of aggression almost always these people were highly socially isolated which and i'm not evoking sympathy i want to be very clear you know i mean nothing makes me more i think everyone is furious and frustrated about this situation with the shooting but i asked david about this i was like why aren't these drugs being used or prescribed and he said because years ago there was a trial at a pharmaceutical company exploring the role of this drug in schizophrenia for reasons that aren't clear and it didn't work and it cost the company a ton of money so now no companies want to go near it there's this kind of you know black listing of drugs that failed in trials and as a consequence there's probably dozens if not hundreds of very useful medications out there that are just not being explored

Channel: PowerfulJRE

Views: 1,549,736

Keywords: Joe Rogan Experience, JRE, Joe, Rogan, podcast, MMA, comedy, stand, up, funny, Freak, Party

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Length: 14min 50sec (890 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 12 2022