Dr. Andrew Huberman - Breathing Exercises for Optimized Brain Performance

and you Huberman has become a good friend and interesting case he swims with a sharks creating virtual reality experiences for people to desensitize them from being fearful and it's an expert on many things optic and eye related I think image is just like a nice you know a guy who I get to hang out with a lot these days and needs to be helping us a lot we coup people for a brain mind over the last year but most other things you've you've heard about obey machine interfaces now from my Lou Jepsen using infrared light you know lazing it essentially through a hologram you've heard about Ed's use of sound and other things or using up though genetics and things like that those are obviously not consumer or friendly ways to hack your mind because you need equipment for them at least for now another made of hack your system is simply controlling your breathing in new ways and some of these techniques are old some of them are new and and you as an expert at you know many of them and well but you just want to actually hear right now okay well thanks so much to the organizers for giving me the opportunity to speak I'm gonna cover some data that lead that gives some impression of how I arrived at the sorts of tools that I'll share with you and I'm in a kind of actionable talk here I find myself in the somewhat uncomfortable position lately of both wanting to do very rigorous neuroscience which I believe my lab is doing and will continue to do but also um in front of people in the wellness community and military communities and interacting with them and you learn that neither community has it exactly right because as we've heard many times today that we need very rigorous detailed protocols before we can make things actionable and yet there are a lot of people out there doing interesting things that may have kernels of value value and knowledge in them that we could perhaps use and extract in the laboratory to develop even better protocols so if that was all very cryptic I'll just begin and hopefully it will become less cryptic so my lab works on these three things visual development how you wire up the visual system visual repair how you fix it in blind people and particular people who are suffering from glaucoma we run clinical trials we also do animal studies and then today I'm gonna talk about visual processing and internal states that is how what you see interfaces with how you feel to determine what you do and the reason why I'm focusing primarily on vision is not just historical it's also because the number one determinant for what you do is what you see as humans we're extremely visual animals so let's say we were to go take a walk up at the dish after this we'd see an animal perhaps similar to this at this point our behavior changes right so our behavior is unconstrained and all of a sudden it's constrained the logical adaptive choice is to pause and maintain awareness right you wouldn't want to run you could draw attention to yourself you want to limit your detectability okay there's a single and clear and adaptive response you could also duck down and hide but then you no longer can monitor the threat okay assuming you view this as a threat which I do the game has now changed the visual perception has changed only slightly but through a pseudo empathy theory of mind thing whatever you want to call it you see this animal's eyes and you assume it sees you you can stand there all day and hope it moves on but perhaps your behavior is now more adaptive if you were to leave and hide or seek shelter the game's changed again so you could pause or you could hide but probably the best thing to do would be to run or walk backward very slowly and at this stage pausing hiding or running are not good options and your best option is to truly fight for your life okay so the reason this is interesting to me is because the visual perception in the context varies dramatically between them at on the one hand but the internal state you could imagine might also vary and a lot of what's been studied in visual neurosciences about how we detect stimuli and make sense of them and we realized in wanting to think about how we analyze visual threats that we were probably gonna have to start thinking about organs outside of the brain and that's the interface with both the brain and organs in the body like the lungs and heart and as they relate to arousal States or some people like to call it stress so I'm going to switch back rather flexibly forgive me that doesn't fit exactly with other people's notions of arousal and stress but for the sake of this talk it should work okay so if we really want to understand how we go from what we see to how we and combine that with how we feel to determine what we do we need to consider the body and the brain and how they're working in concert ok so perhaps the lungs are how that's all integrated and so we do this first in the laboratory mice in mice so I'll tell a quick story that in the world of a mouse this is a bad situation and it need the mouse needs to make very good decisions about things overhead because lots of things fly overhead there trees overhead there are many things that aren't threats and animals need to forage and believe or not mice to spend time out in the daylight and so you can recreate a mouse's natural innate response to an overhead so-called looming threat in the laboratory the following way so this was a protocol developed by my postdoc when she was in Marcos Meister's lab so here's a mouse hanging out a loon comes on it pauses it runs in and then very quickly it rattles its tail against the wall I'll return to that tail rattling behavior mice do this without any learning they do it the first time they do it every time at least for a few days until they realize that it's not really that threatening this is the other response the mouse is stone-cold frozen you'd almost think I'd pause the video except that the loom is continuing so mice either freeze or they run and hide and that's the natural response of the mouse so we're very curious about where the detection of the stimulus and the internal state of the animal somehow get put together so we decide to screen the brain for areas outside the visual system and outside the traditional arousal system that might put this sort of information together and lead to intelligent let's call them adaptive behaviors on the part of the mouse so we expose a lot of mice to these threats then we screen the brain for genes that are activated in neurons that were recently active so called cephas for the aficionados and we found this nucleus or collection of nuclei nucleus reunions and something called xiphoid nucleus and even though I teach neuroanatomy I'd only heard about these once or twice there's not a whole lot of information about what they actually do turns out these are just reflex neural recordings if you record from this structure it becomes more active under conditions of visual threat and other types of threat auditory threat olfactory threat etcetera so my graduate student Lindsey slay mapped all the inputs and the short story is this this structure gets input both from the sensory areas that detect things and from the areas of your brainstem that are called let's call them arousal areas that lead to sort of alertness or sleepiness depending on their activity it's a very interesting nucleus not a traditional visual nucleus so then she went ahead and she activated this structure and what she found was the following this mouse is so-called ventral medial thalamus that region that includes those nuclei has been activated such as activity is way higher than it normally would and instead of running away from this threat the animal is tail rattling which is actually in mice a sign of threatening the the actual the the predator or you see this we put to my C than are about to fight so instead of running and hiding or freezing this mouse is now stepping out into the open and remaining in the open and saying okay let's go let's fight and we know people like this right and there's a healthy context to do this and there's an unhealthy context to do this so silencing the structure didn't lead to tremendous changes but um activating it in the following manner did so we thought that was extremely interesting I'm gonna give you the short story here Lindsay I'll skip the quantification but what she essentially saw is not only do mice now go out and tail rattle quite quite a bit more than they did before but they also do that out in the open they're not afraid to stay out in the open which normally mice don't do you can think of different types of confrontational threat historical ones like Rosa Parks or the scene from Tiananmen Square the the confrontation of a threat that could somehow hurt you or kill you or change your life in a negative way is something that can have you know depending on how you view it and the consequence it could be adaptive or non adapt we could discuss that offline so Lindsay went on to map the outputs of the different structures here and she found something very interesting which is this red pathway that I'm showing here is the Freese pathway so you have a pathway in your brain that takes what's going on and integrates it with how you feel inside I'll talk about that in a moment and makes you freeze or pause it puts you into paralysis which might actually be the healthy response if somebody walked by that window right now with a machine gun which is unusual for this campus the intelligent thing for me to do is probably pause and see if they continue not to hide because if they come in here I'm more vulnerable the other structure and the output pathway is the green pathway and that caused confrontation and so we asked the question what is this pathway doing and I'll simply summarize by saying it's shifting the state of the animal and we know that because if you trigger activation of this pathway this confrontation pathway before you give an animal or threat then the animal will confront the stimulus even if it's not related at all to that it doesn't have to be time locked excuse me so you don't have to do any exact same time so this is like getting really pumped up before something you'll confront it or if you stimulate the other pathway rather in an animal that would normally confront a stimulus now the animal hides you can turn them into cowards so we look at this kind of coward courage pathway although it might be adaptive so it doesn't matter if you stimulate during or before okay all right so speeding through this all you see just as much tail rattling whether or not you stimulate activation in the structure before or you stimulate activation of this structure during the threat all right we all know what it's like to be in a good state or a bad state and I would argue since this is more in the tenor of this this meeting which is to integrate across areas that many of the woes of society have to do with people that fail to manage their state well right you know most violent crime is a failure to manage state right rage and things of that sort okay we'll skip the movie for now okay so then we asked all right this is all fine we've identified these brain structures but what does the mouse actually feel and of course you can ask the mouse all day but it's not gonna tell you anything because it speaks Mouse not human and so we looked and we measured its levels of autonomic arousal it turns out that it's pupil size got bigger a sign of autonomic arousal its heart rate went up in its breathing increased in the condition where it actually was confronting the stimulus so the highest level arousal is associated with threat confrontation which makes sense if you think back to the lion example you can imagine when you pause in the animals walking by your levels of autonomic arousal might be high but not nearly as high as they are as when the animals on top of you and you're fighting for your life so we thought ok well the animals are really stressed and they're they're fighting but the crazy thing is or at least surprising to us is that if you give the animal a choice of either having this brain area stimulated or not they choose to have it stimulated it has positive valence and it's actually rewarded we believe through a connection through the dopamine pathway so there's something that's highly rewarding about confronting stress in this manner to the animal such that they prefer to do that than to freezer to hide which to us at least was surprising those lines just reflect the fact they're spending a lot more time on the laser on side so as the laser off ok I'll work through this we're very interested I'll work through it quickly rather at whether or not this structure has something to do with phobia and desensitization you know we'd love to pair up with clinicians to address that and we are pairing up with clinicians I'll talk about how we're doing that in the following slides I'm gonna speed up here so this is the chamber in which we measure Mouse behavior this is the chamber in which my lab no measures human behavior because humans can tell you what they feel and think so Mele SEOmoz who's here at the meeting with our coordinate clinical coordinator and Mackenzie's been putting humans into the equivalent of the mouse box sorry it's a slow-motion movie was just a cap so you could capture everything I don't know why programmers don't comb their hair but you know that someone else can answer that question so we put humans into this box we measure a lot of things and like falling off of a high bridge of this sort in in both normal people and people that are terribly afraid of heights or people with generalized anxiety and we measure a lot of metrics from their body as well as record from the human brain in partnership with people in neurosurgery like Casey Halpern or my friend Eddie Chang up at UCSF so this is just uh I'm gonna move forward here the other thing is we realize that computer-generated imagery for VR is not great it's just not realistic enough and so I had been interfacing a lot with communities in particular the elite military community some of whom were in the audience earlier today although they're elite military so you didn't know it was a joke they were just here to observe the science and in fact what you find is that there's all these communities of people are doing things that are truly scary and they're doing them by regulating their state in very specific ways so when interfacing with the these military communities and people like my friend Michael Muller who you know kjx at white shark dive to collect our vr footage you sort of ask you know what are you doing are these people really crazy next I think this month the video the movie comes out about Hawks Honnold who free soloed no safety gear whatsoever up El Cap you meet Alex he's a pretty mellow guy right he's not a he's not crazy he's not an adrenaline junkie so how do guys like Muller do this I don't really care about his neurology what I care about are the protocols that people use to put themselves into high-stress scenarios that are truly life-or-death and that can be exported to people in more typical civilian form that might allow them to maintain calm under conditions of stress now why I don't have to tell this audience why it's because you've got high suicide rate at the high school I went to two miles from here you've got tons of stress in the valley stress is everywhere and is at the heart of a lot of psychiatric illness and and failures of health let's say and we need to do something to mitigate it what you find is that these people are not using brain machine interface some of them meditate but mainly they're using tools that relate to how they use their visual system and how they regulate their patterns of respiration so in the last few minutes I'm going to talk about tools that are out there that my lab is now putting science to and other labs are putting science to to try and understand how to mitigate stress under more conventional scenarios but what I do understand and what I've experienced myself because I've gone on some of these adventures and done some of this is that the everything's fine and good in life when you meditate you're exercising you're sleeping well until your pulse rate hits 150 when you're on the freeway you're in traffic and you get a text that something might be critically wrong with a family member or you're in a long-duration stress event like you have to navigate a cancer diagnosis of a close friend so how do you do that how do you regulate and maintain optimal decision-making it turns out elite military is the place to look because those guys have field tested this stuff whether or not they knew they were building the protocols or not they were building them under life and death scenarios and they also are very interested in involving those protocols so this is a recording from the human amygdala done in Eddie Chang's lab of a patient watching the shark VR so we can get things like breathing heart rate pupil size as well as local field potential recording from these patients I'm not gonna conclude anything from these data yet except that we're now in a position to do this kind of thing of measuring from the body and brain of humans in these realistic VR scenarios which of course the only way you can really bring realistic emotional scenarios to the hospital and laboratory okay so real quick we were this is the world of wellness that I've stumbled into and it's kind of eerie and kind of exciting you have people that do ice baths every day and that probably has a lot of interesting effects on metabolism as well as on ability abri this guy is kind of world-famous for ice bath stuff you know the huge success of things like headspace we're I'm definitely interested in mindfulness the problem with mindfulness is I don't know how to measure it because the opposite of mindfulness is mindlessness and I can't really measure that in my lab we're hard to do unless you define it as a brain state or rhythm which people are doing there's also a lot of people taking drugs now something I don't condone the number one question I get as a neuroscientist and interacting the general public used to be how do I keep my memory as I aged now it's what do you think is still a siphon in ayahuasca from people ten years older than I am 20 years that my mother is asking me about psilocybin okay she's also asking me while I'm not at rush Hashanah today you and so that's a different story but that tells you where this collision and this is a serious thing and I have thoughts about this but so the question is what are behavioral interventions that will allow people to adjust their state and what which ones are available and what are they which ones work for everybody because individual differences are great until they become a barrier to actually doing something and what sorts of states are we trying to achieve and here are a number of different arousal states and I don't have to describe this slide for you to make sense of it but I think the two things that people really want to know how to do on command is be alert but calm right that's nice and asleep when they want to be asleep that would be a huge advance for neuroscience and wellness to be able to achieve those states reasonably well 90% of the time when you want to write let's forget about emotions for the time being entirely okay I'm out of time so I'm gonna give you a tool now the two I'm gonna talk about is is grounded in the fact that our lab and mark Krasnow is lab at Stanford and others other labs are finding an incredible linkage between the state the portions of the brain that link emotion centers with arousal center so those are reciprocally innovated so patterns of breathing influence emotion state an arousal state and are and the reverse is also true okay well let's forget about visions tools for now so there are three kinds of breathing and I'm gonna just give you these tools I'm happy to give you the slides and information later there's tons of breathing holotropic breathing stan grof breathing apnea induced breathing freediver breathing here's the take-home message that I think is most relevant here and forgive me for the people on this side of the room breath breathing protocols that emphasize inhaling are generally going to drive you towards higher arousal states so if you breathe in for four seconds hold your breath for a moment and breathe out for two seconds and you keep repeating that you're gonna ramp up your levels of autonomic arousal if you look at holotropic breathing in these weeds are about nasal and mouth breathing and closing one nostril but let's just keep it really simple the opposite is also true exhale emphasize breathing generally decreases arousal and so you can start to think of this inhale for a period that's maybe a two count hold for two exhale for one hold for one and then repeat to increase arousal lower arousal now what if you want to just maintain optimal kind of dialed in calm focus well people from the elite military community call this box breathing you breathe in for a portion of time you hold you exhale for a portion of time you hold you repeat it's a great way to anchor your neurology in sort of an arousal state to stay in the same place and be able to function properly these ones can be used to drive you up or down the arousal pathway and there are individual variations now if I could just have one minute I'll give you an important detail which is how long should you make each phase I've just put the ratios 2 2 2 2 or 1 2 2 2 has to do with your ability to manage carbon dioxide you don't breathe because you need oxygen you manage carbon dioxide by breathing okay if I hold your head underwater at some point your blood starts to feel acid you want to panic and you want to take a breath okay so it's all about co2 tolerance who are the best people at managing co2 freedivers and so what do they do they measure their co2 tolerance and you can do this also so what you do if you want to know your co2 tolerance and sorry for the marathon runners this has nothing to do with Fitness zero this has to do with how well you manage stress in the moment so when you wake up in the morning or now you're gonna have very different co2 tolerance the way to measure it is you take a couple nice deep breaths through your nose in and out closed and then you time yourself how long it takes you to get rid of all your oxygen in a slow nasal exhale that co2 blowout time tells you your co2 tolerance in the moment tells you how well you're managing co2 if you're a skilled free drive free diver and go down four minutes Houdini is to go into a box for nine minutes doing this managing his carbon dioxide it wasn't superhuman okay that's how David Blaine does it - there's nothing mysterious or magical about it so if you blow out in less than 25 seconds I recommend well let's let's if you blow out in 30 to 60 seconds which is how most people blow out in kind of a pseudo calm pseudo alert state then I recommend breathe in for five hold for five exhale for five hold for five repeat maybe 20 cycles 10 cycles whatever you have available to you even in real time and then you can adjust that up you could have that or double it depending on whether or not your blow out time is less than 25 seconds or more than 60 seconds even though I'm pretty you know happy and up here and doing this I can tell you right now if I were to measure my co2 tolerance my co2 blowout time right now it's gonna be significantly below 20 seconds because I'm doing nothing but exhaling as I'm talking inhaling exhaling I'm you know I'm in a state of high autonomic arousal and if you're sleepy you can run this through the arousal protocol and so forth so anyway I've tried to hand off something you can use in real time that's grounded in what we're starting to understand about respiration and arousal and what I'd like to do and my hope for the future with this meeting is I've we've seen some wonderful talks and important points made about the where the gaps are I'd love to see an intelligent rigorous bridge and I think this meeting really represents the first effort at that between the clinical and the sort of wellness and the things that people generally ask about and care about psychiatric and neuroscience psychological and so you know sort of mindful communities if I dare say it but anyway thanks for your time sorry to go over yeah you

Channel: BrainMind Summit

Views: 210,435

Rating: 4.9305191 out of 5

Keywords: Andrew Huberman, Breathing Exercises, Optimized Brain Performance, brainmind, Huberman, brain, performance, Stanford, summit, neuroscientist, neuroscience, brain plasticity, neural regeneration, repair, brain development

Id: OSwQSb-Cb7U

Length: 21min 58sec (1318 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 18 2020