Dr. Andrew Huberman - The Neuroscience Of Courage & Fear

collective insights as a voyage through topics and technology is revolutionizing human wellbeing groundbreaking approaches for a better world and a better life await you welcome to collective insights welcome everyone to the neural hacker collective podcast collective insights my name is daniel i'm with research and development here at nirakar collective and we are really excited to have dr. Andrew Huberman with us today andrew is a professor of neuroscience neurobiology at Stanford School of Medicine which is one of the eminent neuroscience centers in the world cutting edge work in understanding the brain when he and I first met he was at UCSD in the Salk Institute and transferred a couple years ago up to Stanford and he also runs the Huberman labs which is working on the neuroscience of vision and here's a very interesting kind of history with studying vision and in the neuroscience of vision and then sensory processing and then as a result of that fear has really helped develop the neurobiology lab at Stanford and the tech there and they have some really cutting-edge work they're doing with VR and a number of fun things and so we're going to kind of explore today some personal development related insights that come from formal academic neuroscience and we're gonna invite Andrew to be a little bit free to be more speculative regarding what an animal trial or an early human trial might actually say down the road and where these insights are likely going then he probably gets to be in formal paper publication and Andrew thank you for being here Thank You Daniel I'm delighted to be here first of all I have tremendous respect for what you guys are doing at the neuro hacker collective and it's wonderful to see how much things have progressed in the last couple of years and I'm sure the is still to come I enjoyed a lot of our conversations Science and Technology and looking forward to looking forward to more one fun thing about Andrew is that in addition to being you know an academic researcher of the brain from a you know third-person science perspective he also has a long history with extreme sports with bodybuilding with you know various athletics and with the nutrition and biochemistry and biohacking that goes along with that and some fun things that he'll share here and personal development so he's got a first-person experience and third-person knowledge of the field so we we have a fun bit of areas that we can cover so you know I would I would love if we could just start with talk about fear a little bit and the work that you guys have done in fear and specifically the fight flight freeze responses the differences in them courage a little bit about we've learned there because it is one of the you know deepest experiences for all mammals obviously and for humans and that cripples people the most and they're in the presence of fear there are some people that will be crippled than others it won't be crippled by it there's some insights that I think you guys are the very cutting edge of learning regarding this which is critical for everyone so talk to us about it sure so before I start I just have to say I'm I I'm smiling because you mentioned experience with body weight definitely with extreme sports and martial arts I guess I could probably say that I'm one of the larger neuroscientists out there but I wouldn't I just I got involved in resistance training and fitness pretty young for reasons that we can get into later is that I kind of relate to fear and I've just been struck at how quickly the the world of physical augmentation has evolved not just in strength training but in other areas of physical augmentation and how what there's been this lag into a cognitive and neural augmentation but now I think we're in the area where we're really going to catch up so once it gets you a question so I think it's so right so my laboratory has two winnings to it wing of the laboratory meaning some people and some physical space there devotes understanding how to repair the nervous system after injury and that's something I've been mainly focusing the visual system to prevent and cure blinding diseases like glaucoma that's still a very active area pursuit for us the other half of the lab is working on things like why are certain visual stimuli why are certain visual events scary why do they suddenly trigger a limbic response if you will that puts people into a state of anxiety and we're also studying at what I think is a really interesting table is a new area for us what we're calling visual empathy or primal empathy which is the sensation of of an emotion by virtue of what you see somebody else experiencing visually and that's and so so just briefly we got into fear and my interest in fear primarily because we're search of visual animals I mean more than 40% of the human brain is devoted to vision we really traded out olfaction and chemical sensing of things in the environment through our noses for vision some people are also depend on their auditory systems a lot but we're so visually driven so most of what I'll talk about is visual fear I've been asked what is fear you know there aren't great operational definitions for a lot of these things but to me fear is a negative sensation in the body for which you don't really know what to do in order to alleviate it so if you you know if I take a sip of this drink you know which is tea and then you say oh my god you didn't take a sip of that drink did you and I said why why what why not is it what's wrong with it you say that's poison you got 15 minutes to get to the hospital and that's I'm gonna be scared I'm gonna be anxious I'm gonna you know especially if it's you telling me that because you're not somebody to to play games like that you know and then we of course have you know the writers have described fear in a couple different ways interesting with Stephen King I think it was the one who said there's um there's dread the thing that you're worried about happening there's terror there's like some as it happens and then there's horror which is that after the event the kind of the replay in your mind that that was horrible it was horrifying you know that's some of semantics and it's relates to language and it's probably different across cultures but I like that because they all encapsulate something very important which is that they that all of fear involves kind of a negative arousal like an arousal that you wouldn't want to have and so my laboratory a couple years ago we decided when I say we it's really a spectacular graduate student in the neuroscience program then it used TST who is now in the neuroscience program at Stanford Lindsey Salette started using you know the typical animal animal model for us is mice but we also will now work in humans and we have clinical trials of humans from through my lab and um what-what Lindsey did was a really simple experiment where she took a mouse put in a little box and then showed it an overhead expanding black disc which to the mouse we think appears something like a predator coming in to eat it and when you do that too for a mouse it has one of two responses either freezes I mean just absolutely stone-cold freezes or it runs and hides in a shelter if it can and that itself is interesting because we talk about fight or flight but actually a fight response to something scary is very rare in an animal typically an animal that's scared will will freeze or run so I think we need to start to rethink even though I'm most basic kind of um you know cultural understanding of what fear really induces it's gonna be freeze or run the next really critical discovery was scream the brain of these animals that were scared and she asked in a very unbiased ways what are the brain areas that are activated and she identified in this that region of the of the central brain it's called the xiphoid nucleus very few people have known about it I teach her anatomy to medical students I did that at UCSD I do that Stanford and I didn't even know where this nucleus was since right in the middle of the brain right in the center and this nucleus is very interesting because it connects two areas of the forebrain involved in thinking in areas of the brain like the amygdala which your mold and threat detection it also connects to reward centers in the brain and I'll come back to that so here's this area that seems to be involved in the fear response and so then Lindsey when and used some genetic tricks which allowed her to turn on and off or increase or decrease the activity of this structure while the animal was experiencing fear and what she saw was really remarkable what she saw was that mice that were once afraid of this overhead looming object by freezing we told us they were afraid by freezing or running suddenly would ignore it or would even confront it maybe even try and rattle their tail which for a mouse as an aggressive response that's incredible in its own right because here you know she discovered a brain area in that very you know it's reasonable to assume at least play some important role in regulating the behavioral response to fear or what we call the level of threat that or risk that the animal will tolerate right because we can't we can ask them house what it feels but it's not gonna tell us so but what we do know what we can measure is how much risk that animal will tolerate when you stimulate this brain area and then the the fourth element that was really interesting fourth discovery in this is she said whoa what's going on is it something that has to is the activation in this brain area have to be coincide with this the delivery of this fear stimulus and turns out it doesn't she could increase the activity of this structure the xiphoid nucleus and then present animals with a scary situation and they would confront it they would go from fear to courage if you will and that told us something really essential which is that so much of what we think about in terms of our response to fear or our level of risk tones is really a state it's a state throughout the body it's a state that's throughout the brain it's a systemic effect it's not just gonna be the activation of one brain area okay so that was all fine and good and we're excited and those data are been written up and have been submitted and hopefully we wrapped up and published in early 2018 things were looking good for that you know Malcolm would and but in parallel to all that we set up our laboratory where and this was a postdoc by the name of Malia illness who had come to us from Harvard and then Caltech really tremendously a talented postdoc and she said you know all the stuff that we're doing in mice if she done similar work in my sister and her graduate work she said I want to build a box just like that but for Hugh and so that's what we did we took you know this is arguably one of the most state-of-the-art human performance or human behavior labs to study fear in the world it's about a million a half bucks to build a this laboratory where essentially you put a human in there they put on VR goggles I'll say why VR and we've got motion tracking for the body we're measuring heart rate breathing sweating we're also measuring pupil imagery how big the pupils are which is a very fast autonomic readout of a readout of autonomic activity or arousal and so we then took it upon ourselves to go out and collect the e60 video of different fear inducing scenarios attack dogs Heights great white sharks we can talk about great white sharks some real-world fear some real-world you know I wouldn't say terrifying buts pretty scary stuff brought that back to the lab and then in VR you can you can get about as close to the real world as possible in humans and then measure their fear responses either through these non-invasive things like I just described tools like I just described but we've also done experiments in collaboration with my friend Eddie Chang as a neurosurgeon at UCSF we actually had patients with electrodes embedded down through the skull into the human amygdala while watching these 360 experiences and sharks and whatnot and can measure the neural signals that occur so we now have this parallel platform of doing studies in the mouse and prepend studies in the unit and this is where something really exciting comes up first of all we now believe that fight is a separate response that's distinct from the fight from the scuse me that fight is a distinct response from the freeze or flee response that fight may not actually be on the fear axis then it might that fight-or-flight isn't necessarily the way it works you know people always think if you get scared enough you get backed into a corner you're gonna fight that might be true but there's another axis in which people select to confront scary things and the cool thing is there's a study that was published in the sixties to patients they can stimulate any area of the brain that they want including a region that corresponds to the xiphoid nucleus in the mouse this is the central median nucleus of the thalamus and for the aficionados or if you wanted to look it up this is a paper from Heath 1963 and published in science and so these people can stimulate anywhere they want areas of the brain that stimulate sexual arousal the feeling of you know that they're a little bit drunk all these different brain areas they can stimulate and they can because they're humans they can report what they feel the number one brain area now it's just two patients but the number one area that these two people want to hit the lever on all the time so to speak and stimulate is this area of the brain that corresponds to the same nucleus that Lyndsey was studying in mice that shift them from fear to courage or from higher or to higher levels of risk tolerance and the subjective feeling that they experience is one of mild frustration and kind of effort and I find that incredible what it says is that there might be something innately rewarding about wanting to challenge fears or challenge the confront things and you know we've taken upon ourselves to think that fear is a bad thing and stress is a bad thing and now there's some stuff coming out about stress maybe being positive depending on how you interpret the event that is in our work but other work and I find it so interesting that as humans so much of what drove our evolution was the willingness to confront fear and take on us and here now again we're seeing these brain areas that people work they'll actually work in order to stimulate these brain areas just like mice will and so I've gone long-winded on this answer but I guess what I'd like the listeners to take away is that fight or flight is probably a misnomer that the fight access is probably a distinct thing and that the fear response has a lot more to do with a state in your body and brain then it does have to do with something fundamental about your neural architecture it doesn't necessarily mean that you're a scaredy cat it means that and what it points to is the idea that if we can control state if we can manipulate state in a very dedicated way that we stand a chance to really involve our species through higher levels of healthy risk tolerance or higher levels of risk tolerance where payoffs might be advantageous okay so I think that this is one of the most meaningful areas of what it portends for human possibility in human development so I want to go deeper into several aspects of the physiology so first when you said that there's something inherently rewarding about confronting fear so you know we start to think of a hormesis effect right that when you have some stress on an adaptive system that it increases the adaptive capacity of the system and if you don't stress an adaptive system then it decreases its capacity because there's no benefit in keeping it so we know that with exercise and we know it with cold tolerance like wim HOF work that you did but also when someone confronts a stress that they can actually adapt to increase their capacity to handle they become a human with more capacity if there's a stress that they can't increase their capacity to handle then it just becomes strain and damages the system right so it's just like if you lift an amount of weight to just rips muscles that doesn't build muscle so fear we can imagine has a similar thing right which is the ability to confront a level of fear that we actually can process as opposed to just become frozen and you know crippled with and the in doing so we're increasing our capacity and that maybe there is a developmental reward around capacity increasing mm-hmm so then the question I have has to do with maybe speculations on the chemistry of this because you said not just the xiphoid nucleus but the entire physiology and state so when we think of fear and we think of threat detection we typically think of you know decreased heart rate variability increase sympathetic response decrease parasympathetic and then chemically we think of increased adrenal cortex hormones and an acceleration of the catecholamines converting from dopamine norepinephrine epinephrine faster right kind of roughly yeah we had in when we think of reward we think of more dopamine and dopamine opioid dynamics so is there something maybe where instead of dopamine can converting more quickly into norepinephrine and epinephrine it's actually staying as dopamine and may be interacting with the opioids or endorphins is it have you guys started to explore what the chemistry of this might be yeah so we haven't dealt deeply into the underlying chemistry right now we've mainly been focused on trying to parse the neural circuitry so really trying to identify you know these brain areas that are involved in these so let's say call it the behavioral response to fear and the level of risk tolerance because it's very you know actually one thing I'd like to move toward eventually we don't have to do it in this conversation of course is that I think it's gonna be very hard to talk about emotions in any kind of objective way it's hard to really know you know how one feels I mean I can guess that you feel ok but that's an a value that's a valuation I don't really know what happy is to you or happy as to me it's very subjective but we can in a very reasonable way start to think about measuring states in an objective way so what you're bring up is really interesting you know arousal different kinds of arousal there's a stress response there's sexual arousal there's arousal that's excitement if you're looking forward to an event a movie or a concert or time with particular people for instance and of course you can blend all those things too but the the interesting thing is that from a pure a purely neural standpoint it's very hard to imagine that the neurochemical milieu that underlies arousal is gonna be that much different for a scary event versus a an event that you want to be there for for this I'm gonna steal a little anecdote from my good friend and and now business partner Brian Mackenzie who some of you might know he's been a number of Tim Ferriss his books for his work on running and extreme performance Brian and I doing a lot of work on applied breath work now and implied use of the visual system in conjunction with breath work for controlling fear states but Brian tells it like this so you know but the classic example the lion taking out but you know taking off in pursuit of its prey and let's say an antelope or some other grazing animal and you know from a physiological standpoint there's adrenaline in their systems there's glucose is being shuttled to the muscles you know the pupils are dilated it's all systems go it's you know it's really a it's on and both animals are really in this heightened state of arousal that you can say for sure but there's only one difference which is the lion actually wants to be there for the lion the the loss or the or that failure to catch its prey means it can just go try again and for the antelope the loss you know the loss of that battle it's over and so you know really you start to think about human behavior and you start to think a little bit about how the arousal response is generated and neurochemically it's pretty generic then as humans of course you have this forebrain that super imposes meaning on what just happened so what maybe we'll get into this a little bit later but you know I've decided to put myself at various points in my life into some pretty high stress scenario certainly not the most stressful scenarios that are available but some pretty high stress physically threatening scenarios like caged exit diving with white sharks and things like that because I believe that if it's done with a certain amount of you know risk control and you understand the contingencies and there's some skills involved that there's great growth in those in those experiences the same way that mountain climbers feel that there's great growth in climbing mountains I don't think they climb mountains just because they're there or why do they climb them because they're there I don't think so I think that humans want to climb mountains because they want to take on challenges neurochemically I think we're gonna parse different but it must be that the dopamine system is involved at some level I believe that it must be that the adrenal system is involved in some level just based on the readouts that we see in humans and in mice this expansion of the pupils which is what happens under heightened state of arousal the opioid system might be a is an interesting system it's a harder one for us to parse so I'm not sure I danced around an answer we haven't looked at this deeply we will get there the mechanistic work is gonna come in the fall at least out of experiments nowadays it's straightforward thanks to the beautiful work of my colleague called I saw at Stanford who developed channel options and ed Boyden who was at Stanford ethno nifty light control over neurons chemical control over neurons and specific neurons that the next set of experiments that Lindsay and to do is to tickle just the neurons say in the opioid pathway that project out of reunions it's got oh sorry out of die for unions it's very interesting that this area of the brain is also chock-a-block full of oxytocin receptors and so I'll just take that as an opportunity to say that I think that the more generic conversations about dopamine norepinephrine oxytocin and serotonin they've been kind of out there in the general public are gonna start to become more nuanced because of course all these neurotransmitters and neuromodulators are doing different things in different neural structures and I it gets into a deep conversation about how the brain works and that still much of what we don't understand about how the brain works but we'll get there but I find it interesting that arousal is associated with all these stakes both positive and great so really key thing in the lion Gazelle example is the difference in the worst case scenario right so when you think about the amygdala and threat detection the lion recognizes that the threat is it might not it might expend some energy which can be dangerous and the gazelle recognizes that it might die and so they both have arousal but they have a very different sense of total worst-case scenario threat projection so I'm curious when you looked at the you know the mice under these different cases or the humans under these different cases rather than looking at the differences in the xiphoid looking at the difference in the amygdala and saying of course they're all going to be recognizing threat but do the courage scenarios involve some difference in the amygdala where it's actually not processing the threat as being more than it has capacity to respond to because it would seem like Courage's I actually have the capacity to respond to this threat versus not I'm so glad you asked this question because it points to a really interesting result that we have in hand and then I forgot to mention earlier this the xiphoid nucleus as I mentioned earlier connects to the hello which is a threat detection center it connects to the nucleus accumbens which is stated with dopaminergic related reward and it projects to the four brain areas the brain involved in cognitive processing the prefrontal cortex in particular Lindsay did a beautiful set of experiments in which she could tease out which of these pathways when activated could actually trigger the animal towards a reduced fear response and increased courage by increasing the activity of the xiphoid to forebrain pathway in particular when she increased the activity of the xiphoid to amygdala he or she she saw more fear sure less courage and so what you really got now is a structure it's sort of like an old school switch operator and the telephones what some of your listeners won't know what that is because this is like something from you know even before my childhood where people take out plugs and put it so it's like a switchboard where basically the structure is integrating sensory information not just visual information but it's sensory input and then making decisions about okay under these conditions where there's this certain amount of threat what am I gonna do what's the best outcome am i willing to take on some risk that's out that the forebrain is making that assessment and so this is what it's really about it's not about going into a heightened level of arousal to the point where you lose your cognition it's about maintaining clear cognition under heightened state of arousal so this brings up so many questions because the forebrain of a mouse and the forebrain of a human are not really good analogs at all right because for brain of a human prefrontal cortex the abstraction capacity to not just look at our past experiences and see which ones are relevant in here but actually be able to assess the scenario in a truly abstract way I'm super curious about the difference there yeah so prefrontal cortex in Mouse is not nearly as evolved and when I say evolved I mean it doesn't have as much stuff there even there's often prefrontal cortex you're not gonna find in a mouse you're not gonna find in a monkey you know the massive expansion of the cerebral cortex in humans which is why has all the gyrating bumps he taken all that and crammed it into a small store as a mouse goes there mouse brain is smooth because it's less surface area for skull space essentially um so there's stuff there that you're designing in a fine in the mouse on the other hand the mouse is doing some thinking in addition to just some reacting and by thinking what we mean is that it you know the forebrain is required for assessing multi sensory input and making decisions about which motor commands to create and which wondered commands to suppress the freezer response is actually a very I mean it's an eight it doesn't require the cortex we know that based on our work and work from other laboratories but it's a it's a very active response even though the animal is still it's very hard to stay completely slow for any creature unless they're dead and so you know that the forebrain of the mouse is clearly exerting what we call top-down control over the behavioral response it's very interesting to look at these animals when they confront the fear response in this nucleus to me they tail rattle they'll pause as if they're gonna freeze and then they and then they keep going and they'll also start moving around quite a bit more so they're making themselves very salient very visible very audible the tail Riley actually makes noise it's the worst thing you'd want to do if there was a predator it's more like beating their chests than it is freezing or fleeing or anything and so so when we talk about prefrontal cortex in the mouse we're talking about a rudimentary kind of primitive prefrontal cortex which is probably doing some math of contingencies if a then B and if B then C you know the brain is doing math whether or not you like math or not what neurons are doing is they're computing things in space and time and making assessments they're not thinking there's a little person in there the collective is the person or the mouse but the collective activity of those neurons but clearly the forebrain is exerting some top-down control they're good experiments for instance where if you take even just an owl which is a very visual and auditory hunter as we know and you lesion the forebrain input to some of these subcortical areas that control motor reflexes they become like machines if you go like this the owl will look everywhere think of a kitten or a puppy when my bulldog Costello was a puppy I could put anything in front of him and he pick it up with his mouth anything I could anything was a toy now it's like you know he's older his forebrain is is developed and for a long time now he's just not as excited by these little things this is what makes puppies and kittens Judis kind of they walk with walk along they grab a quarter they roll over they pee in the corner they do they're kind of helpless in the fact that everything's with stimulus as the forebrain matures and myelin aids and top-down control from the forebrain matures and myelin aids animals become much more focused and dedicated in the actions that they'll take in that they won't take think a predator a lion that's waiting for the gazelle there's a lot of active suppression it's making an assessment which ones are moving quickly which ones are moving slowly am I gonna attack the flanks or am I can attack the head these kinds of things those kind of assessments are clearly for brain assessments so there's some kind of feedback loop that's interesting here in this shunting from the xiphoid to either more Minghella action or more frontal action because to say that there is some top-down control from frontal only if the xiphoid already shunted that way or there is a little bit that's already happening so there's some feedback process between the prefrontal and the xiphoid that then helps inform the xiphoid shunt more or not yeah have you this question is where is the inte where is the actual point of intervention nice cool question you know that the fuel in earth science has progressed so far we can now control the activity of real of neurons in real time in the whole animal and make these kinds of assessments even in specific neuron types very few experiments including in our laboratory have assessed these kind of the dynamic interplay between different structures in real time that's really represents that I think in the next five years of work not not to defer but we're just getting to the point where we can do that reasonably and but I think you're right I think that it's gonna be activity streaming through the xiphoid to all three structures and then the overall state of the animal will probably dictate the extent to which the balance of activity between you know shifted towards frontal cortex can suppressing amygdala this kind of the battle of neural activation if you will um you know it brings up you could bring up an anecdote but it brings up a scenario where if you've ever been in a panic situation a very high-stress situation and you're not trained to go into an automatic motor pattern you start becoming erratic with your behavior the fear response takes over is you know I had this happen when when our dives recently had an air air failure I was a technical failure there's a really bad situation white sharks everywhere outside the cage I was in the cage at that point safety tank not available to me at that moment for reasons we could discuss really it was like the worst situation except for not except for not being able to get out of the cage so the decision was you know you err suddenly cut out and my first thought was you got to be kidding me and this isn't happening it was kind of disbelief second thought no joke was I'm going home I'm gonna see Costello that was really the thought that went through my it was a cognitive decision wand I going home third go to the safety tank that was what I'd been trained to do safety didn't open go to the second safety tank safety didn't open or his open lose empty so now it's like so you immediately go into these automatic you know these OODA loop kind of responses as the military refers to them and then it was okay I guess I'm gonna drop my weight belt and shoot for the surface because I wasn't on scuba which is great for getting back to air there's air at the surface so I stay down 100% serhiy I'm gonna die from lack of oxygen but you're surrounded by large great whites this is not a good situation they love to eat things or go after things they're shooting for the surface in fact the way that you cage exit and swim with great whites is by swimming toward them when they come out at you and alongside them you loom on them and they're not used to their their apex predator so they're not usually comfortable with things looming on them so they treat you with respect if you do that if you act like prey they will treat you like prey but at that point it was really that was my only choice I was fortunate enough that one of the out of cage divers turned around and saw me and made the what felt like a very slow Traverse back to the cage and then we did the you know sort of classic share everything but even that of grabbing the regulator and breathing off his air and then passing it back and forth is something that if you're not trying to do in your dive training a lot of people just hold on to it and the other guy ends up dying there's a struggle where they let go I mean you you have to be calm enough and so this was a situation which I could sense my behavior starting to get a little erratic as each of the motor programs that I had been lined up or trained to perform was giving me a an F like oh no you're not gonna get air here you're not gonna get it they're here Avery starts getting a little Matic so I think what happens is there's a number of things happening this your state is going up carbon dioxide is increasing in the system and your behavior starts getting a little bit more crazy if you will and this is why people who you know they can't even dial 911 under conditions of emergency or they get tangled up in some seaweed while diving some kelp and their regulator gets kicked out or something or their and and they they find them dead ten minutes later it's not because they didn't couldn't reach over and grab it it's because you you start to lose you lose yourself and so one of the most exciting and interesting areas of neuroscience that's really evolving fast this is some beautiful work that's being done by guy named Steven Leary Lee is out at Harvard looking at vagal stimulation and other people like our lab they're looking an adrenal stimulation is finally after years of this mind-body separation and people even talk about mind versus body people are starting to look at how the periphery you know that the vagus and the adrenals and stuff that's happening in the body is impacting neural processing in the brain and vice versa it's like and you might say duh of course it's all one system but when you and I were growing up it was mine versus body where it was brain versus mine and I think it's wonderful that we've now discarded of that and it's like of course there's an organ in your head it's all working together that was a was a good test experience that you had with the Sharks I have to say I I got to the surface I was vomiting or confident below the water and I have to say as I don't recommend that experience to anybody but I am I am immensely grateful and I knew that what happened over the next 24 hours was extremely important if my interpretation was very important this more about the top-down control I wouldn't wish for that experience but I have a good friend who joined us on the dive we insanely also cage I said good friend Pat Dawson he came to me afterwards and he said immediately the first question he asked me has some experience when to high stress scenarios and he pulled me aside and said so what you take away from that experience that was the first question that I was asked not are you okay or in that immediately was like okay what do I take away I took away check the safeties yourself don't rely on it turned out it was a human communication error really that led to that situation and I also felt tested I feel I'm actually grateful for the experience in retrospect because I felt tested it felt like a little bit of a rebirth of sorts and it was actually the next day that I cage accident for the first time and people say even on the bow they're like they really gonna do that but look I'm a scientist the probabilities are independent the probability that it would happen the next day is totally independent I say I was on scuba so they're independent probabilities right flipping a coin once flipping it twice independent probabilities and the second thing is I knew what had happened and so when you when you have the benefit of knowing what went wrong you're in a good position to to make different choices so this when you say I'm a scientist you're actually saying something very important you're saying I have frontal override of the rest of the response because I actually have a rational process that the probabilities are independent that the things that made it scary yesterday aren't gonna make it scary today because I've adjusted it therefore I can control my fear response that's right and and I have to say that much of my life and perhaps is why I eventually decided to study fear much much of my life has centered around putting myself into scenarios that for me were felt threatening and you know I always tried to assume a reasonable sense of risk reward trade-off you don't want to be you don't want to be haphazard or crazy I mean I look at Honnold right who climb El Cap no ropes no nothing I mean but he he didn't just do it what you know the first time with no ropes I mean he rehearsed it to the point where his confidence he was doing you know he knew all the holes I mean I think I'm not a climber but I've spoken to some climbers and what they said that's so incredible about the fact that he did that it wasn't just his fear suppression it was the fact that he remembered all the sequences that are required under different conditions because it can be different depending on weather conditions and rock conditions etc and those interact so I think that being able to really reasonably assess risk under high stress is important being adaptive is one of the things I pride myself on yeah and of course I was out there with experts and we had permits from the Mexican government to do the cage acts that you're actually not allowed to do it without permits and this kind of thing you know there's a lot of recklessness that goes on out there that I don't support and at the same time I that's right I think my cognitive override process is a little extreme I guess in the world of you know you get sometimes go to the gym and you see those guys who have huge upper bodies but no legs I have strive to not be the guy who just thinks and doesn't feel you know I don't want to be the knurl parallel for that but no but there's there's something important here you weren't saying that you were gonna override fear for irrational reasons you were actually making sure that you didn't miss associate what the source of warranted fear was right you're doing realistic assessment and most of the time what happens is right it's our our adaptive response fear obviously is it was evolutionarily very useful to keep us to have us avoid things it could be harmful right and whenever we have pain then we have fear around having that same source of pain in the future to protect us from something that could be harmful but we usually actually get the causation wrong so we go up for public speaking and we have a painful experience and so then we say well I'm never gonna public speak again because public speaking was the cause of pain as opposed to identifying more carefully being concerned what everyone thought of me and thinking I'm not good enough was the source of pain and I can actually change that and still be able to public speak so one shrinks your world unnecessarily the other one gives you the capacity to say is there something that I can actually do in the presence of the stimulating yeah it's a really really excellent point you're making I mean I feel like one of the fundamental things and I've spent the last couple years because I'm considering writing a book on neuroscience for the general public that brings in some of the more modern understanding about how neural circuits work there's some great stuff out there but I think that we're getting a little lost still in this idea of like lizard brain versus thinking brain I mean these things work as a dynamic interplay they're not working independently and and I enjoy talking about neuroscience the general Republican and one of the things that really you know I'm I'm striving to understand or you know what are the tools that are out there for people to deal with trauma what are the things that who to deal with anxiety as a way to make my laboratory science better and to bring better treatments to people through all the tools and one of the things that I heard and I find so true to in my own experience and and from what you're saying is that trauma is often a confusion about who's responsible or what's responsible Craig in the shark thing you know it example very unusual scenario right for most people is to be in the pet go see white shark rich territories and go into them etc the but D you know the failure of oxygen the day before the failure of that they'd be thankful I mean I wasn't that's not gonna that doesn't change how dangerous a shark is Brandon are independent and so I think for trauma you know so much of it is a even if people can cognitively say yeah you know that wasn't my fault I know I know I had every right to be walking home at night at that time people report this kind of thing right or I know that you know I really didn't do anything wrong they feel as if they did something wrong because they were involved and so the brain is somehow linked to contingencies and said I must be it somehow involved in a way that I shouldn't have been and I think that so that that failure of who's to blame at an emotional level is really underlies a lot of what people report as trauma and otherwise it would just be look I was wronged and so now I'm gonna take myself out of the scenario in which I was wrong and I'm safe but the brain doesn't do that and so we were confused I think we think that post-traumatic stress is all just a replay of some circuit because the experience was so intense look people have been experiencing in 10 intensely scary and traumatic scenarios since the beginning of time and they've been able to dump those and keep going in a bleep reasonably happy lives and there's things like social support and of course sometimes these mechanisms go off and people need real reals you know other forms of support medical interventions and so forth but really it's a failure to to dump the idea that or you know that somehow oneself was to blame and I think that that's you know just by virtue of being there and I think that that's something that in animals you see there's like a condition placed preference or condition place avoidance if you give a mouse something it likes in a location it goes back to that location how my dog Costello does that hell I do that but if you experience something bad in a given environment the tendency is to not go back into that environment you know nature likes to cut a broad marking so I think this conversation brings up both why cognitive behavioral therapy is effective and the limits of its effectiveness at the same time and so when because there's a different mechanisms happening right so we think about cognitive behavioral therapy we think about exactly what you did when you said they're independent probabilities one day on the next and I'm gonna check the tanks myself and the scuba hat means that you know I'm doing the shark risk non oxygen risk that was a straight like CBT kind of action that said hey let's not make a fear that is not actually a warranted appropriate fear and in cognitive behavioral therapy we look at things like getting the causation wrong so over generalizing as a classic one we were kids we trusted our parents they hurt us and so we imprinted everyone who you trust is gonna hurt you don't trust anybody and of course that represented like N equals two out of all people and when we were a kid and didn't know how to actually assess for trustworthiness and defend ourselves and speak up and etc so then we grow up and we say whoa I've been avoiding trust my whole life because of this over generalization maybe it's not true that all people we trust are gonna hurt us maybe it's I didn't know how to assess trustworthiness yet and now I can so there's some increased capacity so the CBT part is get the causation right right so that you aren't over generalizing and the fear response is if we're not clear let's make a very wide just don't go anywhere in that area if you don't know where the landmine is just don't even go to that field right that's right that's right my sister is deathly afraid of sharks you know she she's not scientist she's it happens to be a therapist but she said look the probability of getting by a great white shark if you stay out of the ocean she's not somebody was typically quantitatively oriented but she nailed it I think that the challenge is that if you want to overcome a certain feeling or even hardwiring it's hard to know what scenarios to place yourself in to do that and I think one of the really exciting tools is going to be are going to be the tools that are allow to reopen plasticity something that I don't we can get into occurring this podcast I mean I think that you know how to dump previous experiences and take on new experiences as a fundamentally interesting question I will say one thing though before we if we're gonna transition to something else at any point one thing that I think is really important for people to understand and thinking about the brain and just their lives is the role of emotions you know I think we fundamentally misunderstand what emotions are good for I mean emotions evolved to kind of move us towards certain things kind of appetitive behaviors as they're called or away from other things a person or avoidant behaviors but you know and here I'm gonna borrow from my friend and very talented trauma release therapist Ryan swab whose album Florida he runs an addiction treatment center out in Florida which uses a lot of breath work but also more standardized therapists more traditional forms to treat addiction mainly in the form of trying to reduce stress first and then deal with sort of familial structure and things like that and Ryan you know has this really impressive structure for how to think about emotions which is under you know emotions are sort of like weather right they come and they go and I think we've become a culture that's so attached to the idea that feelings are so important and they are it's very important to be you know we're not robots you don't wanna be a robot but you know the purpose and destination and what you're trying to accomplish are probably more important than feelings when moment to moment feelings when trying to net navigate decisions nodes of decision-making right because if you think about your ship and your head you set your destination in particular location and then that's kinda like your purpose your destination this could be in the work domain it could be in the relationship domain it could be in any domain really you decide okay like for me I knew I had a kind of rough teenage years for reasons related my family structure even though I had a good family growing up and I decided at some point at 19 that's it I'm gonna get serious about school and academics I'm gonna turn myself into a professional of something that was positive for the world and I'm gonna have my PhD at time I'm 30 I'm gonna be a faculty member but time I'm 35 tenure but time for you those were decisions I made like a ship would pick destinations and there were plenty of days in which things were challenging and so what you want to do in trying to navigate any course is when emotions come up they're like weather sometimes you tack down you know use kind of nautical terms you you you know you tack down the ship you know you wait wait out the weather sometimes if I take a different course but you don't suddenly say oh you know I'm gonna steer for a completely different Coast because the waves are choppy or it's looking really nice over there let's just go over there instead and so emotions are like weather and so you want to take advantage of them when they're taking you toward your destination but you also want to think rationally about them when they're not and I think that that's something that's very powerful in navigating any kind of series of nodes of decision in trying to complete a process whatever short or long term process that is so this this connect well to something I was gonna say about your experience in with the Sharks issue you said you felt tested and stress testing is actually a really meaningful thing to assess you know how a person is going to respond and feature stress scenarios to know how much you can actually trust them under stress scenarios right and so specifically here when emotions get intense how much can someone continue to make choices based on their values as opposed to get hijacked by the emotion and that's one of the like deep questions is someone's ability to maintain some some forebrain awareness in the presence of the emotion so that it doesn't completely run them right and in which case they really lost abstract clear thinking they lost their value system as a basis for decision making and so you know one of the ways I think about it is you've got an emotional bell curve that of states where most the time people are here and right after Vipassana or psychedelics they might be like super elated and after trauma they might be super upset but the states can change instantly right you can hear some news and they change and the kind of stage of where someone's at emotionally in their life overall is something like the center of the gravity of that bell curve but then we also have a separate bell curve of their behavior which is the shittiest they ever behave and the best they ever behave and where they generally behave in terms of how aligned with their goals how consider it etc and one of the things I look at for trustworthiness is how much someone separates those two bell curves hmm so that their behavioral bell curve does not respond to the emotional bell curve meaning that they can get emotionally triggered into a poor state and still make good choices you know so that's that's a really useful model I think as there's so many of our conversations Daniel yet you put things into it I think that that's an extremely important model for people to understand I need to think about that a little bit more also because I think right I mean you know when I select people to work in my laboratory I'm looking for a passion for science because I know what's required science is hard and it's also beautiful and you get these incredible experiences and I really believe that people are gonna continued what will come to lab and make fundamental discoveries if they show up and work hard and and are observant I also you know if I could and of course I can't but if I could I would also want a developmental history on them and I'd want to know how they reacted to stressful scenarios and previously which is I think it captures a little bit of your model of the bell curves of sort of emotionality versus decision-making I'm I'm gonna let you in on a secret here if I'm hiring some for a role where the trustworthiness matters a lot right deep defect out of trustworthiness could be really consequential and everyone should pay attention to that this should also be something that USS for when dating because trustworthiness matters a lot and you want to assess it and of course early on everyone just presents their most trustworthy self and that doesn't mean anything at all about who they actually are so I want to stress test it before actually going into a place where there's any attachment or actual risk and so what that look like is I want to go to a place where our logistics get up they miss their airplane the you know Eber comes late some waitress spill something on them and I want to see do they yell at the waitress you know do they behave do they lose their ethical standard and the question is really the way I think about is what is the floor that someone sets on the lowest behavior they're willing to accept of themselves it's like someone someone can say I'm just never going to hit my spouse when I'm upset no matter how upset like I won't allow it and they can raise it higher and say I'm not going to yell they can raise it higher and but you have to stress test it and see right yeah it's interesting I mean I think that um you know so much of our society and so much of life is about these boundaries for ourselves and for each other you know for instance I'm somebody that can be highly motivated by excitement and love and enthusiasm and a whole set of songs that I listen to that immediately just take me to a place where I feel unstoppable and I have also somebody who can work pretty damn hard and um through from the place of you know you're not gonna break me kind of- a little more negative or gritty kind of mindset i can switch back and forth right I think one is more stressful than the other perhaps but both work and the album are what I care about but I know for myself I have boundaries I won't do anything unethical you know whole I cheat or steal in order to get where I need to go and what you're really trying to assess to you know to what extent people have clear boundaries you call them values really to what extent people are willing to break protocol with themselves break protocol with the group in order to achieve what they want to achieve and um you know one thing I a good friend of mine he said you know you love rules and ruin and you know it's interesting I love rules for a pretty I was a pretty wild teenager but not because I was seeking fun I just I was seeking structure and um you know I I do I like rules I feel like it's been said before and there's nothing profound about this but you know it's like a playground with a bunch of kids kicking them all around but it's next to a road and so they can't really play that freely but then you put up a chain-link fence and now you can really boot the ball as hard as you want you can run as fast as you want because there's a boundary there that you know that you're safe right so it's really all comes down to safety and the tough scenarios I've had to navigate in managing people have generally um been you know have improved when I understood kind of what they were really afraid of afraid of failure or some cases afraid of success or afraid of having to you know what was gonna happen to them or there was a backdrop of their life that was more complicated I'm not therapists I run a laboratory so you know there are limits to what we discuss but you know over and over again I think what you find is to come you know Maslow's hierarchy needs you know what people feel safe when they feel like there's some range on what they can emotionally express themselves when they feel like the group really supports them and they're in the company of people that have common goals I think people are willing to start tolerating more and more risk and in a healthy way in order to achieve goals and so now we're talking a little bit more abstractly but I think having a system for oneself is very important and I think that public declarations are very important even just think about the public declaration of merit often a public declaration they're really saying look even though I might and if you just look at the traditional vows of American marriage most of those are saying even if I want to do blank I'm not going to now they never say I'm not going to want to it says even if I want to I'm not going to and nowadays people set different rules for their marriages than people did 50 years ago of course there's a lot more discretion and decision-making personalized decision-making there but I find it extremely interesting that you know we we acknowledge in a lot of our kind of basic ceremonies of culture that what we want and what we're willing to do are two different things and we make those declarations publicly so that culture keeps us in line we don't want shame we want image shame ourselves you know the one of the great things about being a scientist and is that it really is a pursuit of knowledge and truth and so I'm very lucky to be in a profession where sure there are some egos and things like that definitely when I love to win feels great to get papers accepted and grants funding that kind but fundamentally I want to understand how things work and so my powers of self-delusion are not very strong unfortunately and so you know we've just got to do everything sort of you know sweat blood in order to figure out how how this incredible structure in our heads works and and so everyone that comes to my lab is genuinely devoted to that okay so we had to take a short tech break there and there's a lot that we actually wanted to cover and I I think if you're open to it we'll do a part two because framing up fear you know was then a basis to say well how do we really work with us and how do we work with increasing plasticity which is where a huge amount of your you know work is and how do we use breath how do we use cognitive framing how do we use vision how do we use all kinds of things to to help shift it so we'll do another part on that I'm actually pretty excited to hear about the app you guys are developing as well and some thoughts on the future of VR psychotherapy and fear inoculation and all that fun stuff but it's interesting because we're talking about fear here and you know in in general you talk about having a orientation towards increasing people's positive sense of life and emotion and motivation so talk about why is it actually important that one understands fear if they want to have a life is positive and has increased capacity and motivation why is it not just a negative topic yeah I mean I think nice to like we wait you're in discomfort entirely but that's there gonna be obviously stressors are gonna show up and some of those are gonna be your new stressors whether or not it's a medical diagnosis that's scary or waiting for a metal medical diagnosis or something really acute like a you know like a robbery or break-in or something of that sort where you have to really react or not react and under pressure I think that one of the things that's really valuable it you know people have talked about this much more that then I will hear about the able kind of third person in oneself and get out of the see oneself in the scenario in order to make better decisions I think that's useful under for certain professions and certainly certain people I I think that what people you know talk about capacity you know I think that everyone could afford to have a slightly better capacity for stress tolerance especially emotional stress tolerance because what you know we rarely rarely not always but we rarely are punished for what we don't do you know it's the thing that we wish we hadn't said or the thing that we wish we hadn't done it often gets us into trouble and a lot of times that's because we're just in a level of high reactivity and I look at reactivity as a moment the Attic responsiveness it's it's not being intentioned and I think that so increasing our capacity is good there also some people are just really unflappable they're just really really even and really stable that's wonderful under some scenarios and and yet you don't want to be you know you don't wanna be like the Tin Man you want it you want to have some emotion you want an ability to feel into things but know that you're not going to cross about your own boundaries or other people's boundaries in a way that disrupts your your short and long term life plan and so I think that the more that people can understand that these negative emotions like fear and stress and arousal kind of fit in a package of things that motivate the brain to take on certain sets of respond response violent verbal responses when you start to really separate those out and you kind of start to identify where your own internal boundaries are you start to feel more powerful as a human being in the positive sense because you know that you're in the driver's seat you're moving further and further away from reactivity when you experience fear or something that's dreadful or traumatizing as something that you're carrying around or that's kind of floating around over your shoulder kind of a dark side that you know you have and and that the world is a threatening place but also that you have threatening places inside you I think that that's when you see people really becoming debilitated they become almost afraid of themselves they're afraid of what they'll do you know it's like the public speaking news sample the person who has a bad experience public speaking isn't necessarily afraid the next time they can do it that people are gonna throw tomatoes at them who them out of the room or shame them into isolation I think they're afraid of what they'll do you know if you really probe people you say well you're afraid of public speaking they'll say I'm afraid I'm gonna like urinate in my pants in front of everybody I'm afraid I'm gonna say the wrong thing and you say what do you mean what would that be and they say we're afraid I'm gonna offend somebody so they're actually not even concerned about their own well-being they're concerned about somebody else's well-being primarily so when you really get honest about this stuff you start to dissect it out you start to learn that people are really just want to have coherence with with themselves and with their surroundings and so knowing where those boundaries are and knowing there's that there's a thick buffer between what you think you might want to do and what you'll actually do is very powerful and this is the essence of a lot of martial arts and military training and and you know in therapy you learn to listen and to react and none of us want to be impulsive in that way and so I think that you know this kind of alludes to a bigger conversation I think we're gonna have in a part too which is how do you actually modify this and you know the this incredible organ in your brain you're in your head your brain so that it works in your favor you know how do you discard with previously hardwired or seemingly hardwired action patterns and thought patterns and how do you start to create more automatic responses that really serve you and serve those around you better and I think one of the really exciting areas of practical application of neuroscience the basis for your hacker collective in part is to identify tools for plasticity whether or not they're pharmacologic whether or not they're nootropic whether or not they're behavioural I'm very interested in the role of applied breath work and vision tools but also brain machine interface as a way to reshape contingencies or expectations of outcomes it would be wonderful if one didn't need to go put place themselves in the dangerous scenarios in order to increase capacity I think that's really where the field is headed not just in understanding you know how the brain works but how to work the brain and how to modify it and fear just represents kind of one layer or entry point as in that exploration but it's the one that I think it's the one that creates the most suffering and it's the one that if you can overcome even just a little bit it builds on itself really quickly and you can start to see some nonlinear increases or synergistic increases in the amount of increases in well-being or what one is willing to take on and say what I'm somebody who I think has a healthy fear response but there's very little that is as scary to me as running out of air underwater white sharks on that kind of I'm grateful for the experience because now when I'm in a stressful scenario I think well ok it's not as bad as that it poses me into a calmer state and I can smile and move forward so there have to be analogous situations that one can put themselves in that are not dangerous in order to accomplish that kind of plasticity ok so this is interesting you said something that I don't think you actually meant in the beginning which is that it'd be nice if we could go through life without any fear experiences I don't think that would be nice at all I don't wish for that world and it you know the David Pearson the hedonistic imperative brings up this can we just remove negative emotions and have a gradient of positive emotions be the basis of how we work in the future with genetic engineering one of the things that strikes me in all of the ancient wisdom cultures was how much more clear and precise their distinction between comfort and happiness was then the way we I think there's actually something about after the Scientific Revolution we started understanding all of reality as objective because we could measure objective things we couldn't measure subjective things so objective became synonymous with real and we could measure comfort a lot better than we could measure happiness so we started making the world that optimized for it so we have more comfortable beds than kings used to in transportation etc with increased mental illness and you know actual subjective problems because we didn't understand how to deal with that well and but one of the things that the wisdom traditions all did was intentionally induce discomfort to have beings that realized that they didn't have to be the result of their environment and that they could actually internalize their locus of control and when you think about going into the sweat lodge the key to a good sweat lodge is it's hot enough that it triggers the fear response I'm gonna die in here but you actually know that it's not that hot that the shaman is sitting up at the top of it that's hotter than where where you're at the people have done this forever and so you learn not to be controlled by the fear and in doing so you actually learn who you are beyond reactive patterns and you know the Vision Quest the Sun Dance the even yoga asanas so much of them is just get in an uncomfortable position and then find your breath and find peace and then get another uncomfortable position and so I actually love and you know I love the idea that VR could be a way to induce uncomfortable positions with no real risk of harm but being able to induce the discomfort so that we can learn to internalize our locus of control and because that is what sovereignty is right if we are the result of our environment so we avoid fear by avoiding environmental stimuli then we have no sovereignty it's a right I didn't I just want to say I I think it's an attractive idea at times it's an alluring idea that a life of a life without fear or pain but as a practice as an experience it would be terrible you know these days and frankly my entire life I've tried to surround myself with people that were seeking to be the best possible version of themselves there are times I did do that myself and there were times I didn't surround myself with those kinds of people but in general it feels really good to be around people that are trying to become the better version of themselves I would assert that it's almost impossible maybe impossible to become the best version of oneself without experiencing any discomfort or fear or stress and I think that boils down to the core missus idea it boils down to the hans selye who won the nobel prize for general general adaptation syndrome yes you have distress any of you stress but that you become a stronger better neural organism you become a stronger better physical organism by placing yourself into reasonable scenarios or sometimes unreasonable scenarios in which you experience stress and have to work your way through it survive it compensate and show up better and so I think that purely positive emotions would be terrible and I'd go back to this human study this Heath 1963 science paper these patients there were patients because they had electrodes in the brain for other reasons but they were it was a it was available to them to stimulate any brain area including areas that stimulate pleasure and they did stimulate those brain areas but they preferred more than any other experience and was their preferred experience was some low-level frustration on the effort and I think there's something fundamentally important in that in that result it needs to be repeated but I think that the human species evolved by challenging itself and frustration and confusion these days I think a lot about how confusion and frustration actually might be the neural circuits testing out different arrangements of firing patterns makes sense I mean we need to test that we need to evaluate that in first and animal models than the human models to really get down to the mechanistic guts of it but you know it changes the way that I feel when I read something and I go I didn't even absorb and you know I'm gonna go back again maybe this is my brain trying to absorb things take some sleep wake up the next day and boom you have the ideas it's those small bits of pain and pushing yourself up against the boundaries it's not unlike physical practices so I think we're we're rapidly gaining understanding in this not just in the science domain but in the practical application of neuroscience tools like the areas that you work in and I think it's exciting to see where all this is gonna lead a episode that's what our species was designed to do was to evolve itself so I really love this 1963 paper that you're referencing because from an Evo Devo perspective the relationship between about evolution and development natural selection selects for increased adaptive capacity that can be evolutionarily from the point of view of natural selection but also developmentally we can develop increase capacity and now we understand that you pass down the epigenetic so you actually pass down there's a deeper relationship between evolution development you can actually pass down some of the developmental dynamics so that there would be a very deep pleasure response of some kind of deep reward response around developing adaptive capacity given that that's the whole thing that's selected for makes perfect sense right and most of the other creatures are tremendously more hardwired than we are and so to be creatures that have so much developmental capacity and to see what a deep set of positive responses there are on actualizing that and why self-actualization is at the top of the pyramid it's a yeah it makes a lot of evolutionary biology sense yeah you know I mean again I we're gonna get into plasticity our species what the way we're different than honeybee or a bear or another or a tiger for that matter is that you know the duration of plasticity and humans is extremely long and it never actually closes down the idea that there's a critical period that closes completely as is false we know there's plasticity as an adult it's harder to access you don't tend to learn things passively as well you really need to focus your attention or mechanisms you really need to if there's an adaptive payoff you know if you have to learn something in order to eat and survive you're gonna you're gonna learn it more quickly than if you know the rewards are done or the rewards are trivial but and that probably has to do with a 10 ultimately which probably has to do with some sort of cholinergic drive and really anchoring a lot of neural resources towards particular stimuli and understanding the contingencies like what leads to what and really focusing on those but in any case I think that you know there that's what our species was designed to do and I love to take a step back and think about you know this conversation and other conversations that are taking place and in the world now around the future of neuroscience and the future of humanity frankly and think you know and realize that we're at the front edge of our evolution you know things some things might look very primitive and they are but we're really at the leading edge of our evolution now and what's so exciting is that with all these tools with all the discussion and with some reasonable frameworks we're really in in the position to use our neural architecture to reshape our neural architecture to create better neural architectures not just so some of it might be epigenetic you can also imagine that the less stress or higher capacity organism if you you know select to meet the capacity organism you have a child that child's gonna grow up in an environment in which parents have a certain understanding of trust and reliability about the world they're gonna be neurochemical millou's and endocrine hormonal milieu in that family line that are gonna be very important I mean it sounds a little bit eugenic but that's not what I'm intending it's just you're gonna when kids feel safe they behave very differently than when they don't feel safe same with adults right and adults who don't feel safe feel the exact same things that children do I think it was Freud that's guys I looked there to quotes and sort of run in parallel and I always come back to so Freud had the saying anxiety makes children of us all and and I would add to that except that as adults we use adult tools to respond to pry and you know in our pillows or some people might do that violence and they say horrible things and they get revenge and do all sorts of horrible things so anxiety makes children of us all and I think it was I don't know maybe was Vince Lombardi or maybe it was it was one of the great boxing trainers that said you fatigue makes cowards of us all and those are go hand in hand right I mean fatigue the point being that the opposite is also true that when you feel secure you're able to make different decisions about the kind of creative and expansive life you want you want to live you're able to give and this is all sounding very feel good and kind of generic but you can imagine what it's like to just spend a short window of your developmental existence in one regime versus another and then you can imagine what it's like to spend a short and you say wow you know I mean the outcomes are distinctly different so it's our responsibility I think as individuals to what you engage in what I'm calling self-directed adaptive plasticity right you know to be able to find tools you apply tools and for self-directed adaptive Plassey there's no better coping and better coping means that you can navigate your life better you can treat yourself better treat other people better those are if if there are enough people doing that right one of the great those of the nirakar collective and others as well is if you can if we can do that insufficient than large numbers of people we're gonna see a massive evolution of our species if we don't these are gonna continue pretty much the way they've been going regardless of the technologies that we develop I like your self-directed adaptive plasticity I think Rick Hanson and Norman Doidge would really like that term if you haven't shared it with them yet it reminds me and you know we'll we'll close there's so many places we could go and that makes super excited for number two when we come and actually get into how to do self-directed adaptive plasticity it reminds me that we made this paper and we never published it yet and I haven't shown it to you but it was a literature review on adult neural restructuring and so it was neurogenesis Naruto synaptogenesis and synaptic cleaving and to show that yes it's nice to get childhood right but you're not screwed if you don't get childhood right and that you can actually radically through many methods increase neural restructuring of all kinds and so I'll send it to you love to get your feedback on it maybe before we do this next one on on the topic yeah I'd love to take a read I mean I think that it's true you know you had this amazing window plasticity early in life but for better for worse you weren't in the driver's seat with no adult and you start engaging the neural machinery that you that you built and it was built for you and but it maintained his capacity which is to engage in a self-directed adaptive plasticity or you can just take what you got and run the run the gears as they exist and so I think it's our responsibility as human beings because our species is a conscious species to constantly try and become a better version of ourselves which is effectively saying or essentially saying to constantly try and update our neural architecture in a way that allows us to show up better in the world and better serve ourselves and humanity and end the non the nonhuman species on the planet as well I should thank you so Andrew thank you for taking the time and being here and sharing cutting edge research coming out of Stanford and other related places that both really kind of reifies a lot of perennial philosophy and wisdom as well as actually gives us new insights that are refinements that we didn't have before and that is leading to the development of new tools I'm super excited for part 2 which will do soon so everyone who is interested in this and it's like okay great I'm interested in the increased frontal override before your process how do I do then we'll get into that next time and thank you Andrew look forward to it thanks so much it's been a real pleasure and I promise that for part two that the backdrop will be a little more attractive than my hotel room and what doesn't matter where I am but it's warm and cozy I have nothing to complain about but thank you Daniel and and thanks to the neuro hacker collective you guys are doing terrific work really appreciate your time thanks man thank you for listening to collective insights for the full show notes on this episode and for more great interviews visit us at neuro hacker.com slash collective insights if you liked this episode please subscribe to the podcasts and leave us a 5-star review on iTunes

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Keywords: Neurohacker, Neurohacker Collective, Neurohacker.com, qualia, nootropics, nootropic, nootropic stack, science, complex science, systems science, startups, startup, supplementation, supplements, health, hardware upgrade, upgrade, podcast, collective, collective insights, iTunes, stitcher, episode, daniel schmachtenberger, schmachtenberger, fear, courage, Dr. Andrew Guberman, andrew huberman, stanford, huberman labs

Id: se_PmcIDFww

Length: 77min 49sec (4669 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 29 2017