Dr. Huberman - Stanford Neuroscientist

hey folks this is Mark divine with the unbeatable mind podcast thanks for joining me today welcome back I appreciate that you're you know taking your time to listen to this podcast and to share this these interesting things that we're exploring here because I know your time is valuable and you got a million things vying for your attention so super appreciate it and I'm humbled for your attention today I've got dr. Andrew Huber minim we'll just call him Andrew who is a neuroscientist that right-hand room neuroscience ok not a brain surgeon but a neuroscientist from Stanford and I'm gonna give him more formal introduction in a moment but before I do let me remind you and I'm gonna say this a few more times on this podcast but we've got our summit coming up we've got about 20 slots left this is an extraordinary event and it's the last year we're gonna run it in the same format that we've run I will be changing it up next year so if you've heard about it and you're on the fence then this is your opportunity to come maybe your last opportunity to come it's November 29th to December 2nd Carlsbad three days of really awesome unbe mind training some terrific speakers connection with your tribe your boat crew accountability and we'll be building our five mountain integrated training plan for 2019 and if you'd like to come are you thinking about it go check it out at summit unbe Lamine calm and if you decide to pull the trigger I'll give you $300 off and use the code p OD 300 pod 300 also quick update on our burpees for vets I don't know if you've heard this but we're doing 22 million burpees this year but a small tribe of a couple hundred people who jumped on the bandwagon with me impressive yeah 22 million and the goal is to raise money and awareness for vets who are suffering from post-romantic stress you know how big a problem that is a lot of is associated with brain health and meaning and tribe and traction you know stuff like that you know just not really having a sense of purpose after these guys get on the military or the ladies so um we're gonna you know we're suffering for them so each of us have selected a number mine is a hundred thousand which means I'm doing 300 a day even on my broken foot right fantastic it's no big deal so we're gonna raise $250,000 and it's through the courage foundation if you want to learn more go to burpees 4vets calm if you want to check out the courage foundation go to feed courage org thanks for your support all right so here's the formal intro Andrew Shue Berman American neuroscientist why did we have to say American either yeah okay neuroscientist I'm just reading I'm just reading this American neuroscientist he's a professor up at Stanford University he's got his lab up there he's making super interesting contributions to the fields of brain development plasticity neural regeneration and repair I'm going to talk to him about a lot of things breathing and neuroplasticity how the how the eyes and the brain receive information and also affect your environment courage and fear so really interesting stuff dr. human went or got his PhD from UC Davis and did all his postdoc work up a Stanford for a while he was down here at San Diego with the Salk Institute which is right down the road from me he runs his lab like I said the who Berman land of up it up at Stanford we've got a lot to talk about so thanks for being here Andrew and I appreciate the personal minute well thanks for having me here I've heard a lot about you and your program here and I'm looking forward to the conversation yeah likewise as you know you know and you don't mind and my background as a seal and as a yogi and as a martial artist is really the subjective side of neuroscience like I really you know approach things through trial and error through experimentation and relying on you know the word of people who've been doing breathing techniques and visualization and meditation and also my seal training and candidates who have succeeded and I always find it fascinating when someone comes from the opposite side of the spectrum the objective perspective to say what is really happening in the brain when you do these things or how can we combined you know objective and subjective or east and west to create a better or fuller picture so but before we get into like details tell us about yourself like how did you where'd you grow up what were some of the influences in your life that led you you know kind of on the path you are today so I was actually born in Stanford Hospital okay my dad's from South America my mom's from the East Coast they met moved to the area long before there was internet or Silicon Valley and when it was a reasonably priced place to live for most people that's why they landed there my dad was and is a scientist is their theoretical physicist there wasn't much physics in South America no opportunities for physicists so actually he came to the United States on a naval scholarship really yep so and so so did you have to work for the Navy he did he's done some work in contract with the military but he eventually became a particle physicist he was involved in the early development of chaos theory oh yeah so so I grew up till you had some brains in your family I had some brains in my family I was and my mom's a children's book writer and so you know I you know growing up I would say from zero to about 12 I had a pretty normal childhood from the standpoint of you know growing up playing with kids down the street everything was kind of typical American household and I had a lot of influence and in terms of thinking about science and in the world and so I can remember a conversation with my dad he used to walk me down the street on my way to kindergarten and then he would let me go at a certain point because I used to pick up this young lady also a kindergartner to go to school and he I think he said something like you don't want me there when you pick her up it's good if you just take her on your own he's a old fashioned y being Argentine yeah and I remember asking him and we both remember the conversation so I don't think we're confabulating here but I said what do you do and he said I'm trying to figure out how the universe works and I said do you like it and he said I'll never forget his answer he said for me it's like the same feeling that you have when it's your birthday the next day that's how I feel every single day when I go to work and I thought wow like that yeah I could relate to the feeling and and he was wise enough to tell me about the feeling because as opposed to giving me a bunch of details about what he did which I wouldn't understand and so I said okay well I want to do that and he also had the wisdom to say actually you don't want to do physics because by time you're old enough to do physics most of the major problems are gonna be worked out and I think he was right he insists that might just might be in my office yeah you know I think he felt like you know that there's a golden age and a golden opportunity to get into science and I'll talk about that a little bit in terms of my neuroscience career because I feel blessed enough to have entered neuroscience very young and and I really felt like I came into it the best time in terms of tools in relationship and also I see what he's saying in terms of like having like a broad profound impact on the body of knowledge as opposed to like when it gets more and more refined and you just study more narrow and narrow things once the field gets fully fleshed out so yeah if you want to crack into new problems that people haven't had access to I don't really like to phrase low-hanging fruit but in some sense low-hanging fruit and so I said well what should i what should i do then and he said well we don't know much about the brain and I said okay well I'll do that and so I remember that conversation and and so that was when you're a teenager and so I was six when that when we had that kid yeah I've always been very curious about the world and I've loved I love animals I think animal movement in particular but animal cognition has a lot to teach us about how the brain works kind of its fundamentals and we talked about that in terms of you know we we love to think about the human animal so much in terms of our brain machinery and what makes us so advanced but you know a lot of what drives us are more primitive circuitry's know that animals can tell us a lot about because each one represents a kind of extreme form of those circuitry's my name is so that was an early event that I remember well and then for better for worse probably a little bit of both from about 12 to 19 I was actually a pretty troubled kid my parents had a very high conflict divorce you know they and at that time there weren't that many divorce families you know back then they called them broken homes now you never hear that phrase right and it was just one of these circumstances where I went from a lot of structure to very little structure so actually spend very little time in high school I was not a very good student I had a lot of got into a lot of fights I was pretty wild kid I fell deeply into the skateboarding community which was a great thing for me at the time actually some of the guys that I knew back then have gone on to have tremendous careers in skateboarding and things related to it but there was really no parental oversight I was never really into drugs and alcohol never really liked that but I definitely had a lot of aggression I had a lot of intensity and I didn't know where to put it so is it skateboarding and then again in fights and we were kind of we were feral kids and so you know we basically just kind of ran ourselves and you know your brother I had an older sister but mainly I was hanging around you know skateboarding is an interesting sport because you get kids you go to skate parking you get kids they're like six and seven and eight and nine hang out with full-grown adults yeah so I was exposed to a lot in those years and it was a small community then and and so I stay for better for us because I feel really blessed to have had that kind of freedom and exposure so I started spending a lot of time in San Francisco hung out with a lot of guys that who grew up a lot harder than I did saw a lot of drugs saw a lot of violence I had a good friend get killed I had a good friend commit suicide a good friend do enough methamphetamine to go schizophrenic so I was exposed to a lot of kind of hardship I can see that being the good side right I mean it's hard hard as it was you got the school of hard knocks in your life yeah it was it was the other thing I might point out is now knowing what we know about how the brain develops for a teenage brain to be doing skateboarding and all of that you know complex dynamic balancing and constant movement and pushing the envelope of what the body can do yeah it was probably pretty extraordinary you know I mean like yeah I don't know if you could ever like reflect back and how your brain would have developed if you hadn't done that you know yeah it's interesting working you know in some ways it has a lot of similarities to science in the sense that you know you I got comfortable working very hard at one thing over and over and over and over and there was some social reinforcement for getting it right right and it was a lot of fun and and it hurt and I'm comfortable with pain you know I understood the relationship between effort and pain and outcomes pretty pretty early on right and and so I continued that for a while but then it became clear to me that I wasn't gonna be a professional skateboarder I wasn't gonna do much in that that at that time I had my first girlfriend and she made the good decision to go off to college so she went off to UC Santa Barbara where I realized that if I didn't get down there I was going to lose her so I actually camped out in the parking lot outside her dorm because I was a year behind her in school hung out and and at that time I had pretty much dropped skateboarding and I gotten into Muay Thai kickboxing okay I really like the martial arts I needed something to put my aggression in my energy into and Muay Thai showed up in my life and so started doing Thai boxing and loved that went off to school in Santa Barbara somehow I have no idea how but I took the SAT and I'm a should get in probably some early schooling helped me there with kind of a graduate from high school did graduate high school not with high honors you know actually I showed up at graduation a lot of people like what are you doing here but went down to Santa Barbara and my first year was a total disaster I you know people were partying hard I was I was just totally distracted by the social components and still getting into fights and and just really just kind of a mess and so it was January 4th 1994 I remember very well I got into a fight with a bunch of guys it was totally pointless it was one of those things you know like most street violence he could be avoided I mean they initiated it but there was a there was an out and I didn't take it and I remember walking back to the place where I was staying at that time I was delivering bagels living with a pet ferret in this like squatter place because I'd learned in those years you know why pay rent when you can just stay in an empty place I I'd become pretty street smart but that day I realized that you know okay I'm 19 years old there's a girl this is not going anywhere you know sooner or later I'm gonna end up dead or in jail and so what I did is I moved home put myself into Community College I didn't quit Santa Barbara I took a leave of absence is different moved home once Community College I consider briefly becoming a firefighter cuz I was really I like physical engagement I think physical engagement is really key still for me now in terms of kind of anchoring in practices but I just I made this decision I said okay I don't care what it is but I'm gonna do something in academics because I think my body might not keep up over time I'm I don't know if I can ever become a professional athlete but I think I have a pretty good mind and I was you know I was blessed with that by virtue of maybe some genetics and some early upbringing and I'm gonna give it a go and so I went from basically like a straight C student to a straight A student I went back to Santa Barbara I lived alone and for me it was weight training running and studying and I set my goals then I wrote them down as a you know PhD at 30 I wanted to be a professor by time I was 35 and I wanted ten-year about time I was 40 you know kid you know I'm happy to say I made those marks not without a lot of not without a lot of commitment and work and sacrifice but I had so much fun and then it's funny I don't think naturally studying brain that came from your father and the conversation early childhood yeah yeah so so you know I've committed my adult professional life to trying to understand how the brain works how it can change and and then in more recent years I decided look I think academic papers and publications and coming up through the ranks is great but there's a lot that neuroscience has to provide the general public how can i educate the general public about those things and also start to connect with people that are familiar with practices that can make us better much in the same way that people can augment their physical body and health on their ways to make your mind better and so this is an especially suitable podcast discussing this so I made you know I have a couple friends I'm close with we're in the SEAL team community some friends in the martial arts community people in the art community you know I think there's a lot to learn from every I don't call them subcultures but from these micro tribes and tribes and some of those more clandestine tribes as you know have real gifts to offer the general public in the form of things that are not just information but are actionable and I think the mind is still to me the most exciting and important problem that for me to work on anyway and anyway that that's the arc of the storm is everything right the my everything that everything we create in the world comes from our mind first we think it we see it think it and then we create it you just described basically the whole rationale between behind my program and viola mind I mean I started training SEAL candidates in 2007 and I don't know if you know this but I'm it's interesting to talk about I was very much because of my experience in SEAL training because my deep immersion in zen and the martial arts and i would do these like long retreats at the zen mountain monastery where we mix hardcore karate training with our you know but Zen monks you know sitting us down for hours a day I had mix you know profound transformation through those immersive environments and so when I started training the seals at first I was doing on a government contract and that was they wouldn't let me do what I wanted to do and fortuitously I got that contract stolen for me by Blackwater billion-dollar company and so I said well I'm gonna start training people you know just privately and people who wanna pay you know are okay to pay that was the foundation of seal fit and then I said I really want to create kind of an American warrior monk Academy and so I launched a 30-day seal fit Academy and people were coming and living with me only like four or five or six at a time initially and so for 30 days I would train from you know 5:00 in the morning until 7:00 or 8:00 at night sometimes we're on the clock and we would cap it off with what's now the 50 hour Kokoro camp which was like a hell week simulation and these individuals were just going through this and crazy transformation like physical studs and totally focused and they were all going through buds and just dominating right 90% success rate Wow well during this period you can under the the physical part was pretty easy I got put together elements of CrossFit and strength training and Navy SEAL style training and I said what do i what do these guys need to be do to be prepared for combat let's prepare for combat if they're prepared for that then buds will be easy so that became the seal fit operator wads but then I said well where do I have the draw for the mental training because the seals didn't do mental training believe in not it just kind of happened hey they had one class for me when I went through buds on the big four and it was interesting but they didn't teach us how to do it and so I said well where else have I gotten this training I said well I got it from Nakamura and the martial arts and I've gotten it from yoga and I've practiced his stuff for years on my own so this is what it's going to be and so I built on Beal in mind and it was all basically coddled together from practices have been around for thousands of years so the information for how to develop the mind is old you know what I mean it's old the whole science of yoga Tibetan Buddhism Zod's in Buddhism all this is all about mental development agreed and now we know people thinks is some mystery and so I I kind of like to take the fool out of the kung-fu and just strip it from all that cultural and just offer it up and simple practice like the box breathing we talked about so anyways I don't know why I needed to go into that history lesson there but I thought it'd be informative like that's where I'm fascinated but I've like I said earlier before we started that I don't really have much grounding in what's happening in neuroscience besides what I've read and podcast you know with folks so I guess bring you back to you what you know what is this sweet spot for you in terms of how you can educate the public on a way that they'll accept it besides just hey mark Divine's a Navy SEAL and he if he says it works it must work right because for me that's gotten me so far but we now have a lot of credibility we have a lot of creds but we need the science behind it so what's the sweet spot in terms of educating the public about how to improve their brains and functioning and healthy whatnot yeah I mean one of my main directives for my life at this point is to try and educate people about what we do know about how the brain works because I won't claim to know everything about how the brain works certainly and and we don't as a field yet know I mean it is extremely mysterious and we're talking about the brain you mean the biological organ of the brain are you are you talking about the mind yeah probably the proper way to phrase it would be the the nervous system so because that include them up the the brain and body and and then of course and all the things that interface with the nervous system like the gut and the vascular system so the whole self really so do you believe that the body is the mind the whole body and the brain would be the executive governor an agent yes except that I prefer to just think about as the nervous system because you know for instance the there's and some people are now hearing more about things like polyvagal theory and at the vagus if so I teaching her anatomy to medical students and having a long time at San Diego and at Stanford if I were to pull out the vagus nerve from a human and place it on the table in front of us you would be blown away by how extensive this thing is really it's a superhighway and the idea that the vagus nerve is only parasympathetic sort of more only on the you know quote-unquote calming end of the nervous system is just false it's not sympathetic branches it goes everywhere from up and near the ears to innervating all these internal organs it's like its own and the vagus nerve goes on the front of the body right that's right not the spine it's not related to the spinal not intricately no and so the you know it has so many branches with so many connections that you could almost think of it as its own main branch in the nervous system so we have central nervous system peripheral nervous system there's enteric nervous system which is the gut for sensing when your gut is full so I just like these all these all relate with the vagus nerve that's the heart mind and the gut in mind is what we've been through not least but I've been intuiting and the research is that communicates with the brain through the vagus that's right that's right and so you know my lab these days is working a lot on how peripheral States meaning breathing and heart rate and levels of autonomic arousal interface with how the brain proper the part that's in the skull is working to influence decision making under threat and things of that sort we could talk about that but I you know but before we go there is there any condition where an individual would be cut off from their vagus nervous system just like you know you say a spinal injury we were talking about my friend dr. John Atwater who spinal cord injury so he's obviously cut off from some of the you know functioning of his it's interesting I'm not aware of any I mean the vagus nerve like most peripherally located nerves will regenerate out so brain and spinal cord central nervous system won't regenerate after injury there's some stem-cell addition there's the some capacity for regeneration but by and large it doesn't regenerate on its own whereas the peripheral nervous system if you cut a peripheral nerve it regrows at a very predictable rate of about a millimeter per day interesting um the exception to that would be cold blooded vertebrates like fish and frogs you can basically take out an eye which is part of the central nervous system cut the optic nerve stick in a new eye and it'll regrow so the central nervous system of cold-blooded vertebrates regenerates like gangbusters we don't nobody knows why um a lot of programs looking at that so um you know one of my main directives is to try and educate the public about what is the basic kind of structure of the nervous system as it matters for them right right and then also to illustrate some key points about the the brain and how it works so for instance a lot of people like to think in terms of lizard brain versus more cognitive brain that's fine and they like to think in terms of like okay the amygdala sphere one thing I'd really like to get across I'll just use this opportunity as a point to get across is that the brain doesn't work that way the way the brain works is a lot like if a song on a piano you would never say that one key say you know D flat is the song just like you wouldn't say that the amygdala is fear the amygdala is one component of the fear response and it's really a process not an event and so we make those is that just the mechanism that senses good versus bad yes which that's right so amygdala is probably the best way to describe the amygdalas role is not as a fear station but one involved in threat detection up detection right so this is a safe environment especially with the crowd that's located in this building but if someone threatening were to walk through the door we would orient to that and assess it and the amygdala is can be activated under the right circumstances but the actual quote-unquote fear response is harbored in a different set of structures things like the stria terminalis the names don't matter that's another thing I'm trying to do is kind of demystify that that the naming actually means anything these are just structures that were named because neuroanatomist stumbled on them and they needed a common language so I'll try to use as few acronyms as possible I'll try and use as little mysterious language as possible so I you know I think that if people understood that every thought every feeling every behavior was actually the reflection of dynamics that is lots of brain areas becoming active activated in sequence mm-hmm they might my hope is that they might start to think about their thoughts differently so you know a thought I like to think I was just kind of like a pop up on you know when you don't have a good filter on in it internet connection right and they they really don't have any meaning it could be spontaneous firing of some key on the piano so to speak or some neural structure in the head so when you start thinking about what should be driving your behavior or decision-making you want to be very selective about what's coming through and I think that's the kind of mindfulness that we that's vaguely discussed you know mindfulness has we haven't placed a clear definition on mindfulness for the public that's something else I'd like to do flow mindfulness that those are great terms for conversation but putting a sharper definition on them is important so the opposite of mindfulness would be mindlessness and I can't measure that which doesn't mean it's not a useful term but I think to me mindfulness is this ability to realize that your internal dialogue or thoughts if you will or feelings that they have value but not all but not all their value is created yeah yeah and I think once somebody starts to do that and starts to think about their brain as an organ which isn't perfect but it's designed to do certain things and that was seriously biased it's seriously biased that's right then I think you can operate from a place that they're more more control and and anyway that's that's those are two of the major directives the other one is really about plasticity I'd love for people to understand better about what the brains haven't found a way to say this yet but I've been searching for one without making it rhyme but their capacity for plasticity is is really immense but it's very different than the kinds of things that allowed people to shape themselves when they were children as an adult you have the ability to script your own neurology and be truly whoever you want to be in terms of personality behavior and feel but it takes some real work yeah and the question is what is that work and you're obviously developing programs and have developed programs to do and complete that work and how does the general population access that right you brought up so many interesting things let me start the last one so I agree with you a hundred percent like you can create whatever outcome you want you know within the reasons of you know within the boundaries of your of your genetics and epigenetics right so you can if you want to completely transform who you are if you want to learn something radically new like if I wanted to go master rock climbing I'm not probably at this age gonna climb Half Dome you know without ropes or you know I mean you might maybe never know but um the important thing there is to choose wisely right because there's only so much time and if you choose something that it's not in alignment with something you're passionate about or something that you know is gonna be meaningful to you than you're wasting your time and I have this where I'm going with this is I have a little bit of problem with the hacking community even though I'm you know I'm an investor a neuro hacker like I know you are and I'm friends with Dave Asprey but the hacking community is kind of random it's just you know just do this and do that and do this and do that and it's gonna have some sort of benefit and that's true it might it might be a short-term benefit it might be a long-term benefit but it's not really a directed program and I've always been teaching people that if you want to change your life transform yourself then either practice and that practice has a daily methodology to it right and it's got to be consistent it's got to be repetitive you got to be disciplined with it and at first it doesn't seem easy but then slowly it becomes joyful all right until all of a sudden you've become that which you're you know you chosen you know to be your destiny and I think the hacking community has missed that and they're just looking for quick fixes it's almost like you know take this pill it's do this breathing exercise and some of it you know breathing exercise we'll get into that you know but I want to go down this rabbit hole too much but some of them can be downright dangerous yeah absolutely you know and I mean and you not everyone should be doing wim HOF or whatever I mean absolutely I think that so one thing I've been trying to do in recent years as I've been on what I call sort of a listening tour of what's out there and trying to place some structure on it in order to make better decisions for myself and the practices that I undertake and also try and help evolve some of the language and direction around this I can already sense that we're aligned in in this idea that you know you have to be considerate of where you're trying to get to right what you're doing so so a distinction that I've come up with recently and I'm certain I'm not the first to come up with this but the way I like to think about things is anytime someone's talking about a practice or a or a tool or a pill or whatever it is to think about tools for augmenting or changing the mind that are either inside out or outside in so it so coffee as I'm drinking now as an outside-in tool I want to get a bit of a autonomic arousal lift so I do something or ingest something great but there are other tools that are inside out which is I could do you know we could do a breathing protocol or I'm where I could just close my eyes and think about something that really excites me and I can start generating shifts in my nervous system that are equally powerful right right now neither one is good or bad it's not a question of when you when you elect to use one or the other right and I do think and I'll risk saying that individuals who have a lot of inside out tools and know how to access them in real time are more powerful individuals because they don't need the they don't need stuff and they know they don't need stuff so if they're drinking coffee that's great they can still enjoy that it's not about being some sort of austere monk but they know and I actually would love you know I was saying that you know real confidence is knowing that you can handle yourself and some variety in spite of circumstances right and so it's interesting you know I have a couple close friends as I mentioned from the team's community and we talk a lot about the work that you guys did obviously you guys don't talk about for good reason but I think that what's interesting is that many of them perhaps all of them have a tremendous number of inside out tools at their disposal I know people outside the team's community that have inside-out tools at their disposal and they acquire a different kind of approach to life also because I think like in science the military is deeply steeped in protocol and the idea that you have to crawl then walk then run right right I'm not gonna walk someone in my lab and say okay let's publish a paper in nature you start you say let's come up with a great problem and let's brainstorm it and then you you know you iterate through a number of different steps that sometimes goes three years you know the rewards come very seldom right and most people won't even recognize those rewards so there are some similarities there but inside out tools I think are extremely valuable outside in tools are extremely valuable the biohacking community has been mainly focused on consumer products that are outside in right and they have their place but I think that ultimately it'll be the people who really think deeply about evolving these inside out practices like yourself I'd like to someday include myself in that camp but for now I've mainly been trying to figure out what's out there and there are tremendous tools as you mentioned that go back thousands of years and so that's a key distinction and that's one that I just liked it I love that I would and we don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater the way I look at it is some of these outside-in tools for the layperson who doesn't have experience with the inside out or didn't have a Zen master like I did there are a heck of a great way to begin the process but if that's all there is then they can become a crutch and the problem with that is when the happens which it always does your crutch isn't going to be there for you and if you can't activate the mental process internally then you're kind of lost that's a very very good point you mentioned something that I'm intrigued by especially a lot lately was the idea that I think people assume that big things are gonna come from big changes but I'm starting to pay more attention to the kind of the literature and some of the more evolving research around dopamine reward for small incremental changes so in addition to believing and this is just my belief that people that have a lot of access to inside-out tools are quote unquote more powerful individuals in life or can steer their life in the directions they want I also feel that the dopamine reward system can come from external sources right you know people applause social engagement those kinds are all very important tribal connection is very important social engagements very important but there's there are people who are very good at self rewarding without announcing it to anybody and if you can move small steps if you make small steps in the direction that you want to go and you self reward even just by telling yourself good job I'm doing well I'm not failing or I'm failing but I'm gonna fail better whatever language you want to use the self reward mechanism is something that I think hasn't been discussed much and is actually the most powerful service and we have to evolve ourselves because as you mentioned when the stress response hits you know I would say you know every practice is great but show me how someone handles it when their pulse rate is one fifth right you know it's we could you can meditate all day but then when you're stuck in the freeway and you get that text message that says something that's really disturbing or troubling or emergency that's the test right and so any you it's interesting because one of the first things we do with the seal candidates is say you can't regulate your psychology until you regulate your physiology because the physiology would just send your psychology out of whack you mean so that arousal control through the you know primarily through breathing but also through the internal dialogue is critical and then it's the internal dialogue that gets your mind under control and framed in a positive you know that's self reward like you talked about and then you've started to create the conditions to where you can make better decisions it's pretty interesting right there is a there's a distinct process right and so part of the teaching of the public is you know you don't go from zero to hero you're not gonna immediately go from crisis to mindfulness right first we do this to regulate the physiology to trigger the autonomic nervous system and parasympathetic nervous system and then we do this to begin to shift from fear to courage from negative to positive and then we'll do this to begin to open the space to be able to see things more clearly and is that flow state and to make much better decisions in that in that crisis and that can all be trained which is a beautiful thing you know I I say we have these skills we call the big four and we train and when you train them it becomes an automatic flow activator you just start doing the process boom boom boom and then boom you're in the flow state it's powerful yeah that was a little advertisement there by the way no it's great I think your mind works no it's great I mean it's um I think the idea of you know breaking down a task into a smaller set of steps right is fundamental you see this across disciplines right they're not sport or military or elite military or academic and then so I guess one thing that I'd like to offer up is this idea that you know there's this kind of weird shame around self-rewarding because we think that people you know it's kind of shameful to say oh I did such a great job because I you know pointed my running shoes in the direction of the door in the morning but that's actually probably what you're what you should be doing right you have to tell anybody this stuff can all be covert like my Craven said make your bed it feels good that's right yeah that's right applaud yourself and it's in the direction you want to go and so iterating that over and over and over I always say you know people that can convert stress and thought into task completion remarkable people and I see this in my in my laboratory right I have a graduate student right now who incidentally is working on fear and courage and and she's remarkable and she's remarkable in her ability to show up in lab and regardless of what's going on to move into task completion and to continue doing that until she has to go off and complete her next task she has this ability to just kind of set the horizon it whatever she can control complete that move to the next thing and it's funny she's actually bringing the one person in my lab who's not um including me who's who's not tethered to a lot of social media and distractions right and so that might be a component it might be chicken egg here so we don't know what's what but I think that micro you know micro micro finishing lines and being able to establish those for oneself are it's something we're not trained in as young people maybe the skateboarding thing I learned a little bit of that you but you try try try slam slam slam and then make it you know and I do think that a big reward at the end of something you have to be you have to be working in service to or in pursuit of something big that's the purpose part but I think in recent years there's been a lot out there and I'm a big believer in the kind of why stuff and purpose and mission but we focus so much on that that I think we've moved away in this culture around personal evolution from trying to understand how to get more out of the micro increments right now as simple as just telling yourself inside good job and you think well that's kind of silly that what is that worth well it's worth what you didn't say in exchange for that right that you're wasting your time or whatever it is every you know every positive thought is a replacement right so this isn't just motivational stuff your neurology you can't really attend to more than two things at once right so you're not you so I've always thought okay I'm not gonna suppress negative thinking it's never gonna work for me so can I use it as a vessel right you take it for a ride or it can take you for a ride and and I think that's you know we're talking kind of abstract terms here but the deeper neurology to support this is in the form of the stress response in reward mechanisms and these are primitive hardwired systems in the brains of all animals and you can imagine so let's just pretend that we were a small foraging doglike creature without a whole lot of opportunity to plan past five ten minutes or a game let's give the dog some benefit so they can plan for a day now like our dinner tonight so that animal is gonna start foraging and looking for what it needs and when it finds it where it gets on a scent it's you can absolutely bet that it's gonna reward itself or it will be self rewarded internally without consciously realizing oh I'm on the right track it's not gonna say I'm on the right track but maybe I'm not gonna find what I need it's gonna continue to hone its exploration so that eventually when it arrives at the food or the kill that it needs or the water that it needs with a mate that it needs there's the big payoff in the form of food or mating or kill or whatever it is that that animal cares about and so the dopamine reward system is kind of getting pulsed all along internally and then there's the big bolus of reward at the end you just described a large percentage of our population by the way those who are stuck in survival mode right around the world right and they might be not unlike that that's right and there are opportunities for dopamine rewards everywhere in our environment and so I think even everyday you like likes on Instagram there's nothing sinister about likes on Instagram but you have to ask yourself are you micro gee it's an external Mike's reward that's right I was gonna ask you about that cuz they're starting to be a lot of research now on the addictive quality of our devices you know whether it's whether you're cruising social media on your computer but most people now in your smartphones and my son is you know gots like fortunately he didn't grow up with it he didn't have it until because he was born in 99 so he didn't have it until it's like 8 or 9 so I think his brain had some grounding and you know that alternate universe that you and I grew up in but now he's completely stuck on the damn thing yeah so I am Steve Jobs who is local to me growing up I used to talk about you know why he would wear the same clothes every day right it's because he felt like he had a limited number of sort of decision-making units and so that just kind of took care of that maybe that's true maybe it's not but that's what he said makes sense to me I think I'd like to suggest the idea that we have a limited number of focus units per day as well so the ability to kind of set a goal and then accomplished that goal and then move the horizon to a new goal is something that we we do visually and so we so 40% of our brain as humans is visual and the visual system every time you what we call that visualization that includes visualization and kind of associative areas okay so imagery and then be able to build processing external images through our eyes plus internal imaging right and all the sorts of things are happening subconsciously like emotions of others and kind of conditions or spatial units like what the layout of this room is something that my brain has made sense of without me consciously really right and thinking about too much so are we're such visually driven animals and so every time you orient what we call faux v8 where you take the fovea which is the high acuity area of your eyes and you move them to a particular location in space there's an arousal that's associated with that an autonomic arousal or vigilance and there's some cost to that it's not bad I don't say cost and that it's depleting you but it's their number of units energy and you don't think about it because it's very light it's like it's like the penny slots right you're just kind of dumping pennies in you pay you know you do that long enough and you're gonna be out of you of your ration of money and so you have your your ration of energy unit and but the ability to do this is actually fundamental to all animals evolution and survival so if you look at a lion for instance they make that most of the time they they lay around during the day they're in a very person pathetic state and their gaze is not fixated on anything in particular they're licking themselves they're sleeping they're kind of now at some point during the day or week they decide to hunt and at that point everything changes about their physiology and they start to anchor their vision in what's called a vergence eye movement with their eyes now move together they fo v8 to a particular location in space and now they have to make some very careful space-time assessments about how fast animals are moving how fast they're moving their degree of camouflage they're using theory of mind to think how visible am I by that other animal so they're now thinking for the other animal a very intense set of operations then they go out they they hopefully get their kill they eat and then they go back to this parasympathetic State humans on the other hand even though we have this ability to transition between these more panoramic vision type relaxed modes and foliated goal Direction modes the phone in particular but all day long we're in these foliated attention consuming mode and this is something my lab is actually working on in contrast to the lion there are animals all grazing animals which essentially just graze for grass they have panoramic vision to detect predators if they were to show up when an animal like a cow or a sheep or a goat is essentially a lawnmower and I want to take away from there I don't you know with with it with a heartbeat I mean I don't want to take away from their other you know wonderful commands I love animals of all kinds but they're grazing grazing grazing and all they have to worry about is if there's a threat they're so placid that if one of members if one of the members of their species is picked off by us or by a line they go right back to grazing then they're not traumatized in and they're so plaza and they're always in panoramic vision and so one thing we've been experimenting with in the lab is the extent to which being in panoramic mode allows you to relax your autonomic nervous system very quickly and when your info be ated mode you're in kind of a vigilance state and so the phone is is it's a new invention for humankind in which rather than driving and listening to music and going into panoramic vision which is what happens when you drive you're working purely on peripheral vision which incidentally is faster processing you can detect things coming in much faster more information some boxers and learn to relax and not get fixated on the guy's shoulder or the guy's feet or the guy's chest or anything because you can actually start to see things coming in in kind of an arc like motion you shift into what's called the magnocellular system which is much faster bigger pipes faster communication more or less in the nervous system bigger axons faster electrical communication when I fo v8 I'm in looking at details I'm starting to process it's very costly and the phone and reading your phone is I blew it and we're gonna have data on this soon so this is still kind of in the mode of hypothesis and speculation but the phone is draining your attentional resources every time you look at it and I need and we didn't evolve to do this we should not say that it's bad but some people have a lot more attentional capacity than others now the thing that resets this of your kind of attentional units is very clear and that's sleep right and what's interesting about sleep is during sleep not only is there plasticity and learning but sleep is the one time in which your space time relationships are completely untethered right if we were in the dream right now and 1-year old seal team buddies walked in through the door and then my dog walked in we could have a conversation about that wouldn't be weird it's like a psychedelic trip in real time but it's the space-time fluidity there's something about sleep that allows us to anchor our ability to set goals micro increment micro reward work toward purpose and I find it very interesting that so much of the early SEAL team screening process is yes it's physical right but from what I understand and I've never gone through it or been there but there are guys who show up who can do an immense number of pull-ups push-ups these are physical specimens that are way beyond the norm or the mean but ultimately what starts to call people and their multiple things that call people for my understanding is sleep deprivation where you take a normal function human being and they all apart right and so a lot of what you're screening for in a process like that is who can maintain this ability to set a horizon move toward it complete then going to panoramic vision and figure out what's required of me find a new fixation point complete them you're just describing the life process in kind of a microcosm a little bit and whereas if you're only in panoramic mode you're never gonna survive because you're never gonna set a goal and go this is the chill-out phenomenon it's great but you have to balance that with the hyper focus so it's the ability to tether or toggle rather back and forth between hyper focus and panoramic life if you will that really I think makes people effective or hyper I love it and I think it can be trained up totally I think the training I think the screening process selects for people that are have a natural ability for that but as your training program you know suggest and the higher numbers and people that get through it you know it's something that can be learned yeah and I'm very interested at how neuroscience can help contribute to not only that for purposes of military but also for the general public because I think the people don't suffer from lack of motivation necessarily I think it's just that their energy is just poorly distributed yeah and research on willpower is basically saying that as well as as you make decisions during the day your willpower right and basically what they're saying is the energy that your brain is using is tiring you out and you can't you make that's poor decisions toward the end of the day so every time I look at my phone I have to I try and ask myself am i gaining something or giving something up maybe it's neutral and it and you know the phone is here to stay I mean it's for sure it's just how will you interact with it right I'm like you I'm trying to like reorganize my life around how often do I need do I even need to bring this with me you know what I mean so much it can do so much that we've allowed it to do that stuff that now we need it all day long because it's our banking it's our email it's our texting it's this and phone so maybe we need to untether some of those things and just leave the phone at home so it doesn't distract us and degrade our performance I didn't want to mention that in my book the way the seal I have a whole section on training relaxed gaze and focus gaze and I relate the story of you know as a seal Patrol you know this patrolling along in the dark toward a target and they're all in relaxed gaze there's just soft you know and especially at night obviously you have to use your peripheral vision peripheral vision is relaxed gaze night walking is relaxed gaze and it's just basically attention is turned inward the energy is flowing you know it's sucking in information like you said I love the language you use of processing very fast and the imprints are looking for pattern so your brain is looking for patterns and for the seal that's those patterns are recognizable until they're not and as soon as they're not and that could be you know a twig snapping over here or a sound of a champ you know around being chambered then they snap immediately into focus gaze right which you called foveal I love that why don't we always have to come up with weird words for things in the medical community like we just gotta focus I think that early what's interesting things are named mainly on structure not what the structure does which is unfortunate yeah um I think there's a great opportunity to evolve the nomenclature around neuroscience in the years to come I'd like to be a part of that insofar as it serves the audience right right because there are scientists being able to talk to other neuroscientists as useful but the general public also given that time most people originate pick up a book about neuroscience that's right like I don't understand that that's right and I think changing the language is something that is important or I'm making very accessible yeah that's interesting I love that I love that um and it can be trained you don't have to join the SEAL team to train focus and relax gaze and there's great benefit you know think think about like as a leader being able to really zero in on a task or you know another person's you know issues to help them but then to be able to like scan and just start to feel into what's happening let's say you're in a board meeting or you're giving a speech even I mean you can go back and forth shifting yeah I find I get a lot of questions about neuroscience and interfacing Republic and one of the ones I get more often than not is you know what do I think about this idea that there are hidden capacities within us right I think but for some reason we're intrigued by stories like oh this person has stroke and then they could play the piano or like you know and and I think one of the great capacities that we all Harbor in us and then and a lot of people have access these but many more have is this ability to set a goal on a on a micro scale mm-hmm accomplish that goal and move to the next thing it's just it it hurts a little bit I think um and I'm not the first to say this but things like confusion and strain and effort they were that's actually your brain trying out different configurations of firing to see what works it's not supposed to feel good it's not you know so I think as a culture you know it they there's more and more certainly in the fitness culture there's this idea that kind of growth is at the edge it's in those final reps it's in those final miles or steps then you really grow but I think the same is true for mental operations the I you know I love the idea of a flow state and moving into things where things are seamless and fast and and wonderful but I can honestly say I mean some of the the hardest mental work I've ever done then is the work two days later you get the insight or you get the understanding I think most people don't like that feeling and and yet we all crave growth and so I think looking at the stress process as a point of growth is something that I think is starting to take hold more on the on the idea of stress I just was reminded to think you know that there's sort of I sometimes joke about the the Wellness community not to poke fun in it but to kind of prompt its evolution and what I mean by that so I feel like there's kind of three major approaches to stress one is it can hijack you nobody wants that so there's no there are no books out there on how to how to get hijacked by stressed more often that's not what anyone was we all seem to be sent off of that an opportunity that's an opportunity right and then there's the opportunity to learn how to tamp down stress and that's where most of the literature and information and is out there right now learning how to how to control the stress response I think that there's value in that and then there's this third category which I call adaptive apathy which is the learning how to how to not care which is a different approach but probably not a good one but then there's this fourth category that I'm very intrigued by I'm feeling you're in this in this category and it's a much rarer one which are the people who have realized that with stress there's an opportunity to excel beyond their existing capacity that there comes a point in which not stressing is not an option because the stress response is actually something to grab on to and and ride to higher levels of red stress itself is just stress we have you stress and you have distress mm-hmm we want to get away from distress everyone you know get toward you stress which is the type of stress where you control the response to it and you use it like you said to bring you to a higher state of awareness or growth or you know experiences mhm so I think you're right that's one of our key trainings the stress itself is just it is what it is there's always going to be something that can trigger stress mm-hmm and she responds to that you know whether you use that for growth or you know to go a little bit deeper into something or do you shine from it mm-hmm yeah I think human means you know we grow through challenge we have to experience a little bit of suffering mm-hmm if we don't then we experience a lot of suffering by you know letting the world just have its way with us yeah I agree and I think the kind of passivity that comes from just constantly seeking pleasure is is is really kind of it's insidious and then it neva tably leads people to be unhappy that's where as I and so we're talking kind of in coarse terms about you know in the I've been very struck by the extent to which physical practices at least in my life and in a lot of my observation has been the best entry point pressure to mental practices and and there's some there's one reason I like talking to the fitness and and some people in the military community is that they've already embraced the idea that they're trying to get better and they're looking for things to get better now this ability to kind of set goals micro reward and head towards greater rewards is the formula for plasticity it is what the brain needs to do as for any species in order to know how to get wins in the future right and I think that most people if you're lucky enough to grow up with a little bit of hardship and things mostly okay or even a lot of hardship you get to the point in life where if you survive your you know your teens and 20s where you get very good at doing that in a very restricted and narrow corridor of challenges and and this I see across all domains I see it in and there are exceptions of course by seeing people and military civilians businesspeople men women doesn't matter right myself included I'm not unique in this regard is that we get very good at learning how to do certain things well and a lot of things so so what's intriguing to me is that the process that can be used to learn lots of other things in is actually it or any other thing rather or get good at something or setting new purpose is exactly the same it's this idea of defining the end goal and if you don't know at least having enough trust that you're moving in the proper direction and then this micro and what I'm calling micro rewards micro self rewards leading to some bigger larger reward and what's interesting is that you know this kind of failures of a lot of people there's some very public figures right now I won't name that you look at how could they be so effective in one domain of life and such a colossal failure and another we're so colossal II bizarre in another and I think it's because this process we we're a lot like other animals where we get very good at one or two things and not good at a lot of other things but our human capacity lets us be good at a lot of things so what I love about the kinds of programs that you've developed and then I you know I think are getting extracted from a number of different sources and hopefully will be formalized for the general public I think they should be teaching this stuff in schools you know if I had known this stuff when I was in elementary school or you know when the brain is conceptionally plastic that we can actually learn a process a set of operations just like learning chin-ups there's some skill to learning pull-ups or chin-ups but really the more important thing is not about pulling yourself above the bar to be able to do that over and over it's about well can you climb a tree with that okay what is you know can you understand something about physical effort that can then be translating to the translated excuse me to running or translated to reading can you start to look at the the commonalities between those things it almost sounds kind of trivial but in the end it's the core operations of the brain that are important so I you know lots been made in of recently about connectomes like this connects to that there trillions of neurons the the more important thing to understand about the brain is it were in algorithms there are there are mathematical formulas which we don't yet understand as a field that the brain computes about space and time and self and other and empathy which are immensely complicated but they translate across domains so that you can go in we especially with your training into an environment and assess that environment assess that environment whether regardless of who the players are and make adaptive decisions about it that's an algorithm and so the what I said earlier about you know I think that's the sense of self-assuredness and confidence that people want the the more narrow your abilities are the more scared you should be about how you're gonna function and rendering right and yet we we've sort of trained ourselves not just to be distracted by technology but we're tend to be hyper productive in other answer to me the most dangerous situation is to be hyper productive income-earning and kind of good at one thing and then broadly distracted and kind of a lot of noise and chatter about everything else because that to me is a very very poorly directed life yeah you need that component of success but then at some point to realize yourself I think and I think we're missing out on a lot of potential in the world because we haven't learned what the core operations are and I I don't claim to know them but I think they have something to do with understanding how one as an individual through self-reflection sets goals what holds them back I've spent half a day thinking about my own procrastination which sounds kind of like academic across medians thinking about not everything right but actually by the end of that day I had a short list of the things that limp that kind of limit my ability move forward and a small list of things that allow me to move forward and gradually was able to kind of unbolt myself from that so I don't think there's any replacement for hard mental work the good news is it doesn't last that long right right anyway that was a little bit of a riff but to pick up on their riff we talk a lot about integration and so you know my philosophy is that the human being is a body mind spirit system right it's a very complex system and a lot of things going on a lot of algorithms going on but you can't divorce them ultimately and this is what we've done in our society you know we do a little physical training we used to do it through PE now we don't so some people are fortunate because they have some aptitude in that area because and then they get into sports whatever and they experience the benefits but a lot of you know larger swath of society doesn't so then they get disconnected from the body well that removes one at least one-third of the equation right there we teach we get strong cognitively and intellectually through our academic process but even that's incomplete because we're not training the whole mind the whole brain and we're certainly not training the heart mind the belly mind we're not training as an integrated whole we're just talking about memory and and consuming information which really limits us so that means that second part which we're actually strong in is incomplete and then the third part you know spirituality or spiritual strength or working with Qi or energy or you know life force through breathing practices through meditation through visualization through spiritual practices which are human practices have been stripped out of that and we've been led to believe that spirituality is basically do I go to church and am I a good person it's the moral aspect the moral side and the structural side so that third aspect of being human has been stripped of the most powerful components so in order to solve this problem we have to reintegrate in order to reintegrate we have to look at the human being as a whole body mind spirit system so the way we do that is to say okay there's a physical component there's the mental component there's the emotional component which is actually part of the mental but you know we want to separate to get people to understand it better then there's the intuitional component which is like the real subtle aspect of your mind learning to really experience what the messages of your gut your biome and the enteric nervous system and the vagal system what's that's telling you what's the information mean how do we process it is you know our belly in our heart don't speak to us in you know like symbolic language it speaks to us through imagery speaks to us through sensations through feelings gut reactions since and then the last part we don't use the term spirituals I want people to confuse it with religion but how do we find deep purpose and connect to our whole mind so the fifth is really more of an outcome as well as some practices and so if you start it you know if anyone listen to this they've probably heard me talk about the five months you start to practice every one of these or you have disciplines around each one of these five months and then you do them together every day so your workout becomes a five month training plan right where you link a very important purpose to the training you begin the training by where the breath practice which is going to base it breath is the the bridge between all three of these the body - spirit so the breath is going to it's going to train your physiology balance your physiology it's going to get you clear in your mind and start training you - you know what I call the perceiving mind as opposed to the cognitive mind and it's gonna connect you to the deep wellspring of energy that lies okay good now we're getting somewhere now we visualize the workout which is beginning to train the intuitive mind right and we anchor our workout to the emotional outcomes that we want right success you know greater physical health looking better in our bathing suit you know in the summer all that kind of stuff and in that way we can take a simple thing which used to be just going to the gym and turn it into a transformer to practice an integrated transformer to practice and over time what happens is physical improves the mental improves the emotional improves the intuitive improves the Kokoro heart mind and action spiritual line improve and instead of being gravely dysfunctional human beings or we're strong in one and weak on all the others like you described we start to level up and then all these start to your whole body mind system starts to work in a much more evolved and refined fashion which is experienced as better decisions more peace of mind contentment overall systemic health I mean it's it's just so simple yet so profound you know it's it's really it's hard to study for a scientist it's hard to break it down and study right because there's so much going on there yeah there's a lot going on there you know I'm struck by how it's part of a these are things that are accessible on a daily level you know um you know I I was born and raised and living the land of retreats right we have amazing places where people can leave and then these exist elsewhere too right where you can leave for two weeks and get total decompress so the whole notion of of doing you know of working like crazy and then resting like crazy to me it just seems not it's just it to me that the much more sane and useful practices are gonna be the ones that you can implement a daily and you just described how you know you can incorporate the mental into the physical and even some other components as well I think that um you know there isn't a lot of if I have one wish you know one wish it would be that just as we have physical education classes or at least I used to in in elementary school in high school and middle school that some scientifically grounded self-reflection self-directed plasticity tools would be taught in schools because then you would you would essentially generate an entirely new cohort of people that had an awareness I think it's starting and I think that will happen I think that um if I may there's a concept which as you were telling me this it kind of comes up I don't think that there's any specific lab result that we can tie to the holistic practices that you guys have developed but one thing that's interesting is when you start to think about the human capacity the human brain's capacity to set notions of time so when we talk about purpose or you know a goal or what's the meaning of life or what it what you're really doing is you're you're starting to dilate and contract your notion of time so in sleep space and time are totally fluid anything can happen right Abe Lincoln can walk in the room and you won't think it's strange and um there's a so I the way I think about the mind is the following imagine a kind of a glass sphere and that's you and I believe that you're always to some extent focused on your own self and then there's another sphere which is your second point of focus and I believe that it's very hard to have more than two points of focus I think there's a you know I don't think we can have three points of focus and that second point of focus maybe maybe some maybe you can but for sake of discovery you know the second point of focus like the coffee mug or you or our environment or we can focus on something totally different like a concept or the future of the past and those two things are tethered to one another because my physiology is gonna react to whatever it is that I visualize and see now that tether is can be set at whatever distance I want so you and I if we really want it it would be meaningless but we could set the tethers that we're both concentrating on the number of dots on this coffee cup and counting them and creating meaning on them and Center while we're doing that we're not thinking outside the space were in the immediate space-time environment and we're anchored to it that kind of process is very important for task implementation right if I want to do something I need to be very focused I think you described this in your book as their front sight focus right I get that right and you have to be very focused on the task at hand and that horizon point but then at some point in order to be effective you have to be able to loosen that tether dilate out your focus and then pick the next point to Orion to being a little bit of what I said earlier but that ability to reset the tether and then focus on an additional focus point is extremely important now in being a functional human being now if I am dilate out my concept of the reason this has to do with time is the moment that I make that focus outside our immediate environment the brain is starting to think about contingencies in a different kind of time reference like what's the scope of my life where's my meaning come from those are great thoughts to have but if you become anchored in those thoughts too long you'll never actually complete the things that are required in order to go or anywhere just as if I'm too focused on what's right in front of me I'll never actually stay in touch I won't stay in touch with the bigger picture and so the kind of as you describe these practices that you've developed I what I'm struck by is that the workout if you will that you described is incorporating a lot of different time correct reference elements so the the breathing I always think of as and the second hand on our life you know you concentrate it brings you into the here and now being the here and now is great unless you're depressed your education is timeless by the way it's time you get back into your cognitive mind the cognitive mind is always gonna be linear right so that's good you're gonna have the sense of past and future the presence is you know like you said the breath can bring you into the present moment and being radically focused in the present moment it's hard to think because thinking gets us back into time that's right that's fascinating but you can still be if you've trained in this it kind of brings up that like what we're talking before we started if you've trained your body relentlessly then your body is able to spontaneously act in the present moment without the cognitive capacity being switched on mm-hmm do you agree with that I completely agree I think that which is where do you get the flow that's right and so I think that you know setting the you know these points of focus at any one location is not really the key the key is to you want to be in dynamic control of the tether what I mean by that is the the human being who can move their point of focus at will and bring sometimes focused on self sometimes focus on outside sometimes connected to both simultaneously and constantly thinking about where they're placing their focus or even letting the tether go when for you know I like the concept of micro Recovery's I walk between buildings and meetings and I intentionally let the tether go right because if I'm looking at my phone or I'm thinking about what I'm gonna do in the meeting I'm missing out on the opportunity to kind of micro recover and I'm better prepared when I feel right everyone says they teach that in a workout you put the kettlebell down you're not thinking you're not planning you not strat you just soften your gaze start breathing through your nose and even you know just one or two seconds you can have a lot more recovery mentally and emotionally and you know physically and so I think artful yeah yeah and so I think and so I guess this is all to say that you know if there's a pro to take away protocol then maybe the listeners or the viewers would like to think about it would be starting to cultivate their own internal practice around where is their focus in terms of and and how how effective are they at moving that focus from the inside out right and I feel like we set up a lot of our life conditions around trying to do this well without realizing what we're doing we try and get a good night's sleep so that we can do this well we try and eat right and and consume caffeine and the proper ratio so that we can do this well and all that's fine and good but what I love about the practices that you've developed and that other you know I guess a lot of some of that probably comes from me working the teams and other communities that it's really about taking internal control of that process and I would almost say layer that on to a little bit of what we were discussing earlier which is every time you can do that even for a moment to reward yourself in the form of a I don't know self satisfaction that you know the thought where that means you're you are navigating in the most adaptive way through life it doesn't mean you're cut off and strictly goal oriented and non empathic the opposite sometimes in conversation the best thing to be is empathic other times it's just to listen right so I'm very struck by all the language that's been used in the psychology and wellness culture to describe things that I think are very useful the question is when and how and what's the algorithm so I was always struck by these sayings like absence makes the heart grow fonder yeah well I've also heard out of sight out of mind so which one is it it's both right it's the ability to move through grief by focusing on something else and it's the ability move through grief by feeling grief intensely that's right the question is can you toggle back and forth as necessary to be an effective human being and so you look their entire books their entire programs their retreats their whole concepts built around doing one or the other and I love the integrative process that you've developed here because it's really about that dynamic control and you know what it takes to be effective in essentially any mental or physical environment and so so that's what I mean when I talk about an algorithm as opposed to a set of protocols so of course you ultimately you know the listeners might be thinking ok that's also it's fine but how do I do it right ok so your programs would be one example or learning better concentration as one but also learning how to let go of concentration and learning how to relax on demand is another and that's something that can be practiced and cultivated the brain was designed to do this we evolved the machinery and it's it's embedded in us right it and and it was designed for a good purpose it's just that most animals are perfectly fine with a couple core operations and they're they're good you know my Bulldog Costello you know I take care of the rest you don't have to worry about it whereas we worry constantly and that worry I think was designed to get us to try and optimize the problems were not optimizing right I love it so you've heard of the OODA loop mm-hmm yeah so Boyd who was a fighter pilot you know developed the constant super simple concept but it's describing what you're talking about and I don't know if a lot of people are aware about that but the loop is observe orient decide act the observant orient is internal like its internal control its spatial awareness it's it's relaxed gaze it's seeing what happens in the four dimensional space around you as a result of the either the action you took or what's happening around you the stress input right and then orienting yourself to that mentally right now in martial arts that might be you know might be you know some sort of movement or centering or grounding that's happening if you're in like a fight or something refer for a aerial combat it might be positioned in the airplane slightly differently but then the third is decide right this is where you're clicking back into focus and you're saying okay based upon my observation and their orientation i this is the next decision this is the next micro goal and then you take the action and then you immediately soften back into the observation orientation and I think that's the thing that rarely gets discussed I'm so glad you mentioned that because I think people think okay you complete this four-step operation and then what's next and then you just and then you just go like grab on and go and it's like no it's the ability to reset maybe we can add another thing to the loop with oh I want to you know give credit where credit's due but but the resetting back to the point where you can observe yeah that's the key what I think is so fundamental and what's missing for so many people is they they they'd say okay I set this goal and I do this thing and then it's kind of like we always say like in martial arts you know like don't wait for the for the camera shot like you have to pull your punch back and move and start to observe again otherwise you're gonna get you're gonna get collective the way I teach this none of your mind is imagined an infinity loop and the left side is the realm of potential and potential is all this stuff we're talking about it's all that that happens on the inside right a human beings potential is created foster developed engineered Sue's algorithms of how the mind works and how your mind body system is working and then the other side of the infinity loop is performance which is all external so the whole realm of peak performance and and leadership development and it's all looking at the left side or you know depending on your orientation the right side that performance side but no performance or all performance is affected by the potential that's generated by the individual or the team on the other side of the loop and those they meet at a very distinct center point right and if you get the better you get at training shifting between potential and performance the close but the tighter that infinity loop gets until it becomes a pinpoint mm-hmm and it's happening simultaneously and here's a theory that I have and I this is something that would be probably impossible to validate but I believe that the human being can get to a point where they can be acting and recovering simultaneously where that potential and performance are happening on parallel tracks not to say that you don't still need to just do the recovery and the reflection in that and whatnot and just act forcefully but ultimately when it comes to performing it are at our highest level it's the simultaneous process you know when when the operations that we're talking about so I guess I love this infinity loop notion because it's repetitive it's right and I and I really appreciate you loop and it's it's saved lives right the you loop is extremely valuable what the reset of the you de loop is really it's what kind of isn't in the loop description as originally described so I think that when that process is fast enough I I think when that algorithm is being carried out over and over fast enough I I can see how it could be start to feel like and actually become a unified operation so these are all neural circuits like these are brain areas that are being activated in sequence and just like learning how to hit a tennis ball of a tennis racket which I frankly don't know how to do well the first times I do it it's cuz I'm gonna have you know the trajectories and the arcs are gonna be different each time and eventually I'll get it right and so learning how to iterate this more quickly and in different environments is is really the key to training and I think that's the and there's no hack for that and there's there is no hack for that neural plasticity you know as a child you can absorb information like a sponge right the the window for plasticity up until about 20 years old is remarkable and you learn things passively words language all sorts of things most contingencies emotional relationships etc at some point adult plasticity requirements kick in and the requirements for adult plasticity are very precise focus and attention and this is played out through the cholinergic system that emerges from the brainstem it's like a firehose of acetylcholine on a set of synapses that are active around some contingency like if we gave some you know meaning to some some event and we're really gonna focus on it and the outcomes are important you're starting to shape neural circuitry around that set of operations because there's a lot of acetylcholine being dumped at that location attention in acetylcholine are one in or one in the same so do you think can I ask a question yeah do you think that it's possible to train your mind to have the plasticity of a child again when you're an adult or is it structurally I love this session it's really interesting so because the concept beginner beginner mind comes to mind just some degree I mean there are neural circuits that fortunately like the ones that govern your heart rate etc that are hardwired they can be modulated but they you know you wake up every day with your heart beating for as a result of these hardwired circuitries you're not going to modify those um it is very easy unfortunately or fortunately for survival purposes to wire in new fears and traumatic type stuff fortunately we have a storytelling part of our brain that can reframe those and leverage those I know you had Goggins on here recently like he's a I've had that that the 4chan experience of working with him for a little bit on a we're on a consulting project together and and he is every bit as intense as he I don't like Ross for sure in public he's remarkable his intensity is remarkable he could use a little recovery time though I doubt he would agree doubt no degree I'm not gonna speak for him but I read about him just burning out he's I don't know if burnouts in he resources better to burn out than to fade away exactly he is is remarkable but I think that there's a so the ability to enter in new traumatic experiences is always going to be there but there is this idea so that there's never been a example that I'm aware of of a human mutant that is hyperplastic their entire life so I'm one who who could learn as well as they could as when they were a child and so it's unlikely be a single gene or a single brain area or something like that if it were we probably would have seen the mutation and this hyper learning person would be have been talked about or known however there are certain individuals have been discussed throughout history who have maintained an intense or a recognizable ability to change and involve themselves in in ways now the one that comes to mind is the one that I learned about as a child because I grew up in a family with a scientist for a father we didn't talk about who won the Superbowl we talked about who won the Nobel Prize and so a Richard Fineman the famous dick Feynman was always discussed my dad you know knew him wasn't close with him but I heard a lot about him growing up he was remarkable he learned how eat ought himself how to draw in his 60s so slowly mind you he you know it's not like he learned overnight and he he was into flotation tanks and he you know he had his Nobel as most people don't even know what he did for his Nobel I barely understand it I think was quantum electrodynamics or something which I definitely don't understand but but what's remarkable about Fineman to me is his notion of curiosity and play so I've spent time recently thinking about like let's put a more pointed definition on what those are and why they might be useful so curiosity to me is when you're very eager or excited to know the outcome but you are truly unattached to the out current you want to know but you don't even know what you want to know otherwise it's not curiosity otherwise it's a it's something else curiosity about the outcome tends to like real curiosity tends to anchor your attention and leverage the neuromodulator systems like acetylcholine and dopamine that open plasticity likewise play is this if you do it appropriately in meaning with high effort but just below that kind of stress threshold where you feel committed to the outcome and you can play competitively but play and curiosity I think are close cousins in the brain and when I say that I mean that I think the core algorithms and the neuromodulator systems that are involved I think are gonna are gonna be the same no I'd say neurotransmitters are the things that like glued the glutamate and GABA that allow their sort of what a lot of neurons to have a conversation kind of like we're having a conversation neuromodulators like acetylcholine dopamine serotonin they're like the volume on the microphone interesting they adjust the volume of certain conversation so imagine room were there a lot of conversations that's your brain okay but neuromodulator systems are like someone coming along like the your sound and video tech coming along and putting a microphone between two people and all of a sudden that conversation becomes the dominant one in the room that's how plasticity works and if that conversation carries on long enough and there's a the microphone so to speak the acetylcholine or dopamine system is there those synapses miners' will last that will be where recorded and and and kind of indelibly marked in for posterity now what it means is that the child brain is probably bathing in these intro modulators and what as adults they become less available and this actually might be where it's nootropics actually become up yeah a reasonable conversation I know we both invested in quality in the neuro hacker collective early on I did that because I was very excited about the nootropic space I don't think it's for everybody frankly for the listener nootropic is a brain supplementation supplement right but I I've long been interested in this space because I think that I don't think it's a replacement for other sorts of tools but I see my food like food or sleep at and personal ease right focus or you're right exactly and I did a little bit of commentary on some of the dangers of nootropics as well as some of the benefits that was in the BBC recently you can just google at BBC nootropics or smart drugs I think you'll find those and so there's a lot of information out there in considerations but I think that the most interesting ones and I think quality mine was the one that I'm you know got excited about was which is where I invested which is that they tend to augment see the cholinergic system now the cholinergic system is fundamental to memory it's fundamental to memory formation and to focus and it's a system that can be pharmacologically tapped into I think one has to be cautious in how they do it the traditional way of doing this was tobacco no kid one of the strongest ways to release Nick so nicotinic receptors they're two kinds of receptors for a steel coin nicotinic and muscarinic nicotinic ones are the ones that respond to things like nicotine which increases heat of calling so many writers and artists it was a it was a hard trade-off when they realized it's either lung cancer or my ability to focus right so that's that which kills you makes you mentally strong that's so you know thinking about ways to get some people I know some very famous neuroscientist I know whose names I won't mention to Nicorette not just as a replacement for their cigarette but is to enhance their ability to focus I'm not gonna claim any double-blind onua tropics is there anything that is has that quality like nicotine or is a some of the substrates and nicotine in the nootropic yes so some of the cholinergic donors that are in quality mind and and and other nootropics for instance and we'll do that interesting and so I think that's where people say oh it's just caffeine I don't think it's just caffeine I think that the acetylcholine system is is key there a lot of nootropics have mucuna purines which is which is pharmaceutical grade l-dopa now I have mixed feelings about that because I I think the dogs are Genest open yeah when you know they you're taking l dopa basically yeah and I'm not saying that's necessarily bad everyone has to you know consider talk to their doctor etc I'm not a physician I would say I'm not a physician so I don't prescribe anything I'm a professors I profess lots of things you have to decide if they're valuable or not and if you want to do them or not but but I think that the dopaminergic system is one that is so powerful right because this is what evolution embedded in us in order to get us to continue to do certain behaviors whereas the acetylcholine system is the one that's true that's hard to access guys like you hylian and for that matter highly trained musicians or academics or people that are have a very pointed focus in life are very good at attaching their cholinergic system to to a set set of operations what's really interesting about the practices that you were describing earlier that you've built around the seal fit Academy is that they they're designed to be exportable I have to assume that although you might want people to come back from time to time for refreshers it's not really about what happens here it's about what they take yeah right use daily so your training algorithms and the ability to learn those algorithms is intimately tied to these cholinergic system so attention IC o---- : go hand in hand curiosity and play I think are the doorways through which most people are going to access learning because they're fun they kind of feel non pressured and yet the growth is going to come at the point in which something becomes difficult so I love the talks of gamification of like language trending like duolingo it's really powerful if it's fun I mean people what we know based on everything from nutrition science everything is you know a very well known nutrition scientists call you mine recently said it doesn't matter how much science and nutrition comes out people are gonna go ultimately for convenience and I actually I personally disagree I think that as a culture we're starting to become more in tune with long term health goals and so likewise with the mind I think we need to be we have to lock ourselves in a box or go to Walden Pond or something ridiculous like that because that's not feasible in this day and age but to start to think about you know where is my sense of play and curiosity coming from what am I really curious about what do I want to know what do I want to cultivate and then how am I going to do that and I can doing that you start to open up that window for plasticity so you asked um do we have that ability throughout life and I think yes you just have to kind of get more of a crowbar into the door as opposed to it being really open and then I think if you do these practices over time I really believe and I've seen many examples of this that the door stays ajar so that you can almost sense when you're in a learning mode and you're starting to enter that learning mode and I think the brain has this ability it and it's absolutely accessible that's fascinating so I'm gonna offer this up you can see if you can push back on it but to me like when I'm working with a beginner like something's new and they say well just tell me what to do give me something to do three things and so my three things are brain health through nutrition and and when I'm talking about the brain we're talking about fat and ketones and newer tropics it's a brain health get the brain healthy mm-hmm second begin to move your body and so that could be it could be a CrossFit it could be yoga it could be Tai Chi it could be burpees move your body and when you move breathe deeply and you know use your positive internal dialogue because now we're getting into that body mind state and then the third is breath training breath practice because as I said oh the breath links the body the mind and you know your deeper spiritual power which we're going to disconnect from any concept of God because it it's basically what the intelligence that and the telogen energy to combine intelligence and energy that infuses us which makes us conscious right so I say move your body in the morning and box breathe for a minimum five minutes and do that every day how long do you recommend people who do the inhale hold exhale hold this beginners a four count is probably perfect if five count is you don't need to do any more it's not like maybe seal underwater breath hold training and the reason the ratio is even even count inhale even kind of hold even kinda exhale you can't hold you that other ratios will have a different effect on you and what we're looking for is balance what I need to do is bring people back into balance physiological balance will lead to psychological balance then we can start it's like weeding the garden then we can start doing some work on the quality and the content of the mind do you suggest that people do pure nasal or your name is pure nasal yeah in in a controlled training environments pure nasal but out in the field let's say if you're walking around or something if you can box me that's great you might exhale through the mouth and then you know we we shift to the tactical breath anytime our rate elevates which is just slow inhale slow exhale no hold it's impractical right the tactical breath is taught in the SEALs box breathing is now taught in the seals at any rate so those three to me are like the money right that's the foundation after you've done that for a year you know it's gonna be different for everybody obviously then you can start to explore some meditative practices and visualization otherwise if you start jumping into that you're just not gonna be able to hold your attention you're gonna be uncomfortable you know everything's gonna be out of whack you got to get the body mind back into balance first learn how to be able to sustain your concentration for a long period of time and then you can begin to work with some of the deeper practices that's great I mean I think threes are great threes and the simplicity of it it's interesting because recently we had a brain mind summit at Stanford this is something that's gonna transition between Stanford MIT Oxford and Cambridge and and it's funded by the Rhodes trust it'd be great to get you out there at the next one and and I talked about box breathing and I did credit you thank you um and and I was trying to explain you know it's kind of interesting you know breath work kind of sounds like meditation robes and levitation but as soon as I say respirate and people in the medical community I say you know respiration work okay now it sounds kind of physiological the same thing right so um and it's and there are some caveats to this but in general that you know as you lude to anything that's exhale emphasized right is gonna blow off more co2 it's gonna drive people towards more parasympathetic relaxed states whereas ami emits more inhale emphasized it's gonna drive people to more heightened arousal and so box breeze it breathing is perfect way to balance co2 and o2 and get people into this kind of clear mindset because I think that a lot has been made of in the psychological space and also in neuroscience about emotions one thing and that's great and there's a lot to tackle in terms of emotions but they're very subjective but I think the two states that most people would like to be able to access are clear focused and alert like so that's one thing so focused and alert and asleep when they want to be asleep so if I mean if if they're and there are tools but if there were tools that could ripple out through you know all societies not just American society that where people could deliberately set their state through box breathing or better access sleep through sort of apnea like breathing meaning not sleep apnea but exhale emphasize breathing for instance teaching their body how to relax that way I think you do a tremendous amount to offset mental disease and you would greatly improve the baselines on most people's life and so when you describe these three three things to implement what I love about is all of them are gonna have real effects in real time but I loved it and here I'm stealing from our friend Daniel 'shmock and Berger the NHC you know he always talks to me about things that are either baseline elevating baseline lowering or baseline maintaining those are very different than the kind of like um you know sort peak event and so I haven't done 40 years of Zen I haven't talked to Dave in a long time so I don't know exactly what the benefit set is there but but the idea that there's gonna be one thing that can shift everything to me just doesn't fit with what we know about how the brain works which is not to say that the 40 years of Zen program it doesn't have value let's just say what is the adjustment on baseline over time and so in the Bay Area the number one neuro hack I like to joke is Burning Man right everyone goes out there once a year and then they work like crazy all year long what about your daily practices in terms of resetting your sort of stuff not even resetting but supplementing your creativity supplementing your focus ability and so daily practices create this upward spiral of up regulation or up leveling right and it's never linear you know even like physical practices and tracking you know let's say your bench press don't like that it's never linear you know sometimes you plateau and like oh my god I'm not me Nelson boom they take a week off and they have this massive you know peak or spike but I guess my point there is it's easy to track the physical progress you know but when it comes to psychological or the mind or emotional it's not so easy to track that's right but through journaling and through you know through a self-awareness process you can begin to see that you're you're moving along this trajectory which is not flat and nor is it in fits and spurts it's more of a transcend and include and then you have a deeper sense of awareness and more peace of mind more focus more and you and you can note that that's different than where you were six months ago and then you may feel like okay I'm just practicing practicing practice and all of a sudden you have another transcend and include moment where just like boom and these are experience like paradigm shift or crystallization Zoar or like a radical breakthrough of awareness or insights and you know comes in many different forms right yeah it's it's interesting there's a lot of devices out there now you're measuring brain waves and snod and I don't want to be dismissive of any of them but you know most of the stuff that's designed to measure brain waves both research-grade and commercially available is very surface level you're not getting very deep into the brain where a lot of the more core emotionally related or autonomic arousal related processes are occurring and so it's not say they don't have value but I think that using an outward measure is great because you know like okay stress response hits you know for a real life event you can't prepare for it that's the whole point so if you've so when it hits you know how quickly are you able to anchor yourself in that moment right are you you know how how clear is your cognition I think you know those events are gonna come so I sort of said you can't prepare but you can prepare in terms of your ability to navigate it buffer it leverage it whatever it is and so you obviously don't want to seek out high-stress events necessarily but measuring progress to me is about you know how many days pass in which I'm feeling on purpose meaning moving toward the the kind of core things I want to accomplish in which there wasn't a major catastrophe and if there was a major catastrophe that I used that as an opportunity to leverage you move forward right and it does become a little bit subjective I do think journaling is extremely valuable I think there's something there are there are me just as there is machinery installed in the human brain I have a close friend at UCSF who studies this machinery to generate human speech mm-hmm name is Eddie Chang is amazing guy records from the human brain while people produce speech we could talk about that very interesting work there are brain areas that have been installed in each of us to convert thought into written word by virtue of the hand or if you're at hand impaired I agree with it so that's why it's not getting away from writing is a big bits hardware I'm drawing so there's a little bit of this coming out now about drawing if you don't draw well about about converting thoughts into 3d into 2d space or 3d space this is the first time in human evolution that humans have ever converted internal language to language with their thumbs we've never really been typing with our thumbs this is a new the the digits on your hand were designed with a specific purpose in mind and a lot of the brain is visual but human beings have the most that wide variety of options in terms of how to move so an cheetah can run fast and it can lie down and sleep and it can kind of do it cheetah trot whatever you call that but humans can sprint they can jog they can duck under things they can dance they can grab they can reach they can rock a baby they can do an immense number of motor operations there's a guy out of Harvard right whose work I really love he wrote spark which is a John Ratey tremendously smart guy and it's about how the Fitness has a really profound neuroplastic effect right right about how to use physical entry points access classes he really fits very much you know what we're describing here and he has this other book called go wild which is not about returning the caves but it's really what he argues is the two kind of the two most dominant drivers of human happiness in his experience which is includes clinical experience a lot of it are active social engagement and movement through natural terrain isn't which I find fascinating and so close to my own experience like hiking or like hiking or walking down the beach or you know feeling what it's like to walk in the soft sand or run in the soft sand or yeah or feeling waves or moving through a park and just the visual flow component and he and I have had a couple discussions about this but in addition to breathing I think there you know I would love to see about here about people using starting to play with their visual system and seeing how that affects their mental states and arousal States one of the ways that we know people can rapidly down regulate the stress response in real time is to just go into panoramic vision what you described this is how we didn't stack you know some of these practices so one of my practice because I live on the beach is to go for a beach walk with my wife and you know it's a beautiful Pacific Ocean and sometimes you know in the beginning there's a little chitchat my wife you know wanted to do a little that and processing and stuff so there's there's the emotional connection you know there's a physical connection because we're holding hands there's the immersion in nature and so then what I'll do I begin to stack in box breathing and wide-angle vision and then a mantra and so right there there's the I the we there's an emotional connection there's the authenticity of bonding together in nature and you know there's the stim the visual stimulus like you said the constant flow of those beautiful imagery there's the mental control through the mantra so my mind isn't distracting off on you know useless thoughts or non important thoughts there's the breath practice and then there's you know walking barefoot which is grounding I'm so there's so much going on there and that simple beautiful 45-minute you know or an hour-long walk on the beach or in nature's profound yes and and probably engaging more components of your nervous system that were there for what you were designed to do then pretty much any other practice you could for sort of recovery and connect right you know and anyone I enjoy so much easier to do that than to go to a flow tank yeah I mean I and I love the notion of float tanks and and things like that and and I think I think it's great that people are thinking about this I sure anything that has friction because I even say this about exercise you know if if the gym getting to the gym is the friction point remove the friction point just workout at home your body has all the tools you know yeah burfi created the Burpee as the ultimate exercise right you got burpees pull-ups push-ups squats sit-ups running in place is there a guy named I don't know poor guy told me there was no last name and transmuted into a into a good revered practice the torture he must have put up with as a child but yeah so remember if you want to you know float tank I've done it I did it six times I stopped I was like there's no way it's worth my time to drive all the way to the float tank to do you know 60 minutes or more of science I can just sit down in my bench and get the same benefits but I had to train myself to be able to go there you know could I see why the flow tank could be useful for someone who hasn't learned to do the sensory deprivation right right in yoga tradition one of the the eight limbs the fifth limb is sensory turning in central deprivation and so you learn to disengage your senses it was your eyes closing your eyes disengage the eyes close your ears off you disengage from sound interesting close your olfactory senses and that can be trained interesting and then you can go really deep the the walking along the beach might not be something everyone is it has access to but horizons are immensely powerful because they naturally draw the gaze into panoramic vision and so you're not going to get this through your phone I've thought about ways that we could create a device very important but you're not going to actually and and there so just to make the argument of how relaxing it is I'll just make the counter argument if I want to stress somebody out the best way I can do is to put them in a small confined environment for a long time or they don't see any kind of what ends up happening as you start falling deeper and deeper into your own internal autonomic response it's almost like that second sphere I was talking about before like to each other's and there are two spheres tethered together start to collapse on the one another and you know people sometimes get intrigued by these things like the Bourdain suicide why would someone kill themselves I don't have any data to support this but and that that was tragic as our all suicides but the but the one idea is that when these two spheres of focus collapse into the self and the feelings are not pleasant you they're losing ability to sense that there's time beyond what they're experiencing so most people can tolerate uncomfortable feelings for a second so you say well if I said you can do it for a second why not a minute you do it for a minute why not an hour and the the thing about depression and suicide not to make the conversation dark but is that when people are in those states they have this sensation even though they have the knowledge it's not true they have the sensation that it's gonna go on forever or that if they exit that sensation it'll just return to again so it's the kind of why try the converse though is also true so if you can you know if you can start to move out that focus you know walking on the beach focusing on things outside your head and so get that balance kind of like your box breathing has the balance between o2 and co2 kind of balance between an internal dialogue and external events yeah that's really the kind of relationship with the world that most of us want to be in where you're not cut off from experience you're not like buffering yourself kind of like this is why the word resilience is great but it kind of it implies this kind of boundary between you know what's going around whereas what you know when you start to achieve the kind of higher levels of mindfulness and awareness it's like it's being in in concert with your environment you can stay connected to self and connected to what's going on then things can be pleasant or unpleasant internally externally and you can kind of learn to move through that and and again this is sounding a little bit abstract but I think some of the concepts that been brought forward in the you know in the martial arts and in and in yoga like be like water I've thought well okay well what was that mean I think it's this idea that we can move fluidly through time and space and that includes staying anchored to the self there's not the idea that you have to forget about what you're experiencing it's just kind of what does it mean how should I operate and being able to do that really quickly so um I guess the point is that horizons are a powerful tool I think there are a power tool in the regulating stress mm-hmm just as much as closing your eyes and focusing on a Third Eye Center kind of traditional meditation as a power tool this is fascinating because what's coming through my mind right now is that you know a couple couple things I'll try to link them one is you know some of the POWs right so Admiral Stockdale is a great example in a solitary confinement environment no visual of the outside world and what they did see was unpleasant and so instead of collapsing into that and and you know experiencing the awesome shame and self-pity that was being foisted on them he turned to his visual capacity and began to imagine beautiful scenery he began to imagine all these golf courses that he you know he had played on and and replaying the holes and getting very good at it he imagined himself back in the classroom and retook all of his courses so with great you know recollection right and so where I was thinking about is that and I believe this too and I want to describe a visualization that I teach is that you can have that broad external focus internally and you can also have a narrow focus internally and both are important and so this is important for anyone meditates because someone says well the only way to meditate is to focus on the third eye you know turn the eyes up a little bit and look for the white light you know around the pineal gland that's great but it's also limiting because it's going to develop that internal focus and you're gonna stop having the capacity for the broad focus the broad focus is through visualization so the visualization practice that we have we call the mind Jim and that is we take people into a space that we claim is kind of a birthright because everyone when we lead them into this space it's like it's all of a sudden it's there right it's like some place I've never been before but they have a sense that they've been there before and it's always beautiful right I've never had any experience going into their mind Jim and describing it as restrictive or ugly or dark it's always this unbelievably beautiful landscape that has often mountains mine has beautiful snowcapped mountains and waterfalls and and we go there to visualize to do our work and it's this expansive feeling of Awesomeness like grace connection profound you know I mean again how do we test this you know you can't test someone's visual capacity we don't have any instruments that can see what a human mind is seeing probably not you can do brain imaging and you know everything we know about brain imaging says that you know if I close my eyes and imagine like this immediate environment it's gonna show patterns of activation similar to the brain it is a slave to what what's given to it or what it produces for itself I mean that that's that's become clear and I think I love the notion of a mind Jim I think you know one thing that I'm realizing is we have this conversation is that being of healthy mind it's interesting we talk a lot about mental health but usually when people talk about mental health they're talking about mental illness but in think about mental health we haven't really defined what the parameters of mental health are we know what the physical health parameters are we like we have a BMI maybe you know body mass index maybe that's legitimate maybe it's not you should have a certain level of flexibility or strength depending on the needs and of your life and you know and obviously you don't want cancer biomarkers running rampant and these kinds of things but we have not defined what it is to be mentally healthy yeah and I think I would look for things like contentment peace of mind non-attachment right the ability to like you even said this earlier to disengage from the outcome but still be very motivated toward mm-hmm outcome yeah and how do you measure those right how do you a right so I might add to those that you know like so what are the Burpee push up and pull up for the mind right and it sounds like and I love that you're breathing I'm breathing a certain way one of them I mean I think a little more in breathing I mean I to me I've spent a lot of time with wim HOF I mean we brought him out to the Bay Area yeah brama just has a friend to bear and we did some talks there and you know I would say women's like the Bob Dylan breath was right he's this phenomenon in terms of how he can access these states and bring people into these states they tend to be more in hell emphasized and then although there are long exhales and I don't want to destroy that they have great protocols and people know how to access those that has its utility I think that breathing just as a basic fundamental right and tool that people are using is something that let's call it respiration maybe for more access if it brings more people in them will call it that I think has a tremendous benefits and now full disclosure here I'm I consult for the lung health Institute so you know there it's Damian with people who have breathing issues I think may can benefit from breath work but just typical people right and like it's like zero cost from free medicine free medicine you can generate it's an inside out till it's immensely powerful just switching the nasal breathing box breathing these are are absolutely power tools and then what's lovely is that it can be done covertly mm-hmm right where i'ma show this hole we've done covertly right so no one has to know whereas meditation the kind of idea you can also do covertly but by closing your eyes and retreating to a corner of the room or something you are taking yourself out of social engagement to some extent and the other thing is what happens when the stress response hits you can immediately anchor in breathing some people find that easier to do than others but it's just practice if you've been doing training it you'll do it so I think you know we've we've I mean you've been talking about this for a long time so I want to give credit where credit's due but I think that breathing that balances oh - and co2 like box breathing is something that I would love see seem taught in school in the same way that they make kids run the track or the jumping jacks I just it's a fundamental god-given right physiological right and and if you don't do it well you can reclaim your breathing ability by breathing more so it's um it really is powerful not and I don't think we're making too much of it I know it's that powerful yeah you know and it's got to be experienced you know I mean it's it's hard for people to really understand because like well I breathe so yeah it's true you breathe but when you control that breathing and you do it in specific ways whether it's wim HOF or box breathing then it has a very specific effect on your neurobiology right it's gonna affect your physiology than affect your psychology and it's gonna affect your ability to connect deeper like we said to that kind of spiritual strength which is not even something that you know the brain neuroscience community is ever gonna really investigate you know no although not spiritual strength although my lab we you know we do experiments on mice and where we can do very you know invasive type things of recording from neurons but we also have a human laboratory where we use virtual reality to expose people the different states Heights great white sharks real filmed experiences not digitally created experiences or more cartoons right I'd love to experience a yeah you should come out with yeah I mean you're a mutant based on your training and whatnot so you'd be on it on a certain end of the scale in terms of outcomes but but I think you'd be fun still to see how we're measuring pupil size breathing heart rate and in patients that mutant in the good sense mutations can be appreciative people adaptive mute there are adaptive mutations and there are non adaptive mutations I think your training and you know is a self prescribed positive mutation the UM wow that sounds counter the nurse I'm gonna go back yes sandy I guess what I'm a positive mutant exactly well like the x-men right the reason I love the x-men it's all about mutations that give people you know super problems question how I use them right so the but we also have a population of patients that we have access to through neurosurgery who for other reasons have electrodes embedded in different regions of the brain so we've been doing the first-ever recordings from the human brain while people are in virtual fear experiences while measuring the body's responses Wow so to me the field of neuroscience I'm hoping there's gonna be more of this we're not the only ones doing it fortunately I guess start to merge heart rate breathing brainwaves direct recordings from we have direct recordings from human amygdala in a patient while they're literally have great white sharks swimming around them Heights we're doing this in phobic patients people generalized anxiety we're always looking for subjects so if I'm a I'm gonna give a little plug to my lab this is not a personal endorsement if you can find you can email us at or we're on instagram at Huberman lab but that's where we recruit subjects for these experiments your tax dollars by the way pay what kind of people are you looking for we're looking for people who have anxiety people who don't have anxiety who have specific fears and and who aren't aware of whether or not they have specific fears and unfortunately we don't have all groups or those who aren't aware that's right subjects who are have a deep phobia of sharks or that's right or high dogs or claustrophobia and one thing that's fun is we we a number of these are involved but something I'm really interested in is task switching so we have we put people through a set up I don't wanna give it away in case that you come to lab where you're you're in a situation where you're doing a simple game that involves some cognitive control of putting out lights on a screen and then suddenly you realize that you're in a much more threatening situation than you thought and you and the the task of the experiment is to toggle back and forth between maintaining your safety and performing an operation that's critical and so and while we're doing this we're monitoring all your physiological responses because one thing that we want to get people better eyes the ability to task switch so my Zen teacher Nakamura we used to be sitting in Zen and this is actually a they still do it to this day and you'd be there meditating and all of a sudden he would come you know behind you sometime you know if you're if you knew you could feel his presence right so you could be ready for it but at first you wouldn't have a clue and he would just whack you over the shoulder with bamboo state'll wake you up yeah and so the idea was you know that the Japanese concept was too spontaneous Satori or spontaneous enlightenment that in that moment of I'm in a completely relaxed you know kind of meditative state and all of a sudden and your whole physiology psychology radically shifts to a threat environment or to this like boom something else is happening here and and it does something to the psyche where you have this quick usually temporary separation of I guess sense of self right and that experiences of a deeper connection to like reality or to time time stand still you know it's all these things we talked about all the sudden and this is the moment that the Zen monk begins to realize that's why they call it realization they realize that they're not the thought they're not the the thinker mm-hmm there's something there's more to what's going on in this human experience than just me processing this steady stream of thoughts and so now it reminds me of what you were talking about the two perspectives and the tether we called the witness so the Zen monk is immediately connected to the witness which is the pervasive nonlinear perceiving mind and that mind can now watch the thinking going on super interesting there's no fast no time and space are so closely linked in the brain so that if so if my visual focus is on this cup for instance my spatial reference is the the mug but my time reference is also locked - what's actionable if I'm in panoramic vision time is much more expanded because space is more expanded and this is a real thing you know this starts to sound a little bit kind of whoo but it's not that because the way that the brain works and the way the visual system works is to set up contingencies what's actionable what's not actionable and I actually I had why we can slow time down it's why we can slow time down and and so in terms of life events I don't think this is a digression but I want I feel like it ties back into that your meditation wouldn't then the bamboo strike you know moment you know I've had that as many people had I've had the experience or even called the misfortune but I had a close friend and colleague very famous neuroscientists actually pass away recently I've had this weird thing about mentors I just mentioned this is my first mentor in science was its phenomenal guy taught me so much about the brain killed himself and then my second mentor died of cancer at 50 and my third mentor died of cancer at 63 so the joke in my community is that like I'm the common factor and you know you don't want me to work phone yeah don't ask me Danny I don't say that to emphasize any of the tragedy but what I learned something very fundamental from each of those so I already talked about suicide but it made me intensely interested in suicide how someone could do that right someone who has so much awareness about the brain tells you something about mental disease also tells you about this collapse on the cell the other two people who are phenomenal individuals discussion for another time both taught me something very interesting which is as they got closer and closer to death they started talking about directly to me about these incredible experiences that all represented the way I I now reflect on them as carving up time in finer slices so they could really appreciate like the sip of a cup of coffee and it's most like him has this intense experience and how grateful they were and what I could see what's happening was the end was coming and they were starting to micro slice time whereas normally I just think of like I think I'm gonna get home tonight so I don't think about my cup of coffee in that same there's not this initiated every moment so the dilation and contraction of this time representation is directly related to what we think of as meaning and importance and the value of everything in people because so I've thought about this recently in terms of grief and so I have this idea and maybe I'm crazy but here's the idea so my colleague died and and I walked by his office every day we haven't hired someone new to replace him yet you couldn't replace him but to put someone new in the office and every once in a while I'll feel this pang of grief and it's a sensation and I'm familiar with that sensation many people have felt this and and I started thinking about like okay I don't over I don't want to overly intellectualize this but what is grief and why is it that I know because I'm an adult that in five years this will be gone right it'll be a different feeling and I I think I I understand at least from my own process which is that grief may very well be the actual mental operations and visit let's say nervous system mind and body of moving something that was once actionable into in actionable domain memory so if I have my wallet and it gets stolen I'm pissed and I'm sad I'm upset it's a kind of mild form of grief nothing when you're losing a person because it's no longer actionable I can't just reach for and every time I want to reach for it it's frustrating every time I walk by Ben's office and I can't go talk to him about a scientific problem right yeah and he was a magnificent thinker and human being it pains me but it's the idea that I can't go in there even though the office is right there now at some point that idea of that it's actionable will transition into the reality in a deep sense because no he's gone that he's not an actionable figure in my life anymore I can think about him I can remember things but the grief is gone and so grief so I was thinking well why would the human brain evolved this and what's utility of thinking like this well for animals if one member of their species were to die the worst thing you can do from an infectious disease standpoint is to actually interact with the dead body what do we do we get it in the ground and we start to think about them as in an in actionable character in our life and we start to think about it more as a tombstone in an idea or memory or ideally you think about their life but you no longer think about calling them or texting them or or writing to them or hugging them and that process of moving that over I think is what we describe as grief and so I'm using this as sort of an example of what I would love to see neuroscience do for what we thought of as emotions which are very challenging but also for positive states and accessing things and one reason why I think in this conversation I realize that one reason why I think that that science and military or ex-military communities are the ones who are going to be responsible for doing this is that science and the military are both great at putting protocol and language around the concepts so that more you know it's actionable yeah right right so how would you ever teach kids about what grief really is so on the one hand you're told to feel your feelings on the other hand you're told that you know this too shall pass okay so it's all kind of muddled in in language that is hard for most people to internalize so so I'm not saying that an intellectual understanding of something is designed to take it away but I think if we understand what's happening we're less likely to make bad decisions on the surface okay so going back to space and time in a way that's maybe a little more positive and fun and actionable I've long felt that if I want to get better at task implementation I should learn to increase my focus so that so the practice for that would be and I tell me if I'm wrong here we'd be learning how to maintain a focal gaze of a particular location just getting better at doing that when you feel like you want to err off it staying on a little longer and that's the that's the beginning practice of Zen or you know staring in a can all right you know so pricing focusing your focus and and then increasing the duration the quality of the focus and then the duration of the focus okay so that's something I'm gonna take away from this because that's something I definitely can benefit from it still and then the idea is that but maybe to get better at create being at ideas then thinking about where those are pulled from ideas and creativity are actually pulled from the subconscious when space and time are kind of loose you know it so people talk about I'm I have my own thoughts and I'm not crazy about the psychedelic craze as it stands now we can talk about why that is I think sleep is a very powerful tool for accessing creative thought maybe pen to and out of sleep as well into and out of sleep a transition absolutely those early phases as well as maybe panoramic states in which you're kind of just taking everything in and you're not so focused on a fixation point our practices to cultivate in order to generate more creativity because in though in that mode space and time are fluid and you can create new contingencies and then the last thought tied to this is that not only are we not taught to do the sorts of things that you teach at the academy but it's great that there are tools that are now available to people but we're actually taught to do the opposite so the first thing that happens when you're a baby is you're hungry or you have to go to bathroom or whatever it is and you but the baby doesn't know hunger in just senses anxiety it feels autonomic arousal it's not even anxiety doesn't mean know what anxiety is and then it cries or whines or fidgets and then all of a sudden breast milk or bottle milk is presented to it and so the free version is the it relieves that so the first contingency we learn is outside in is the solution mmm-hmm the first contingency it's like the first learning rule and it's tied to our survival it's like okay I feel anxious I don't feel good I don't feel good I make a noise and then the relief comes from the outside hardening box exactly exactly well I I don't have kids but if I ever have kids is gonna be one of the first things I teach them I promise that because I think that one thing that we need to start doing is cultivating these inside out tools and because in tribal communities it makes sense you the baby can't go and access its own nutrition their nutritional supply so it has to do that but at some point in life I think becoming in a human being is about learning these inside-out tools and the tools are there you're describing them and they're related to these space-time relationships and the ability to to kind of open your toolkit and select put back that tool and select another tool now you're really talking about moving into spheres of kind of elite performance and here we're not even talking about sport military academia music poetry we're talking about just everywhere trying everything parenting everything so I really I have to say that I think the algorithms that you've hit upon are fundamental and I think that there are brain mechanisms that can support them I think Sciences job is going to be to provide data where it's useful but for instance I don't think we need another study showing that meditation shifts the brain the question is what aspects of meditation shift the brain in the directions that we want to go more plasticity more focus more creativity right and that's really the responsibility of my field and mine colleagues and the newer generation coming in fortunately as it has been exposed to a lot more in the kind of mindfulness space and other and physical augmentation space for that matter that they're thinking about it so I don't think we'll ever actually understand how the brain works like oh and the answer is you know kind of it doesn't work that way because it's it's dynamic food complex it's dynamic but the algorithms I think are universal and so you can tell I'm sort of like gay I'm excited because when I have a conversation like we did today I feel like the algorithms are starting to surface and creating a common language is going to be very useful and anyway I'm just expressing my own own excitement for what you guys have done and for what's emerging in this space I think I think and the next generations coming and they're gonna have tons of ideas - yeah right they're gonna assimilate right and transcend and include right and not you know basically will be obsolete and that'll be a good thing well they'll credit people properly and hopefully they'll what they'll eventually realize is that the the the brain hasn't evolved right to do many more new things in the form of these computations it's applying the same algorithms to different two different things but anyway I realized that I start speaking louder when I get excited but it's a genuine excitement that that people are that were in this discussion and that people are accessing these kinds of discussions because and and I always am curious to hear about other people's insights every once in a while someone will come up to me at a meeting or or will write to me and I'll I think wow you know that's something truly unique and different that I hadn't thought of because I think the pallet of choices out there about how to shift one state are now pretty vast I mean just like the pallet of ways to you can tire flip you can you CrossFit you can run you can swim you can do but there's so many tools out there but the fundamentals that they all supply or really what it's about and likewise in the kind of cognitive neuroscience and what I love - for me the future is like okay so if general population is starting to come back into balance and starting to do some basic training around body mind health and breathing and visualization then the next fears to begin to tap some of the untapped potential that we haven't even been doesn't talked about yet you know I mean like some of the extraordinary possibilities that I think the human mind has and that'll be a future discussion you know and then we got the intersection of AI and and you know that's why yes networks mental neural networks right what is that going to look like yeah I think the next 20 years are gonna be extraordinary so it's important for everyone to kind of up level their mental operating system both physically you know through proper nutrition and sleep and you know nua tropics but also through these practices like we said and to understand it from you know the neuroscience standpoint so it's all critical but that's just the beginning that's to provide the foundation to kind of leap into you know what I consider to be a next you know evolution of like what what it means to be human mm-hm you know because technology is gonna do that for us anyways and if we don't up level you know we're gonna get buried or we're going to destroy ourselves yeah well they certainly created enough enough things to make us suffer it's kind of you know I like a half joke that you know we're now creating technologies to buffer us against the technology okay so so be it you know and I guess you know but we're still in choice I guess to you the kind of workshop language you know we're all in choice and that the great thing about the mind stuff just like physical you realize we were talking about before we started like with a wall and a floor and gravity you can give yourself a great physical workout you know and just with the inner workings of your mind you can do so much I you know breathing visual system these things help but it's all there and it's I'm super excited to see where things lead and because of the great thing about YouTube and podcasts and and the digital space is that this information is wicking out further all the time and that means you're we're gonna access the people that really we would have not otherwise access you know I think the next frontier would be virtual like your experience of virtual reality but it's you know it's in a controlled environment but when everyone can have virtual reality we can start to embed or develop some holographic training programs you know that that you know can plug people into a new state immediately like we're all in the same yeah begin to train you know train focus and train awareness through deep immersive you know three or four D environment I guess for D would be where the time comes into play yeah that's gonna be interesting right that's coming can't wait for this it's like the constructor of the matrix or the holodeck concept you know it's it's super exciting it's so interesting to see how these communities around neuroscience and military and ex-military and and athletics and how they're all they're all converging on same common set of goals I think people deep all deeply want the same thing and it's that feeling of wow I didn't realize I have that superpower but now I have it and in that sense really seeing new opportunity and that's super exciting to me I agree wow I think we've been going for a little while here probably should wrap this up it's been amazing conversation i Andrew so thank you so much thank you thank you it's been a pleasure and tell us where tell the listener where you can where they can learn more about your work and the studies and a webpage yeah so pretty easy to find if you google my name andrew Huberman what you'll find is my lab webpage first which is Huberman lab comm that describes the people and things the people in my lab and the things that we do the range of things I didn't talk today but we run clinical trials for optic nerve repair and glaucoma and things that sort so there's a lot there as well as the fear courage and plasticity work and then we do like we have an Instagram which is that Huberman lab where I post information both about the work that we're doing but also what I find to be some of the exciting work in neuroscience around plasticity pain management some actionable stuff just pulling from the papers that come out it's not always accessible in the language that it's written and so I try and convert it into language that that is accessible to everybody and in either of those places you'll find contact information where if you're interested in being in our studies that would be great the science thanks you I thank you if you decide to do that and even if you don't so that those are the two major entry points if you want to learn more about what we do and I just also want to thank you for this opportunity to be here I know your programs I have tremendous respect for what you've done and what you're doing and this has been immensely stimulating for me so yeah thank you so much you're welcome and thank you and I look forward to getting up to San Francisco now that my son's going to school up there it's a neat that's a no-brainer so to speak so I want to come and be immersed with the sharks terrific and you can poke and prod me I'm human yeah my nickname in the seals was cyborgs so it's still there you go yuria still out there you go we'll figure we'll figure it out one way or another we'll take the measurements awesome well thank again and you folks thanks for listening like I said it's always an honor to have your attention so stay focused and relax the gaze on occasion and Trainyard we'll see you next time whoo yeah hey this is Mark Devine thanks very much for watching the end beautiful mind podcast on YouTube you can also find the podcast at itunes stitcher SoundCloud Google Play and unavailable mind comm / podcast sure to check out the new episode released every week whoo yeah

Channel: Unbeatable Mind

Views: 73,317

Rating: 4.862649 out of 5

Keywords: Unbeatable Mind, brain, self improvemnt, self help, training, navy seal, sealfit, intelligence, capacity, mental toughness, goals, stanford, visualization

Id: D2iJ5LNp0WU

Length: 135min 32sec (8132 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 15 2018