Harnessing Autonomic Arousal to Think & Do Better – Andrew Huberman #572

[Music] bulletproof radio a state of high performance you're listening to bulletproof radio with Dave Asprey today's cool fact of the day is that anxiety may be inherited from your parents brain activity patterns and researchers found a pattern of this brain activity that's tied to anxiety and traced it through generations of monkeys the results of this large study of about 400 monkeys bring us a little closer to understanding severe anxiety and how its inheritable this came from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and they say this new activity pattern really acts almost like genes going through your family tree they measured anxious temperament by subjecting young monkeys to a stressful situation and they measured how they responded to that to that situation notice how strong response they had and they measured their levels of cortisol and they figured out which monkeys stress harder than other monkeys and then they scanned the monkeys brains under anesthesia and the monkeys that had the bigger stress response showed a crucial difference in the extended amygdala which is a brain structure and its surrounding that's known to be involved in fear and threat detection oh and if you meditate it's probably involved in some of the more esoteric spiritual states you can achieve when you train it the other way but no one ever talks about that that wasn't in the study either but two parts in particular of the amygdala the central nucleus and the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis behaved in lockstep in the high stress monkeys and this is through functional MRI scans and they found if your parents had it the kids had it along with that anxious temperament what this means is that you can blame your mom for your mitochondria but you can blame both of your parents for your anxiety you know that or maybe you should just do some basic forgiveness and all that stuff and be done with that crap because you can retrain your amygdala they didn't put that in the study either but that's been a big part of my path to being not an anxious jerk all right now I typically like to foreshadow and you can wonder am I going to be talking about monkeys FMR eyes or anxiety in this case well none of the above and maybe a little bit of the above because we are talking about neuroscience and we're talking with a leading Bay area-based PhD who studies comparative neurology to understand our brains and brain evolution and he's doing this at Stanford School of Medicine where he's a professor of Neurobiology and he's made a bunch of important contributions to the field of brain development brain plasticity neural regeneration and repair so of course that's why I want to talk to him we're talking about none other than dr. Andrew Huberman Andrew welcome to the show thanks so much for having me I'm thrilled to be here now if you are a fan of neuroscience which is pretty likely if you've been listening to the show for a while we're going to define all of our terms as we go through the interview if you didn't know what the amygdala was that's okay now Andrew you know like so much cool stuff I almost didn't know where to start what I'm thinking what I asked you because you talked about increasing cognitive capacity which is which is really cool and you've done some really crazy martial arts and scuba diving like you're you're a very fit neuroscientist as opposed to you know the thick glasses white lab coat and overhanging belly that's probably the stereotypical neuroscience guy so let's start there what's up with increasing cognitive capacity by leveraging your stress and arousal system like what does that even mean yeah so I've long been interested in perception cognition all of neuroscience and the short history of this is the following so really there are five components to how you go through life and only five and they are the things you sense right the things you perceive so which which of those sensations you're focused on so then even it sends something but you wouldn't consciously know you sense that you're saying that's right so I could say you know right now you're sensing the bottoms of your feet in contact with the floor but until you think about it you weren't attention to you weren't perceiving it correct but you're sensing things all the time you can't turn off the sensory epithelium as we call it the sensory sheet of your eyes and your ears and your nose and your mouth and your and the rest you you basically you're sensing things all the time well you can turn those off with either lidocaine or LSD right yeah those are pretty extreme okay but I'm saying but when you do those weird stuff happens like any time you walk drunk I can't feel my hands or I can't feel my face after like those are extreme states that everyone remembers because they're so bizarre right I mean you could amputate a limb too but it's a good point right so that so I guess I'm referring to they sort of like basal states okay the normal States okay I don't mean to be nitpicky but that's yeah so so you know you're sensing things all the time and then there's what you perceive which is what you're focused on and then you're there are your emotions slash feelings and I'd like to call them emotions not feelings because when you call them feelings they're sometimes confused with sensations that's the feel part that's just a semantic thing and then they're your thoughts which are interesting we can talk about a little bit more and then there are your actions so that's it you've got sensations perceptions emotions thoughts and actions and that's essentially all your experience and of course there you're engaged in those simultaneously to varying degrees at any time and then there's this thing that they all ride on which is your level of alertness or let's call it autonomic arousal some people like to call it stress but that gets a little tricky let's just call it autonomic arousal here's what I mean by that when you're dead you're not gonna experience any of those things as far as I know forever bed so I don't know now as your alertness let's say you're fast asleep you're sensing things you're having thoughts they're not very organized most of the time you can even have feelings you can have emotions within sleep we know that and you have very limited behaviors unless you're a sleepwalker or something like that but as you become alert and calm more of those things become available to you like deliberate conscious thought and as you were feelings about your morning your the people in your life your life plans your path etc as you become more and more some people like to call it stress but as autonomic arousal goes up the weights of those things and what's available to you shifts dramatically so your ability to engage in conscious deliberate thought goes down as autonomic arousal reaches peak levels so if you're in a panic it's very hard to think about things in a organized way this is like the stuff lieutenant colonel Grossman who wrote on combat was just on the show and he talks about that they're very extreme states how even soldiers like they just go to training cuz they can't think they can't do any of that stuff and then you're saying even as you approach that your cognitive abilities goes down as your stress levels go up that's right and they're all and if I look at the whole of wellness or biohacking and I there are tools that are designed to control autonomic arousal that fall into different categories like the ones that are designed to raise your ceiling on what you perceive as stress you know ice baths hard runs these kinds of things there's a whole galaxy of those as you know and then there are the ones that are designed to bring your stress level down once you enter the stress response to kind of tamp it down consciously and then there are the ones that are sort of designed to bring your state up you know a you know wim HOF breathing comes to mind oxygen dominated breathing we can get into this in more detail if you like but in any case that the in thinking about brain activity and life experience in this way I became interested in the following question so I'm classically a visual neuroscientist meaning that my lab studies visual perception and the nerve cells and connections in the brain that mediate visual perception because we're just such visually driven animals about 40% of the human brain is devoted to visual processing in some way as well as merged with other sensory modalities like hearing but I was interested in why some visual stimuli create anxiety or increased autonomic arousal and some perhaps and we could get into this actually decrease autonomic arousal and potentially could be used as stress management tools that are very fast in real-time do you mean we say visuals too much you mean like flashing lights or pictures of zombies or something like what are we talking okay yeah great so if you see a picture of something that frightens you even if you don't have a phobia your autonomic arousal immediately spikes down we're all familiar with that there are things like light exposure overall light exposure with no form whatsoever what's called just ambient light like the overall level ambient light delivered early in the day will increase your autonomic arousal it will actually increase alertness there's a very powerful circuit for this you know well about this and that you that's the circuit that you want to avoid triggering late in the evening which is why you might wear blue blockers or something - we're not avoid looking at your phone in the wee hours Oh so light and visual stimuli have a powerful control over autonomic arousal and the nice thing is in a scientific sense about vision is you can completely control what are called the statistics of a visual scene so whereas like showing somebody a zombie is kind of a complicated visual stimulus in some ways it's actually very simple I know exactly where the lines are in that image I can make them different contrast I can make them different speeds I can give them more more or less reality depending on how I contour them all of this is to say that a few years ago I decided to start addressing stress the question what is stressed in the brain what are the circuits what are the what is the potential for the visual system to be used as an intervention for stress management both preventing going into the stress response as well as managing the stress response once you're in it and that brought us to an interesting question which is the one that you asked which is how is it that autonomic arousal which I can modulate using the visual system and I can get into that in more detail if you like how is it that autonomic arousal allows someone to process more information or less information is there a sweet spot in which being alert and maybe even slightly more in the stressed regime actually allows me to process information better and faster and here's the reason here's the experiment that we did that led to that hypothesis essentially a student in the lab PhD student was looking at the fear response in mice just laying mice run around in this little empty aquarium no water and then showing an expanding black disk above them and that essentially mimics their set their experience of an incoming predator and so my we'll do one of two things and they'll do the first time they'll do it every time and they don't need to learn it they'll freeze or they'll run for shelter okay so mice are innately just naturally afraid they'll freeze or run for shelter now she mapped the circuits in the brain that mediate that response and then she started increasing or decreasing the activity of these brain areas she found an area of the thalamus was just kind of this egg-shaped thing in the middle of the brain called the nucleus reunions this is a very poorly understood area of the brain but it connects to the frontal cortex and here's what was interesting if she increased the activity of this brain area that connects the thalamus to the frontal cortex and she showed the animal a fear inducing stimulus the animal would confront the stimulus it would no longer freeze or hide it would literally walk out to the stimulus and rattle its tail which is the mouse equivalent of beating its chest and saying ok let's go let's fight and if she comes off that structure the animals became more fearful and how was she turning that on she was using a to tip one of two techniques one is called chemical genetic where she actually puts a virus that on its own doesn't really do anything bad but with the wit that carries a receptor it's a muscarinic receptor that she can be injected drugged has either silence or increase the activity of the structure this is going to be the future of gene therapy in humans things like this not that exactly but right now you only do that in mice but I'll talk about we're not doing in humans that's it oh that's so incredible so just tuning that part of the brain and I recently did transcranial magnetic stimulation of entitled brain structures you could probably hit the thalamus with that in fact I even have some gear here that does it with magnets at a lower amplitude than the quarter-million-dollar gear that they're using it the the psychiatrist's office but yeah it's coming when the brain circuitry are coming and and so yeah so this is a circuit that literally changed fear into courage and so we asked what what's going on here and so it turns out that this circuit is allows the animal to bypass the amygdala activation I know you mentioned amygdala and your try to bypass amygdala activation and instead to engage the frontal cortex now that was all fine and good and we were excited that we discovered that circuit but the really interesting part was when she explored the level of stress in the animal when it was engaging in these so-called courageous or confrontational responses the autonomic arousal measured at the level heart rate and breathing was actually increased so we think of courage as this kind of calm state that allows you to you know engage in challenge without experiencing fear or negative emotion but it's quite the contrary and we know this because if someone were attacking you your level of autonomic arousal or stress will go through the roof but if I just got a snapshot of your response to that you're gonna fight back right as if they're just following you you might hide or get into the car and leave so the fear response is actually the lower arousal response and that was all fine and good and interesting but then the the third thing that she discovered was really what blew our minds which was that when we did an experiment to ask the animals and of course mice can't answer we can ask him all he want but they won't answer hey we didn't experiment where she stimulated this brain area when the animals were on one side of this little chamber or the other this container we found that they preferred the stimulation side they loved stimulation as pathway so this confrontational or courage pathway is actually directly linked we discovered to the dopamine reward pathway and it means that successful confrontation of fear meaning not dying not getting eaten not doing something stupid but successful confrontation of fear involves increases in your stress and is heavily rewarded in the brain so much so circuitry is is forever changed after that so this is a paper that we published in in Nature in 2018 and it immediately prompted us to say okay we have to do this in humans we do do it in humans maybe not that exact that exact study but one of the things Tony Robbins walking on coals right you like you feel like you're gonna die and then you stop like oh I did it and and it changes it rains or you look at like the flow genome stuff where one of the ways to go into a flow state is well just almost died on a mountain bike doing 50 miles an hour or skis or something and you get that dopamine hit and you go into this altered state it seems like we know that that there's a reward system because we can see it in the in certain behavior patterns like that and but are you actually able to measure that in humans now yeah so we immediately built up a virtual reality laboratory that looked exactly like the Mouse laboratory except bigger of course and this prompted us to go collect the most realistic fear inducing arousal producing stimuli that we could curvy our so that so that was what led to my collaboration with shark diver photographer Michael Muller and doing you know cage X at shark diving and recording great whites to bring back that footage to the lab and build VR experiences that are very realistic compared to most studies of fear you know the history of the nurse of studying neuroscience fear and humans is my opinion has been a little deprived let's say you know but VR changes that because you can control everything within the VR you can look at where people are looking can measure where their eyes are you can get subjective reports you can measure their breathing their heart rate but the real twist in all this that made it exciting was we teamed up with a neurosurgeon at UCSF guy named Eddy Chang spectacular neurosurgeon to actually record neurons from the human brain both the amygdala the visual cortex structures like the insula to actually get measurements of what the brain is doing in humans while people are going through these fear confrontation courage versus freezing first types of scenarios and what it's taught us and it's still early days for the human work I should mention that work isn't published yet but what it's teaching us is that the capacity to maintain cognitive load to perform a cognitive task under conditions of high stress and arousal are it actually you can train this up you can get you can essentially access and produce more cognitive information you can basically think better let's just you know put in plain language you can think better and do better in a complex game or in a simple game when your autonomic arousal is higher and so I'm very interested in this because you know I know there are a lot of people walking around that are really stressed and people who are traumatized and that's terrible and certainly everyone should deal with that with the through the appropriate channels but there's this real question like what was autonomic arousal designed to do well autonomic arousal was designed to leverage your behavior you know it's design once you got hungry enough you were supposed to get agitated enough that you went and sought food when you say autonomic arousal you're talking about sympathetic like the fight-or-flight response being turned on enough not that not the sympathetic branch or sorry not the parasympathetic branch the rest and reset branch of the autonomic system I you're talking about being a little stressed enough to do a good work that's right I'm talking about why here's my theory I'll try and you know weave this with some of the more common daily practices with people who don't have electrodes in their heads you know I've always found that a little bit for me just myself a little bit of mild hunger or like the intermittent fasting thing or the kind of ketogenic oriented nutrition always sharpened my focus you know back in 2000 when I was or 2005 when I was a postdoc at Stanford my I got teased a lot because I would drink the oil off the almond butter and everyone was like oh girls I could work very long hours that way I always liked when I was working long hours to maintain a little bit of sympathetic tone as they say well you know be a little bit more on the stress regime it was time to relax you know you can eat some starches and crash out and you could be good so the nervous system is highly susceptible to these kinds of manipulations because in you have to remember that of course you and you know this the autonomic arousal like even the the stress that people feel around loneliness that was installed in you to get you to go find a mate right and if you are not lonely like you have a mate and you've made it recently and there's a period of time it varies between individuals where your content to be relaxed the parasympathetic dominance because nature so you're being that Ani pers you're being manipulated from the inside based on what nature wanted you to do but you can leverage that that's the power that of that fourth element which is conscious thought and so it occurs to me that there are two states that most people want to be in not 50 they're there their psychedelic states and there are other kinds of states flow States but the two states I think most people seek are alert and calm or asleep and I feel like one of the beautiful and exciting things that's happening with this biohacking movement and with the Wellness movement and is to find healthy sustainable ways to be alert and calm when you want and asleep when you want and if you're not good at it to get better at it and so what lab doesn't work on those things directly I'm just fascinated by the extent to which autonomic arousal can be used as a tool to get you where you want to go it makes so much sense it's funny because one of the things that I was kind of embarrassed to put in in game-changers there are four laws for high performance around sex and relationships because it's one of those big three things that every cell in your body is wired to do right like even single-celled organisms if they don't have sex so they don't reproduce in some way the species will end right so we're kind of wired but I found there if there really is an orgasm hangover at least for men and it has to do exactly with that arousal system or like there's a couple days we were just relaxed but if you wanted to get stuff done you know you actually don't get stuff done the next day you're you're a little bit more chill and maybe you know a bit less satisfied with life because you know you're like yeah I got I got nothing to do today sort of thing so I published a year's worth of data just on that which that was the embarrassing part but what you're talking about there's the neuroscience behind that's you're saying if you don't eat for a little while not for a long time you might perform better if they intermittent fasting boom there you go I would say if you don't eat and you have some extra ketones from say bulletproof coffee in the morning float around you probably going to get even more of that right but if you go on the number one thing though that that we're all going to do is run away from kill or hide from scary things and you're saying having enough of that even as cognitive enhancing but alright I'm sitting here I completely vibrate other than you're saying how exactly am I going to get more of that first the first f-word the fear f-word as opposed to the food f-word how am I gonna get more of that without being at risk of breaking limbs and getting TB eyes and things like that yeah I mean I think one of the things that the flow genome guys have really spelled out well I wouldn't saw one of their things recently as you know this idea that you know you want it you do they have this list of kind of suggestions they don't call them Commandments but one of their suggestions and I don't work for them they just but I'm friendly with those guys yeah I was the first investor in the flow Genome Project so yeah I'm excited about what they're doing is they're putting in things into a really nice framework which is you know you definitely don't want to end up like in a body bag or in jail or do something it's always my concern about like just do high speed skiing and yes you know not for most people yeah let's see when you can die and people do die and and I worry that you know the the thresholds for that especially the YouTube videos and all that and you know that I watched and enjoyed free so low but that's not something that most people should do right so you have to you know you have to be make a very thorough assessment so it you know the threshold is different for everybody but what I'm what I would like people to appreciate and I think um certainly you do is that some level of an understanding about what the stress response is really for reframes it from a pathology that we're supposed to run from and control at all costs to something that you know you can think about developing tools for so I think of tools in terms of like real-time tools and offline tools so if the work that we're doing now we look at both so-called normal subjects and subjects who have generalized anxiety and again it's early days but what we're finding is that one way to measure or evaluate as well as potentially control the stress response in real time is by your by altering the way in which literally you look at the world now here's why so the visual system has a powerful control over your level of autonomic arousal so you have to think about the which direction you want to go so let's say I'm alerting and kind of sleepy and I don't I'm not motivated or engaged there are times when I'm not stressed I'm kind of under stressed and I need to lean in to work or do something yeah there are a number of ways to do that of course many you know your listeners know them and you have many of them they're powerful but the we have two kinds of vision is panoramic vision so-called magnocellular vision because it's carried by big neurons that transmit information very fast as designed to view the world and kind of panorama so if you dial out your gaze as you're listening to this or and just kind of see yourself but see yourself in the entire room or even better if you're outdoors and you just see everything the world Khan takes on a spherical shape that's associated with a branch of the visual system you're engaging a branch of the visual system that is more sort of parasympathetic dominant it actually animals letter grazing animals only have that system they don't have what's called foveal vision they don't have high acuity vision they're grazing and their only concern is to get their food while detecting if anything comes into their environment it's actually a system that allows you to process information much faster because the neurons are big for potential threat detection but it's a low anxiety State now there are many yogic practices they're kind of associated with soft gaze and things but this is the neuroscience of that and you can do it by dialing out your gaze by contrast when you focus your eyes on a single what's called virgin's point and you enter foveal vision you're now switching to high acuity vision and your perception of time switches this is what's key you're altering the you start micro slicing time so big-picture time bins are bigger small picture time bends are smaller just simply by virtue of the two parallel circuits that we have in our brains primates have in their brains Lions have in their brains but animals like sheep and cows don't they only have that panoramic vision so we've been exploring in the lab the extent to which you can use the your states of viewing the world as rapid ways to enter and adjust your level of autonomic arousal so when I'm kind of sleepy and I need to focus and do work I actually focus on a crosshatch about about a meter away in for about a minute and it actually acts to lock your my attentional system you can actually there's a blip that kind of increased in autonomic arousal goes up with that and then I personally find it easier than to focus on on a work task conversely if I'm sort of in a stressed state you know people always say control your breathing I'm a big fan of breath work as a way to control your breathing but the problem is it's closed loop so if I'm really stressed and I can't control my breathing then controlling my breathing is an option but dialing you know it's also not covert all the time you can't do it in every circumstance can't do it if you're scuba diving you can't do it under a number under you sometimes you should but adjusting breathing when in real time is a complicated thing because you don't want to compromise your activity but you can dial out your gaze and very rapidly adjust down your level of autonomic arousal in fact the visual system is the fastest way maybe the auditory system as well to down regulate your arousal and the answer the reason for that comes from neuroanatomy so here I teach neuroanatomy the medical students and there are two Craney there are multiple cranial nerves that feed the so-called reticular activating system this wakeup system for the brain but the two that people often overlook are cranial nerves two and eight which are the optic nerve and the vestibular ocular tori nerve so the so if you if you recall the the optic nerve was the primary evolutionary anciently installed mechanism to control arousal and now you consider that the human brain is 40% for vision and now it makes sense why okay of course you want to block blue light in the evening because that optic nerve that second cranial nerve is carrying arousal information to the brain and if you stimulate it with blue light which is susceptible to in the evenings of course in too strong them you're gonna shift your clock so our ancient brain used vision as the as one of the primary drivers for controlling autonomic arousal it's interesting when I went through this period of jesus's supposed to be about 10 years ago where I was working with a developmental ophthalmologist mmm and he had me do all sorts of crazy exercises that over the course of three months I went from 20 60 in both eyes back to 2015 and I got rid of a stigmatism and to this day I'm still 2015 and I had I had drifted so I was like 2060 2080 something like that so it was kind of magic but it was an hour of weird vestibular activation exercises I was exhausted for the whole day after I did is like it was really terrible brain stress to be honest but one of the exercises that that made the biggest difference as something that I'll still do today if I need to is like you've rub your hands together like the way you would like in Qigong and then you cup them over your eyes and just open your eyes but all you can see is darkness and if you talk to you know dr. berry Morgul on the Chinese energy master UCLA surgeon who's been on the show a couple times it's like well there's special key that comes out of rubbing your hands but you talked to a neuroscientist like you you're saying well covering the vestibular system allows the brain to relax and allows the eyes to relax and maybe is triggering that relaxation system so I mean I've taught people to do that for anxiety but I think you've got the mechanism for what's happening there yeah it's perfect sense I mean I think that you know I'm I as you know you know I don't shy away from the notions of yoga or meditation or the area right so can you be a modern neuroscientist and just completely dismiss all that stuff like it shows afar well you know it's interesting because I mean people very my colleagues here are very open mind I mean people are very and extent to which they do these things I think there's a new generation of people coming up who were exposed to ideas who care about who realized that their nutrition impacts their health I mean I've been trained I've been very sad to see colleagues who didn't manage their health well here at Stanford people tend to be pretty health wounded but who didn't manage their health well you know who understood that some of them were we're studying cancer of all things right you know and so you see this where people who study psychiatric illness and then commit suicide I mean it happens and the reason is that um we're all myopic we're all nearsighted in some way you know we all have our blind spots I think that what's so exciting now it is is and this is something I care very much about is that the field of neuroscience is in a position to bridge in a logical rigorous and yet open-minded way to the fields of wellness and these more kind of what used to be nice fields like yogic practices and things of that sort I mean you it can't be overlooked and you know one reason why I love running my lab so much and one reason why I also am so interested in these fields of wellness and biomechanics because I think growing up in this area I really got to see how computer science and engineering that and Fizz that was once the domain of academics eventually made it into companies like Apple and Google and all these incredible companies and I think the same thing is going to happen in neuroscience I think it's happening now it's starting where the career options and the paths that these really smart hardworking scientists and really smart hardworking people in the Wellness communities are gonna start to merge through and I'd like to serve as a bridge as much as I can for information in other other ways to keep that the flow of information bi-directional enter you you said something really important that you said a lot of researchers or physicians or academics say that they're they're blind to or they're myopic or they're blind to certain new ideas you've actually spent probably more of your career than anything else actually studying real blindness and you actually said I plan to give my entire life to the study of the visual system and one of your interviews with a glaucoma Research Foundation so you're like one of the top eye brain interface guys out there and you're actually working on I'm curing blindness um why do you care so much about blindness I think it's because we're just such a visually driven animals you know I mean I I love music but if you took away my hearing at B all right smell I could do without you know we have all these wonderful senses you know touch is obviously key but we're just so visually driven and I think it was early on you know I was raised in visual system neuroscience meaning my graduate advisor was in the lineage of these two guys he David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel who won the Nobel for discovering critical periods this idea that you could your experience during particular phases of life dramatically shaped the brain like duh now but you know in the early eighties that that wasn't necessarily it would certainly wasn't known it wasn't data supported they did that so their my scientific grandparents or great-grandparents but I've always been fascinated by vision I grew up with it with a kid he went to our school was kid Tony and he walked with a cane and I remember having a very very strong emotional response to that it was just so clear that he wasn't gonna be able to do most of the things that any anyone else was going to do and and I think it hit me got level I never knew that I'd get at that point I get individual neuroscience but I also but I know how important I felt how important the problem was and then later my lab was working on development of the visual system and I thought well this is great but we got to apply some of this to regenerating the visual system so we you know there was a wealth of knowledge from our lab and other labs on how the eye connects to the brain and vision and takes place and I felt like look at the time is now so we did we published a paper back in 2016 showing that specific patterns of electrical stimulation using screens not wires but having mice view particular patterns of visual stimulation could actually enhance regeneration after a blinding injury and you know that I got contacted by hundreds now thousands of patients around the world but can you help me can you help my kid um can you help my wife is so debility I'm losing my vision and so what I decided at that point was this kind of the typical line of oh it's gonna be five or ten years before we do some humans more studies in mice more studies in mice I thought you know enough of that if you're blind more studies are not needed right exactly so I thought what is a safe and non-invasive way that we can bring this to humans now so one of the things I'm most proud of is and this was a team effort of course and I rely on excellent people here at Stanford and elsewhere but was to take the time line of running taking a result like that to a clinical trial in humans typically it's five to ten years and we made it ten months so right now we're running a clinical trial with the ophthalmology department here at Stanford where there are patients it's a small number of them still but we're growing that number who are have VR headsets that they wear put on five times a week for a thirty minute training so to stimulate the retina in specific ways in order to try and get enhanced vision so that they can see better and for people who are losing their vision and this is key for people that are losing their vision to not lose their vision so to hold on to what they've got because it's one thing to cure blindness to reverse blindness but it in many blinding diseases it's slow so like in glaucoma it's really slow and so we are making a serious effort to halt their vision loss and I can't it's a clinical trial so I can't report the results of that yeah I'm also blind no pun intended where of the the results in many cases in order to keep the science rigorous but um it's you know I'm excited about where it's going I'll just say that and and of course the data or the data but I really I got asked about it yeah do you go home at night and put those VR goggles on to give yourself supervision ah no but I've become very um no I don't deny you hook a brother up sure I can I can hook you up with the the code and and the stimulation is actually kind of fun we have people forage through a virtual art gallery so you can learn art while you do this yes make this stuff interesting if you're gonna spend like five times a week for 30 minutes we had to make it interesting for the patients so we designed a virtual art gallery that the patients go into they view these empty frames which are boring but then they see specific patterns of visual stimulation and then as a reward for that they then get exposed to different they see these different paintings and they're learning the paintings and as they and we're using that as a measure of their visual perceptual abilities too so yeah I'm happy happy to tell you what we're doing with it supply with the with what we got we're we're you know the VR technology has expanded so fast I I don't think VR is give me one of these things that like is gonna take over every industry and like people predicted it would but I think for clinical treatments it's extremely valuable one of the things that fascinated me when I got really into my visual system was that my left eye would actually turn off so I I would not see in stereo vision but I didn't know what I was blind to the fact that this was happening so my brain would get tired my visual system was just my eyes didn't team well so I worked really hard on turning that eye back on so that I would have both eyes work at the same time in really training the brain to cause them to work together the theory that they that they came up with was that well I started reading when I was 18 months old so I probably spent a lot of time staring at a page instead of looking at trees and crawling around and stuff yeah absolutely yes wait how old were you when you did this retraining I was about probably 34 33 34 so I mean yeah that's an amazing story it's awesome because you know the classic thing the human weasel Nobel Prize was for this idea that the brain is plastic early on and that's kind of frozen these critical periods Eric Kandel came on the show the guy who like discovered neuroplasticity right right so huh yeah no I mean I think that one of the great you know sequels to that was these people like Ken Dayle like um Eric Knudsen like Mike Marisnick who have shown that no they it's an absolute no they're if you it's not just restricted to early life that if you pay attention to the task that you're focused on so this is gaming the realm of adult plasticity if you pay attention to the task and you have sufficient level of autonomic arousal or alertness right sympathetic arousal then the neuromodulators dopamine and acetylcholine nicotinic receptors are stimulated by the acetylcholine we talk about nicotine right you're a fan and there are certain regimes then you open up plasticity you essentially amplify the conversation between particular neurons that are involved in that sensory event like viewing something or conversation or whatever it is and then you get long-term plastic changes in that circuitry and I think nowadays in 2019 it's absolutely clear that adult plasticity is not only possible it's available you just provided you engage in the particularly hring bouts they have to be short they have to be focused they have to be repeated and it does help if there's some neuromodulator augmentation now that's not for everybody right now I personally not everybody should be chewing Nicorette or whatever but there are applications right but there are conditions in which that can potentially enhance plasticity as you know more about that topic than I do but the plasticity and adulthood is very real and you're a really great example that I'm really interested because I'd love to put on a pair of virtual reality goggles and like have it over weight my left eye to like stress that part of my brain so it would become you probably even better than it is because I knew that I have a perceptive weakness there and I imagine a substantial number of people have one eye that's a little bit weaker than others we've had Helen Earl anon who talks about this stuff so I know we could do that with VR and I'm hoping that you are some some of your friends are doing that but the the flipside I'm a computer hacker by background by training and I think about what happens if you have malware running in VR goggles you know can I change the flicker rate on just the left eye versus the right eye I mean could you like trash people without them really knowing it yeah I mean if someone had ill intent they could do that sure I said it's actually kind of scary I mean if you're playing this VR for 6 hours a day and there's a 5% tweak between your two eyes over time that could be like a substantial performance improvement you would have no idea why right well I don't think anyone should be spending six hours a day in VR I'll be cheering valence and a colleague of mine here at Stanford wrote I wrote this book experience on demand and is a he's been in the VR field essentially longer than anybody that I know and he he has some very specific prescriptions especially for kids whose brains are very plastic because there's you know look one hour or two hours of a patched eye of just click occluding and closing one eye in childhood can lead to a permanent shift in the brain representation that i you can become cortically blind to that unless you do the reverse experiment which is to cover the other eye and open the one that was recently closed and reverse it that's the kind of work that he when Wiesel won that Nobel for so the rewiring that you can have an adulthood is more subtle in any one session but that's why you don't want to be spending six hours a day in VR or I mean it's not clear you should be doing six hours a day of any one thing in particular except maybe sleep right all right there you go I like that quote what about we'll just call it human augmentation about going beyond the what you know what we were born with you've you've done your scuba you've done some pretty extreme sports sorts of things over over the years what's your take on it is it is it real is it happening already is it going to happen what does it look like it's gonna happen it's happening you know that there are some people out there that are you know claiming they're gonna you know put chips in the brain get people learning languages in a few days enhancing you know here's the deal at this point in the sort of history of neuroscience we understand a thing or two about sensation the neurons involved that mediate sensation of thing or two about perception a thing or two about emotions although emotions are very poorly understood a thing or two of about thoughts although that's a very poorly understood and action that we know a thing or two about because you can measure it right now that means that you know what the brain is doing the so-called neural code is it mysterious so that's there's been a lot of recordings from the brain is so-called when people say reading the brain you're sort of like what are the signals what how one of the neurons active in space and time during a behavior or a thought at cetera and then there's writing to the brain there's actually manipulating the neurons and their activity well we don't know what the algorithms are that lead to say if I'd say okay you know have you ever had a pet did it snow absolutely have a dachshund named Merlin cool so like just that conscious recollection of his name and his or her name and and the ideas of Merlin there's so much context right we don't really know what that what the symphony of neuronal activation is for that such that we could manipulate it and change your relationship to it the things that we're getting good at at neurosis neuroscientist and as biohackers or are manipulating that arousal state you know I'm fascinated by all the stuff all the constitution breathwork and ice baths and ketogenic diet so it says these are all things really designed to manipulate arousal state and then you've got the stuff that's more targeted at cognition per se like Dew traffic's and things of that sort there's really more your wheelhouse of mind but I watched the field I try and place it in neuroscience context this the people that are talking about creating super beings that can learn so much and retain so much um you know III invite a challenge I've been delighted that people are thinking about neuroscience but without it any understanding of really how to think about emotions in a in a rigorous scientific way or think about thoughts in a rigorous scientific way to really understand what those are I'm not all that confident that people know what sequences of stimulation to put into the brain in or to get it to be 10x better 50x better any one thing however I will say this things like you mentioned TMS there are laboratories that are now using ten Hertz stimulation not inhibition or inactivation that activation 10 Hertz activation in particular circuits to open up the window for classes to date with magnets or what would team it with okay so I have a neuroscience facility not quite up to the human lab standard but you know we we have two neuroscientists and a lot of EEG stuff but will actually use very specific frequencies with an alternating current across the brain including 10 Hertz as one of them but we'll do that to increase neuroplasticity before doing neurofeedback so that you can get basically bad more results in less time and I doing that kind of stuff well the alternating current for now going on 20 years in different different frequency sets but you're doing it with Magnus which will also use pulse Magnus actually in those frequencies but they're very weak compared to what you're talking about I'm a little frustrated the Russians started doing this in the 60s that's how come I know about it is from the Russian space program and it feels like transcranial stimulation tDCS about eight years gonna start blogging I wrote a lot about how to do it yourself I've sent it out in the the quarterly curated box I do and I look at that bio hackers are doing that one thing but we have 50 years of using electricity or in some cases magnets on the brain but it's almost unheard of you got halo neuroscience out maybe doing it what it why does it take 50 years for this stuff to come out do you have a sense from the inside of academia yeah so I think yeah so they're people using 10 Hertz stimulation trying to open up windows for plasticity you know it can be done why okay the reason is that failures at neurosurgery and in medicine can halt fields entirely so like you look at gene therapy right like there were some early failures that setback if you'll do this powerful thing of gene therapy of using viruses deliver genes that people need into their body and brain in different ways and get set it back a decade or more um you know that there's the medical community is very reactive right like the fen phen thing like people were losing weight and people start dying it's like gone right so anymore right so um tryptophan right it looks like now you can go buy 5-htp or tryptophan it at the at your health food store online at Amazon but you know it used to be that because of a contaminated batch of tryptophan that some people died is like surveillance off the market you know so people are relying on heavier sleep medication when they probably didn't need to so there's a tragedy as a result of that band right - so I think um people are reluctant but it's changing I think that brain-machine interface is gonna be the first place non-invasive brain machine interface I high-five you for that so the non-invasive part of that if it was thing there's the the you on must neural lace idea where we're gonna have these implants in our brains my wife dr. Lauda and I started a company that did a lab testing for immune rejection of implant materials that are supposed to be hypoallergenic and so we went kind of deep on that this is in the mid-2000s and I'll tell you there are people allergic to titanium allergic to gold things that you're not supposed to be able to and then you have biofilms and infection and I'm pretty out there but I've had stem cells everywhere and did all sorts of stuff that I swallowed electrical stimulation devices but I'm not implanting crap in my brain until we've managed to get all the signal out of our our eyes all coming off our brain and there's just so much that's not touched it feels foolhardy and stupid and like you read too much sci-fi which is almost impossible to do in order to think oh we got to drill holes and I feel like I'm most almost like a heretic for saying that but but you you said non-invasive before I did so why are you in the non-invasive camp versus you know why shouldn't we all just go to get a chip well I think is I'm realistic about what's gonna what most people are not going to breach the skull they're not gonna take a little drill skull you know neurosurgeons aren't afraid of drilling through just all they love it they live for it they trained for it and so they're the first people will say oh yeah you know it's no big deal but they do it with with a purpose now I think that um you know there is this portion of your central nervous system the brain right the only piece of your brain that sits outside of your skull is your Rhett and so I'm obviously you know I keep coming back this time I'm making a push for the you the visual system as an entry point for at least manipulating states and for accessing you know there's fear to courage transition for accessing you know control over stress in real time I'm not an engineer I'm not developing the technologies to do this one of the reasons I was excited to come on your podcast is because people listen to it I think that there are smart people out there that can create science grounded tools for this okay and remember that's a piece of the brain hanging out outside the skull for which the statistics and the this in other words the stuff you want to deliver to the retina then I don't injecting into the retina I mean looking at stuff or seeing certain things is is kind of known it's not like you have to go find some substance in the Amazon it's called light you know and you just have to manipulate like either in VR in another format in intelligent ways and I think that so that is one form of brain machine interface now halos an interesting one too i think the founders of halo one of them trained with mike mercy i've never tried the device but they came they came on the show is pretty cool yeah yeah I mean it's grounded in very good logic I received nothing from them but I think that the logic is great stimulate so-called post synaptic activity you know activity in a motor cortex while engaging in a motor task you want to learn better get a little more or much more amplification of the signal and you know learn things faster it may it all makes sense I think that the stuff that you're doing of you know I haven't tried all the the tools I'd love to next time I'm in Santa Monica I'd love to try some of the tools and goodies and all this stuff but I think very few people are willing to take an intelligent thoughtful engineering approach to this you know on the one hand you got scientists that are busy running their labs and trying to figure out how things work under normal conditions and solve disease and stuff and then you've got people in the bio hacking community with who are like well what one pill is just gonna get me there and I think I'm not just saying this because we're in conversation I think embracing the brain machine the non-invasive stuff the supplementation stuff the the whole of it is the only way to arrive it's a whole field right it's like saying the field of neuroscience couldn't have gotten by with just an electrode and you also need an atom molecular biologist field of biohacking and wellness you need people who are thinking about different domains of the problem and and you're doing that and there are others of course to you you nailed it when I I created that that community and in the term in fact they added biohacking to the dictionary in 2018 in Webster's it's a new word in our language yeah it is are you serious I'm serious yeah I was blown away someone texted next thing that I always say the moment you become a verb then you know it's like Marie Kondo now they're talking about like you're gonna Marie Kondo that so pretty soon you know what are you gonna call it bitter no it's just called biohacking and I actually I didn't trademark that works I wanted it to be a name for like how do we bring neuroscientists and Navy SEALs and you know deep-sea divers and weight loss experts and you know all the people who didn't win bodybuilders for God's sake like they would never touch no scientist but they're really really good hackers of our human biology and well they're willing to try most yeah we need guinea pigs who want to look like balloon animals I'm just kidding but you know like if you want to get real swole but I I wanted that and you're you just hit it on the head me talk about you won't get there with just one because I used to try just one of those when I had a lot of work to you because I was pretty much wrecked and it kind of makes me mad when people like it says that one pill is like no you can't eat garbage and take the one pill it doesn't work right and if you just eat really cleanly and you think that's gonna magically give you all the performance you can do well that's not gonna work either like you you just have to stack it but then it's actually work and sometimes maybe you need more arousal so you'll be inspired to do the work you know it's interesting because I think that right now we're at such a key point in the evolution of not just in her science but this this biohacking field I think that um it's no longer niche and there are a number of scientists really you know I heard a great podcast I was with Rogen and and David Sinclair on Aging you know yes yeah I've been following David Sinclair's work some of the effects some of the people who've shown some new things about nicotine mu driver-side where you're gonna come on soon so yeah okay so yeah I mean guys like Sinclair he was willing to at least talk about what he's doing in his own life you know he cares about his longevity as hell you know there's there's a new generation coming up and we're I mean I've been in this game a while because I into a young but you know we we want to live long healthy better lives I approached neuroscience in my career in neuroscience I looked at I was like look I'm not professional athlete but like this is competitive and time consuming and energetically demanding and potentially stressful as anything else and it's professional and this is my livelihood so my nutrition my supplementation my exercise my whatever brain machine interface stuff I happen to play with a lot unless of that was all geared toward trying to be better what I do right and live my normal life outside the lab but but but so i biohacking my way the route neuroscientists like that's it you know yeah but that's that's why you know you have a position at Stanford because the and that came out really well in game changers this last book I asked 450 people who did something noteworthy enough to be on the show the same question and found the common patterns of what they did to become your pre-eminent at what they do and well what you did to become at the top of your field is very similar like there's common patterns and one of them is in fact the number one answer out of all these interviews when I had a station go through the data with me it was actually food like an a surprising number of people realize that when they eat crap they just don't perform well at what they love to do and then they know but then it from there it goes all over the place which is which is fascinating so you you somehow knew that and I have two more questions for you one is how did you know to do that like did you have weird parents who were hippies giving you you know drops of herbs did you ever like what that's a rare human thing to just evolve into yeah it honestly it was it was because of a girl it was I mean that the short story I was you know I was a kid in high school like skinny skateboard kid and I looked and I was you know there's a girl a couple of years older than I was and I heard I might have a chance or like she might have looked in my direction for a millisecond you know I fell in love young followed her off to college and I oh and I so I got into fitness first you know I was like alright I'm gonna start doing my push-ups and sit-ups and that kind of thing and then you know you get into that community and pretty soon you discover like oh how I eat impacts my body and how I feel and how I think as well and over time I got really interested in um nutrition and supplementation I always wanted to try out different things i you know i found i do bet best personally on like limiting my starches and eating more fat so i was lucky that my dad is um argentine so he was always like he was always like look you know you want to eat meat because it's important like you know this was in the 90s right because it was on these low fat low protein diets so and i felt like i could outwork people like in terms of longevity like in time everyone else was crapping out and and i'm still going and then i could use I learned pretty early to use exercise to change my schedule so if I need to be alert in the morning I started exercising in the morning I can shift on jetlag that way and so I started biohacking early on it and frankly I loved supplements I think I'd taught me to be in tune with my body I'm very sensitive so how many a day do you take oh man so the joke among my friends and colleagues is when people say what do you take my response is just all of them I I have the things that I take if you looked at what I take the most I'm kind of thinking like it's gonna be number because it oh I do 150 pills a day so that would be the rest of the show oh it's somewhere in that regime okay but you take fist balls basically oh yeah I mean right I mean yeah this was easily and and I'm a big fan but I'm very systematic so I've got my stack I'm always happy to share that with people but that's just what I do I got my my stack and then I systematically trying new new things and and I can tell very quickly if something doesn't work for me or works for me everything I get you can get off Amazon and it's like typical and so I don't take anything really esoteric but I've long taken things like desiccated beef liver tablets oh yeah me too for years is my thing like I mean multivitamin ginger these kinds of it like but you know so I eat pretty normally except for pretty clean but you know I think in general the supplementation has given me I would say it's hard to put a real number on this but anywhere from like a 10 to 25 percent advantage in terms of you know just all existing like attentionally they're dropping out or like I see them later like on for a meeting I don't mean here at Stanford because there's some superpower people here but of course but like on for the meeting and then you walk and there are you see them five years later you haven't seen someone in like a year you seen them you're like what happened you know they're like falling apart they talking about their their this pain and that pain I'm like I'm 43 now and I don't put time and energy into it but I think it makes me happier and it makes me better for my work oh the ROI on that is is exceptionally high and there's an infinite number of things you could do they take all of your time but over the course of practicing them you figured this one was worth it and this one wasn't and and that's the path of biohacking I final question for you yes I've been running an anti-aging non-profit group actually one that meets in Palo Alto for almost 20 years and I've learned from people you know three times my age at least well back then three times my age now is getting up there but I've been real public in men's health recently it's like look I'm going to live to at least 180 here's the math here's what I think I can do it and that's pretty far out there but you're a biohacker you're neuroscientist you're very well trained you know what's going on up there how long are you gonna live mmm it's a really interesting question I actually believe and I've felt this for some time that two things one is that we have a kind of intrinsic sense of how long that is without any intervention I think we can sense it although we have family history so that gets in the way I have a theory and I I am NOT this is not grounded in any data that I have ever collected but I have a theory that how protracted or prolonged your puberty was is a good predictor of your longevity and now probably someone out there is like so-and-so said that 20 years okay yeah I yeah I get it I haven't read the lyrics I haven't PubMed at this or details right usually take a look every once in a while um you know that the men of my family have lived very long times they age slowly I you know I hit period like you know 14 like most like many kids at that age but my it was very protracted in terms of the acquisition of what they call secondary sex characteristics right and I think that right now I'm I'm aim for a hundred but the key but I'm willing to expand that out but um this year on my birthday I went up to clouds rest this peak up in Yosemite did my my age and push-ups and I plan to do that every year nice I'm determined to prove that you can get better every single case I feel better you can like you could get younger it's totally apparent I literally feel better and I can perform it every single year and I think there there are levers to make that go better of course and you know more about that than I do but I'll put but just to be optimistic I'm gonna say 120 and you just added 20 years right there all right that's what I like there well yeah 120 because I feel that um 100 is without intervention there you go okay yeah 100 without intervention and I'm gauging that on a I believe that we have clocks that are that allow us to get some sense of our of how long we've got to go barring accident or injury of course right right boss doesn't care about your genetics right he step on bust your thumb so um if it's moving the so the but the and I'm not suggesting you won't do that of course the opposite but I think that the the I think we have a sense of our of our arc and I think the duration of puberty and the acquisition of the speed of acquisition of secondary sex characteristics is a interesting potential predictor of that arc beautiful semantics Andrew thank you for for your work you're doing really fascinating stuff across a diverse spectrum of neuroscience and neurobiology and for for people listening you've got to check him out on Instagram he has one minute neuroscience lectures it's at Huberman lab is where that that stuff is and I really appreciate both the depth of work but also the fact that you're you take the time and that you have the ability to share it in a coherent manner because there are a few neuroscientists probably some guys you and I both know who are doing profound work and they can't tell you what they're doing because they just you know they don't have that int so so just thanks for being a good storyteller about your work and just for doing that hard stuff that you do well thanks so much for the kind words and for hosting me I'm a huge fan of the work that you've been doing and are doing and it's really for me it's very gratifying to get a chance to talk about these ideas with you and share them with your audience so thanks ever so much if you like today's episode do you know what to do check out Andrews work on Instagram at Q Berman lab and while you're at it if you like the show and you haven't had a chance to pick up your copy of game-changers I'm going to buy you 500 hours of life if you were to listen to 500 episodes of bulletproof radio which is gonna take you approximately three months of your life working forty hours a day and there are quite a few people have done that but if you haven't done that yet I went to the trouble I went through every episode gathered the knowledge from them looked for commonalities sorted through it and made it so that you can read the book or listen to the book you can read it in about four hours and you can get all of that boil down knowledge with the sink the simple question is what are the things you could do to perform better as a human being not by following one guru or another but saying what do they all agree on what are the common patterns so you can pick the things with the highest return for you this took me more time to write and in most so many other books and it's not here's Episode one and here's what you learned it's a it's a real study of vulgar video so check out game changers if you haven't it's almost entirely five-star reviews the best reviewed book I've ever written it just hit the shelves and pick it up today [Music]

Channel: Bulletproof

Views: 38,837

Keywords: dave asprey, bulletproof radio, bulletproof podcast, bulletproof coffee, butter coffee, andrew huberman, biohack, biohacking, human performance, high performance

Id: iG9H3EUnhLE

Length: 63min 51sec (3831 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 05 2019