Thank you for the very kind introduction,
this will truly be something different than what you just heard. I'm blown away by the speakers here, and by
the speeches, and by all of you. I have to say, I go to a lot of meetings,
I talk to a lot of different crowds, I've been going to the wrong meetings. So, this is wonderful and I'm extremely grateful. It's a brave thing to invite an academic to
speak to a general audience. Because generally, when you ask an academic
what they do, you're in for a long haul. So, in the next three hours, I'm gonna tell
you about...no, I'm just kidding. My goal is to make this accessible to you
and that we can all learn something, and I'm gonna tell you about my favorite things in
science. And just briefly, I'm not gonna give you a
long CV or bio, but my father is a scientist, I grew up in the science game, my mother writes
children's books. So, I grew up in the storytelling game. And really, for me, my birth as a scientist
was at 6, I asked my dad what he did, he told me that he was a physicist, I said, "That
sounds cool, I wanna do that," because I was a young child who wanted to be like his dad. And he said, "No, no, no, you don't wanna
do that, the natural world will be figured out eventually, and soon, you wanna understand
something really mysterious." And I said, "Like what?" And he said, "That thing in your head, your
brain." And I had actually never thought about the
fact that my brain was in my head before. And since that day, whenever I meet a child,
I always say, "Where's your brain?" And I make them point. That's an important thing. And today, we're actually gonna spend a little
time on that fact and why it's very useful. All right. So, today I'd also like to offer you something
that I like to think is very powerful as a practice, and some of these topics have come
up in the various talks. So, as I give my description, you're gonna
hear some themes that have come up before, things about emotion, about strong emotion,
about the power of strong emotion, about the power of understanding what your brain does,
and how that can be useful. Okay. So, the title of my talk is, "Neurohacking
for Massively Accelerated Brain Change." And why is that? So, this is the world I live in, I'm a neuroscientist
at Stanford University which, you know, I'm not gonna claim any responsibility for this,
but by all objective measures, is one of the greatest research institutions on the planet. And it's an amazing place because people always
are thinking about the future and how to serve humanity. And that's one of the things that makes me
feel so honored to be there as a faculty member. So, my life, this is me in my daily habitat,
working at the microscope or pipetting, mixing fluids and that sort of thing. Or lecturing to large crowds of undergraduates
or medical students teaching them neuroanatomy, and things of that sort. I love this job, I feel like I was born to
do it. And my favorite day of the week is Monday,
and always has been. So, there you go. So, the world... That's how I feel, and I appreciate the support
and, you know, I think that's what we're all looking for. So, my world is one of genetics, Big Pharma,
I consult for a number of biotech companies who are interested in medications, FDA trials. All that stuff that, frankly, is wonderful,
because it's based in some important things which are the reason I went into science is
about facts not opinions, it's about truths, not trends. So, unless I stop today and tell you otherwise,
I'm gonna be distilling down a number of facts, factual science, laboratory science, I'd be
happy to give you the references if you'd like them but I'm not gonna go into everything. The problem with all this is that it's very
slow, right? It's slow. We're all waiting eagerly patiently, in some
cases, desperately for important treatments for disease, or for ways to better enhance
our life through our brain science. And it's slow and we're impatient as a species,
which is a good thing. Because you also have this thing, which isn't
about how the brain works, but neurohacking, which I call how to work the brain. So, I think that's why we're here. We want to understand how to better work our
brains. And this, give it a name, give it Reiki, acupuncture,
freezing yourself, cryo, drugs, whatever it happens to be, whatever your kick is. This is one of my favorite people is somebody
you might recognize, Wim Hof, the great Wim Hof, who figured out that if you essentially
make yourself ice, ice-cold and learn to control your breathing, you can learn to control a
lot of aspects of your brain. I encourage you to look up Wim's work, he's
doing fabulous work and we're gonna be doing more at Stanford with Wim on trauma control,
pain management, and so forth. Holds a number of world records, he walked
up Everest in his shorts and bare feet, Kilimanjaro, 20 Guinness World Records, impressive guy. There's also a lot of ingestibles. So, a lot of people just they ask me, "I want
my brain to work better, what should I take?" You know, that's our tendency, what should
I take? What should I put in my body to make it better? Today, I'm gonna talk about two things, I'm
gonna talk about things you can put in your body to make your brain work better and the
future of that. I'm also gonna talk about behavioral changes
that you can make, which simply allow you to do things to make your brain better on-demand,
because you need both, really, and I'd like to encourage that point. So, generally, the two kinds of neurohacks
are behavioral, do this, or don't do that. So, I could tell you do something and don't
do something else, and those are very useful, or ingest this, and then don't take that. And we sort of like you can organize things
into more or less this kind of framework. So, my two professional life goals outside
the world of neurohacking are very simple. And I just feel like obligated to share them
with you. Because my general life mission is to understand
what makes us human, how the brain works. And that's been my obsession since I was 6,
it's my obsession today. And when I die, my hope is that I will have
made an important contribution in trying to understand how the brain organizes our lives
into meaning, how we form relationships, and really understand the biology, really understand
it. And the purpose of that is not just because
I enjoy doing it, although I do, the purpose is to discover new ways to relieve suffering. So most of my laboratory works on ways to
regenerate nerve cells, which they don't like to do, nerve cells in your brain and spinal
cord don't naturally regenerate. We, unfortunately, unlike other animals in
the animal kingdom don't naturally regenerate those cells. And so in a case like childhood blindness
or early-onset glaucoma is a disease that we devote a lot of our attention to, you go
blind and you never get vision back. There's no eyeball transplantation yet, we're
working on that. And so, that's my professional life goal in
the world of science. Now, in the world of science, I have a lot
to keep me busy, as you can see. So, why would I focus on neurohacking also? And this gets a little personal and I don't
have a long story, what I have are a few snapshots of how I've spent the last 30 years of my
life. I've been so obsessed by biology and by the
human experience that from a very young age, frankly, from the time when a lot of this
stuff was considered a little fringy, but now it's becoming more mainstream. I started psychoanalysis 25 years ago, you
can say what you want about that, I find it to be incredible. This man, Sigmund Freud was a genius, he got
a lot of things wrong, he had sex with a few of his patients, and he did cocaine, and that
gives him a bad reputation. But, you know, and there are other public
figures who have done far worse. So, he had amazing insights about the power
of the subconscious. And so much of that we're hearing about in
the talks is about the power of subconscious, and I'm gonna talk more about that. I'm also obsessed with hypnosis. I do daily hypnosis and have for a long time
now. It's a very, very powerful way to get below
your cortex, below your conscious experience, and to change your brain. And it's something that really needs more
research to back it up but we already know it works. So, I loved Emily's quote the other day, you
know that neuroscience is finally catching up to what these Inuit [SP] dudes have known
for a long time. I don't think I got exactly right, but there's
an amazing insight. And we need the message to get out there,
and hats off to all of you for being...really I view this group in all seriousness, as pioneers,
the important thing is to get that message out very broadly. If it's isolated, it's a problem, if it ripples
out, the more it ripples out, the better. And, you know, we're all gonna look forward
to a time when these kinds of things like hypnosis, hopefully psychoanalysis to other
forms of therapy, new forms of nootropics. I definitely have experimented with a number
of different nootropics and I'm a big believer in meditation today. Later, I'm going to talk about specific forms
of meditation to enhance the sorts of things you want. I think meditation is wonderful. Most people are enjoying a certain practice
of meditation the people who are here, and there's a lot of room for more discovery and
growth of how to make meditation better in many different ways. I'm intrigued as a neuroanatomist about the
chakras, I'm deeply fascinated by all these things that people have discovered. As Emily mentioned, the people who have already
discovered this stuff for what it does, but where in the body is it? I really feel in order to get the message
out broadly, to a huge number of people all over the world, people like my parents who
are a little bit skeptical of things like chakras and Reiki and things like that, we
need to give a mechanism. It's not to bore them with mechanism, it's
to convince them that this stuff is safe and really cool and extremely powerful. And without that, unfortunately, many people
won't come on board. And I spent a little time in this arena, too. I grew up in the boxing game, it runs in my
family for whatever reason, I know a neuroscientist who boxes, it's not good for your brain, trust
me. But there is something very powerful about
martial arts and other forms of physical activity, whether or not yoga or something else, which
are that they teach you something very important, which is both how to control your breath and
how to control your stress response. And there are also some interesting things,
and Asprey I unfortunately arrived late. But yes, restricting ejaculation, you know,
fighters have been doing that for ages. You know, this is something that Qigong practices
for ages, as a way to enhance willpower, drive, and aggression. You got to be a little bit careful, younger
guys, you can drive your aggression through the roof, so be mindful. So, I'm gonna tell you in the next 10 minutes
or so, about 4 critical facts about the brain that you should know if you care about enhancing
your life. And I'm also gonna tell you about some powerful
neurohacks for increasing brain power, presence, creativity, and productivity. And I hope I have time to get through all
this. So, I'm gonna move a little bit more quickly. If it gets a little academic and kind of wordied,
don't take notes, I'm happy to give you my slides, just, you know, tune in a little bit
and let's just get the gestalt. Let's get the big picture here and I'm hoping
you'll come away with something of real value. All right, first thing, the brain is an organ,
I take a lot of these out of a lot of heads, it's a piece of meat, okay, it's not vapors,
you look in a skull, you see a brain. And so, that's very powerful when you start
to think about the fact that the brain has a job. Your heart's job is to pump blood through
your body, the brain's job is to do mainly three things. Okay? The brain's job is to control your behavior,
your breathing, your heart rate, move you around when you wanna move, okay? It's there to perceive the world, whether
or not you think fruit is good or bad. In this case, I'm rarely convinced I don't
wanna eat a lot of fruit, and I learned a lot about that. But your ability to perceive that image and
know what it is, your brain is very good at that. And then to imagine, I intentionally left
that area blank. So, I want you all to just think really briefly,
this isn't a fun exercise but what's your flight number coming out here? Okay. You can do that, my dog Costello can't do
that. That's a uniquely human ability to think about
something that's not in the room, to imagine something on demand and to plan and to create
new things. And that's very powerful, it's also what gets
you into trouble, and I'll talk about that in a little bit. Okay. So, there are some basic truths, right? So, everything that happens to you, your entire
experience, I don't care what anyone says, I don't care what alignment the earth is in,
everything is happening because your brain has these three jobs. And all of your experiences filter through
that thing in your head, that pile of cells, that's arranged in a very specific way that
we're still trying to understand, called your brain. Just like we could be talking about the heart
whose job is to pump blood. So, I wanna describe just how the brain works
in three basic ways, two of which you've heard about before. We all have heard the lizard brain, the thing
that freaks you out when you think there's someone standing in the corner and then you
turn on the light, there's nobody, or if you were to come up on a car wreck, and all of
a sudden your heart's pumping. Your brain is very good at that stuff and
that's great, that's why you're alive at this moment. It is an unerring unfailing system, keeping
you alive, your lizard brain, and it's generally designed to keep you alive and to scare you
from doing things that would hurt you. It's a shame because I would have liked it
to be generally good at making me feel good all the time. But that's generally not what it's good at. And I'm stealing from the great Tony Robbins
who says, you know, "There's paved roads to fear and misery, and cobblestone or dirt roads
to happiness." And that's true at the level of neuroanatomy,
you don't have a whole lot of your brain devoted to happiness, you got a lot of your brain
designed to keep you safe. So, anxieties and fears come about a lot easier,
and you need to combat those, we're all getting better at that. Thinking, planning, imagining, and doing is
the other kind of end of the spectrum, I talked about that. And then there's the one that really counts,
right, which is this thing in the middle, which is the way that those things are connected. What you think depends on how you feel. What you feel depends on how you think. We know this now. This is kind of common knowledge. And it's these maps of your experience. It depends on what happened to you and how
you view the world. And we know this at a psychological level,
neuroscientists sometimes talk like this, they often don't, I'm in the minority. But there's a lot of neuroanatomy, there's
a lot of powerful neuroscience to support this. What do I mean by your maps of experience? I mean, what happened to you shapes how you
view the world. And so, what's important is how you change
how you view the world if you wanna go forward beyond what was just...how you were programmed,
let's say. All right. So, again, this is where it gets a little
dense, and I promise it gets a little more fun. So, this is where you get meaning, right? Or your maps of experience, and I'll talk
about where those meanings come from. All this other stuff is really urgent, has
to do with on-demand, keep your heart pumping, keep yourself breathing, that's happening
moment to moment and it's below your conscious detection. If you think about it you can notice it, but
otherwise, it's below your conscious detection. And then there's the stuff that is really
why you're here if you think about it, which is your future and evolution. So, where you get meaning is super important,
if meaning is what gives all your experiences their significance, right? And they're these maps that I'm talking about
in very vague terms, what are those about? And we've heard a lot about them. We heard a great talk yesterday or a day before
rather, about how you can take fear and then change its meaning and turn it into something
powerful, right? So that's exactly what I'm talking about. But that was something that as an adult that
she did, right? So, why fear? Why do we have fears? Why do we have trauma? Why do we have shame? And here's the stinger, it was all set up
for you in your youth. I don't wanna focus on the bad but most of
the stuff when you're young, you're just a passive learning machine, it's all coming
in. Little kids are learning three languages with
no accents flexibly, they're not even thinking about their learning instruments. You know, someone asked a great question the
other day at the workshop, "Wait, now I know, I want all that stuff, how come it's so much
tougher?" And there's a lot of biology that I'd be happy
to tell you about that explains why that all shuts down after these so called critical
periods during development. So, what happens when you're an adult and
you wanna change your brain? So, now I'm gonna get into stuff that hopefully
is useful to you. Okay. So, there's basic facts that changing your
brain in a real way, as an adult, requires that you do particular things that activate
particular chemical systems in your brain. So how do you do that? Right, I could tell you all about the chemicals
and I will tell you a little bit about them, but how do you do it? Okay. So, this is a right here right now urgent
situation, car wreck, it's terrible. You can imagine any other trauma and its place,
when that happens, a little area in the base of the brain, the name isn't important but
if you care, it's called nucleus basalis, does its job, which is just it's an alert
system. It puts all its attention on right here, right
now, get everybody safe, it's your alert system and it has this effect of dumping out a certain
chemical called acetylcholine at specific locations in the brain that are paired with
that experience. And forever, that experience will be traumatic
unless something else is done, okay? So, there's some nuance and some details to
this but that pretty much summarizes it. It has been replicated many, many times in
dozens of studies. You can pair pretty much any experience with
stimulation of nucleus basalis, this thing in the base of the brain, and that experience
will be mapped or remapped in your brain as an adult. And that's remarkable, it's also exciting,
because then someone like me, says, "Well, then how do I change my experience? How do I change the meaning of what happens? How do I change something from traumatic to
positive?" The good news is nucleus basalis is just a
slave to whatever is exciting, traumatic, it likes emotion, it likes peaks and lows. And so, if acetylcholine is released, that
means you can massively change your brain at that moment, with whatever's paired with
it. And so, when you get into a peak state here,
you're jumping up and down, or in a really low state and you're thinking how miserable
something is, you have to be really careful because those are the things that you're wiring
in, all right? So you can move to a state like this about
driving later if you form enough associations with driving to really eliminate, to override
the fear, you need to create a positive experience in its place. So how do you do that? So, I'm gonna tell you that the way to do
that is not to think too hard and to not verbalize things too much. And this is coming from someone who's spent
25 years, 3 times a week on a couch, letting subconscious things geyser up. And that's where I really learned that it
was really the things that you don't realize that have the potential to have the most impact. But this power of emotion, the ability to
couple really strong emotions with things is so useful if you wanna change your brain
for the better. And the way you do that is clear in the physical
space. We all know this story, there are many news
cases like this, woman's child stuck under car, superhuman strength. We heard a lot of amazing stories about desperation. JJ's story was one of desperation, she's like,
"No, I'm not gonna accept failure" because failure in the case she was describing was
potentially the death of her child. So, desperation is a strong one and it's motivated
by fear. But what if you're not in a desperate state
and you really want to do something? In that case, there's something remarkable,
and then we should...and we should ask ourselves, why are children such great passive learners? They're not trying, they're just learning,
they're coming home with all sorts of things, sometimes things you don't want them to come
home with, right? It's because they have this element of play. And what is play? Play isn't just movement, although it includes
movement, it's giving things everything you've got, but keeping it in perspective, it's that
sweet spot of enjoying life and trying really, really hard at it at the same time. It's essentially what we all strive for and
there are these incredible cases throughout history, famous scientists, because I grew
up in a house where people, you know, revered scientists like Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize
winner, he's most famous for Bongo drumming naked on the roof of Caltech. And he became an amazing artist in the '60s,
and he developed all sorts of other skills. And he always had this childlike way of looking
at the world, he never let himself gets stuck in his ways, never became a curmudgeon and
a remarkable man. And that's something that I... You come away with nothing else, I encourage
you to do that. You want your brain to change, stay light,
stay loose, but give it everything you've got. It's tough, right? It's tough. All right. I'm gonna speed up a little bit here. There's also this question of people wanna
do this, they wanna accomplish this stuff, but it's hard, right? I mean, I'm talking but it's hard to actually
do these things. I'm gonna give you a little tool in a couple
slides and I hope you hack into the systems into these neural systems that are about creativity
but also about drive and focus, right? I grew up in Silicon Valley, right? It's all about drive and focus. We're also supposed to be like Steve Jobs,
take walks with bare feet, imagine great things and make billions of dollars. So, how do you bridge those two things? Right? I'm always like, wait, how do you…you know,
keep things in perspective, but give them your all. And you each have individual stories, I think
that they reflect us, and I've really enjoyed hearing about them and I enjoy hearing more
in the remaining time of the meeting. So, in the past, how do people tap into this
acetylcholine system? How do they get their attention on something
for 30 minutes? Cigarettes, amazing stimulants of the nicotine
acetylcholine system. Talk to artists, talk to musicians, they felt
like something really dropped out for them when they found out cigarettes were really
unhealthy and could kill you. I am not encouraging you to smoke cigarettes
but there is something remarkable because they'll kill you through other ways. But there's something remarkable about nicotine
stimulation. And then there are these things, these nootropics,
and here I have to just have a disclosure, which is that I do a number of...I consult
for a number of groups that are making nootropics and I have some stake in these different ones. Qualia is one of them, I'm not telling you
to take Qualia. The one thing I'd like you to do is go to
the website, only because...the neurohacker.com website, only because the guys that are doing
this are unselfish enough that they're organizing all the nootropics into a kind of information
base of nootropic stuff. So I think that's useful kind of like examine.com
something which I have nothing involved with, it's great for if you're interested in supplements. There's this kid, I think he's like 10 years
old or something and he makes amazing website that organizes all the supplements into peer-reviewed
studies, you can find everything you want there. So, I'm just an information nut, that's basically
what that's about. And then there's the question of like, what's
next? A pill would be great, meditation is awesome. But what if we could combine these things
in really powerful ways? Or what if we could just create better forms
of meditation, not saying that what has been done in India and elsewhere for ages isn't
remarkable, but that more people can access. And so, there's a new kind of meditation that
I'm encouraging you to try and it's based on the neuroscience that we know. And I realized I'm out of time, but I promise
this will only take two minutes. And we were able to do this as a group outside
and I'm happy to send you these slides. It's impossible to do indoors. But it goes something like this, it has to
do with the fact that our goal is to get present, right? You breathe, you get present, you become less
reactive, it's very important. And in your daily life, you wanna be present
but you also wanna dream big and go for things and access your creativity, which is about
being not present. It's about not right now, not being limited
by right here right now. But then you have to turn around that great
idea and turn it into something you have to implement. So, how do you bridge those things? One of the things that makes us remarkable
is our ability to bridge time as a species. Again, my dog Costello doesn't wake up on
New Year's Day 2016 and say, "50 rabbits this year," you know, that's what makes dogs so
present. And that's what makes us so neurotic is that
we leave this space, we go elsewhere but leaving is good too because leaving is the reason
that Steve Jobs is able to create objects that didn't exist before, like the iPhone,
that we're all such a slave to now, right? So, how do you do this? So, there's three kinds of general themes
of meditation, I'm not an expert in meditation, and then I promise I'll wrap up, which is
the first thing you want it, what I recommend, just trying, try it and let me know, send
me an email, let me know how it goes. Is one meditation, very short, five minutes,
where for one breath, one breath, you close your eyes and go internal, and you get behind,
and some people call it the third eye, right? I'm gonna get the language wrong but we all
know what we're talking about, you get inside your breath. And then the second thing you do is you focus
on something at a short distance. There's a powerful system in your brain when
you focus both eyes on a single point, like a watchmaker making a watch, or you're reading. That state is accessing very specific channels
in your brain that are very different from the one that when you close your eyes, okay? And it's called the virgin's eye movement
when you put both your eyes on the same thing. And then the last one is the one that we get
a lot of here that feeling awesome feeling when you go out to the beach, or you're on
the top of a mountain, or you look at the horizon, or you arrive in New York City, if
you're me, and you just go, "Oh, my God," and you're defocused. And that's when you're...these ideas the creativity,
kind of spontaneously geysers up from below. But then you have to get back and you need
to get to work on something. And so, what's been very powerful, and we're
gonna put...we're putting patients through this, or subjects in brain imaging is this
way of accessing all these different brains states is really about accessing different
notions of space and time, trying to get access to your whole brain. And it's a short meditation. I recommend just one breath at each of these
kind of stations in your mind, up close and focusing on your hand and out. And I'll repeat that a few times during my
morning, or maybe once or twice during the day, it's quick. And we're getting remarkable feedback from
the people that are doing this, about the kind of state that it puts them in both engaged
and present with the bigger picture. And in the end, it's all about the bigger
picture, right? Because it's about not just what you do with
your life, but how you're gonna create good in the world. And so, I'd like to stop there rather, I call
this space-time bridging just because it sounds fine and you need an acronym, so STB, and
that's not because I want to own it. I just want people to use it and experience
how great it's been for me and for the other people I've suggested it to. And then if you're interested in some of the
other stuff that I'm doing in 2017, there's gonna be some more information coming out
about how you can use these primitive states either fear or I prefer positive states in
order to change the way that your brain works for the better. They're gonna yank me off stage any second,
in me is pretty fear. So, I'm gonna go now, so thanks so much. I really appreciate your time. Thank you. Thank you.
