Andrew Huberman ON: Learning Effectively & How to Train Your Brain For Optimal Performance

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
When we positively associate with a song, a person, a face,
an object. We don't just benefit from those activities based
on the effects of those activities. It's also what we
believe about those activities. Combine and the release of dopamine
makes you more capable of then leaning into life and
going and doing other things. The effect of a small,
even you know, half a percent increase in dopamine transmission

(00:21):
in the brain is the difference between feeling like your
life is bleak and you can completely attack the day
in the positive sense. Hey, everyone, welcome back to on Purpose.
I'm so grateful let you come back every single week
to listen, learn and grow. And I am so excited

(00:44):
to be talking to you today. I can't believe it.
My new book, Eight Rules of Love is out and
I cannot wait to share it with you. I am
so excited for you to read this book, for you
to listen to this book. I read the audiobook. If
you haven't got it already, make sure you go to
eight Rules of Love dot com. It's dedicated to anyone

(01:05):
who's trying to find, keep, or let go of love.
So if you've got friends that are dating, broken up,
or struggling with love. Make sure you grab this book
and I'd love to invite you to come and see
me for my global tour Love Rules. Go to Ja
shettytour dot com to learn more information about tickets, VIP experiences,

(01:26):
and more. I can't wait to see you this year.
And you know that the podcast for me is just
an opportunity to reach out to people that I'm inspired by,
people that I feel are changing the world, people that
I feel have amazing insights that I can learn from
and want to share with you. And today's guest is
someone that I've been connected with for a while, but
I'm so excited to finally have him in the studio

(01:47):
because not only is his insights having a huge impact
on how we live, how we think, just the energy
that I felt from him in the first couple of
moments that I've met him, I can already tell that
it's all in his heart too. And so to meet
someone who's super strategic, super scientific, has an incredible mind,
but has a beautiful heart in person, that's my kind

(02:08):
of person. And today's guest is none other than Andrew Huberman.
He's a neuroscientist and tenant professor in the Department of
Neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He has
made numerous significant contributions to the fields of brain development,
brain function, and neuroplasticity, which is the ability of our
nervous system to rewire and learn new behaviors, skills, and

(02:32):
cognitive functioning. He also is a McKnight Foundation and Pew
Foundation Fellow and was awarded the Kogan Award in twenty seventeen.
Work from the Huberman Laboratory at Stanford School of Medicine
has been published in top journals including Nature, Science, and Sell,
and has been featured in Time, BBC, Scientific, American Discover,

(02:54):
and other top media outlets. In twenty twenty one, doctor
Huberman launched The Huberman Lab Parts, which I'm a huge
fan of and I know you are too. The podcast
is frequently ranked in the top twenty five of all
podcasts globally and is often ranked as the number one
in the categories of science, Education, Health and fitness. Please
welcome my new friend and someone that I'm a huge

(03:16):
fan of an admire Andrew hu Woman. Andrew, thank you
for doing this, thank you for being here, and honestly,
thank you for what you do in the world. I
think it's been brilliant to see someone bring so much
heart into science and science into heart. And I know
that people who listen to you and hear from you

(03:36):
and communicate with you, and even I've really meant it
a few moments we just spent right now. I love
that combination, and I wonder how you whether you even
see it that way, whether you don't. But I'm fascinated
by Is that how you've always lived? Have you been
fascinated by the heart and science for a while. First

(03:56):
of all, I just want to say thank you for
having me here. We've known each other through some mutual
contacts for a while and it's a delight to be
here an admirer and a fan of all you do
and the way you approach it. So heartfelt. Thanks for
having me here in terms of you know, how things
have evolved to where they are now. You know, I

(04:18):
don't have much of a mission statement, but I suppose
if I had to pick one, it's to share the
beauty and the utility of biology. Since I was very young,
I've been obsessed with learning, and I've also had a
compulsion to share what I've learned, especially when I think
that the information can be of use to people. So
the little six and eight year old and ten year
old version of me wouldn't shut up. I was just

(04:41):
constantly talking about all the stuff I had been reading
about on the weekends, and over time I just made
sense to become an academic for that reason. And then nowadays,
with the advent of podcasting, I have this wonderful opportunity
to share things that I think are useful in terms
of the heart and the mind. You know, I can
only frame it by saying that, you know, our nervous
system is our brain, our spinal cord, but of course

(05:03):
all their connections with the organs of the body and
back again, and so we really can't divorce any of
the organs of the body from our thinking and feeling
and action and vice versa, as you very well know.
And then from a more personal standpoint, you know, I've
had the great benefit of training with mentors in science
who really lived and breathed their science, but also had

(05:23):
a deep sense of humanity. Each one of them had
an ear, an ear towards things that were relevant to them.
In one case, one with a particular interest in mental
health and the struggles around mental health and mental illness.
The other just a person who just loved animals and
the natural kingdom. And then my other advisor was a

(05:46):
very strong advocate for scientists of all kinds and backgrounds.
And so I was so blessed to be weaned by
people who really instilled in me a love and a
desire for learning and sharing and doing research, but also
understood that how one shows up to the conversation means everything.
And so you know, I just feel very blessed to
have had that, and I'm just trying to do right

(06:08):
by them. I love hearing that, like I had no
idea that that was a part of how you were
mentored and guided. And I mean, I'm sure they feel
very proud in seeing that you continue on and pass
that legacy and so beautifully. But I think what I
find even more intriguing about that is so many of

(06:28):
our early learning experiences are not necessarily that way. And
you said that you loved learning and you love sharing.
I think most people that I know, are at least
that I talk to or I hear from in comments
or podcasts, would say school was not an exciting place
for them. Maybe they went to college or didn't go
to college, but they necessarily didn't have a positive experience.

(06:50):
Maybe it was filled with fear or doubt or judgment
or criticism, or maybe there was a lack of confidence.
That could have been not only from teachers in the
school system, it could have been from friends or bullies
or people in that environment. So what I'm fascinated by
is our relationship with learning, because when I look at

(07:11):
my relationship with learning too, I remember starting off having
that buzz and spark, then almost feeling like I was
forced to believe there are only certain ways you could learn.
I grew up believing I didn't like reading because we
were only encouraged to read fiction books, and even till

(07:33):
this day, I don't like reading fiction books. I have
no interest in reading fiction books. I love reading nonfiction.
And today I can read nonfiction books every day, every week,
every month, every year, and I'm fully engrossed and immersed.
That's why I'm excited for your book one day. And
I think that is something that I learned that I
do love reading. I do love learning, but I was
never introduced to that form until my father gave me

(07:55):
a biography when I was fourteen years old. And so
how do you think our relationship with learning has been
formed over time? Hearing from your own as well. I
think it was the great physicist Max del Brooke who
said that, you know, when teaching, assume zero knowledge and
infinite intelligence. I try and keep that in mind. I

(08:15):
think that we are all innate learners by virtue of
the fact that this thing, this nervous system as it's called,
is really a map of our experience, and it's there
to form itself. It's unusual among the organs in that
it shapes itself right, Unlike the kidney or the liver
there doesn't constantly update its own form and function in
the same way. The nervous system is there essentially to

(08:38):
educate itself so that it can operate better in a
given environment. And once one understands that, you start to
realize that the forms of learning are many. So, for instance,
you know math, or I suppose in the UK's maths, maths,
you know, could be learned by way of different using

(08:58):
different types of examples, movement of trains or bartering systems,
or on paper just simple long division and multiplication. But
in the end, what you're really trying to find anytime
you're teaching or learning is you're trying to find a
universal algorithm of how the brain works. And what I
mean by that is that you know, all these nerve cells,
they only can communicate through chemicals and electricity. You know,

(09:19):
it's really just meat in there, I believe it or not,
but there are algorithms that are universal. So whether or
not one learns better verbally or visually, or whether one
has a propensity for math or for verbal subjects, what
is true for all of us is that the brain
is they're always asking questions and trying to make predictions

(09:39):
about its environment. And I think what happens is when
we're children, we are learning passively all the time. As
we get older, and especially as we get to our
mid in late twenties, it takes an immense amount of
focus and energy in order to learn. But of course
the nervous system can still shape itself well into adulthood,
almost certainly for the entire lifespan. But that focus and

(10:00):
energy feels almost like an agitation. And I think that
as children, we don't necessarily experience that agitation, because we
can for better, for worse. We can experience and change passively.
Neuralplasticity just happens by way of pure experience. As we
get older mid twenties, early thirties and so on, that
threshold of agitation for people feels like it's something to

(10:23):
back away from. But if we can learn to approach
that and understand that that agitation is actually the circulation
of chemicals, which is the brain and nervous system telling itself. Aha,
now I need to pay attention and change. We can
start to actually modify the way that system works. So
it's a bit of a convoluted answer to your question,
but I think that at the heart of our nervous

(10:43):
system is this ability, these algorithms by which it can
change themselves. And it's on all of us to understand
that that bit of agitation and discomfort need not be
interpreted as discomfort. That's the edge where learning is beginning.
So confusion and being perplexed, feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the
amount of information, that's actually the stir of chemicals that

(11:06):
are queuing the nervous system to change. Because if it
can do something easily, there's no reason for the nervous
system to change. Now, in terms of different styles of
teaching and learning, I think that many of us experience
that agitation early on, and we, for reasons that are understandable,
we backed away from learning anymore. So, for instance, I'm
musically I can't. I'm musically deficient. I love music, but

(11:27):
I can't play music to save my life. And I
think that's entirely because as a kid, every time I
would try and play music, it just sounded terrible. Everyone cringed,
the dogs, dogs literally howled, So I stopped right But
knowing what I know now, that would be the queue
to that. The agitation, the stress, the embarrassment is actually
the cue to the nervous system that it's about to

(11:49):
rewire itself. So I think if people just understood that
children and adults would lean into learning more regularly and
hopefully with more ease overall. Yeah, definitely, I mean even
now when what sparks from that answer, which I actually
really appreciated, is the idea that as we get older,

(12:10):
as you said, it has to become more conscious, it
has that tension. It's almost like you have to start
figuring out how you learn based best and how you
process ideas. So for me, I know that I love
to first dive deep and immerse myself in something, and
then I like to create a structured approach to get

(12:32):
there if I enjoy it. So if I want to
learn a new skill, I'll get obsessed with it for
a weekend. I'll go on the course, I'll read the book,
I'll watch every video. I just want to dive in
to really see if I genuinely care or whether it's
me thinking I care, and to try and separate that
ego and that true desire for me at least. And

(12:53):
if I do a weekend of something and I realized, oh,
my ego like that, but I didn't really like that,
I'm going to step away or actually, wow, this is fascinating,
then I'll go and build a step by step plan
with small steps and incremental steps that I've learned over
a long time of learning different things. How can people
think about the best way they can learn? What are

(13:14):
different styles? What are different methods that you think people
can think? If someone's listening right now and they're like Andrew, well,
I want to learn a new instrument, or I want
to learn a new language, or maybe it's I want
to learn how to start a podcast, or I want
to learn how to players sport or whatever it may be.
How can someone start thinking about how they should approach learning?

(13:34):
Terrific question, and fortunately nowadays we can look to studies
done in humans that define some very key principles. The
first principle is that the whole process of neuroplasticity and
learning is really a two stage process. First, there must
be focus and alertness. That focus and alertness is associated
with the release of neurochemicals so called neuromodulators, things like

(13:56):
a setocline in particular, which sort of acts as highlighter
pen if you will, for certain connections in the brain
to later be reinforced. And the neurochemical adrenaline, which is
also called epinephrin also depending on if you're in the
UK or elsewhere. A long interesting story not for this
time about why it has multiple names, also called adrenaline,

(14:19):
is associated with an increasing kind of agitation and alertness
a pseudocoline. Think of it as kind of a spotlight
or a highlighter pen for certain connections in the brain,
so you need alertness and focus. And then the second
stage is that it is only during periods of deep rest,
in particular sleep and something that I call non sleep
deep rest, which I've given an ACRONYMCA. Scientists like acronyms,
n SDR, non sleep, deep rest, things like yoga, nidra,

(14:42):
things like shallow naps, things like forms of meditation that
don't involve a lot of focused concentration. You're a far
more the experience a meditator than I. So I'm outside
my wheelhouse when talking about meditation. But it is only
periods of intense focus and alertness followed by periods of
deep rest that allow the nervous system to change, and

(15:02):
there is an abundance of evidence for that. So that's
the first thing to understand. The brain actually rewires during
deep sleep and rest, because during deep sleep and rest, naps, yoga, nidra,
deep sleep, there's a replay of the very same cells
in the brain that we're active during learning, oftentimes in
reverse for reasons that are still not understood, but at
a much higher repetition rate. So you're actually getting repetitions

(15:24):
while you sleep. This is why one will strain to
learn a language or a motor skill, or maths or
something like that over and over and over. Doesn't happen.
You take a couple of nights sleep, take a break
from and all of a sudden it's there, it's because
it happens in rest. Now, there's some other things that
one can do to enhance this process further that are
arrived to us from good data. First of all, there's

(15:45):
a so called alltradean rhythm, which is the ninety minute
cycles during which we can focus pretty well for a
duration of about ninety minutes. Of course, flickering in and
out of focus. Nobody really focuses for ninety minutes straight
unless they've built up that capacity or they are very
interested in what they're learning, right, they're just wrapped with attention.
Usually people flicker in and out, And of course, nowadays

(16:06):
there's a lot of literature and ideas about ways to
maintain focus, put the phone away, limit noise. Some people
like background noise, some people like music, some don't. It's
very contextual, highly individualized. But ninety minutes is sort of
the batch of time that the brain can focus really
hard on one thing before it needs a true rest
of an hour or two before you can go back

(16:27):
to learning or working very hard. The other thing is
that there's some very interesting data showing that shallow naps
or NSDR non sleep deep rest done within four hours
of one of these ninety minute learning belts can be
very beneficial for accelerating learning. And then there are these
incredible data on so called gap effects. So there have
been studies of skills that are physical skills, mental skills

(16:50):
where people will, for instance, try to learn scales on
the piano or a math problem or a spatial problem
or a physical skill, and then at random, every so
offen a buzzer will go off and the person will
just be told to do nothing, sit their eyes closed
or eyes open, and do nothing, just stop the learning
process for about ten seconds and then return to doing
what they're doing. These are these little microrests. It turns

(17:12):
out that during those microrests, the hippocampus of brain areas
you know that's associated with learning and memory, and the
neo cortex, also associated with learning and memory, undergoes replay
of the thing that the individuals trying to learn at
twenty times the speed, also in reverse, just as in sleep,
and that can lead and has been shown to lead
to accelerations in learning. So they're these ways. I wouldn't

(17:35):
even think of them as hacks because the word hack
is a little tricky because when I think of the
word hack, it seems doing something with an object or
a tool that wasn't designed for that purpose. Right, the
nervous system already harbors these mechanisms and one can access
them through these little microrests. So, whether or not you're
a child or an adult, every so often when trying
to learn something, just pause for ten seconds or so

(17:56):
do your best to just clear your mind. Of course,
it's very hard to clear them up mind, but do
your best to clear the mind and then go back
to the learning task as it were, And that has
been shown to vary to significantly accelerate the learning process
and the retention of newly learned information. And then the
last thing you touched on earlier, which is this notion
of incremental learning. You said you like to throw yourself

(18:17):
into something as kind of a litmus test of whether
or not you enjoy it or not. Turns out that
from beautiful work done by my colleague at Stanford School
of Medicine, Eric Knutson, has shown that yes, it's true
that early in development in humans this would be up
until the mid twenties, we can learn things in larger
batches and much more easily than we can later in life. However,

(18:38):
if one batches that work into smaller increments, and so
for instance, deciding maybe set a timer, turning the phone
off otherwise, and saying, I'm going to spend three minutes,
just three minutes in trying to intensely learn this thing,
even if I feel like I'm failing. If one does
that repeatedly, those little increments of learning can lead to

(18:59):
an outsized amount of learning overall. And so the nervous
system loves incremental learning. It loves to batch things into
focused little bouts. And you know, if that's already the
tools that you've built up, which it sounds like you have, wonderful,
But if somebody is out there trying, you know, struggling
to learn, really trying to break things down into very
brief periods of intense focus, that is the queue by

(19:21):
which during sleep the nervous system will change itself. And
this has been shown over and over and over again,
even in very late life individuals and people in there.
You know, we like to think life could go on
further than this, but people in their eighties and nineties
still have neuroplasticity. There's even evidence that new neurons can
be produced in the hipocampus of people in their late
eighties and nineties. So the capacity is there. This is

(19:44):
why I love what you do, because you would never
consider that the answer to learning is depressed right lessly,
provided the focus comes first. But of course, sleep deprivation
makes it very hard to learn. And there's something else
and that happens in sleep. Nowadays, we I think most people,
thanks to the beautiful work of Matthew Walker at Berkeley

(20:05):
and others, really understand the value of sleep for health,
immune system function, etc. There is a stage of sleep,
rapid eye movement sleep that we're all familiar with, of course,
and where literally the eyes are moving, that tends to
come later in the night, during the second half of sleep,
where there's a there's a tendency to have very emotional dreams,
or at least dreams that are laden with a lot

(20:26):
of emotional content of some kind. During rapid eye movement sleep,
there's an inability to move the body. We call this atonia.
It's literally a sleep induced paralysis that's healthy and a
complete failure of the nervous system to release adrenaline, epinephrin.
This is sort of like a trauma therapy in some sense.
If you think about it, it's a replay of an

(20:47):
emotional events the neurochemical that makes us feel tense and agitated,
so in our mind, those dreams can often feel very distressing.
It's been shown that if you deprive people of rapid
eye movement sleep, they fail to dump the negative emotions
of things that happened the day before and the day before.
And I think all of us have experienced the shifting
emotionality that happens when we are sleep deprived. What ends

(21:10):
up happening is that the little things seem like big things,
but after a few nights sleep, we're okay, and there's
no mystery to why that is anymore. I think almost
every sleep scientist believes that has something to do with
this built in kind of trauma release therapy where you
get to experience the thing in your sleep minus the
neurochemicals that make your body feel terrible, and somehow that
dissociation allows people to then step back into life with

(21:32):
a clean slate. Wow. Yeah, no, I've heard those ideas before,
but the way you just wove ail together is really special.
What I'm intrigued by, then, is what's the latest science
on dreams? Because there are so many spiritual wisdom based
approaches to dreams. I've never really dive deep enough, I think,

(21:53):
from a scientific perspective into dreams apart from some particular aspects.
But let's go there. Yeah, where is so? I love
the idea that sleep, of course, is acting as somewhat
of a dishwasher cleansing, healing agent, so that while we're sleeping,
we're actually being able to release these ideas. Hence we
have where did dreams fit into that? Picks? Ye? Yeah, Well,

(22:17):
I'm glad you said dishwasher because from a pure physiological standpoint,
this is separate from dreams. But from a pure physiological standpoint,
it's now well appreciated that during sleep there's a rinsing
out of the debris that accumulate in the brain. The
brain is the most metamolically demanding organ that we have.
It consumes tons of energy. Most of the energy that
we burn in terms of calories, is from our brain,

(22:38):
not our muscles. Even if people aren't don't feel like
they're thinking very hard, and thinking very hard as we know,
can feel very taxing. We can feel exhausted after a
hard conversation. Right. This washout, as it's called, is a
so called glimphatic rinse out. The brain wasn't thought to
have a lymphatic system, but it does. Cerebral spinal fluid

(22:59):
starts to reverse basically it's pattern of flow during sleep.
All these incredible ways of washing out the brain during sleep. Now,
during the first half of one's night, the ninety minute
cycles still persists. That we were talking about earlier, these
old trading cycles, and those ninety minute cycles are mostly
made up of a so called slow wave sleep, so
we see big amplitude brain waves this kind of thing.

(23:21):
Dreams tend to be pretty boring early in the night.
They tend to be more associated with motor function and movement,
and it's actually the case that growth hormone is released
in the early part of the night and that most
of the repair of the body and tissues is occurring
during that first half of sleep. As the night goes on,
dreams become more intense and more emotionally laden, regardless of

(23:43):
what's been going on in someone's waking life, And in fact,
toward morning, almost all of those ninety minute cycles that
occur back to back is going to be comprised of
this rapid eye movement sleep. So the sleep toward morning
is going to be much more emotional. Now. The interesting
thing is that if you look at the data on
dreaming in humans and you look at it purely through

(24:06):
the lens of neuroscience, you get a bunch of language
back about okay, not much up and effor in happening.
So you're associating the emotion from the neurochemical state. If
you look to the psychology literature, which I do, or
you read a book like Memories, Dreams and Reflections by Yung,
or you start to look at some of the kind
of hybrid work which is psychiatry, which of course are
mds that are grounded in physiology but also think psychoanalytically.

(24:29):
They I think they're really onto something with this idea
that dreams are basically a time in which the ordinary
sequence of life events is converted into heuristics, shorthand symbols,
and the brain loves symbols in the daytime too, right,
we don't walk around parsing every angle of every object.
The way the visual system works is that the recognition

(24:49):
of your face, for instance, there's a brain area that
I've seen you many many millions of time, billions of
times probably, and I recognize you immediately as Jay Shetty
because there literally is a neuron my brain that's a
Jay Shetty neuron. We know this right from recording from
brains of people that recognize people. Right. If I met
some of your staff today, lovely people, for the first time, now,

(25:10):
those neurons exist for them, But that representation of you
was built up through basic representation of just the orientations
of lines, all right, just like a one would sketch
your face and then build in more elaborate representation. The
brain represents things in symbols in a very abstract way,
so without going down too far of a rabbit hole,

(25:31):
if I were to, for instance, say you know what, Jay,
I'm going to play artists today, of which I'm not,
and I'm going to draw your face, and I did
my best to draw your face and showed it to
you'd probably say, oh, well, that's not great, but you'd
probably recognize some of the features. But for instance, if
I had decided that I was going to put your
eyes in a different location, eliminate your teeth, put a
bunch of tattoos on your face for fun, and show

(25:52):
you this, and I'd say, you'd say that doesn't look
anything like me, And I'd say, ah, but that's my
abstract representation of you. It turns out that the brain
represents everything in the external world as a shorthand abstract representation,
and in dreams, the reason that we tend to, for instance,
replace people with animals or objects with different objects is

(26:15):
because the brain is thinking more in terms of the
relationships between objects than it is the objects themselves. And
so this is where dream analysis gets a little bit tricky.
So the analysts would say, you know, the for instance,
I had a dream not that long ago where I
was being chased by two animals. It was a bear
and a wolf, a very salient dream for me. And

(26:35):
turns out that that bear and that wolf I realized
only later that day. I was walking around. I'd gone
for a swim in the ocean, got out of the ocean,
and I turned to someone. I said, oh, my goodness,
I know what that was about. That was about these
two children that are now in my life. That and
I thought, they're chased me, like they need something for me,
And it opened up an entire conscious discussion about that.
So in my mind, these children were represented as animals,

(26:57):
not because children are always represented as animals, but probably
because it was the feeling that they were impinging on me,
and they're they're lovely children, but nonetheless that they're impinging
on me. So the point is not my dream. The
point is that dream analysis always has to take into
account that the brain operates in symbols where objects are
replaceable and there is there are only relationships between objects,

(27:22):
and so if one has a very scary dream about
a person or sees a monster, it's really in the
early waking state of the day that we are in
a position to best understand those relationships. So here's a
tool I recommend that's actually supported by sleep science, which
is when waking and in the first thirty minutes or
so around waking, you're in this liminal state. Even if

(27:44):
you're somebody who wakes up and feels very alert, you're
in this liminal state where that symbolism is still quite fluid.
I highly recommend that people try and not bring in
too much new sensory experience if they want to understand
their dream, stay lying down with your eyes closed. Maybe
tell your partner, if someone else you live with, if
you live with somebody that you just need a few

(28:05):
moments and just try and move about your day in
a way where you're not trying to solve the dream,
but you're also not bringing in a lot of new
sensory experience because in that moment, you actually stand a
chance of parsing what that relationship is. And this is
something that psychoanalysts understand. This is something that, believe it
or not, clinical hypnotists understand bring people into a state
of deep relaxation and be able to capture that transition

(28:29):
between the sleep and waking state. Forgive me for the
you know, excessively long answer, but not exacting, not excessively long,
please carry on. Yeah, Well, so there's physiology that we know,
and then there's the psychology of this. And just to
make it very clear, the brain thinks in symbols in
the daytime and in dreams, in waking states, and in dreams.
It's all symbols. Every This is symbolic representation because we

(28:51):
can't parse all the information coming into our nervous system,
but because the nervous system's main job is to make
really good predictions, to basically do statistics like when, for instance,
as a child, one of the first things you learn
is that objects fall down, not up. So the first
time they see a helium balloon, it's like awe and excitement.
That on excitement is the release of neurochemicals that teach
the brain sometimes objects fall up, so to speak. So

(29:16):
once one starts to recognize that the brain is always
trying to make these predictions, you can start to look
at your dreams as symbolic representations and how those relate
to one another. The action functions are far more interesting
and important than it was a vase. And you know,
when I was a kid, there was a vase in
my grandmother's home, and that vase represented something maybe, but

(29:38):
more likely you would want to think about the shape
of it or where that vase was in relationship to
other things, because that's how the brain works. It makes
predictions based on context. Yeah. I hope that's helpful to people.
If there's If there are other theories of dreams, and
I'm certain that there are that extend past this, I
apologize for not addressing them, but I think for most people,

(30:00):
just thinking about the relationship between objects in their dreams
is going to be more useful than thinking about what
exactly that the dream was about, quote unquote, Yes, and
I want to just say, please, do not apologize. That
was a brilliant answer, and it was so useful even
for me, because I think you're so right that so
often even people will ask me. They'll be like, hey,
I had this dream, what does it mean? One thing

(30:21):
we have not solved as a neuroscientists. Two things. One
why it is that people need to tell other people
their dreams because other people, unless it's a trained therapist,
are useless, of course help unless they have intense knowledge
of the symbolic representations of your life. We should all
be doing this ourselves. And the other one is a
kind of peculiar one which there seems to be a
need among many people that if they wake up in

(30:42):
the middle of the night and they can't sleep, to
wake up other people who are sleeping. But I haven't
solved that one. No, I love that, and I completely
agree with you. I think when I think about that though,
what really struck me was this idea of the brain
loving symbols, and I think of what are healthy symbols
throughout the day, because I think we forget. I mean,
you came into this room earlier, we came into the

(31:04):
studio and you were looking around it all my symbols
that I surround myself with. Do they count as symbols?
Do they not count as absolutely? One thing I've noticed
immediately on walking in here is these many things that
are beautiful and they have a lot of depth to them.
And I have this obsession with anytime I'm in a
new environment, provided that it's appropriate, I just have to
sniff around and look at everything to kind of know

(31:26):
where I am in relationship to things. Absolutely, And I
saw you do that, and I didn't want to bore
you with the history of everything I can said it
to you. But the idea that I find as well,
this environment has been sculpted with symbols that allow me
to be present with someone and what I hope will
help others be present as well, or at least spark

(31:47):
their curiosity and intrigue so that we can have that
in our conversation. I wonder what are healthy symbols are
there set and healthy symbols for the brain to connect
with on a daily basis before sleep to sleep that
allow us to program ourselves more effectively, because I feel
like most of the symbols that we're seeing are unconscious

(32:09):
or unintentional or mainly marketing or advertising or propaganda. But
we're not really selective around our symbols. Yeah, I love
that you asked this question because for years, you know,
we hear these things, like you know, you're the some
of the five people you spend the most time with.
But nowadays we spend more time with symbols and people
on social media than we do oftentimes with other individuals,

(32:32):
or at least equal amounts of time in the room. Right,
Rarely is it just the physical bodies in the room.
It's all the people in our phone, which I don't
see is a bad thing. Right. Actually, for years, when
I was working more or less in isolation in my lab,
I had this little list. I don't think I've ever
shared this before. I had this little list of people
who I love and admire, many of whom I've never met,

(32:54):
and I just would read that list over and over again.
I didn't realize that at the time, but I was
developing what I believe the analysts call this an interject
or an introject. Perhaps someone should look that up forget
which one it is, which is actually a subconscious representation
of somebody else's ideas and approach to things that if we,

(33:15):
for instance, listen to you over and over again, the
nervous system starts to ask questions like what would Jay
do in this circumstance. That's a very real thing, and
we're not always consciously aware of it. Now. Physical symbols
are also very important because the brain likes to make predictions.
It loves symbols because symbols are a shorthand way of

(33:37):
eliminating a lot of useless information. But much of the
way that we operate and feel really does impact us
at a subconscious level. And this has been shown over
and over again. I mean, it's and it's always cast
in the context of subconscious bias, which has kind of
a negative slant anytime we hear bias, of course, but
there are positive biases as well. So I think that

(33:57):
for some people, having order among symbols is very important,
equal spacing, everything very aligned. I'm sort of one of those,
but you know, I'm kind of in the middle. Other
people they aren't so consumed with the relationships between how
they arrange things physically, but they enjoy great depth and
emotional relationship to things, And it could be appendant. It

(34:18):
could be nowadays, you know, people like tattoos are kind
of interesting. Yeah, they're much more prominent than when I
was growing up. They are an externalization of how people
feel on the inside. Yes, right, So those are very
powerful symbols. And there's something about the process of stamping
in into one skin, etc. The slighter intense pain involved
depending on where and who does it and the person's
pain threshold. So symbols are a way in which we

(34:40):
create an external reflection of who we are to ourselves.
But also they are operating in a subconscious level to
keep us, for instance, in a place of order, like
to be able to organize one's thoughts. In a world
filled with statistical information, every ray of sunshine is statistical information.
We can't pay attention to all of it. So I
think that to directly answer your question, there are a

(35:03):
couple of things that I think from morning till night,
make it outsize positive effect on our nervous system, both
in terms of its ability to feel, think and act
and its ability to learn. The first one isn't so
much a symbol unless you adopted as one, and I
certainly have, which is there are now thousands of quality
studies showing that we should all try and get some

(35:25):
bright light, ideally sunlight in our eyes within the early
hours of waking. This doesn't necessarily meaning waking with the sunrise,
although if you can do that that's great. Some people
wake up before the sun comes out. Getting a lot
of bright sunlight in one's eyes early in the day
puts a number of neurochemicals and hormones into a state
of let's just call it what it is, positivity. Mood
is enhanced immune system function. Sleep is enhanced sixteen to

(35:48):
twenty hours later, and so on, also in the evening.
So the sun as a symbol is very important, but
it's also anchoring our subconscious physiology. Because every cell in
our body has a twenty four hour clock, we need
to time it to the rise and fall of the
sun each day. When human beings become misaligned with that
rising and falling of the sun, bad things happens to

(36:09):
the nervus system. Now, fortunately it's very easy to fix.
There's a study done at University of Colorado taking college
students camping. I wish I had been a subject in
the sense moment. But they found is that melotonin rhythms
cortisol rhythms, which can be a healthy thing. We all
have cortisol, protects, us, energizes us, dopamine, epinephren All these
rhythms of the body could be reinstated to their proper

(36:29):
timing by waking up and seeing the sun and going
to sleep not too long after sunset, depending on time
of year, for two nights and two mornings, and this
lasted at least two weeks, even though people were getting
artificial light. So I would say the symbol of the
sun is not just uh, you know, it's not a
trivial thing at all. It's the anchor by which our

(36:50):
biology is designed, in our psychology follows. Of course, I
think you know, many people who have wile sleeping, many
people who have mood issues. Is a metabolism. I mean,
I could list it on and on and on people
will ask, So I'll just put it out there. Try
and do this without sunglasses if you safely can't. You
don't stare directly at the sun. Never look at any

(37:11):
light so bright that it's painful to look at. You can,
of course, blink only takes a few minutes on a
cloudless day. If you're in the UK and the depths
of winter, you're still going to get more light coming
through cloud cover by going outside than you would indoors
with bright lights on, And it can take anywhere from
two minutes to thirty minutes, depending on how dark or
bright it is outside. Sunglasses and excuse me, eyeglasses and

(37:33):
contacts perfectly fine. If you think about if anything that
just focuses light onto the retina, don't try and do
this through a window or a windshield because it filters
out a lot of the light that you want. So
the sun is a key symbol. I think if people
could adopt that there, I'm certain their physiology and psychology
will benefit. Then in terms of physical symbols, I find
it very useful and that they're good data. If you know,

(37:56):
if a picture is worth a thousand words, a movie
is worth a bazillion pick. So having an image of
something that makes you feel good and seeing that early
in the day tremendously powerful. Having a mental image of
something in your mind is equally powerful because you also
carry that with you. And then if you do have
a meditative practice, or even if you don't, being able

(38:17):
to try and bring the mind and the body into
that experience. So taking a moment to look at a
photo of someone that you love or appreciate and or
the actual person right, and being able to actually sense
that and feel it at a complete nervous system level.
It might sound like kind of woo science, but it's not.
The nervous system extends through the whole body. So the
extent that you can make that a truly whole body

(38:39):
somatic experience, yeah, that it leads to an outsize effect
on the just the ability of the nervous system to function.
And then of course we are bombarded all day with
negative symbols. There's just no way around that. But we
can buffer ourselves against those negative symbols by very strongly
associating with certain things. And here I'll just that great

(39:00):
neurologists and writer Oliver Sacks had this obsession with minerals
and stones. He felt they had personalities, and he used
to say that he had developed such a strong relationship
to them, their touch, especially as he started to lose
his vision later in life, the way they felt, and
they made him feel safe, They made him feel good.
So these could be inanimate objects. So find things that

(39:22):
you love and associate with them on a regular basis,
and you are literally shifting your nervous system towards this
place of buffering yourself against negativity, and you are reinforcing
the very circuits that trigger the release of neurochemicals that
make you feel better. And some people might say, well,
then you're just kind of doping yourself up with your

(39:42):
own chemicals. But as a last point here, the neurochemical
dopamine is a very important and very misunderstood molecule. First
of all, it is the substrate by which epinephrin neural
energy is created. And people think of it as dopamine
is just feeling good, But dopamine is not about feeling good.
Dopamin is the molecule of motivation and the desire to

(40:03):
pursue additional things in a particular line of life. So
when we positively associate with a song, a person, a face,
an object, the sunrise, we don't just benefit from those
activities based on the effects of those activities. It's also
what we believe about those activities combine and the release
of dopamine makes you more capable of then leaning into

(40:25):
life and going and doing other things and so. And
this are not small effects, right, The effect of a
small even you know, half a percent increase in dopamine
transmission in the brain is the difference between feeling like
your life is bleak and you can completely attack the
day in the positive sense. So fill your life with symbols,

(40:45):
you get. What's wonderful is that you get to curate
what those are. If you don't have access to them
in your physical environment, they can be entirely internal. And
when I think about the great stories of the Victor
Frankels and they, you know, and people who have just
overcome tremendous challenge, they've internalized symbols such that the tiniest
of things can actually evoke this dopamine release system. And

(41:10):
dopamine is just a generic neuromodulator. It doesn't know anything
about your experience. It only knows what you believe about
your experience, and it's deployed according to what you believe
about your experience. So in theory, I could train my
dopamine system to release dopamine every time I raised my
right hand if I genuinely thought that that had if
that has meaning for me. And this is the art

(41:31):
also of superstitions, right, This is why you know people
will engage in superstitions because they've built positive associations with
outcomes according to a certain behavior. So what you start
to realize is that the brain is making predictions about
the external world. Who's Jay, when's he coming back? You know,
what objects are going to be in the room this
time versus next time. If I suddenly walk out in

(41:53):
that painting over there, which I've happened to love, is
now on a different wall, my nervous system would notice
that because it's but it's also making as about internal state,
and a lot of depression and anxiety is about people
feeling like, oh, when they feel lousy, that that lousy
feeling is going to go on forever. The way to
rewire this is to understand that making and controlling predictions

(42:15):
about how you feel internally gives you a sense of agency,
and that sense of agency, at the end of the
day is just purely neurochemical. So these are pretty straightforward
things to master. I mean, that's mind blowing to me
because I've never heard dopamine be explained that way. Well,
domine everything about dopamine release is learned. Yeah, there are
a few things, like all at all the ones that

(42:36):
evolved for us to be here. Okay, so associated with
reproduction food sugar, there's a very powerful dopamine pathway in
the brain and in the gut too, because sugar has
a nutritive value, right, we should all probably be ingesting
us of it. But you know, it's a hard wired system.
Food when we're hungry, warmth when we're cold. Those are hardwired.

(42:57):
But the dopamine system is designed to be trained up
to associate with anything. Yeah, and this is how a
guy like uh, you can meditate for long periods of
time and feel I'm guessing there were times in which
it felt brutal and there were times in which it
felt incredible. This is how a guy like David Goggins
can um, you know, punish himself with running it, you know,

(43:19):
over and over and over. And yet somehow he's inverted
that dopamine circuit so that it feels like something he
either wants to do or that by overcoming that the
resistance to doing it, he gets a dopamine release. So
dopamine is entirely a learned release system. There are a
few things that trigger it's release no matter what. But

(43:41):
and I should highlight drugs of abuse. I was just
about to say, a cocaine amphetamine um excess, you know, pornography,
excessive dopamine release, and that the diabolical thing about dopamine
under those conditions is that the higher the dopamine release,
the big amplitude dopamine, the bigger the crash. Always it's
the way the circuits are designed. Now Here, we're talking

(44:02):
about self training in healthy amounts of dopamine, yes, non
addictive amounts of dopamine release, or you could say mildly
addictive patterns of behavior that serve us and the people
around us well. And in that case, I think of
that as kind of an adaptive addiction compulsion yea, and
not one that we should necessarily avoid. Absolutely. I think
that for me, the way I differentiate that, and I

(44:24):
think that's such a good distinction that you're raising there,
because what you're basically saying is we could commence ourselves
through the release of dopamine that anything's good for us,
and hence it can lead to addiction or it can
be these aspirational positive habits for us. And I think
the way I've been able to at least differentiate is
that which is good for me, that which makes me

(44:46):
feel good after I do it, because that's that release
of dopamine that I'm experiencing after I do it is
more important than that which makes me feel good before
I do it. I love that. So I don't feel
good before I go to the jim or maybe before
I meditate, or before I eat a healthy bowl of
protein and food that's good for me, but I always

(45:08):
feel good after it. I love that. And when I
feel good before I stay up late at night and
hope that we're going to have a great time. I
feel good before I eat a pizza. I feel good
before I have loads of sugar because I have a
massive sweet tooth, but then afterwards I feel the pangs
of it. I love that. And it proves that in
your heart you're a neuroscientist. Because there's something called dopamine

(45:29):
reward prediction error. This was defined by getting rule from
Schultz and others, and it's an incredible thing and it
can be made very simple, which is when we positively
anticipate something, there is dopamine release. I mean, just tell
kids that you're going for ice cream and you're seeing
what is I'll now explain as reward prediction error. Now
you get to the ice cream shop and it's closed.

(45:49):
What happens is there dopamine drops below baseline before they
were told they were going for ice cream. If they're
going to the ice cream shop and they have ice cream,
you might think then they get even more dopamine. But
guess what, the ice cream isn't as good, or if
one kid that the ice cream cone falls and they
don't get another one. What ends up happening is that
dopamine is relative to where you were just feeling, it

(46:11):
doesn't feel that great. And so this is the diabolical
nature of addictive drugs. People get a dopamine surge in
anticipation of using, and over time they get less and
less of a dopamine surge. But the punishment signal, as
we say, that comes afterwards. The trough afterwards goes lower
and lower and lower. So it's like a asymmetric seesaw.
It's not just back and forth. It goes dopamine, but

(46:32):
then it goes punishment signal. Now you've figured it out
because dopamine reward prediction error says that if you have
less dopamine heading into something, then you do afterward. That
tells the synapses, the brain connections that were involved to
reinforce themselves and to engage in that behavior. Again, and
this is also what happens with surprise. If you go

(46:53):
someplace you're not expecting, you know what likes. Let's go
to this place for dinner out and all looks good
and it's amazing. You create a much bigger dopamine signal
than if I tell you Jay, I got to take
you this place. This is the best sushi in Los Angeles.
It's incredible. That actually sets you up to not enjoy
the meal as much. So we all should learn to
kind of control this dopamine. NB. You've done it beautifully

(47:14):
by simplifying it into making sure that you get enough happiness, thrill,
excitement in retrospect. That's the way to wire in healthy behaviors.
And I've never actually heard it put as succinctly as
you because academics are not trained to be succinct, as
you can tell. But I think if everyone kept that
in mind, they would do themselves a great service, which is,
try and ask whether or not there you had as

(47:37):
much or more pleasure in the aftermath of something as
you did during and you will. You get two benefits,
one as you can avoid addictive type behaviors and the
other because you avoid that crash if there's a dopamine
release after there's no crash, and the other is that
you'll have a tendency to return to that behavior over
and over again. There's also I think a lot of

(47:57):
people enter new relationships there is a well established dopamine surge.
With the early phase. Everything feels possible. People feel like,
people go out and make purchases. They're kind of manic, right,
and it's a very exciting kind of mental illness that
we all enjoy from time to time. But then people
start to enter the phase of real challenge or oftentimes

(48:18):
real challenge, and if they can't make that transition seamlessly,
and they constantly focus back on how great things were
and they look at the differential, it can be a
kind of a dark picture, and then people have to
start working on trying to reignite, so to speak. But
the bigger the dopamine surge at the beginning, the bigger
the crash. So I think that a wonderful model for
relationship is also to temper that dopamine release, spread it

(48:42):
out over time. Try and spread it out over fifty
years any your home free. Now, I'm not an expert
in relationship, but it is absolutely clear that dopamine is
the hallmark of human bonding, then you know early on anyway,
then come the oxytocin and all the feel good, warmth molecules,
because dopean fundamentally is about accessing things that are outside

(49:03):
your immediate experience. It's reaching for things beyond the confines
of your skin, a degree, money, a relationship that you're
worried that's developing and that you're working on. Whereas the
serotonin and oxytocin system, which I think most people have
heard of, are feel good molecules. They're associated with things
We already have, knowledge of how wonderful our partner is,

(49:23):
knowledge of how much we love something, or how much
we appreciate the meal that we had. So neither it's
not that dopamine is bad and serotonin is good. These
are molecules that have built up in our system over
time to allow us to establish new relationships of all
kinds two things end people and to ourselves, and then
to sustain them. But that those big dopamine peaks early

(49:45):
on are very very dangerous, and we need to learn
to temper them and just spread that out over time.
It's a resource, and we need to learn to calibrate
that resource. Andrew you, honestly, you just blurn my mind
again and again and again, because is there are so
many long held beliefs that I have, or techniques or
tools that I've built, or mindsets that I've created and

(50:08):
that I share and coach and pass on from the
studies that I've done. But I get so much joy
out of seeing deep study support those ideas. I think
I want to unpack a lot of the things you said.
The first thing I want to say is my new
claim to fame is that you said I'm an honorary neuroscientist. Now,
so I'm gonna you think like a neuroscientist because to

(50:31):
be able to batch things in time that way is
a unique skill. I'm not saying this for flattery, but
it makes you feel good even better. But the fact
of the matter is funny, but I'm grateful. But most
people think about experiences as one thing. You know, we
went to Costa Rica. It was amazing, ah and I'm
sure it was. And when dopamines flooding through your system,

(50:51):
there's also something really cool. Is it distorts your perception
of time. It feels like time goes by very very fast,
but in looking back, it seems like a lot happened.
I think about when you're bored in the doctor's office
waiting room. It feels like it goes on forever and
you look back, Guess what happened? Nothing, it's low dopamine state.
So dopamine actually acts as a It's like shooting a
film at high frame rate. Yeah, okay, so it feels

(51:15):
like a lot's happening. You look back and it goes
by very fast. But you look back, a lot happen.
So you batch things in time. And this is fundamentally
important to how we work. If we look at experiences
only in terms of how we experience them and not
the aftermath, we miss a huge portion of life, and

(51:37):
more importantly, we miss the opportunity to access the right
behaviors and thoughts. Yeah, we can be very misled by
things like dopamine. It's it's a it's really a tricky
molecule to work with, and we're all working with it.
No one is immune from this, right, But yes, you
are absolutely a neuroscientist. That's my new that's my new tagline. No,

(51:59):
I such a fascination with neuroscience, and I hope that
at one point in my life, I create the time
and space to deeply study and study, should do an experiment.
It's genuine a desire in my life. So I'm not
Jefford has a mind body Lab, Ali Crum's Lab, which
is all about beliefs and how beliefs shape our physiology.
My colleague David Spiegel and psychiatry studies hypnosis and brain

(52:21):
states and beliefs in mind body. So Stanford of course
does all the hardcore, rigorous stuff around moleculobiology, genetics, it's
deep sequencing. But we also have a collection of people
there that are very interested in mind body, so we
should design an experiment. Yeah, definitely, I'd love to. That
would be that's music to my ears. I'm backing more
of what you said. What I find so interesting is

(52:43):
that you said, obviously this this painting that you like
behind me, and then you said if it was in
another place, then you know it takes a bit of
time to reconfigure and recalibrate, you know what's going on here,
and when you look at our lives today, so much
of the anxiety that we experience is based on change
or or the lack of being able to predict as
we talked about or unpredictability, and we've long known kind

(53:06):
of like what you were saying before, We've long known that,
you know, things will not always stay the same. We
realize that change is the only constant, that uncertainty is
the only certainty. Like we know these truths, yet we
love holding on to predict, even for me, Like when
I walk into this room, I do predict that these

(53:27):
things will remain on the wall, and the mics will
be here, and Homer will have set up the lights,
and there's some predictability there, which creates security. But as
we all know, shifting and being good with change is
so integral. What do we do with that? Like, how
do we start opening up and being more comfortable in

(53:47):
the discomfort of change, not just growth, but just change
and shifts that we don't expect and predict. Yeah, I
think two ways. One, I'll just go back to this
fundamental feature of the nervous system, which is it's trying
to make predictions. So the reason why change is stressful,
even positive change, believe it or not, is quote unquote
stressful is because of this and the release of adrenaline

(54:09):
and associated molecules with anytime things change, I mean, if
you look at the psychologists have worked this out, there's
a hierarchy of stressors, and of course at at the
top of that hierarchy are awful things that we don't
you know, I think at the top, to be honest,
I think death of a child is perhaps the greatest
stressor divorce, death of a loved one, these kinds of

(54:31):
horrible things that we wouldn't wish on anyone. Then as
one goes down not too far below, you see things
like moving to a new homer apartment. You think, well,
that could be a great event, right, birth of a
new child, and you think, wait a second, I thought,
that's supposed to be one of the greatest choice in life,
and indeed it is. But it's stressful to the nervous
system because so many things have to be reconfigured, not

(54:54):
to say anything about the lack of sleep with a
new born and this kind of thing. So change is
always going to force our brain to make more assessments
of our environment. One of the things that we can
say about the brain for sure is that once it
learns something, it likes to not have to think about it.
When you walk, because you already know how to walk,
you don't think right left, right, left, right left. But

(55:14):
when you learn how to dance a new step or
something of that sort, or a new skill sports skill,
you have to think about it, and it's work. And
anytime we have to think about behaviors and they aren't
simply reflexive. That work, as we call it, is in
it's a combination of the release of things like adrenaline
ephron in the brain and body, I should say, from

(55:35):
the adrenals in the body, but also in the brain,
from a little brain area called locus ceruleus. That is,
X is kind of a sprinkler system for the brain
and kind of wake up all brain areas saying okay,
let's pay attention to a lot of stuff here. Very
basic system, but very fundamental system. It's literally a wake
up system for the brain works in parallel with the
release of adrenaline into our body. Now, one way to

(55:57):
deal with change is to know this right, to understand
that if one feels stress or agitated around a new move,
or you have a partner who's really stressed about a
new move, even though it's exciting it should be exciting,
that that's perfectly normal because what they're experiencing is this
increase in agitation and alertness, and it also makes it
harder to enter deeply relax states because the brain is

(56:19):
in a mode of predictions, making predictions, what's happening next, thinking, thinking, thinking,
And one of the things that's key to falling asleep
each night and replenishing our ability to think and make
predictions is the ability to turn off thinking. This is
why I'm such a fan of what traditionally was called
yoga needro, which literally means yoga sleep lying down. It's
a form of meditation, as you know, and with breathing, etc.

(56:41):
I certainly I want to point out that I have
no desire to rename any of these ancient practices. These
are beautiful practices. They've been built up over thousands of years.
The reason I call sometimes batch yoga nidra with so
called NSDR non sleep deep rest is that, unfortunately, both
in science and intradition cultures around some of these behaviors,

(57:03):
the language has become a barrier for people to try them.
I'm not trying to wash away any of the wonderful
culture and tradition around these I want to be very
clear about that, but ultimately it's about accessing a state
of mind. As for anyone that's listened to a yoga
Niedra script, and I should say I do niitra every day.
I have for almost a decade now. It's without question,

(57:23):
along with viewing morning light, sunlight, the most powerful practice
I think I can recommend anyone. It is about, as
you always hear in a classic Kneedure script, you move
away from thinking and doing to being and feeling. Now
what is that If we take a neuroscience lens of me,
what is this thinking and doing, being and feeling. It's
about shutting down of the prefrontal cortex, which is making

(57:44):
predictions what's happening next. Right as we move into sleep,
you enter that kind of liminal state where things become disjointed. Right,
a cat flies through the room and then you might
jerk yourself awake, and it's kind of odd, but that's
the state of not thinking and doing and just being
and feeling being in one's pure somatic experience. So I
would say, in order to move through change, designate twenty

(58:08):
to thirty minutes each day to put the brain into
a state of non thinking, non doing, and into a
state of quote unquote being and feeling, so not making predictions. Now,
the tricky thing is when one is stressed. That's especially
hard to do. And this is why I think, what
is it? Technihan said, you know, what is that? Who said?
You know? Um? When stress? You know, I meditate every day,

(58:32):
but when stress, meditate twice as long as something like that,
when I don't think I have time. It's a skill.
And so this ability to turn off thinking enhances one's
ability to enter sleep, which is vital for mental and
physical health. Obviously, learning, et cetera. For reasons we discussed,
So develop the ability to deliberately disengage from thinking and

(58:54):
doing and do that during periods of low stress, right
twenty to thirty minutes a day, even ten minutes a
day of just learning, teaching oneself and practicing the art
of turning off prediction is an incredibly valuable skill. And
then the other one is to just understand that we're
being bombarded with contextual change all the time. You know,
I love Instagram. I teach science on Instagram. I see

(59:16):
you there daily, and so scrolling on Instagram is an
interesting experience because in five minutes you can look at
a thousand different contexts. The human brain has never dealt
with that kind of change before. Even when television when
I was growing up, there were three or four good channels,
then it went to cable, and then now you get
onto an airplane or something, you got two hundred and
forty channels. That's a drop in the bucket compared to

(59:39):
what we can get in a social media feed. So
I think we just need to be aware that the
brain can work with that. But then what you're turning
on is an ability to walk into a new context
and figure it out the statistics. Imagine if an Instagram feed.
And I'm not demonizing Instagram, I think they're wonderful. I
think they provide a wonderful resource. Truly. Imagine if we

(01:00:00):
walked out of this room and it was a completely
different landscape. It was a jungle. Then we turned the
corner and go into what I would think was the kitchen,
and it was the kitchen of the you know, of
some Thomas Keller restaurant in New York. Turn the corner
and all of a sudden, we're underwater. That's social media
and we can cope with that. So if I think
about it that way, then I think if we can

(01:00:22):
cope with that then we can cope with transitions in
so called real life with ease. Now, some people have
more situational awareness than others. They walk into an environment
and they're sensing all the things other people walk into
an environment, and they're very good at narrowing their attentional spotlight.
The latter group actually has a bit of an advantage.
They probably wouldn't be so good as a special operator

(01:00:44):
in the military that has to develop a situational advantage,
or a police officer or a teacher, but they're going
to be immensely good at one on one interactions because
they can make the room disappear. And so, but we
need both kinds of people, and we all need to
learn how to sort of brighten and broaden these attentional
spotlights and narrow them as well. And I'll just briefly

(01:01:05):
say we are old world primates, as it turns out,
and we have the capacity to do what's called covert attention. Yeah.
I can pay attention to you, but I can also
notice that in my periphery there's something else going on.
So I've got two spotlights now, but I am dividing
my attention. We can't do three simultaneously. But what I
can also do is decide to merge those two spotlights
and intensify them and narrow the aperture of my visual

(01:01:27):
window and my auditory window. So we should always think
of our our attention is two spotlights that can be
very broad or it can be very narrowly focused, and
that we can overlap them. Yeah, and I think I
think we should all know how to do both. We
should learn how to narrow the aperture of our focus,
deeply engage, but also deliberately disengage. And the process of

(01:01:49):
falling asleep that we were talking about before is the
practice of learning how to take that attentional spotlight, move
those two apart, and then not dim them, but extend
that same luminosity out more broadly, more broadly, and then
we're off to sleep. So it's about deliberate control of
the nervous system. And unfortunately, we all know how to

(01:02:11):
focus on something if we're very stressed or excited by it.
Most people don't learn how to turn off this focus
and learn how to deliberately disengage. And one of my
great hopes for humanity is that children and adults will
learn how to deliberately disengage because it benefits sleep, which
benefits mental and physical health. And also, if you think
about it, most of the bad things that we do

(01:02:32):
to ourselves and others, and that people do to one
another most, not all, but most are from a heightened
state of reactivity where we're just not conscious. And that's
because our aperture, our window of attention is too narrow.
We're not taking in to account the full space end
time of what we're thinking about. And as a last point,

(01:02:53):
space and time are linked in the brain. If you
have a narrow visual focus, you tend to have a
narrow time slicing right, which makes sense if you think
about like a little kid watching ants on the ground
and then gets called into dinner and all of a sudden,
the way you batch time is different. When you're sleepy,
you tend to batch things in big blocks okay, or
when you're bored, big blocks of time. When you're very excited,

(01:03:14):
stressed or happily excited, you're in that fast frame rate.
You've gone from sixty frames per second, which I think
is a typical smartphone to a thousand frames per second. Wow.
So you're catching all the micro nuances, but you're missing
everything else. And what I find most interesting about that though,
And I want to study a few years ago and

(01:03:36):
I don't know if it I don't know, I can't
remember where it's from, but it said something along the
lines of that Today, in twenty four hours, we're exposed
to more tragedy through the news or pain or stress,
whatever word we want to label that as. Then we
were in my entire lifetime twenty five years ago. I think, sadly, yeah,

(01:03:58):
I think I have to agree. Yeah. And what I
found also was that what you're saying, and I love
this idea of we have these two points of focus
and putting it together or bringing out, which I think
is fantastic as a visual too. There's an element though
that really draws us in of judgment and criticism, like
I find judgment. I'm using judgment as the overall word.
Criticism is a very specific word. But what really makes

(01:04:22):
something harder, like when we're processing thousand posts on Instagram,
the most difficult part is when judgment comes in, whether
it's positive or negative, because that's what draws you in.
And I find that we have more things to judge,
and to make that many judgments in a day is
quite exhausting, and then to be exhausted by the number
of tragic or stressful moments that we experience. And like

(01:04:47):
you said that, you know, it's okay if we're on
Instagram we're seeing multiple things or where it's seeing this kitchen,
into this animation, into this world. But when a lot
of it is painful to deliberately disengage, but the main
connected to reality, I feel like that's somewhere where people
feel like they're in Nomad's then yeah, and you know,
it's it's a particular challenge now with the number of

(01:05:11):
images and movies that can come at us. And you know,
I think that here, I I'm not one to usually
talk like this, but I think much of building a
good life is about both honoring and challenging the asymmetries
of our nervous system. What I mean by that is,
you know, everything we've talked about up until now are

(01:05:31):
wired into us from birth. We have dopamine, F and
FER in these circuitries. We can attentional spotlight that all
we show up in the world with that, and we
have to work with them. We also need to acknowledge
that there is an asymmetry to learning. You know before
we talked about the gap effects and the two stage
process of neuroplasticity. There are exceptions. The exception is learning
of negative things. You only have to touch the hot

(01:05:53):
stove once, or the metaphorically speaking, the hot stove only
has to touch you once before it changes you. So
there's one trial learning of negative experiences. Now, once we
understand that asymmetry, and once we understand that negativity actually
has a bit of a stronghold on our nervous system,
then we accept I would hope we would accept the

(01:06:14):
idea that then we have to work a little harder
to counter that, or maybe a lot harder. In the
same way that so called highly palatable foods, which is
now because it kind of signs geek speak for unhealthy,
highly processed foods, because there's some you know, I do
love fruits and vegetables, and there's some wonderful baked goods.
Let's I love croissants. So I don't want to highly

(01:06:36):
palatable foods. But but I think we could all do
well to eat healthier foods, and they are not as
rewarding in the short term as some of these highly
palatable foods, right and especially to the young nervous system.
You know, there's you know, a milkshaker or candy just
taste better to these kids than vegetables for reasons that
are hardwired into the nervous system. But we know that

(01:06:58):
kids need their fruits and vegetables probably more than they
need candy. Okay, So we have to all learn to
counter these built in asymmetries in our nervous system. And
as adults, we probably thought we had it made, but
then now we're bombarded with all this negative imagery. And
so the key is really the symbols that we were
talking about earlier, to really build in positive symbols and

(01:07:21):
internal symbolic representations. What I mean by that not just
physical things in our environment and people, but also how
we hold those things inside is so important. I think
this is what comes to this notion of intentions. It's
work right right life and right action and all these
things that we hear about. It's work. It's working against
the tide that is pulling us toward negativity. That's in fact,

(01:07:43):
there's a study that was done in the sixties. It
was published in the journal Science. There's an excellent journal,
and the Apex journals had people with stimulating electrodes in
their brain for reasons related to neurosurgery. These people could
stimulate multiple areas of their brain one at a time,
and they reported how they felt. So that the human
would stimulate and they'd feel drunk, where they'd stimulate another

(01:08:06):
area and they'd feel happy. They'd stimulate another area they'd
feel sad. The fascinating We learned a lot about the
human brain from these studies. The brain area that people
preferred to stimulate the most. This is really gonna upset
a few people was the one that led to anger
and frustration. And you think to yourself, well, that's just terrible.
Are we just doomed? Right? No, It turns out the

(01:08:27):
anger and frustration is a signal to the brain and
body that you need to do something in response to that.
Usually move away or move forward and sort of enter
an aggressive state. Knowing that trained, right, that's like habit
that probably comes through and habit. I think this is
why people I'd spend more time on Instagram than I

(01:08:48):
do on other social media platforms. But listen, I'm not
embarrassed to say you go on Twitter and it's a
more combative zone. It's just the nature of the beast
there it's a more combative zone, in part because there
are a lot of academics on there. It's more combative.
So I notice if I log on to Twitter, I
already get a little bit of an adrenaline surge, just like,
all right, you're ready to fight, and just knowing that

(01:09:10):
we have this innate bias towards frustration and anger and
that kind of friction. Hopefully, my wish is that it
will allow people to relax around that and to realize, ah,
this is sort of like the food that I immediately
want to reach for. That's the kind of dopamine signal
that you were talking about early on. But how am
I going to feel afterwards? Yes? How am I going
to feel afterwards? And I would say that ninety nine

(01:09:32):
percent of online interactions where people end up in these
ridiculous battles, later both parties probably think, well, how did
I get wrapped up in that? It's absolutely crazy. You know,
you think you're scoring slam dunks on each other at
the time, but it's ridiculous. So I think the thing
to understand is that we have these asymmetries, but that
we can learn to work with them the way that
a really I think a really incredible psychiatrist. He's done

(01:09:55):
a lot of work on trauma. Paul Conti describes it
in a different context. Is that um and he's like,
into my mind, the expert on trauma and just just
done beautiful work. Is that it's like those little kids
toys where there's a little ball bearing moving around in
a maze, he describes to me. So this is all
Paul Kanti's an MD, and this is his work, not
mine his words. You know, there are times in which

(01:10:17):
we are like that game where just a slight shift
and all of a sudden the ball bearing goes down
the shoote. And what we should all be striving for
is for you know, slightly concave and for it to
kind of maybe move around a bit with the with
the events of life and what we hear and see.
That's what we should be striving toward. And that takes work.
Some people are naturally there, but very few people are
naturally there. But this is the power of meditation. This

(01:10:38):
is the power of non sleep deep rest. This is
the power of good sleep or most nights. This is
the power of excellent social relationships. This is the power
of mindsets and intentions, that stuff, gratitude practices, none of
that stuff is weak. All of that stuff acts as
a kind of a foundation from which we can approach
things and go, Yeah, the pulses to get pretty upset

(01:11:01):
about that, but I'm going to lean away from that.
Very hard to do when we're not tending to that.
Those foundational elements actually quite easy to do over time,
because it gives us the perspective. And I think that
if we understand that we're being bombarded with this, it's
like being at a buffet of junk food. Yeah, but

(01:11:21):
understanding that somewhere in that buffet is really nutritious food,
and that's what we should be aiming for and learning
to kind of override the natural signals of oh, I
really want that, and I really want that by thinking
about exactly what you said earlier, which is how am
I going to feel afterward being and what's that that's
dilating our perception of time. We're getting out of that

(01:11:42):
slave to dopamine mode and we're starting to think about, no,
I'm not going to let dopamine control me. I'm going
to control dopamine. And that's powerful. Yeah, Well that sparks
for me, is Also, this idea that I've been in
love with for a while is fragility and strength and
how not being exposed to something doesn't protect you, but

(01:12:06):
it makes you. Weaka, it absolutely does. And you know,
nowadays there's a big interest in so called dopamine fasts.
I think they have their place. You know, if people
have been engaging in things that are high dopamine evoking behaviors,
there is a place for this. This is one of
the routes to sobriety. Beautiful work by my colleague at Stanford,
doctor Anna Lemky. She wrote Dopamine Nation, incredible book about

(01:12:27):
dopamine in the context of addiction, but all kinds of addiction.
She talks about this, there is a role for dopamine fast.
Really moving away from intensely pleasurable activities for about thirty
days is necessary for some people to reset. But it's
naive for any of us to think that then you
go back into the world and you're not being bombarded
with temptation of different kinds. I mean, the whole idea

(01:12:48):
is to bring the system back into balance so that
you can notice the subtle inflections, right, I guess the
meditators and Yogi's I always loved the language they use,
would be the kind of subtle after meditation, you can
notice the kind of subtle ripples in life, right, Whereas
if you're just hard charging all the time, you miss
so much. Again I'm using in the yeah, yeah, but

(01:13:09):
I think that so dopamine fast have their place, but
better to have your hands on the steering wheel, accelerator
and break of all these mechanisms and to go through.
It's only when you know the car has been wrecked
that it needs to go into the repair shop. Most
of us don't need a dopamine fast. We need to
understand how dopamine works. We need to do exactly what
you described earlier, which is to extend the time domain

(01:13:31):
so that we think about am I getting dopamine later also?
Or is this just a quick up and down kind
of event. Then I think we can move through life
in a much more adaptive way. And then you mentioned
obviously when you're talking about relationships. You know, we talked
about how dopamine is there at the beginning, but then
we talk about serotonin and oxytocin these inner feelings, which
I love that description also of like how dopamine is

(01:13:53):
the pursuit of external things and oxytocin and serotonin about
how we feel what we have. I think that was
another great visual And I love how you speak in
symbols more than you know, like there you know it's
I really everything you've been sharing today, I can visualize it,
and I really enjoy visual learning. And so when you
were speaking earlier about how you can visualize a symbol

(01:14:15):
even if you don't have it physically, and even when
you said that to them, I'm like, Oh, that's really
fascinating that dopamine is that oxytocin and serotonin. Is this
with oxytocin and serotonin, we know that a lot of
the habits you just mentioned they are what create this balance. Right.
So the reason why people doing about decreasing dopamine, I guess,
is because we've noticed that dopamine is shooting through the

(01:14:36):
roof and often what we do for oxytonin, oxytocin and
serotonin and not really that balanced across the board. What
are Let's look at relationships and go is there a
need to have dopamine in long term relationships or are
serotonin and oxytocin enough and not just relationships That applies
to Korea. It applies applies to everything I feel. Yeah. Absolutely.

(01:15:00):
There's a wonderful book about this written by a psychoanalyst
in a slightly different context. The book the title of
the book is Can Love Last? And it's an interesting books.
It operates on the premise that when we first meet
somebody and we want this in the context of romantic relationship,
and we desire romantic relationship with them, it's very much
about objectification of the other person. And I don't mean

(01:15:21):
objectification in the traditional sense. But we don't rely on
them yet, right, We only rely on the ability to
pursue and get them right or for them for us
to pursue them exactly, But we don't rely on them
for safety at all. If that evolves to become a
romantic relationship right with trust, then what happens is there's

(01:15:41):
a true dependency there. If one person were to leave
for any reason, die or leave or cheat or break up,
it is truly devastating to the safety mechanisms of the
brain and body. Right. It's a reactivation actually of a
lot of the machinery that was designed for attachment between
infant and parent. Right is it just as an important
aside all the work on an attachment that was done

(01:16:03):
by Bowlby and Maine and others in psychology of taking
deliberately taking babies away from their mothers and then reuniting
them and evaluating the responses batching them into different All
that circuitry isn't lost as we grow up. It's repurposed
for a romantic attachment. There's no question about that, no
question about that. We just operated into different domains of
anxiety becomes about waiting for a text message as opposed

(01:16:25):
to mother to come back in the room or nursing, etc.
So same circuitry reapplied. As we advance into relationships, we
become more dependent on people. But the idea, and that
it's touched on quite a lot in this book Can
Love Last, is that there is a need from time
to time in some relationships to bring the dopamine element

(01:16:47):
back in. Now certain cultures have actually built this in
in a very strategic way of actually having men and
women not physically contact one another for several weeks out
of each month in order to maintain the kind of
quote unquote excitement of a relationship. Nowadays, we tend to
have this model of lover and best friend and sometimes
even business partner right, which for some people can work

(01:17:09):
and for other people can quash all the excitement. Right.
It really depends, and especially nowadays where people are working
a lot more from home, there isn't a tendency for
people to spend much time apart and to miss one another.
Missing one another the yearning for the other person is
a beautiful thing. It's a painful, but beautiful thing. What
is that yearning? That yearning is the pain of the
lack of dopamine and serotonin. Actually just came back from

(01:17:32):
a trip and we were visiting a couple friends of
ours and they said it was right beautiful. They said
they've been together a long time. They said they've had
three nights apart in their entire relationship, and one of
them got sick during that time apart. And I thought,
that's beautiful. Now, for some people, that's a beautiful model.
For other people that would be excessive, and it actually
could eliminate a number of the positive neurochemical features of

(01:17:54):
the relationship. And there's a lot of variation around this.
So dopamine is required to quote unquote re up the
excitement in a relationship. How is that achieved well? Dopamine
is the molecule, as you recall, of reward, predictionary of novelty.
So doing things that are not expected is great. Routine
is great for serotonin and oxytocin predictability, Routine predictability, same thing, safety, routine, predictability,

(01:18:20):
serotonin oxytocin system, no question about it. Dopamine is the
neurochemical of novelty and pursuing new things. So for couples
that are very set in their ways and feel very
safe and homey together wonderful, but creating ways in which
they miss one another, or creating new experiences for them
to kind of re up, the dopamine in the relationship

(01:18:40):
can have a tremendously positive effect. And I look forward
to a day where neuroscience is actually incorporated into relationship
design and an intelligent and respectful way that they're respectful,
meaning that their differences. But we see a lot that
people will just go out and get a new relationship, right.
I'm of the mind that us you know, it's it's

(01:19:01):
dangerous situation, better to probably avoid divorce, right, certainly for
sake of children. Sometime I've heard, of course, that divorces
can rescue relationships too. I understand there's a lot of nuance,
but I think everyone would prefer emotionally, financially, etc. To
be able to be in a great relationship for a
long period of time. And so I think that understanding
that the push pull between dopamine and serotonin is key.

(01:19:24):
And just to remember that missing someone 'earning for someone
is the anticipation of how great it's going to feel
when together. I think that that could that could go
a long way. And also for people that get very,
very very excited about the new person the new thing,
just be wary that not everyone's dopamine system works the

(01:19:45):
same way. And with dopamine, it's great to have increases
in dopamine, but where it passes a threshold and it's
very big peaks. Where there's a peak, there's a crash,
and the crash is always asymmetrically deeper than the peak.
There is no way around this. And learn to temper
the excitement if you're an excitable person, yeah, and I

(01:20:05):
would say learn to ramp up the excitement a little
bit if you're somebody who's not so easily overwhelmed. Yeah, definitely.
I mean me and my wife, we've been married for
six years, and nearly together for ten which you seem
to have an amazing from the X from the album Yea,
I would say I always like to clarify that I
don't think you know. I grew up wanting a Hollywood
romance and my views of love were defined by movies

(01:20:28):
and music, and I realize that is not what love
looks like at all. And my wife has been a
great teacher to me in that space of showing me
what a beautiful relationship can look like. But it doesn't
look like how we think it is. And I think
often when people see me and my wife, they may
think we have that version two and I would just
I'm very careful about the idea that we have a

(01:20:48):
fantastic relationship, but it isn't fantastic for the reasons that
TV or movies has convinced us that relationships are good.
But we spend around three months apart every single year,
not by design or it's just by work and life.
And I haven't seen my wife for the last three months.
It will be one more month before I see it.
So the yearning is real. I cannot wait to see it.

(01:21:08):
But at the same time I get to focus on myself.
I get to have a loan time. I get to
refill and refuel myself. I get to discover new parts
of my identity. I get to learn a new skill
like so many healthy And of course we don't have
children yet, so we don't have that responsibility. But going
to what you said, I see so much value in
in how we can be open to these ideas. I

(01:21:30):
think that's the point that it's not about there's one
size fit soul or one right way. But I want
to shift Andrew with our conversation to something you brought
up earlier, because and if you don't feel comfortable to talking,
why we don't. But I heard and I've become aware
that you are. You have tattoos, have symbols. Yeah. Tim
Ferris outed me on his podcast. Yeah, thanks to Tim,

(01:21:52):
Yeah I do. I UM. You know, I grew up
a child of an academic and um. But then when
I was a teenager, I got involved in skateboarding, punk
rock music. I saw a lot of friends in that world.
So the photographer for our podcast is from DC and
Nike Skateboarding, Mike Blayback. Of good friends in that world,
become friendly with guys like Danny Way and you know,

(01:22:13):
it's amazing, one of the greatest skateboarders of all time,
by the way, I mean, he and I aren't close friends,
but we become friendly, and for me that's you know,
I grew up in that, and yeah, those were cultures
that made a lot of sense to me given where
I was at the time, and they have always felt
to me like my first non biological family. So I
started getting tattooed pretty young, too young. And I will

(01:22:34):
say to all of those out there they're thinking about it,
think carefully, Yeah it is they are permanent. Things have
changed around this. I always cover up my tattoos for
the following reason when when doing public facing work, which
is that generally when I'm trying to teach in roal science,
I'm trying to download ideas and transmit them. So I

(01:22:55):
just want to avoid any distractions about the symbols that
are meaningful to me because they just aren't relevant in
that context. I have a good friend who explained it
this way. He said, well, you know, maybe tattoos should
be an important part of the hiring process because rather
than covering them up, if you have a lot of tattoos,
it is evidence that you can sit still for a
long period of time while in intense pains. I'll also

(01:23:16):
say this, I was fortunate to know good tattoo or
its a good tattoo. There are there's a range out
there and and along the lines of them being permanent.
I will also say that black and gray lasts longer,
doesn't fade than color. So so what's your most h
what's the symbol on your body? And I'm sure you
have many, but if you were to pick one, not

(01:23:37):
your favorite, but one that feels really meaningful right now
in your life. Yeah. Well, first of all, it's funny
because people often will say, what are you going to
do when you're like sixty or sixty five? You got
all these tattoos, and I just think, okay, Well, first
of all, and I'm incentive to stay in shape. And
the second of all, um, you know, I actually worry
about them disappearing because then I have to have them
all redone and they're pretty painful. A long time, I

(01:23:58):
got a lot of them, so a long time. It's
been twenty five years or more of getting tattooed. So, um,
I can't pick just one. But I do have a
picture of my bulldog Mastiff Costello and a pop print
of his life size or actual size. And I loved
that dog. I had to put him down. Um while, yeah,

(01:24:18):
and it was just you know, the last line in
the contract of good dog ownership is that you're going
to put him down before there and suffering. And it
was a It actually turned out to be a beautiful transition.
I did it, you know, in a beautiful location. He
went easy. And I don't want to talk about too
long because I'll cry out of love. I noticed I
still cry when I think about him, but it's not sadness.
It took me like three months to realize. I was like,

(01:24:40):
I always cry when I talk about Costello. Where I
want to cry, and I realize it's because I love him.
The feeling isn't sad. He just he had such an
incredible that's that symbol, that physical and anyone that knows me,
I loved that dog like crazy. So there's that one
and then um and I don't want to focus on
negative things, but again, it's a feeling love. I talked

(01:25:00):
about these three advisors that I had earlier. I was
blessed with amazing advisors, and sadly first one died a suicide,
second one cancer, who I was very close to my
third one cancer, so that the morbid joke among people
that know me is you don't want me to work
for you. Now I can make that joke because all
three of them had an incredible spirit about life. So

(01:25:21):
I actually have all of their initials or symbols of
them tattooed on my body and I miss them every day.
But I also, you know, I think there is something
powerful to embedding something in your body. Some people wear pendants, obviously,
some people decide to get tattoos, and you know, I've
been encouraged at times people like, you know, just show
your tattoos, be out there with them. I want to

(01:25:42):
be very clear, I'm not ashamed of them at all.
I'm proud of them. But yeah, but for me, if
I'm teaching or I'm trying to be an educator, I
really want to emphasize the information. I also think, listen
to the world's a complicated place and we can't always
control people's interpretations of why we do things. So for
the young people they're thinking about getting tattoos, um just
understand that's the world we live in. Although I think

(01:26:04):
nowadays people are more accepting. So, yeah, thank you for
sharing both. Yea, thank you. I wanted that more. I
I just appreciate hearing about because we spoke about symbols
and yeah, and that for that reason, I really wanted
to understand the symbols that you know, Yeah, for me,
something about having you know, um, having experiences that I've
externalized to the surface of my body. It feels right,

(01:26:26):
it's weird. They feel like my skin now. Yeah, I
feel like birth marks. I never look at and I
know we won't get up in the morning look at
the mirror and go like there's a tattoo, and there's
a tattoo. Normally I just think like, oh, yeah, Like
it's just it just kind of becomes part of you,
as you know, because obviously you Yeah, I already have three.
I had a plan. It's not the number, it's the
I hadn't plan to have my whole upper buddy tattooed

(01:26:47):
when I was younger, and then I became a monk.
So I haven't had any since. Yeah, but up un
cycle my first when I was sixteen, second when I
was eighteen, and then lost one when I was like
twenty one, Okay, and I did them all and then
I would gave them monk and then I haven't had
any since. And my wife's been the other way around,
Like since we've been married, she's had like she had
one before we married. I had like seven more. So
she's Yeah, it's like I don't wear any jewelry except

(01:27:09):
to watch. But yeah, tattoos for me have been. UM,
it's been a fun journey. And I'm forty six years
old now, so I plan to keep going. You know.
I love that. Yeah, there's there's at this point, it's um,
it's I suppose it's neuroplasticity. It's built into me. Andrew,
you have been so kind gracious with your time. I
am you know, I've always known how phenomenally intelligent and

(01:27:33):
smart and sharp and deeply studied you are. But I'm
really grateful I got to experience your heart today in
so many ways, and to me that that beautiful synergy
you have is really meaningful to me to experience. I'm
so grateful to you for being here, for taking the time,
for for being We've been in touch for a couple

(01:27:54):
of years, maybe even it's been or you know, through messaging,
but to really experience you in full today has been
been a treat for me. We end every own Purpose
episode with a final five. These have to be answered
in one word to one sentence maximum, which for this
academic might be a bit but we will try so
Andrew hum and these are your final five. The first

(01:28:15):
question is what is the best advice you've ever received
in any area of life? Know thyself? The oracle said that,
and it's absolutely true. We have to be good scientists
of ourselves and understand where we have talents, competency, end
or challenges and then work with those beautiful all right.

(01:28:36):
Second question, what is the worst advice you've ever received?
Ahead that everything is just experience, you know, the idea
that all experiences are equivalent. I would love to think
that all our steps leads us to enlightenment kind of thing,
but we have I do believe that we, or at
least I need to be far more intentional than that,

(01:28:58):
and that we can be beautiful. Question number three, what
is something that you didn't value before but you've learned
to value now? Almost embarrassed to say it, but um, family,
you know I've relied very heavily on friendship as a
deep source of reinforcement in my life. I've leaned hard
into that for many, many decades. I think recently I've

(01:29:22):
become quite moved by the supports within my family that
I hadn't realized that really set me up so well
to to do what I want to do in life. Beautiful.
I love hearing that question number four, what's the first
thing you do in the morning and the last thing
you do at night? First thing I do in the
morning is get outside and get sunlight, and if the

(01:29:43):
sun isn't up, I flip on all the lights and
then I go get sunlight. Also drinking a glass of
water before I go to sleep at night, Yogendra, you
know doing that night you do? I actually I think
about those three people I was talking about before. I
do every night think about them. I don't know, it's
been a long time now, that accumulated over several decades,

(01:30:03):
and um, yeah, I think about them every night. Love
that I don't even think to do it. I just
do it. Yeah, I've I lost one of mine mentors
of the others is still alive right now. Wanted them
to Stage four brain against and just a couple of
years ago and I when you said that, I was like, yeah,
I know, yeah, I know that feels like so yeah,
all right. Fifteen final question. If you could create one

(01:30:27):
law or set one had it that everyone had to
do every day for the rest of their life, what
would it be. I think, I know it's going to be,
but I have to ask you, well, since most people
will assume it's sunlight viewing and I'll just I'll just
assume they're doing that anyway. I would die a happy
person if people would adopt a practice of learning to

(01:30:50):
deliberately calm down, whether or not through non sleep depressed
or a couple deep breaths, find a tool, because I
really believe that much of the misfortune and pain of
life could be avoided if people learned to calm down.
I also know that there's a lot more joy to
access when we do. Andrew, You're phenomenal. You blew my

(01:31:14):
mind multiple times today. I hope this is not going
to be the only time that we hang out. We
agreed the first and we spoke that the podcast was
an excuse to build our Friendship's right, I feel like
there is This is a podcast episode that I would
highly recommend that everyone listens to. Again. Takes notes. When
you make those notes, try and find those elements that

(01:31:37):
you want to put into practice. I would highly recommend
that everyone who's listening to this episode go and subscribe
to and listen to Andrew's podcast, which is a wealth
of wisdom and everything we've discussed today today tip of
the Iceberg. We've dived into so many different areas. You'll
find episodes on every single aspect of what we've discussed
on his podcast. Highly recommend that you go and check

(01:31:59):
it out for the episodes that really connect. We didn't
even dive into you incredible work deeply on vision or
on sugar and diet, and you know, we haven't even
we didn't even get to go. Then we'll do that
hopefully another time. But please make sure that you tag
Andrew and I on Twitter, maybe on Instagram to let
us know what connected with you, what resonated with you,

(01:32:19):
What is something that you're going to try this week
because of this episode, how those habits are going. I
love seeing you put these ideas and insights into practice.
That is the whole goal of living a life that's
on purpose. Andrew, I thank you from the bottom of
my heart express my deepest gratitude for doing this. And yeah,
any final words anything you want to share that's on

(01:32:41):
your mind or heart that you want to put out
there in the world. Over to you. Thank you. I
want to genuinely say thank you again. We've known each
other somewhat a distance for a long time now. It's
been a tremendous pleasure. You know. I look to social
media and a lot in science and a lot of
different landscapes for inspiration. It's been a remarkable thing to

(01:33:02):
see what you've done. And it's so great to meet
in person because I knew you were the real deal
but there but you know, I'll just say this. I
know many people already feel this, but I just want
to say that to meet you in person is a
real honor for me, and I just so admire what
you're doing and I know the intent behind it is

(01:33:23):
real and the way you show up to it is incredible,
and so I'm just I'm floating on the gratitude of
being able to be here today face to face. Thank
you so much, Andrew, Thank you so much. Everyone. Make
sure you share this episode, pass it a long term
frand who needs to hear it. As I said, you
can obviously go and subscribe and listen to Andrew's podcast
which is called Huberman Lab, which you will find on

(01:33:45):
all podcasts platforms. It makes you do that, and of
course follow him on Instagram. As you can tell, he
loves to be there too, highly active, very present. Make
sure you follow him for more insights and more intelligence.
Thank you so much for watching this episode. Please do
share it. I'll see you next time. M

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Jay Shetty

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Andrew Huberman ON: Learning Effectively & How to Train Your Brain For Optimal Performance