Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. Recently, the Huberman Lab hosted a live event at the Meridian Theatre in Toronto, Ontario. The event consisted of a lecture entitled The Brain Body Contract, followed by a question and answer session. We wanted to make sure that the question and answer session was available to everybody regardless of who could attend in person.
I also want to make sure to thank the sponsors of that event, which were AG1 and 8 sleep. 8 sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity. One of the key things to getting a great night sleep is to make sure that the temperature of your sleeping environment is correct. And that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature actually has to drop by about 1-3 degrees.
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I've been sleeping on an 8 sleep mattress cover for well over two years now, and it has greatly improved my sleep. I fall asleep far more quickly. I wake up far less often in the middle of the night, and I wake up feeling far more refreshed than I ever did prior to using an 8 sleep mattress cover. If you'd like to try 8 sleep, you can go to 8 sleep.com slash huberman to save $150 off their pod 3 cover. 8 sleep currently ships to the USA, Canada, UK, select countries in the EU and Australia.
Again, that's 8 sleep.com slash huberman. AG1 is an all in one vitamin mineral probiotic drink. I've been taking AG1 since 2012, so I'm delighted that they sponsored the live event.
The reason I started taking AG1 and the reason I still drink AG1 once or twice a day is that it provides all of my foundational nutritional needs. That is, it provides insurance that I get the proper amounts of those vitamins, minerals, probiotics, and fiber to ensure optimal mental health, physical health, and performance.
If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.com slash huberman to claim a special offer. They're giving away 5 free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3K2. Again, that's drinkag1.com slash huberman to claim that special offer. And now without further ado, the question and answer session from our live event at the Meridian Theatre in Toronto, Ontario.
What motivated me to do the guest series with Paul Conti? First of all, for those of you that don't know, Paul Conti is a psychiatrist, he's a Stanford and Harvard-trained psychiatrist. I wanted to do the series with Paul for several reasons. We initiated that series. First of all, he's incredibly talented as a clinician.
And yet, despite having written an excellent book about trauma, I felt that two things were true for sure. One is that most people won't get the opportunity to work with Paul sadly, he's time limited.
Second, his expertise is incredibly vast, not just restricted to trauma. Trauma, if understood, can be transmuted into deep sources of knowledge that other people can benefit from. And indeed, what I found in Paul, as I got to know him, is that he has just profound insight into the unconscious mind. He's been long asked in and around the podcast, what about the subconscious? What about the unconscious? And I was of the mind that the supercomputer of the human brain is the four brain.
The thinking, planning, context setting, piece, right, diviner, forehead. It's the reason that we're not the house cats, the house cats are the house cats, and it's the reason we're the curators of the planet. But Paul said, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, the unconscious mind is the supercomputer of the mind. I'm like, well, that sounds great, but how do we understand the unconscious mind?
And he has a really biological and psychological and psychiatric understanding of the unconscious. And in that series, he talks about these so-called cupboards that we can look into in order to better understand our unconscious mind, in order to allow our unconscious mind to teach us things about ourselves that are useful. And there are three main places where our unconscious teaches us useful things that allow us to be more conscious of the way that our brain is working in useful ways.
The first is in these liminal states between waking and sleep. It really does seem to be the case that when, surprise, surprise, we're completely still, and we're emerging from or dropping into states of reduced autonomic arousal, but our level of thought, if you will, is still active enough that we are aware, maybe even lucid dreams, and also in dreams, our unconscious mind uses, as I think, young and Freud pretty well understood, symbols to teach us things, but everything's flipped in there.
Genders flipped, just because you're having a conflict with somebody in your life who's a man doesn't mean that that person shows up as a man, they could show up as an animal, so species are flipped. The symbols become mishmashed, but Paul made it very clear that all this can be parsed if you do a certain kind of introspective work.
I thought that would mean a lot of talk therapy, how are we going to get people to learn how to do talk therapy by themselves, we want to keep things as much independent of cost and things like that, and the practices he started talking about were incredibly simple. Things like mirror work, some of the psychologists in the room will be familiar with this, I thought mirror work, what is that?
People trying to activate their unconscious, or excuse me, access their unconscious in sleep by a practice of staring into the mirror for some period of time while awake, and reflecting on self and aspirations, and the idea of the body as a container, all this stuff, even for a kid from Northern California, so I'm really new, new, agey. And here it's scripted by Paul into a formal structure that one can use to parse your own mental health and enhance mental health.
So that was the reason for doing the series, and especially the episode on relationships, not just romantic relationships I found, hasn't come out yet incredibly interesting because he talked about how in his clinical experience, all virtually all the stuff that people pay attention to in relational stuff, are they unarsicist?
So the obsessive is this person, a musician versus whether or not I'm an accountant, are we compatible that none of that stuff predicts anything, as well as the balance of these three drives, the aggressive drive, the pleasure drive, and the so-called generative drive.
And I found it to be fascinating, and I'm excited for that episode and the other episodes to come out, but basically because Paul's brilliant, and he makes the, what I consider pretty obscure and opaque, very clear and concrete, and there are a bunch of worksheets, again all available as zero cost, and none of them requiring that you do therapy with anybody if you choose not to.
So I think that's the reason for Paul to kind of work, one could do on oneself, and the last thing I'll say about this is that, and I should have said this first, is that the primary motivation was we did a series of Dr. Andy Galpin on physical fitness, why isn't there a series on mental fitness?
Like, what is that? Why do we talk so much about mental health when we're, and it's usually a conversation about mental illness, what people should have tools and practices that are zero cost, I believe, to be able to introspect in a structured way and enhance their mental health, the independent of, you know, their level of income, and I think Paul was the guy to do it, and we'll do more of that with other people as well, because no single episode about any topic or series can exhaustively cover any topic of the Lord knows we will try to do.
Okay, next question. What are the recommended protocols and best practices to enhance emotional resilience and develop effective response during highly triggering situation? You're asking the wrong guy. Yeah, I mean, I don't snap, I don't snap, I was a wild teenager, but I don't snap, I'm not the aggressor, but I do have a snap button, and it's been pushed before, and I have to say when that happens, it's really kind of a scary thing, not to me, right?
And it's been many years, but I think anyone who's hit that threshold where you just try not to say something, you say it anyway, you know, that's usually how it shows up for people. I think we hear the statements like be responsive, not reactive, because that's why I became a biologist, because stuff like that makes no sense to me.
But in that moment, how are you responsive, not reactive? So to me, I was like, what are the tools? Clearly as you go up that continuum of autonomic arousal, it becomes much harder to do whatever that means, right? So that hence the tools for reducing stress in real time. I think the one that we haven't emphasized so much on the podcast.
And by the way, thanks to some great therapy that was not voluntary, I was able to, you know, I was a wild kid, a wild wild kid, a hung around wild kids, and things were pretty different then, and we worked it out. But I think nowadays it's wonderful, because I think people are more conscious of the need to understand their nervous system, their own psychology.
And I wasn't as calm and back then. In fact, I hid the fact that I had the therapy for a long time, thinking, wow, like everyone's got to think I'm crazy, they did call me crazy. You know, I think things have really changed. I think the last 20 years have brought about a profound shift in the way that we think about our own species and what are useful tools and practices.
One of the things that is abundantly clear is that that threshold for a stress response really is different for different people, different, different situations, but that it is something that can be practiced and elevated. And in terms of not getting near that trigger point through the types of practices I talked about earlier, getting more comfortable with adrenaline circulating in your system is what it's really about, frankly.
But of course it all starts with a good night's sleep, right? It's going to make you far less reactive. But of course when you're stressed, that's often when you're not getting good sleep. So I think that ultimately that our ability to, as you know, more emotional resilience and effective responses during triggering situations is really the consequence of practices of taking good care outside of those situations.
And then of course inevitably there will be situations where people get triggered. And it's actually interesting to see the way that people behave online. And the fact that many people in fact in science as well have literally lost their jobs for having, you know, not being able to control their thumbs.
It's kind of, we're in an odd time where there's the distancing of doing things online as opposed to in person where people somehow engage in saying things and doing things that they wouldn't in person. But I think that ultimately it's the consequence of good self-care. And this gets actually back to some of the things that are covered in the Conti series. You know, we hear about self-care as we think that means massage is which are great by the way.
And we think that that is about exercise and that's wonderful. But much of self-care is about really making sure that our nervous system is in the state that we need it to be in in order to go about our day. And I think this is why morning routines and practices are so vital. I think that those set the stage for the emotional resilience. Those set the stage for avoiding getting triggered so to speak. I don't think there's a lot that one can do in real time except perhaps physiological size.
So sorry to give you a sort of empty answer. I'm not a pessimist on this front. But I think that ultimately it's like saying, well, what if you have to scale the side of a building to get in, you locked yourself out. So you can do to prepare for that. Well, you can buy a ladder. But if you don't have a ladder, you know, what, because what you probably should do is be physically fit enough to climb up a railing or something like that and know how to pick a lock or something like that.
So I think ultimately that it's the consequence of stuff that's done away from those triggering situations. Next question, please. I want you to describe the brain activity of somebody when they're suddenly inspired and having foster inspiration in your life. Well, I talked a little bit about this, but I will say that the best way to foster inspiration is in the words of the great Joe Strummer. They actually call it Strummer's Law. No joke. No input, no output.
I think one of the things that I've observed over and over again is that as much as we need to dedicate ourselves to our craft, to our families, to our friends, that ultimately our best ideas come from disparate experiences when we're not seeking a particular kind of input to get ideas. Now, maybe this practice of being completely still while being alert fosters a lot of, I think the way I understand is more of a geysering up of stored information in the unconscious.
I think Rick would talk about it or Paul Conti would talk about it as geysering up from the unconscious because when we are focused on the outside world, we're taking in sensory information, or extra reception as opposed to interoception. So, my belief, and this is a practice I do every week is I make sure that at least once a week I either walk or hike or run without any earphones, and I'm trying to get into states of wordlessness.
I'm not in a state where I'm not digesting a podcast, where I'm not reading a book, where I'm not listening to a lecture, where I'm not in conversation, and essentially trying to turn off the linguistic narrative. We are a storytelling species. We tend to take all of our internal and external experience and construct things around language, but language is not spoken language is not the language of the nervous system.
The language of the nervous system still remains to be identified. It's something else for people that think and feels it will certainly incorporate that. Spoken language, of course, is important, and we have some core structures to spoken language. We covered this in the podcast episode with my friend Eddie Chang.
Ultimately, the way to come up with new ideas of inspiration is going to be to collect the raw materials of experience, and then give ourselves these periods, maybe even just five, 10 minutes to lay around half the day doing nothing still. We'll add a little bit of detail, and give those raw materials the opportunity to marinate and combine in whatever ways that are unique to you, and then to guys are up.
What inspiration looks like in the brain, we don't really know. There's awe. There are some studies about awe, but that's different. The word that better comes to mind is delight. It's something that we witness that overwhelms our attention. Delight is when it somehow links up with our own internal narrative. I have something to do with what's happening. I'm not just here to witness it. Firework show, really impressive firework show is like awe.
There's nothing to do about it. It doesn't relate to anything about you, really. You're purely a spectator. Whereas delight is when you see something and it somehow links to something in your emotional or personal history or how you're wired, that now there's something to do about it. That's inspiration. And we don't understand where that exists in the brain or what that looks like, but I think we all recognize that feeling when it happens, and it's also wonderful.
Next question, please. How can Canadians fight the seasonal depression winters are too long here? Well, this gives me an opportunity to share with you what I think is one of the coolest things about our species. Notice I say that about many things. So we talked about circadian rhythms, right? Sun rises, sun sets, and we get that information transmitted into our nervous system by looking at the sunrise.
By the way, you don't have to watch the sun cross the horizon. It just needs to be low solar angle, low in the sky. Once it's overhead, it's a different signal. So low solar angle. That's what it's about. It's not necessarily about seeing the sun cross the horizon. By the way, someone the other day on my team said, wait, won't you get cataracts if you look at the sun. Low solar angle sunlight is very unlikely to cause cataracts, which should be just doing a 10 to 30 minutes.
That solar, you know, the sun overhead is when it's quite bright. Yes, indeed. Some people are going to be at risk for cataracts. So ophthalmologists in the audience can attack me for that one, but it was our chair of ophthalmology at Stanford that said it. So I'm going to trust him. Okay. That's circadian 24 hour rhythms, but there's also these circadianual rhythms. So if you're at a fairly northern location on the planet, night skivari long days get short in winter.
What happens then? Well, melatonin, the hormone of darkness, right, is essentially obliterated by light by sunlight. So what's happening when days are, you know, 12 hours long, you have very little melatonin, the duration of the melatonin signal is very short. Then as you proceed into the fall, days are getting shorter, nights are getting longer, the duration of the melatonin signal is getting longer and longer.
Then is, of course, in winter, there's a lot more darkness. Melatonin signals are very long. Daylight signals are very short because the days are short. So you can say, okay, well, that's obvious, thank goodness. But what that means is incredible. What that means is that you have a hormone melatonin that's secreted from your pineal gland, which decart, called the C to the soul.
Because there's only one of them in the brain. I don't know how he came up with that one, but the pineal secretes melatonin and it, and you suppress melatonin secretion with sunlight viewing. There's a couple of synapses in between the eye and the pineal, but it gets there up through the neck, basically, a cervical ganglia.
What's wild, therefore, is that the location of the earth around the sun and the tilt of the earth is translated into a neural and then a hormonal signal in your brain, which, to me, is amazing. That literally means that the position of the earth around the sun and its tilt are translated into a physiological signal that's working unconsciously to tell your brain and body what time of year it is, but it doesn't care what time of year it is.
It cares about where you are in this orbit about the sun. So, if you think about when days are, say, eight hours long in the fall versus eight hours long in the spring, what's different? What's different is how long the signal was the day before.
So, the seasonal depression we now know is the consequence of the melatonin signal getting longer, not an absolute duration of the melatonin signal. In other words, in the spring when a day is eight hours long, but yesterday the day was seven hours in 48 minutes long, your brain has a memory of how much melatonin was released the day before, much more, than that particular day.
So, integrating clock. So, this is a very roundabout way for me to teach you about the melatonin seasonal rhythm, cycle and answer the question directly by saying, if you want to offset seasonal depression, what you want to do is extend the amount of bright light that you're getting in the morning, slightly as days get shorter.
So, you can't do that with the sunlight because there's no sunlight because you live in Toronto, not Toronto. What you want to do is find some artificial source that you can look at in the morning before you leave your home.
I haven't talked much about this on the podcast because our listeners are extended around the globe and not just in northern locations, but what this essentially means is getting maybe two to three minutes of bright light exposure as you're heading from fall into winter bright light from an artificial source.
So, I do not need to purchase a so-called sad lamp, one of these very expensive seasonal effect depression lamps. What I did was I purchased because I'm very sensitive to seasonal changes in light even though I don't live very far north, as you can get a 900 lux drawing tablet. These are quite inexpensive. They're not zero cost but quite inexpensive. And just put that on your desk or on your wherever you make your coffee in the morning, 90 minutes after you wake up.
And just get five or so minutes before you leave the house. And then as you extend into the winter, you don't have to be neurotic about increasing the duration every day. You could actually, the way these slow integrating clocks work, you could actually even just hold it a little bit closer each day. Don't burn your eyeballs out.
But, essentially, if you just dose yourself with a little bit more bright light early in the day as you extend into winter, that will essentially trick the melatonin system into thinking that you're going from eight hours into 10 hours of light as opposed to eight hours into six hours of light. Okay, very simple. And if you can't get one of these 900 lux tablets or something off a website, then you could do this with any bright incandescent bulb should work.
Again, just be careful not to put it directly against your eyeball. Okay, next question, please. How do you increase neural plasticity? Well, this is an opportunity to talk about something I should have said earlier, which is that ultimately, whether or not you are triggering neural plasticity through elevated focus or whether or not you're taking
high dose psilocybin, your business, not mine. And we could talk about psychedelics if you want. Just decriminalized in California or soon to be decriminalized. Cool, people are enthusiastic. Yeah, the one thing I've done, I've been pretty vocal about my belief that the data are really interesting to say the least about not microdosing.
By the way, there's not a lot of evidence that microdosing is useful. I'm not saying it's not, but they're not allowed clinical trials. So showing that, but the two macro dose with with effective therapeutic support. Trials are very encouraging, not just for major depression, but also for various eating disorders, alcohol use disorder, which is by the way that the term that people are starting to shift to as opposed to alcoholism or alcohol use disorder.
Which is not to be politically correct, we just so you understand what they're talking about when they're talking about, alcohol use disorder. Whether or not psilocybin, whether or not it's MDMA, whether or not it's frustration brought about by your inability to play an instrument and your determination to do so. In the end, it's all about deployment of the neuromodulators. Neuromodulators being some combination of dopamine, serotonin, acetacolene or epinephrine, again, usually in combination.
What's very clear is that the neuroplastic effects of MDMA, the neuroplastic effects of psilocybin are brought about by huge increases in serotonin. This also can help us understand why for some years, and to some extent still now it was thought that the SSRI's, the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors would be good treatments for depression. I think some people, by the way, have experienced tremendous relief from the SSRI's. We don't want to demonize them.
At the same time, it's very clear that depression is not simply low levels of serotonin. That's also not true. Hence why there's effective, in some people, antidepressants like reprion that increase dopamine and epinephrine and not serotonin. The point here is that these neuromodulators, as they're called, allow for what? They allow for modulation of synapses, which effectively allows for neuroplasticity.
Ultimately, whether or not it's through talk therapy, Kundalini breathing, you know, hyposilocybin MDMA or the combination, which I think is called a hippie flip. Never done them together. I confess, never done them together. But have done them. With the clinician, by the way, in legal circumstances, and not a lot, not often that is, it's very clear that it's opening windows for plasticity.
Now what's intriguing, if we're going to just talk about psychedelics for a second, is why a drug like MDMA, which increases dopamine, which by the way, MDMA is methylene, dioxy, meth, amphetamine. Don't let anybody tell you it's something there. It's meth. It's meth. But it's meth with a lot of serotonin thrown in there, too. But it's meth. And it's clear that for the treatment of PTSD, it holds promise. It's not absolutely safe, especially for people with cardiac conditions.
And if you're going to go down that path, you want and need a skilled guide. And this is where I think the laws are really going to have to pay careful attention to who and what is a skilled guide. And when it comes to psilocybin, the serotonin increases what effectively causes broader connectivity in the brain.
And what's interesting is that both of those drugs increase plasticity mainly through increases in serotonin but working on very different receptors. So they've different types and outputs of plasticity. What's interesting to me is that because I'm a strong believer that children should not be doing psychedelics.
Nor should we be giving children psychedelics is that the increases in connectivity in the brain that are the consequence of playing a musical instrument or ideally an instrument with others as a child. Mimic a lot of the broader scale connectivity, sort of called so-called resting network connectivity that occurs when people take psychedelics as adults. In other words, and I can't emphasize this enough. And again, I failed at music miserably. I'll tell you a story about that in a second.
But so getting kids to play an instrument is it's very clear and proves their ability to learn all sorts of things for their entire life. It's just so so important. I don't really know what to do about this or who to shout out or talk to about keeping the arts active in schools as end physical education. But the idea that we would just train kids in math is just frightening because if you want them to be truly good at math and science, you also have them play instruments.
By the way, when I was a kid, I played the violin. My parents made me. It was not the instrument I wanted to play. It was only one picture and they taught me the Suzuki method. I was supposed to learn by ear and there's one picture and all the other kids have their bows up. And my bow is down and I'm standing here on the stage and my fly is down. And that and literally the neighbors dog held and I quit after that concert.
So I was traumatized but they showed me the picture my sister teased me relentlessly. So neuroplasticity, figure out your choice way to increase a neuromodulator like serotonin or epinephrine acetylcholine or dopamine. I honestly would not encourage pharmacologic or psychedelic approaches as your primary entry point. I really don't. I think that there's a place for that in certain circumstances, but that would not be the primary entry point.
Next question, please. What type of movement protocol do you recommend for somebody who's working from home sitting on the computer from 8 am to 5 pm? Okay, well, a couple of things. I mean, I can make all sorts of recommendations like get up early and move and if you can take breaks and walk this sort of thing.
But let's assume that all of that is kind of understood that there are certain forms of exercise that we should all be doing. I think now it's very clear based on the beautiful work of Peter Atilla, whose brother is in the audience by the way tonight. Yeah, yeah. He's got a younger brother. He's got a younger brother. Can you imagine Peter Atilla was your older brother? Imagine. Be pretty cool.
I sort of adopt people as siblings because they don't know it, but I do. But I just assume Peter was my older brother, which turns out he has a younger brother already. And Peter is essentially hammered home the truth, which is that we should all be getting somewhere between 150 to 200 minutes of so-called zone to cardio where we're walking a lot and moving about where we can just barely hold a conversation.
I know people in Toronto seem to walk a lot, so that's great. And then three days a week or so of resistance training and there are a bunch of other mobility things that we should all do so that we don't fall and break our hips because that's where another bone because that's another way that people really limit their health spin and lifespan and so on and so forth. But two things that can make being at a desk, which I love, even though I like to learn, I hate sitting still.
You can do the standing desk thing. I do that by stacking boxes. The other thing that was interesting. Today, we won't see this study out of the University of Texas. I think it was in Houston this last year about the soleus push up. Today, we'll see this. This is pretty interesting. So the soleus, this wider flat muscle below the gastrochdemias of the calf is a really unique muscle in the human body. It's 1% of the total human musculature, but it has an ability.
We'll assume for obvious reasons to dramatically shift fuel utilization in the body. What they did in this study was they had people who were sitting for three or four hours a day just simply raise their heel. Seems almost silly. They call it soleus push up. When I called it that online, I literally got attacked by the gym bros, telling me that's a seated calf raise. Okay. I mean, I'm like, okay. Now, I wonder if this whole brosized thing gets kind of, you know, people get really aggressive.
They lift their heel and they're pushing their toe down. Some people think of it as bouncing the knee, but it's really about pushing the toe down and lifting the heel. So they just simply at these sedentary people do this heel raise. And what they saw was that there was a dramatic, highly statistically significant increase in blood glucose utilization and reduction in both insulin levels during that activity and around the clock.
Really interesting, but they were doing was mimicking some aspect of walking. Now, is it as good as walking? No. But if you are stuck behind a, you know, working from home, sitting behind the computer from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
What they found was that people getting into this unconscious pattern of lifting their heel over and over and shifting back and forth mimics a lot of the effects of walking. It's not a replacement for exercise, but the shifts in glucose and insulin output and utilization, excuse me, utilization output respectively.
So we're very impressive. And this group down at the University of Houston, you were see of Texas in Houston is starting to incorporate this into people who have limited mobility. And it doesn't seem like other limb movements can do this. There's something special about the solace. It was designed.
And it's a very, very rare quote to be a muscle that's used repeatedly over, you know, extended hours of time and that has this unique pathway of fuel utilization. So is it going to cure obesity? No. But if you're stuck behind a desk, that would be something useful. I have this little fidget thing.
I was too lazy to build one, but I found one online for a couple of bucks, where you just when you stand at your desk, you just kind of kick it back and forth. I wouldn't say it leaves. You're kind of cool. Then you just kind of kick them back and forth. And some people will tread mill at the desk. I can't do that. I can't do that many things. But I also'm still like working on this one. I can't quite do that.
Next question, please. My morning meditation consists of, okay, and then I think we're about out of time. But the, yeah, so my morning meditation is not really a meditation. It's a perceptual exercise. And that perceptual exercise is has a weird name because I gave it a weird name.
And I didn't intend to sound mystical and I don't want credit for it, but I call it space time bridging, but it's not that. What it really is is that the, to me, one of the most interesting things about the nervous system is our ability to orient in different time domains.
This gets a little bit abstract, but we know from states of high stress that we start find slicing time. We know this right. The world becomes like a slow motion video because frame rate has increased. We know as a visual visual scientist, I can tell you that in my laboratory, we were doing studies with virtual reality where we can crank up people's level of stress by giving them certain visual stimuli.
And then their ability to parse information is clearly increasing in the time domain, they're find slicing much in the same way that when you look at a slow motion video, somebody dunking a basketball or something that sorts because the frame rate went up.
So when we are in high alertness states, our frame rate increases when we're very relaxed, our frame rate decreases. So if you're Rick Rubening and you're lying there, looking at the sky, your frame rate is probably slower than if you're hyper focused on omg as you know, like you said, imagine a dreadful situation where somebody sends you a text message, well let's make it positive.
Somebody's having a child in your family and you're like, you know, is it a healthy or mom and baby okay? I mean, mid seconds feel like minutes, minutes feel like hours because you're find slicing time.
Okay, and then mom and baby are fine. Okay, great. Happy story, I think. Great. So when we're very relaxed, we tend to bend time more broadly. Now it's also true that your visual system and your perception of time are inextricably linked such that if you close your eyes, and you're focused on your internal state, you are fine slicing time and the second hand, if you will, is more or less that the metronome rather is your breathing or your heart rate from combined.
When you open your eyes and you look at something in your immediate environment, when you move from so-called interoception to extraoception, you start your perception of time shifts fairly dramatically. And you now perceive time according to believe or not, the speed of images moving in your environment relative to you.
And then as you look out further on to say the horizon, you extend the time domain even more. If you then imagine yourself kind of in the whole globe, you extend your time domain even more. So my morning meditation, if you will, to more of a perceptual exercise, is to step through these different time domains to close my eyes and focus on my internal state, open my eyes and focus on something close by.
Look a little bit further, look a little bit further. Think about sort of myself on the globe, the whole world moving, so you're really extending your space domain, and then the time domain expands with it. And this comes up when you see these little means of any time you're worried, just remember you're a little dot, I don't know, little blue dots, spinning in the universe, you know, this kind of thing.
But you don't think that way when you're stressed, you're thinking, I'm the blue dot, you're the problem, whatever, you know, I want that, you know, you're not thinking. So this perceptual exercise is a way of training the nervous system, my nervous system to shift deliberately between these different time domains. And for me, it's been very useful for improving task switching, something that as you probably have noticed, I'm not very good at.
I go into the trench, I don't leave the trench very easily. So that's been very useful. And if you are interested in this in more detail, there's a wonderful book called The Secret Pulse of Time. And there's a Hitchcock movie that's discussed in that book, which the movie is about 75 minutes long. And during the course of that movie, the background actually includes rising and setting of the sun, and a bunch of different speeds of movement and interplay between the characters.
And the perception at the end of the movie is that a much, much longer period of time occurred because of unconsciously your brain was paying attention to these circadian signals and these other signals in an absolutely fast, same in Hitchcock, not a huge Hitchcock fan. But now I, after seeing that, I was like, wow, that's genius.
This space time thing, what you see out the window is in one time domain, in the room is a different time domain. I won't tell you who killed who. But it's very, very interesting. And so the point being that when your visual system is up close, focusing on things up close, or internally, you're fine slicing. When you focus on things further away, you're more broadly focusing and so on and so forth.
So that's a morning meditation I do. It's only perceptual exercise and only takes about a minute or so. And the other thing is that on the monitors, they're flashing now. That was your last question. So I, I wanted to say a couple of things before we go. First of all, thanks to all of you who stood out the night for the long duration. I realized this stuff is like nerdy, detailed. And there are a lot of other things you could be doing with your evening and your time.
And so I'm very grateful that it won't come together tonight for this. What I like to think was a discussion. And I also just want to thank everyone for your interest in the podcast. It is a labor of love. I'm highly dependent on my team for doing all of it.
I don't do it alone by any stretch, but as much as it might seem like it's me talking to all of you, it really is about all of you. That's the reason I do it. And I'm ever so grateful. And I'd certainly be remiss if I didn't say thank you for your interest in science. Thank you. Thank you.