Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. The question and answer session from the Sydney Opera House in Australia is the 8-Sleep and AG1. 8-Sleep makes it extremely easy to control the temperature of your sleeping environment at the beginning, middle, and throughout the night and when you wake up in the morning. 8-Sleep makes it extremely easy to control the temperature of your sleeping environment at the beginning.
8-Sleep makes it extremely easy to control the temperature of your sleeping environment at the beginning. Thank you to the Sydney Opera House for hosting us and for making this event possible. What are the latest findings on the physiological mechanisms behind stress's impact on the body and brain and what are some practical tools or techniques for managing stress effectively?
Thank you for that question. I'll deliberately not repeat what I said earlier about physiologic-sized panoramic vision, etc., and raising stress threshold because we covered that already. I think that one of the most interesting findings, two most interesting findings in the field of stress in the last five years or even three years. I think the work from my colleague, Ali Krum, at Stanford, she's been a guest on the podcast. She works on mindsets as the following result.
Students, Stanford students, that is, come into the laboratory. They view a, I think it's a five minute movie about how awful stress is for the mind and body, all the things it does like deplete your immune system, make you miserable, deplete certain aspects of the reproductive axis and on and on.
And then a separate group comes in and watches a video also five minutes also true about all the things that stress can do to enhance performance, both cognitive or physical, like, or additional energy, additional cognitive power, access to certain memory sets, albeit narrow memory sets, etc. And what you find is that the results point directly to the fact that whatever you believe about stress provided the information you have is true is what happens.
So if I tell you that stress improves your memory, focus attention, one observes that. If I tell you that stress depletes your immune system, etc., one observes that. So this is something that we don't quite yet understand as neuroscientists and the psychology of it makes more sense, frankly, than the mechanisms, but it's becoming very clear that what we believe about a given phenomenon strongly impacts how it shapes our response to that. So I find that very interesting.
Now, of course, you can't delete information about stressing bad for you. So what does that mean if you want stress to be enhancing as it's called? There's literally now called the stresses enhancing mindset that the thing you can do is to learn more about how stress can be enhancing. We're not talking about lying. We're not talking about placebo effect. We're talking about real knowledge based in fact that one can absorb.
And I find it amazing and wonderful that the mere learning of something can actually change how we respond to something at a core physiological level. The second, I think very important set of findings on stress relate to a structure that I've talked about recently on the podcast and I talked about with the one and only David Goggins, most people presumably have heard like he's on his way is running here right now from Central America.
So yeah, that guy, I'll tell you that guy is every bit as intense as he comes across. I met him for the first time in 2016 at a gathering in Silicon Valley, which is doing a little bit of work for this company. At the end of the day, he leaves for a minute and he changes into his shorts and his shirt. He's like, I'm going running, I got to go to the airport. I'm thinking I'm going to go running, then I'm going to go to the airport. He was running to the airport.
Seriously, well like 14 miles from the airport, which I realized 14 miles from marathon or no big deal, but he's got his bags. I'm thinking myself this guy, he's nuts and I love him. He's really that guy. It's actually very refreshing. I think one reason we love the Rick Rubens and the David Goggins is they truly are different, but from one basic standpoint is they just don't give a shit.
They do what they're going to do and they trust that they're doing right for them and for the people around them. It's awesome. It's really awesome. I think that it, again, brings about that, you know, that doesn't come about very often for me, but you just kind of stuns you into like, behold, David Goggins, Rick Rubens, the cuttlefish, whatever.
So, but I talked about this with David. There's a structure in our brain and these are recent discoveries, not by my lab. I wish I'd discover these, but actually a colleague of mine at Stanford, Joe Parvizi, who's in the Department of neurosurgery, has made these beautiful discoveries about the anterior mid-singulate cortex.
It's a structure in the brain. There's a lot of subdivisions, but when Joe put a little stimulating electrode into this area because he had patients that needed neurosurgery and they probe around asking questions, what do you feel? How do you feel? What are you going to do? And sometimes they hit an area. I've seen these experiments. They're unbelievable.
Stimulated an area in the person says, you know, I feel like I'm about to go into a rage. I'm like, okay, let's back off. Let's move over here. Antirimid-singulate cortex to stimulate. And the patient, the person says, I feel like I'm heading into a storm.
Oh, that doesn't sound good. And they say, no, but I'm ready. I'm leaning in. A different patient, stimulate their anterior mid-singulate cortex and the person says, I feel like I'm going to get up out of my chair and do something really, really difficult. Okay, so this is interesting. Across multiple people, you're seeing the same general kind of forward center of mass and of response.
And then there's now scores of studies in just the last three to five years showing that, for instance, people who successfully overcome a challenge of any kind, fitness challenge, cognitive challenge,
enterimid-singulate cortex expands or at least increases its baseline levels of activity. You see people that fail to meet that challenge less enterimid-singulate cortex activities. There's a bidirectionality of the response. And on and on, and it seems that doing things that are difficult, that we don't enjoy or that we have to push ourselves to do.
So, we have to grow and enhance the activity within this enterimid-singulate cortex. And the beauty of it is that it generalizes that the enterimid-singulate cortex can be applied or the growth of it can be directed towards lots of different things, which is, I think, a call for, of course, seeking pleasure, seeking comfort, seeking relaxation, seeking sleep every night, seeking sunlight in the morning, etc.
And then, deliberately seeking out challenges, that is, challenges for us. The importance of doing hard things in a safe manner, psychologically and physically safe manner, of course, is truly beneficial toward our ability to manage ourselves in what would otherwise be called stress.
So, those, the work of Ali Krum and the work on the enterimid-singulate cortex by Parvizi and a bunch of other labs, I think are the two areas where I feel like things are happening really quickly. We're making big strides as a field, and we're moving away from, kind of, conjecture about how to better ourselves in lots of different ways.
Can you talk about time perception? Why is it that, in some instances, time moves very slowly, while in others, it seems to move very fast. Thank you. Tonight has been so fun. Thank you! I have had fun too. This is something I'm trying to do more of. Not necessarily live, that too, but someone recently, who I love and admire very much, said to me, we're going to have so much fun.
And I thought, oh, I'd be whole. No one's ever said that to me. No one's ever said that to me. All my years growing up, I mean, I love, I'm with all due respect to my parents. I can't remember anyone ever turning to me and saying, we're going to have so much fun. So, I'm trying, that to me just kind of blew me away. I'm thinking, yeah, like, you're allowed to have fun.
So, time perception is a topic that I am, you know, as obsessed by as I am many other topics. But one that is really near and dear to my heart, because I've always been struck by this observation that is certainly not uniquely mine. That, you know, if you're sitting waiting for an appointment at the doctor's office, it feels like time goes by really slowly, like really slowly.
Whereas, if you have a really full day with lots and lots of activities, it seems like time went by really fast. Like, oh, my God, I can't believe it. It's so much time has gone by. Sorry, so much has happened, excuse me, but not a lot of time has gone by, which means that our frame rate on life is highly dynamic. And in fact, it is. And in fact, it's set by you guessed it, our visual system, at least for sighted folks, for people who are low vision or no vision.
And by the way, I always reference that because my laboratories work on low vision, no vision issues for a number of years. It's through the auditory system. But for sake of generalizing now and simplicity, we'll talk about the visual system. So it is a fact that when we focus on things up close, think a watchmaker, think about looking into your phone, our perception of time is more fine green, that is our frame rate is higher.
So more frames per second than when we view things at a distance. You might think, well, how could that possibly be? How could that possibly be? But it makes perfect sense. When we think about the time space coding in the brain, we need to anchor ourselves to something, the rising and setting of the sun. Of course, the, you know, I mean, unless you're a flatter, you know, we're going around the sun. Yeah, what's that? No, we got no flatter. There's one flatterer in the audience. Okay, cool.
The, not just I don't think that's what they were saying, but. We need to anchor ourselves in time and our visual system is the way that we anchor ourselves in time. We have facts about past, present, and future. So we have knowledge. But at an unconscious level, we need to anchor our frame rate, set our frame rate.
And so this is why if you go down to Bondi and you lie at can you look up at the clouds and the clouds are kind of moving in an unpredictable way whenever we're looking at a landscape which has some lack of predictable features like waves or rustling of trees where you could predict that if the winds blowing this way that the tree's going to go this way and then back again.
But you're not really in a mode of trying to anticipate just how far in the same way that for instance if you call an Uber or you're waiting on a text message, you know, if you're ever waiting on a text message, you know, you'll find slice. Okay, dot dot dot ones that then come and wins that thing. You're fine slicing time as your level of autonomic arousal goes up.
Your frame rate goes up as your level of autonomic arousal goes down so you're sleepy or if you're viewing things that have kind of an unpredictable aspect to them, then your frame rate expands your the passage of time changes or your perception of the passage of time changes.
This is why one of the reasons why I love Aquaria, you know, and one of my favorite things to do since I don't have a fish tank at home right now, but that's going to change soon is I'll go on YouTube and there's this beautiful live video of this aquarium in Japan and I'll just.
Zone out the most relaxing thing ever and every once in a while a whale, they have a whale shark and Aquarium every once in a while whale shark will go through and go like, and then it disappears and then a little fish and the kelp and the exact and it's immensely relaxing what it does is it slows your frame rate down.
And then I find that resets me after just five or six minutes to go back to doing this, you know, high frame rate type stuff, which is what we're doing when we're texting when we're typing when we're social media, by the way, is tuned to a frame rate that's really interesting that keeps us engaged just up into the point where then we want to swipe to the next thing it's the algorithms are are designed.
And by the way, I have a somewhat benevolent, semi benevolent view of social media, I think it'd be used for good, I think you'd be used for not good, I think you're limiting one's time on there is good, but there's some good content on there for sure a lot of my life is spent on there indeed. So frame rate is set by where you're looking the further out you're looking the larger the longer sort of time bins you're capturing bigger time bins, okay less resolution closer in.
And the more you're trying to predict the next outcome, sort of fine green analysis predicting what we call DPO's duration path in outcome what's going to happen for how long or and what's going to happen is something that you're thinking about and wondering about then frame rate goes up and there's actually a wonderful movie, a Hitchcock movie the name escapes me at the moment in which Hitchcock understood this and it's a movie that's only about 90 minutes long but in the background the sun rises and sets.
And the way that people move through the scenes of this movie gives you the feeling by the end of this 90 minute movie that a full 24 hours past it's really interesting you feel it in your body as if it was a much longer movie even though if you look at your watch that happens and now the cannabis smokers again are thinking like yeah like we sit there and you're like whoa that was a really long time you look and it's like three minutes went by and you're like wow psychedelics will do this as well.
They certainly do they distort our time perception mainly through the deployment of large amounts of the neuromodulator serotonin which is intimately involved in kind of clock perception mechanisms there are a bunch of other things that can set sort of intrudence a grid of my city of our auditory system that also adjust our frame rate I think one of the reasons why 40 hurts tones can be valuable for doing cognitive work is that they tend to entrain the certain circuits within the brain for doing the kinds of work that most people call.
We have to type things out think logically kind of if then kind of analysis very different than say writing new sheet music or coming up with poetry where you know here again we can think back to the you know the Rick Rubin thing or the you being stationary right like the wall sitting with the movement in the brain going forward there's something about adjusting frame rate for capturing new ideas versus implementing ideas implementation of ideas tends to be carried out on the screen.
And to be carried out on higher frame rate type time perception and now you can understand why visual perception said about the distance of a laptop or phone would be good for that or a conversation you remember that whole thing of like looking at somebody's face and having a conversation as opposed to looking off into the distance walking and allowing one's gaze to go panoramic so hopefully now you're starting to sense some themes so that that's all I say about time perception now but of course humans have throughout history and still now frankly.
Also embarked on a lot of pharmacology if we're honest in order to try and adjust frame rate for sake of productivity but you know caffeine will adjust frame rate in the predictable direction but also things like alcohol and various drugs like cannabis in order to just frame rate I'm certainly not suggesting you do those things I'm not a cop you do what you want just know what you're doing.
Can you please talk about the jet lag protocol you followed when arriving in Sydney oh yeah well this one was a little bit easier for me because obviously it's not that far off is just your full day head from where I live back home in California but nonetheless I suffer tremendously from jet lag and once actually in 2017 I went to Abu Dhabi 12 hour flip from where I was living at that time in the Bay Area.
And I was a wreck I barely make it the meeting I was crying I was really messes me up I slept great the first night and then just didn't sleep for two days I was a mess so jet lag is something that I really had to work hard on and there are a couple things worth noting I'm done a whole episode about this but I'll kind of hit a few key bullet points and maybe it's relevant to you even if you're not traveling at any point soon because many people are jet lagged without traveling because of the way that they stay up late.
In fact most everybody in the world now qualifies as a shift worker did you know that and here no disrespect only reverence and gratitude to the actual shift workers at stay up all night doing emergency work and hospital work and caring for children and things like that throughout the night so I'm not trying to take anything away from them but we are all shifted enough by virtue of artificial lighting and electronic devices that we are effectively shifted and shift working because we're staying up and going to the airport.
We're staying up engaging our cognitive systems in ways that frankly we didn't evolve to which I'm not saying is bad but it's just the reality okay what to do for jet lag. The key thing is this and actually this is very valuable in general for sake of sleep so this is something I haven't talked enough about on the podcast.
Ask yourself what time you normally wake up without an alarm I realize there's some variance day today but you know for me it would be about let's say 6 am so let's say for you at seven you know just pick your typical wake up time. If you subtract from that number so for me 4 am that almost with certainty is what's called your temperature minimum your temperature minimum we could measure it.
You could put a thermometer in your mouth or if you come to the laboratory unfortunately they have to do it rectally. 4 am would be my temperature minimum maybe for you if you wake up at seven typically or around seven it can be 5 am okay so we're not actually measuring your temperature in the morning. We're not actually measuring your temperature in this kind of good on in this thought experiment we're doing is we're trying to find a time so here's what's interesting.
If you expose your eyes not your skin but your eyes to bright light in the 2 hours or so maybe 3 hours prior to that temperature minimum time so if you wake up at 7 am 5 am is your temperature minimum so in the 2 hours maybe 3 hours prior to that. If you shift your wake up time and your to bedtime what's called a phase delay a shift in your circadian rhythm by about an hour.
Interesting given that if you view bright light in the 2 to 3 hours after your temperature minimum you advance your clock meaning you pull back your clock to want to wake up a bit earlier and go to sleep a little bit earlier. Buy about an hour for every time you do that.
You think well okay I wake up in the morning at 7 am let's say I'm using you as an example or me at 6 am I usually try and get some sunlight in my eyes especially on overcast days etc etc you've heard me blab about this many times before in the podcast and elsewhere so how come I'm not going to bed earlier and earlier every night and waking up earlier and earlier every morning and indeed you would you would keep phase advancing your
clock if you did that except that in the afternoon if you got sunlight in your eyes as presumably you did today as beautiful sunny day on your way here you phase delayed your clock a little bit and as a consequence you wake up and go to sleep
at more or less the same time every day it's an amazing mechanism and guess what viewing sunlight in the middle of the day does not do the same thing it doesn't shift your circadian clock they don't tell you that in school but they should they're telling you like all the other stuff.
The reason it doesn't do it is that middle of the day period is what's called the circadian dead zone sounds very dramatic or ominous getting sunlight in your eyes during the middle of the day is great for mood and it's evident that is also important if it gets on your skin and healthy not burning amounts levels that would induce burn then it can enhance testosterone estrogen levels etc in healthy ways healthy ratios nonetheless that morning sunlight viewing after your
temperature minimum advances your clock makes you want to get up earlier go to bed earlier viewed before delays your clock makes you want to get up later go to bed later so this is very useful if you want to shift your clock at home before you travel to get on to a new schedule for work or school or if you're traveling what it means is that when you arrive in a new location like I did in Melbourne the other day
believe me I practiced that for like at least an hour you know and with two offseason they kept telling me I was doing it wrong until finally they're like no I'm just joking with you you got it right like the time you guys have a wicked sense of humor down here the the the key thing is that if you land you have to ask let's say at 8 a.m. local or noon local time the key is to ask
what does my body think what is my temperature minimum back from back home so for instance if you land at 5 p.m. but it corresponds to time before your temperature minimum and you go outside you're like whoa beautiful setting sun I'm supposed to get sunlight in my eyes well guess what you might delay your clock if you want to go to bed earlier that's probably not a good idea
whereas if you want to stay if you want to advance your clock you would view sunlight at a time that is corresponding to the two hours after your temperature minimum I realize it's a little bit tricky but that's all you have to ask yourself for the first three days first three days that you travel to some location because then you can shift very fast so what that
requires is sometimes saying oh I don't want to shift myself so I'm actually going to wear sunglasses in a brimmed hat to avoid shifting because I'd like to be on the local schedule or in some cases I really want to wake up here and I'm in the perfect opportunity to wake up because it's the middle of the afternoon and Sydney and back home I would have just hit my temperature minimum and so I'm going to get sunlight in my eyes well that's going to wake me up and it's going to actually
make me want to go to bed a little bit earlier so I can go to bed at local time so I'm not going to be up until you know three a.m. So you might have to work this out a little bit on paper but this is the way that military and this is the way that shift workers who are educated in the mechanisms of this stuff that's the way they do it it also helps to eat on the local schedule because food is another what we call
the zeitgabre another one of the time keepers for the circadian clock so if you force yourself to eat on the local schedule that can help you shift activity can help you shift and social rhythms can help you shift as well but that temperature minimum and the role of light before or after the temperature minimum either delaying or advancing your clock that's the heavy hammer in this whole process so I did that and these days I do a lot of red light
time in the evening when I want to go to sleep and I don't mean red light panels like the expensive stuff that has a whole other set of uses what I'm talking about is just getting a red light like a party light we turn off the lights and put in a red light and that is known to reduce cortisol levels as opposed to other kinds of lighting so it only takes about half hour before you go to sleep or so you want to just mellow out you just switch over to red lights actually very pleasant right as
long as you can go about the activities you want to do safely just get you know get in you put up red light up and by the way rick's house is like all red lights at night no artificial lighting past sundown as like a plant can you elaborate on the science between psychedelic still a cyber and neuroplasticity yes you know this is a topic that just a few years ago I was like to frighten to talk about I was afraid to lose my job frankly you know these are still
scheduled drugs in the United States although they are being explored for therapeutic reasons mainly for the treatment of severe depression but among among other things smoking cessation eating disorders by the way
the interrexion nervosis still is the highest morbidity of any psychiatric challenge is just really tragic so you know like there's a real need for treatments that work and psychedelics like psilocybin LSD to some extent MDMA which technically is not a psychedelic it's in the pathogen we can talk about that also called ecstasy so these sorts of compounds have been explored quite extensively in the last few years
and I've completely revamped my stance on them for a couple of reasons I'll just come clean you know as a kid too young I explored these things I do not recommend that I had some pretty bad experiences on LSD as a young teenager
and I don't recommend it I think the brain is highly plastic that time in fact being an adolescent a kid or a teen is a psychedelic experience you do not need psychedelics and I don't recommend them unless some very qualified clinician you know can convince you otherwise I you know in there I would also you know seek a second opinion but they clearly have their role and I think a couple of things have changed my stance first of all there are a lot of federally funded studies taking place
at Stanford and elsewhere on these compounds second the for whatever reason and I don't quite understand the sociology of it but for whatever reason psychedelics are no longer associated with the kind of counter culture the way they used to be and are in fact heavily associated with some of the veterans groups that are using these for PTSD with groups in the states groups like veteran solutions which are doing amazing work with different psychedelics including I began
eboga 22 hour long psychedelic journey I've never done it truly where you close your eyes and you get essentially real life like recollection of your experiences but you have agency inside these experiences there's some cardiac issues with I began that require constant monitoring of the heart but they've got some really impressive outcomes this is all work by my colleague Nolan Williams at Stanford so things like psilocybin we view a little bit differently now
days what is psilocybin psilocybin if you look at it chemically looks a lot like serotonin a lot like serotonin and it tickles that is it binds nearly selectively to a specific serotonin receptor and it seems to create more what we call resting state lateral connectivity which means more brain areas connected to other brain areas or at least talking to those brain areas after the psilocybin journey as it's going to be a lot of work
to the psilocybin journey as it's called as opposed to before now these journeys and I have done them as an adult I did this as part of a clinical trial it was participated in a psilocybin trial and I participated in MDMA trial
they can be terrifying while they're happening but often there's great insight from those experiences provided the right support is provided and they always say set and setting so I'm not providing all these like caveats about safety for no reason or to protect me I'm saying to protect you I mean it can be and it was for me absolutely terrifying
and then you do it again as part of these trials the second time I'm like okay this time moments can be good at going on a bone terrifying it was a horrible but I learned a lot and there does seem to be an antidepressant effect I wasn't clinically diagnosed with depression but prior to that but we're after thank goodness but I think what we're seeing with these compounds and from my own experience if I may is that they allow us to see relationships between events and the
events of past and present and hopefully anticipate certain actions and changes into the future while experiencing the fullness of the emotionality of those experiences in real time so as somebody who's done an immense amount of therapy I can tell you that I find great value in talk therapy I do especially of the I think what's called insight oriented psychoanalysis or psychotherapy doesn't have to be classic psychoanalysis
not just support you need that not just rapport you need that but insight as well is the goal those three things but one of the issues is unless you get on the phone with your therapist or you talk to them in person in a moment where something is really acute like it's really getting you right at that moment sad or happier whatever it may be
it's hard to experience the fullness of that issue in that moment while also parsing it cognitively and it does seem that the psychedelics and to some extent MDMA allow people to get into the full amplitude maybe even enhanced amplitude emotionality of an experience
and at the same time allow people to reflect and with the help of a so-called guide or the therapist take notes in a way that lead to specific actionable outcomes and I think that's the real value you can get real time experience with insight and of course you need support as well and of course set and setting and safety are absolutely key
so psilocybin seems to do that in one manner MDMA does it in a different way MDMA by the way we know dramatically increases serotonin endopamin but it seems to be the serotonergic effect that is responsible for most of its therapeutic effect by the way MDMA is methylene dioxymethanthetamine which isn't necessarily saying that it's bad what's actually interesting is that MDMA
is actually provided that it's pure and in the appropriate dosage range does not seem to be neurotoxic as it once was thought to be the paper claiming that was retracted they accidentally were giving the subjects in that study
and they were retracted the paper but nobody talks about that paper but do you know it's kind of interesting do you know where the most of the data on the lack of toxicity of MDMA comes from there's a beautiful set of studies that were carried out on subjects who were exclusively from the Church of Latter-day Saints sometimes refer to as Mormons
Mormons are an excellent test population for a study like that because they don't do other drugs but MDMA is not on the no-fly list so apparently according to these papers and by the way I have a lot of friends who are LDS and they're wonderful people according to these papers which I believe because they're published and peer reviewed and they still are in the literature you can find subjects in that community not all LDS or LDS folks are taking actually I don't think but presumably no
but people who have taken anywhere from one to two to 50 to over a hundred doses of MDMA in a short period of time and aside from a mild deficit in attention and the people who have taken the large doses or frequent doses that is there do not seem to be many cognitive deficits that are detectable and certainly no apparent neurotoxicity which is not to say go do MDMA as much as you like
I think there is the potential for neurotoxicity if it's taken too often and things of that sort so a lot to still figure out but MDMA seems to have a slightly different trajectory then psilocybin it tends to be less scary although it is very sympathetic arousing that is so people can get afraid or if the elevated heart rate etc but the empathogenic component is really interesting because ultimately with PTSD it's really about developing empathy for one's self
and resolving one of the core issues of trauma which is often not discussed which is that at an unconscious level and an unconscious level trauma seems to be a confusion to the nervous system about who's responsible so that even if somebody knows and understands hey that was them they're the perpetrator I'm the victim somehow the nervous system gets confused about responsibility in a way that leads to triggering of some of the negative feelings around that event or events as the case may be
and MDMA seems to be able to intervene in that confusion and short circuit that confusion through this self empathy self empathy something that I think deserves more exploration in the years to come so lots happening there in the United States MDMA is now being registered with the FDA for additional perhaps for legalization right now it's it is still illegal
so if you take any of what I said tonight and go buy MDMA I'm not at fault okay getting in the sun about two hours before going to sleep really improves my quality sleep what's going on here love this this one can be pretty simple the relationship between temperature and sleep is a well established one to fall asleep you need to cool down by one to three degrees you probably heard me say that before to wake up you need to heat up by about one to three degrees
and when you get into a sauna or you take a hot bath or even to a lesser degree you wash your face with warm water in the evening hands with warm water because of the way that the body through the regulates you actually end up cooling yourself off you think no I got in the sauna actually I've been going to the sauna at this place here recovery they have a wonderful sauna cold
plunge and then they have this bed where you float on the thing have you tried this thing this thing is so cool it's like a water bed but it like floats you are they're amazing amazing by the way they don't pay me to say that I'm just grateful that they let me like sit in this bed I've been sleeping in there as much as possible but they shut down at night
eventually and I got home so the the sauna is a great tool before sleep or cold or warm shower or hot bath or warm bath for the following reason the brain area that controls thermal regulation is the ideal preoptic area which is operates like a thermostat so if you warm the external portion of the body the brain has to then what cool down your core body temperature it doesn't happen right away but it happens as you get out of the sauna and maybe you take a warm
a shower cool shower so what ends up happening is that you warmed up which allows you to cool down internally and then you're able to fall asleep and stay more deeply asleep that's probably what's improving your sleep in fact a kind of mantra that I learned from the great Matt Walker who wrote the great book why we sleep and by the way we have a sleep series with the mighty Matt Walker coming out later this year we record six episodes all every aspect of sleep you can imagine
he says and I hope I'm getting this right he says you need to warm up to cool down to go to sleep or to fall warm up to cool down to fall asleep stay cool to stay asleep warm up to wake up there you go that's a straight bite out of Matt Walker's mouth so he deserves that citation not me so that's what's happening when you get in the sauna now when you get into the cold plunge you're cold
but guess what same thing the surface of your body is cooler those thermo receptors transmit information to the media preoptic area of your body and your core body temperature eventually goes up
provided you don't stay in there get hypothermic of course people are always asking me I have a good friend who just so happens to be straight edge he's like never never even has sip of caffeine I don't know it's a good thing because he's extreme and he got a cold plunge and he went in for a minute and then the next day he's like I did three minutes and then pretty soon he's like hey I got a sick and I was like what do you do he's like I got naked in the cold plunge for 45 minutes
I was like well listen you know like first of all thank goodness you don't do drugs and second of all like easy does it easy does it that the cold cold is a very powerful stimulus as is heat so you know you know minimal effective dose you know you have some fun with it but don't go wild I still don't know why you got in there naked but who knows if we expose ourselves to the same stress over and over again
do we release the same amount of adrenaline and its positive negative impact and just becomes less receptive to release less adrenaline and hence it's less harmful it's a great question depends on the context typically you'd release less and less adrenaline and actually this relates to a really important fact about the ever famous structure the amygdala which means almond
I told you that the happens to be shaking like an almond the amygdala people associate with threat detection in danger but it's actually a novelty detector essentially and it's involved with a bunch of other brain circuits that anytime we experience something novel you know we have a elevated level of autonomic arousal like earlier tonight before the show there was a kind of repeating don't do and the first time I happen I'm like
fire alarm like what's going on by time it happened five times it's going to like yeah so that's what we'd I'd be willing to bet both amygdala's that had recorded from my amygdala's it's got one on you side of the brain you'd find that that the first time the big increase in activity lesser second third fourth fifth and you attenuate you habituate so if if the stressor is one in which you don't care it doesn't have much relevance to you like that alarm
probably less and less adrenaline I'd be willing to bet however if with each subsequent exposure like somebody you really can't stand or something like that it's decreasing your life satisfaction and increasing your level of cognitive or psychological stress and it would go in the opposite direction I think that's fair to say hey Andrew I like that I like that that's cool yeah the other day it was really interesting everyone's in a while someone walk up and be like hey listen to the
podcast there's always nice it's always nice to meet people and this can walks up to me this was in Melbourne and the in the gym like this never happened before it was really cool just walks up he goes
hey Andrew my cool I just let that's it he's walked away I was like right like I was like cool and I was like that kid is so mellow it was really cool like I was like we would have been friends what actually I was friends all the wild ones but is a really interesting phenotype again human phenotypes
fascinate me so if we run into each other on the street and I ask your name and we talk I'm genuinely interested I'm not studying you I'm not taking notes or data but people are so different but hey Andrew okay so maybe it's him hey Andrew hey
Adi I found that I'm able to focus far better when I bounce my legs up and down while sitting on the balls of my feet what's going on you got a lot of energy that's what's going on no I think you know there isn't a ton of science on this but it's very clear as I mentioned earlier
that people have different spontaneous movement rates and some people you know some people are a little bit more jittery if you look if you go into a classroom the young children see them sitting around boys and girls let's say somewhere between four and six
oftentimes you'll notice that some of the kids can sit extremely still and then some of the kids are like really like and there is a chromosomal difference there the boy it's known that that boys have a slower development of the so-called top-down
inhibition from the forebrain that the prefrontal cortex which frankly we hear about over and over again many podcasts a lot of description of brief on the cortex it's main job the best description I've ever heard of it anyway is my friend who's a neurosurgeon at the link who came up through my lab and that McDougall he's been on the podcast is the job of the prefrontal cortex is to send connections to the rest of the brain and say
shh basically to the appropriate circuit so it's that's why people of the pre with damage to the prefrontal cortex for any reason or to generation of the prefrontal cortex find themselves doing things where we find them doing things that are a little bit context inappropriate and in some cases dramatically inappropriate but in most cases just kind of context inappropriate they don't suppress behavior very well so you know it may be that a certain level of
autonomic arousal brings us into that optimal you know some people called a flow state flow state is a little bit of a nebulous thing I mean I have great respect for Stephen Kotler and those that have talked about and written about flow but what I really can just say about flow as it relates to neurosciences like backwards it spells wolf
like we don't really know that much more about like the neural basis of a flow state but for each of us we have these kind of tunnels that we like to be in where we find that our level of focus and action is just right and so I don't think I'm going too far out on a limb here how do you by saying that if you if you find that you focus best when you can dispel a little bit of that energy by moving your body
that you're able to do your your best work that makes sense to me I I don't do them so much anymore but for years I would do you know surgeries lots and lots of surgeries down the microscope dissecting retinus dissecting retinus like if you got eyeball I can dissect it and go at it when you do my sleep and I would find that if I had a little bit too much energy that the four steps would jiggle a little bit and what's in the caffeine thing
and a friend of mine who's a world-class neurosurgeon Eddie Chang is chair of neurosurgery UCSF he's been on the podcast and he said oh there's a solution to that that we learn in neurosurgery
they're like the astronauts of medicine he said you know you tap your foot that's kind of cool why would that work he said well basically you've got some sort of anticipatory activity in an area of the brain called the basal ganglia which is involved in these go-no-go type actions like all of our actions are yes go and no go don't do something else
no flexor extensor there's all kind of stuff very complicated but seamless for most people and when you have a bit too much anticipatory activity you're getting ready to go like a sprinter out the blocks and you're you know you're doing something that's very important like a brain surgery in his case or you know a microsurgery in my case for research purposes
that if you your activation state is too high that you can dispel some of that energy by just simply tapping your foot or doing some sort of rhythmic activity with another part of your body appropriate to that context of course okay last question Andrew yeah oh they skipped that one I guess that's the new thing I'll never forget when I got my lab for the first time I came up in an era when it was still pretty formal
neuroscience here like you'd say they professor so and so and then they said you can call me Barbara and I'm like hey Barbara but before that no one you don't need to say hey or that and I'll never forget that my lab one of my first graduate students now a professor is very very talented scientist at the University of Utah
and I got a text from it just said she called me Andy she said hey Andy when are you going to buy us an espresso maker it was like the second day and I was like whoa times of change so I think it's good I think the lack of formalities actually good at first I was like wait a second I weigh my whole life to become a professor and now it's hey Andy but I think you know with with the years I've realized it's actually kind of nice I'm 17 years old congratulations I'm
and I wish you know you didn't want to know me when I was a nice kid but I was just a lot of confusion I'm 17 years old so you're in a psychedelic experience of youth what is your biggest advice on finding your passion oh well goodness gracious I think you you know I if I'm honest I think we talked about a little bit earlier I think your passion is rooted in a feeling state that you
already accessed hopefully many times but at least one time earlier in your life when for whatever reason or circumstances you weren't thinking about what your parents wanted you to do what was cool or not cool in school you were in a pure feeling state of yum that's really cool be cool and so I can't answer the question for you but I'll tell you yes continue to forage I do believe that learning is among the most wonderful things that we can do for
ourselves but that if you spend some time in your memory banks that you'll be able to remember a feeling and maybe the feeling was about a board game you played or or something you observed or maybe it just came about through some other activity and the feeling is unrelated to the activity that's where it gets a little tricky and we're answering this
question for a 17 year old but it's true for all of us this is where it gets a little tricky is that sometimes we think it's the activity but it's not the activity I mean Lord knows I stay out of the Aquarius stores these days you know because if I go near one it's all over and it's it's that it's the it's the delight in something that is very personal in fact I
think is very unique to you to the extent that and I do believe this that it's not capable of being created by anybody else and that feedback from other people about what we should do or what we're good at while it can be useful it's merely a calibration point for saying like someone says maybe you should do this and you go or like me like yuck those are all just calibration points on this like compass to take you back to that feeling state so I apologize for not having a more concrete
mechanism works the first time works every time kind of you know instant tool like a physiological sigh rather this is going to have to be some self exploration but the good news is your 17 year brain still plastic the good news is all of us are capable of neuroplasticity throughout the life
span and the good news is all of us are capable of introspection throughout the life span so even if you can't remember you can sense and if you can sense what you're doing is you're feeling what what is this I don't want to turn this into a neuroscience lesson but I'd be
remiss if I didn't say that you're perceiving and feeling on the basis of converting physical information in your environment sound waves photons mechanical pressure chemicals going in through your nose and mouth you're converting that into
your own chemical signals that's what being and perceiving it really is it can't be anything else so there's something about the way that you're wired Oscar that is different and leads you to say yum yeah yeah yeah that that and for me I've always associated with a certain physical
situation in this arm don't ask me why I don't even know and if you can sense into what it is that gets you going in that direction if any and all of us do that then I really believe you can sense into your unique gifts or maybe you just need to sit back and think and deliberate complete sentences for an hour like Rick or one of those other geniuses I don't have a better answer that's the best I can do thanks so much thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you so much so it just
as a as a final note this evening I just want to thank everyone for coming out as Rob mentioned to you know come out as far as I know there's no alcohol here people are here amazing an event with no alcohol and a Saturday night in this beautiful Sydney summer and where we talk science
thanks for letting me tell some stories learn some stories my my real wish my deep wish is that everyone do some level of addiction and if not tonight and going forward and I so appreciate that people are interested in the concepts around science and health and the really big big wish for me it maybe I'll even just call it an ask is that I truly don't develop the protocols I I mine them occasionally I develop them but I mine them from the rich sources of you know
I'm not just a person in papers and and elsewhere and put them into a format that I'm deeply appreciative people enjoy digesting and hopefully apply but hopefully share and I certainly don't need attribution none of them are named
after me intentionally because that's not going to give him any information about what they do or how they work and last but certainly not least thank you for your interest in science thank you to the Sydney Opera House Trust for their hospitality and for making this event possible and last but certainly not least thank you for your interest in science