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Hello boys and girls, ladies and gents. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris show where it is my job to interview world class performers from all different disciplines to tease out the habits, routines, influences, life lessons and so on that you can apply to your own lives.
My guest today is Andrew Huberman, the to H-U-B-E-R-M-A-N-P-H-D. You can find them on Twitter and Instagram at Huberman Lab. Andrew is a neuroscientist and tenured professor in the Department of Neurobiology at Stanford University School of Medicine. He has made numerous important contributions to the fields of brain development, brain function and neuroplasticity.
Andrew is a McKnight Foundation and Pew Foundation Fellow in the recipient of the 2017 Cogin that's COGA and Award for his discoveries in the study of vision. Work from the Huberman Laboratory at Stanford Medicine has been consistently published in top journals including Nature, Science and Cell. Andrew is the host of the Huberman Lab podcast which he launched in January of this year.
He's also a show aims to help viewers and listeners improve their health with science and science based tools, new episodes air every Monday on YouTube and all podcast platforms. As mentioned, you can find him on Instagram and Twitter at Huberman Lab. You can find him on the web at HubermanLab.com. Andrew, many people have been trying to match make for five or six years and finally here we are welcome to the show.
Thanks so much for having me here. Yes, we've crossed paths near misses for a long time and it's great to finally sit down and chat. I thought I would start right in your wheelhouse and use a headline to introduce the subject of vision. Scientific American interview you do not long ago and they titled the piece, quote, vision and breathing maybe the secrets to surviving 2020 end quote.
So breathing I think for a lot of folks might seem self-evident, stop that, you have a lot of problems on your hands or if you do it incorrectly we can we can certainly dive into that later on. Vision I think will jump out is perhaps odd to a lot of folks. Why vision? Why is vision perhaps a secret or a key to surviving 2020 or any year for that matter? Yeah, so the vision and our visual system is perhaps the strongest lever by which we can shift our state of mind and body.
And that might at first come as a surprise because we think a vision is this thing that we have to see colors and motion and recognize faces etc. But the two little goodies in the front of our skull our eyes are actually part of our central nervous system. A lot of people don't realize this but your neural retina the little light sensing piece of the eyes in the back of the eye kind of lines it like a pie crust.
And these two pieces of your brain that were deliberately squeezed out during early development so they're the only two pieces of your brain that are outside the cranial vault as we say. And those little pieces of brain have an enormous impact on the state of the rest of your brain. So it's fair to say that what you see and how you view the world literally has an incredible impact on your state of mind.
And you're reading also on your state of mind and body but the reason is the following our visual system is not just for seeing objects shapes and colors etc. Our eyes have two functions so much in the same way that our ears are responsible for hearing but also there's a balance mechanism in there.
Our eyes are responsible for detecting shapes and colors etc. But also for telling the rest of the brain whether or not to be more alert or more relaxed and the most fundamental way that our eyes do that is communicating time of day. The presence or absence of sunlight to our central circadian clock and then the central circadian clock which is really just an aggregation of neurons communicates to the rest of the brain and body.
Whether or not for instance metabolism should be higher metabolism should be low whether or not we should feel like moving or feel like lying down and not moving at all. But there are a number of ways in which the visual system works on fast timescales to adjust our inner state. And one of the most simple ways that it does that is one that normally happens when we're stressed or relaxed but we don't recognize it.
So for instance if we are very relaxed our pupils change or the shape of our lens changes such that we actually have dilated vision. We see the entire environment we're in so-called panoramic vision when we are stressed or we are excited about something the pupils dilate the shape of our lens changes literally the optics of our eye changes.
And the information about the outside world that's delivered to our the rest of our brain and body changes the aperture of our experience our entire experience shrinks. We get so-called so-disdraw view of the world we're looking through so distraughts essentially when we are alert or stressed. And we've experienced this but we don't normally notice it happening so much like breathing our experience of life whether or not we're alert or stressed excited or calm changes our patterns of breathing.
We're all accustomed to that you know our breathing speeding up we're holding our breath in anticipation but as well our inner state drives changes in our visual system the aperture of whether or not we see the big picture or we have a very contracted view of the world. But both those things breathing and vision also run in reverse meaning if we change our pattern of breathing we change our inner state.
If our state changes our breathing changes so it's reciprocal it's bidirectional likewise with vision when we are excited or stressed the aperture of our visual window shrinks we get that so distraught view of the world when we are relaxed the aperture of our vision expands.
But as well it runs in both directions if we expand our view of the world literally force our our visual field or just it's very easy actually you can do it no matter where you are right now if you just try and expand your visual field not by looking around.
Or moving your head or eyes but by trying to see yourself in the environment that you're in so you literally dilate your views you could see the ceiling in the floor in the walls if you're inside or if you're outdoor seeing as big an aperture of your visual field or your visual environment is possible.
So you're directing your attention to even though you might remain looking straight ahead you're just directing your attention to as wide a peripheral view horizontally and vertically as possible is that what you mean?
That's right exactly so essentially if you keep your head and eyes mostly stationary you don't have to be you know rigid about rock steady but if you look forward and you expand your field of view so you kind of relax your eyes so that you can see as much of your environment around you as possible to the point where you can see yourself in that environment.
What you do is you are turning off the attentional and believe it or not the stress mechanisms that drive your internal state towards stress. This is why when you go to a vista or you view a horizon it's very relaxing because you naturally go into panoramic vision. When you are indoors you're looking at your phone you're looking at a computer or a camera or something in that sort or you're talking to somebody or an intense conversation.
You may not notice it but your entire visual field shrinks to a much smaller aperture and that drives an increase in alertness in internal state. And we sometimes call that stress if it's a negative experience. If it's a positive experience we might call that love or obsession or fascination but the important thing to realize is that both vision and breathing have a profound and very rapid effect on our internal state of mind and body and it runs in both directions.
Our internal state that could be triggered by a text message or hearing something that somebody says drives changes in our breathing and our vision but our breathing in our vision can also drive changes in our internal state. And so that article in scientific American was a discussion about how we can leverage the visual system and the respiration the breathing system in order to take control over our internal state because it's not just that 2020 was stressful.
It's that our internal state determines everything. It doesn't just determine if we feel like we're having a hard time falling asleep or we're having a hard time focusing for instance. It also determines how we batch time how we analyze where we are in the world in terms of our lifespan. A good example this would be when we are very stressed we find sliced time.
This is why when people are in a car accident or something they might report that things were in slow motion they're actually your frame rate increases. Whereas when you're very relaxed your frame rate slows down and when we are relaxed we get so called perspective. We are able to say well this too shall pass or I can place this stressful event in a context.
The first thing that's just fundamental to our nervous system works is that we are constantly placing our experience both our immediate and past experience as well as our anticipation of the future into some sort of larger context. And our visual system literally how we are viewing the world at that moment dictates how we create perspective in terms of states of mind.
Sounds a little bit abstract but it's actually it boils right down to optics of the eye and very concrete things like how you move your eyes and how you view the world.
This is super fascinating to me because I've thought a lot about breathing and how on one hand breathing is a function of the autonomous nervous systems when you're asleep you don't have to consciously inhale and exhale but simultaneously it's this almost API into your autonomic nervous system because while you're awake you can control and direct and modify your breathing for that directionality.
But I've never thought about it from the visual perspective and just a quick bit of trivia that is out of left field but nonetheless came to me that people might find interesting is that the dilation this hyper dilation of pupils is I don't know how much it is associated with a rousal or sexual arousal but for those who have ever heard the word belladana is a plant.
The reason it's called belladana beautiful woman in Italian is that it used to be turned into a tincture and it is a psychotropic and it is also very dangerous so don't recommend people consume it but many many years ago hundreds of years ago women in certain parts of Europe would create a tincture and put it into their eyes to hyper dilate their pupils because it was thought to be very very attractive and beautiful women could you speak to how one can.
Think about using their visual apparatus or stimulating or not stimulating their eyes their visual system for say sleep if one wants to optimize for sleep what are some considerations and it could be that it could be other inputs but I just be curious to know how this fits into sleep for you personally.
Our light viewing behavior has perhaps the strongest effect on our levels of alertness and our capacity to fall asleep and get a good night sleep and this is because at the fundamental layer of our biology every cell in our body needs information about time of day.
It's no coincidence that we have a collection of neurons over the roof of our mouth the so called super chiasmatic nucleus that's our central circadian clock it informs every cell in our body about time of day but it is deep in our brain has no access to light so there are a collection of neurons in the eye the so called melanobs and ganglion cells or sometimes called intrinsically sensitive.
Photosensitive ganglion cells these are just neurons in the back of your eye remembering course that the eyes actually part of the brain that's outside the skull and. Those neurons communicate to the central clock when it's daytime and when it's night so the simple behavior that I do believe everybody should adopt including many blind people we talk about why that is is to.
View ideally sunlight for two to ten minutes every morning upon waking so when you get up in the morning you really want to get bright light into your eyes because it does two things first of all it triggers the time release of cortisol healthy level of cortisol into your system which acts as a wake up signal and will promote wakefulness and the ability to focus throughout the day.
It also starts a timer for the onset of melatonin this sleepiness hormone or the hormone of darkness as they say melatonin is inhibited by light so by viewing light first thing in the day you set in motion these two timers one for wakefulness starts immediately and one for sleepiness that starts later.
The key thing here is that people are hearing a lot nowadays about avoiding blue light blue light is so terrible turns out that blue light is exactly the wavelength of light that triggers activation of these cells and that's exactly what you want early in the day. So people generally will say well maybe I should just look at my computer my phone first thing in the day well it turns out that these cells are very.
Hard to activate early in the day and very easy to activate at night so it's kind of like the biology is encouraging us if you will to take on the right behaviors which are to get outside even if there's cloud cover there's a lot more light energy a lot more photons coming through cloud cover.
Then you're going to get off your phone or a computer and early in the day two to ten minutes outside without sunglasses is going to be really beneficial for a huge range of biological functions and brain state. I have made a practice I'm in the middle of nowhere in the country right now of getting up and not necessarily doing a full work out but just jumping rope for literally two to five minutes two to ten minutes outside facing the sun or the sun.
Perfect and there's certainly an effect I mean I am moving so there's an effect on cortisol and as you noted it's like cortisol gets this ridiculously bad rap across the board and it's like guys if you don't have cortisol you're dead.
So if you like having storing like a gin and breaking it down into glucose and so on you it's important to have some cortisol there's a tremendous for me mood elevating effect of this exposure and I'm just I really have never familiarize myself with the mechanism by which that would be the case and certainly if it's placebo I'm happy to just take placebo but do you have any explanation for why that exposure can have such a mood elevating effect.
Yeah it's definitely not placebo that morning light exposure is going to also trigger the activation of dopamine release you know dopamine being this essentially feel good neuromodulator.
The best way to conceptualize dopamine is that yes it's part of the reward system but it's really the molecule of motivation and positive anticipation that's really what it's about and I should mention that the cortisol is going to be released in a pulse once every 24 hours no matter what that's coming as we call it an intrinsic rhythm but you can time it by viewing light and or by getting exercise early in the day.
There are actually data to just kind of emphasize what happens when you don't do this there are really nice data from my colleague David Spiegel's lab he actually co-published this with the great Bob Sapolsky a few years ago David's our associate chair of psychiatry at Stanford and they showed that if that cortisol pulse shows up later in the day and especially if it's around eight or nine p.m.
then it's associated with depression by shifting that cortisol pulse earlier in the day you ameliorate some of the symptoms of depression and because of the dopamine release you get this overall mood enhancement there are four things that really time are circadian biology and these mood mechanisms properly and align us for sleep and they the most powerful time keeper as they say zeitgabre because Germans discovered this mechanism initially so the most powerful time keeper site gay bar.
That's there it is I knew you do better than I would. Is is light when you view light and light is the most powerful stimulus for your biology and central circadian clock then it's exercise so it's your protocol of jumping rope facing the sun you're layering on timekeepers you're giving more signals to the central clock and the rest of your body about when to be active and you're also indirectly singling when you want to be asleep later.
Then it's feeding I know a lot of people fast through the early part of the day now that's very fashionable and I do that as well but were you to eat early in the day that can also help and then the other one is social cues so interacting with people early in the day or with your dog early in the day have a dog I live alone with my dog so that's how I interact with the world socially but those things are going to create wake up signals and your body will start to anticipate them and your brain will start to anticipate.
Such that if you miss it for a day you're still going to wake up and feel that alertness signal early in the day so this is not something that you have to do every day but ideally you do it every day because it's like setting a clock or a watch properly and I should mention that for people that live in areas with very dense cloud cover.
You can use light boxes and things of that sort but irrespective of that in the morning and during the day and anytime you want to be alert you want to flip on as many overhead lights as possible this is because these cells in the eye that trigger activation and alertness of the rest of the brain and nervous system reside in the lower portion of the eye they view the upper visual field now the inverse of all this is also important as you approach the evening or nighttime and you want to go to sleep.
That is a time to start avoiding bright lights of any color not just blue light and if possible to place whatever lights are present in your environment lower in your visual field so this would be desk lamps was people don't have floor lighting dim the lights if you want to wear blue blockers or do something of that sort that's fine but I think people have taken the blue blocker thing a little too far by wearing them all day that's actually going to disrupt your circadian clocks so in the evening you really want to avoid bright light of in the morning.
Bright light of any kind and again it's an averaging if you do this every once in a while you go to the bathroom in the night or you have an emergency and things are really bright for one night not going to screw you up however there was a paper published in the journal cell a few years ago by my good friend and call you get the national institutes of mental health is the hammer hit are the chronobiology unit the national institutes of mental health and what.
Samers lab showed is that bright light exposure of any wavelength between the hours of about 11 p.m. and 4 a.m. cause a serious disruption in the dopamine system such that in subsequent days you have a disruption in a lowering of mood difficulty in learning there's a cascade of things that happen in other words we get punished for light viewing at the wrong times of the circadian cycle and we get rewarded for light viewing at the current.
Let's talk about the latter portion of the day before I get to that though just for my understanding if one say wants to target going to bed or more accurately feeling sleepy enough to go to bed easily with rapid onset at say 10 p.m. is there a preferred time to get that exposure early in the day in the sense that if I'm doing my 10 minutes of jumping rope facing the sun is it best to have a certain distance temporarily from when I want to go to sleep.
Yes it's about 14 to 16 hours prior to when you want to sleep is the ideal time to get that morning light exposure and if we want to get a little bit technical about this we can and I'll do my best to make it clear because there's also a way that you can use this mechanism to shift your circadian clock to avoid jet lag and shift work.
I'll just ask you what's your typical wake up time not getting up in the middle of the night using the restroom necessarily and then going back to sleep but when you finally get get up and get out of bed what time does is that typically. I would say when I'm living my best life and not not being marty from back to the future it's usually seven o'clock let's just say.
Okay so if seven o'clock is your average wake up time then we can be pretty sure that two hours prior to your natural wake up time is what's called your temperature minimum it's when your body temperature was lowest that temperature minimum. I should be clear we don't need to know your actual temperature no needs to know their actual temperature minimum but you can count on the fact that two hours before waking up your body temperature is close to or at its lowest point and to be clear.
This would be if you are waking without an alarm clock right that would be if you're following natural rhythms correct. So if you view light I should mention that you have to do this light viewing behavior with your eyes that might seem obvious but some years ago there was a paper published in the journal science which is one of the three apex journal science nature cell and it stated that light presented to the back of the knee of humans could shift their circadian clocks and
that paper was retracted by the same authors that published the study there was a technical flaw humans have no extra ocular photo reception so we need to tell the cells of the body what time of day it is essentially where we are in time by light viewing behavior with the eyes blind people do this a little bit differently some blind people actually still retain these so called melanops and cells people without eyes at all maybe from a burn victim or something
they are going to use social cues and exercise and other things but most everybody on the planet does this through light viewing behavior so when I say get light what I mean is get light in your eyes obviously never so bright that it's going to damage your eyes you'll know if a light too bright because you'll want to close your eyelids that's a simple rule of thumb but the key thing here is that if you view light in particular bright light in the hour or two before that temperature minimum is going to be a little bit more light.
So for that temperature minimum so for you Tim that would be between you know around 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. it's going to have the quality of delaying your circadian clock what it'll effectively do is make you want to stay awake later and it will make you want to sleep in later the following nights.
However if you view light in the hour or so immediately after that so called temperature minimum so this for you this would be 6 a.m. or 7 a.m. it's going to shift your clock in the other direction you're going to want to go to bed a little bit earlier and you're going to want to wake up a little bit earlier the next night.
Now if you hear this you're probably thinking well my clock is always more or less in the same place how come it doesn't jump around I wake up I've you light how come I'm not going to bed earlier and earlier every night and waking up earlier and earlier the reason is there's a second time of day which is in the evening as the sun sets.
Where you're circadian clock is also vulnerable again to the shifts and typically because most of us are viewing light in the late afternoon all of us are naturally having our clock shifted so that we want to get up earlier and go to bed earlier the next night.
And morning but we're also delaying our clock a little bit in the afternoon now we can make this all very simple the simple thing to do is within 30 minutes of waking up get bright light exposure in your eyes and not from a phone or from a screen because it won't be sufficiently bright get it from sunlight and if you can't get it from sunlight you can use one of these light pads I don't use one of these expensive wake up.
Clock or something like that I bought an LED drawing pad like a trace table like the artist sheet mechanism it actually says on it I forget the company but it says 930 locks you can find these very inexpensively online and that's going to work great I just said it at my desk in the morning if it's very overcast and I'll work.
Now it is important to get outside because even though your windows or the windshield of your car is optically clear it filters out a lot of that blue light that's important for setting your circadian clock so 2 to 10 minutes of light viewing early in the day and then you can do yourself a great favor as well by going outside in the evening or late afternoon as the sun is approaching this what we call low solar angle because that will also send another
signal to the brain that it's evening so there's a morning stimulus and an evening stimulus this only takes a few minutes each day and what's key to understand is that the cells in the of your body they're going to have all these rhythms of liver function in metabolic function your brain is going to have its rhythms of alertness and anxiety and sleepiness providing multiple signals so for you exercise in light in the morning and then in the afternoon a little bit of light is going to tell your system.
In a redundant way but in a powerful way these are the times to be awake these are the times to be asleep and then if you like we can talk about evening behavior but that temperature minimum is worth knowing because if ever you are traveling for instance to Europe what you can do is in the 2 or 3 days before you can just set your alarm wake up around your temperature minimum maybe an hour before turn on some bright lights in your home so you get bright light exposure and you will start to shift your clock forward that 9 hours.
That 9 hour jump can be accomplished in about 2 days if you do this correctly and the reverse is also true you could shift your clock earlier if you like and when you land in Europe if we want to get down into the weeds when you land in Europe you have to be cognizant of what your clock is back home remember your temperature minimum it's much more important than where you are in your new environment that temperature minimum is an anchor point remember light viewed in the hour to before that temperature minimum will make you want to go to sleep later and wake up.
Light viewed after that temperature minimum will make you want to go to sleep earlier and wake up earlier. Let's talk about something that is a perennial topic and that is sleep aids specifically I'd love to get your opinion on various supplements or prescription medications for that matter that people might use. There's a huge list of things that people could use on the prescription side certainly you've got the ambience and the trasadones and so on.
Then on the supplemental side you've got melatonin very very popular you have California poppy I mean there's a infinitely long list of various supplements I would love to hear your thoughts on at least two of these one is melatonin because of its popularity and then you can get your opinion on the other side. And then the second is actually phosphatidyl serine so PS for short and using it to blunt cortisol release after going to bed.
I would just be curious to know if you have any opinions on those or any others that you would advise against or advocate for or use personally. Sure so I'll say why I'm not a fan of melatonin when I was a graduate student I worked on the melatonin system in the circadian system and one of the most powerful effects of melatonin is to suppress puberty.
The melatonin system is closely linked up with GABA inhibitory neurons in the hypothalamus it effectively keeps puberty from happening so the melatonin rhythms of young children pre pubertal children are not as phasic. They're pretty constant and that's one of the reasons they don't go into puberty there are many other reasons they don't go into puberty until certain triggers are set. But melatonin has strong effects on the sex steroid hormones that pathways relate to estrogen and testosterone.
And I think it was the one experiment that I did where we took we were working on these little called Siberian hamsters these little hamsters who in long days because they are seasonally breeding animals in long days these Siberian hamsters have testicles well that at least for Siberian hamsters are a pretty impressive size.
If however you inject those animals with melatonin or you put them into short days to increase the amount of darkness and you decrease the amount of light remembering of course that light inhibits melatonin their testicles shrink to the size of a grain of rice.
So I don't know if this was my male ego or something but I saw that experiment and I thought wow this is powerful stuff this melatonin stuff and it turns out in females of the same species they leave estrus they stop cycling they don't have menstrual cycles they have estrus cycles. And there are powerful effects of melatonin on the reproductive axis now humans are not seasonal breeders and we have a more robust sex steroid hormone axis than that.
But especially for children but also for adults it just seems to me that melatonin has a number of other effects that are worth considering enough effects that I tend to avoid it. Now I should also say that most of the concentrations of melatonin that are in supplements are 10 to 1000 times what the endogenous internal levels would naturally be.
So people taking melatonin are seeing dramatic effects but you're taking super physiological levels of melatonin we all kind of bulk when we hear about people taking you know 1000 milligrams of testosterone sipionate a week which unfortunately certain certain people do but this is the equivalent of super dosing sleep hormones and these are hormones that have other issues and other roles I should say in the body so that's why I veer away from melatonin also.
There are three things that I personally have found to be much more beneficial that seem to have very good safety margins of course everyone needs to check with their physician but those three things are magnesium three and eight THR E O N A T E or by glycinate magnesium by glycinate magnesium three and eight and magnesium by glycinate are able to be transported across the blood brain barrier more readily than other forms of magnesium.
I know you know a lot about this topic Tim so correct me anywhere I might misspeak but like for instance magnesium citrate is a great laxative goes by another name to you can imagine what it might be that will remind you that it's a great laxative what it's not great at inducing sleep.
Magnesium three and eight or magnesium by glycinate so 200 to 400 milligrams about 30 minutes before sleep is a powerful sleep aid people with heart issues might not want to take it or might want to check with their doctor but I take a cocktail of magnesium three and eight and then two other things one is very commonly known which is
theanine TH E A N I N E 200 to 400 milligrams of theanine can create a kind of a hypnotic state help you fall asleep basically falling asleep requires turning off your thoughts and the only people that should really avoid theanine I think are people who suffer from sleep walking or night terrors it can create very vivid dreams and then the third thing is apogenin apigee and i n which is a derivative a chemo mile but it acts as a chloride channel agonist so it essentially helps shut down the
body and by hyperpolarizing neurons and all this kind of stuff for the aficionados if they want to know so that cocktail of 50 milligrams of apogenin 300 to 400 milligrams of magnesium three and eight or by glycinate and 200 to 400 milligrams of theanine for me has been the best way to
consistently fall asleep quickly and stay asleep most if not the entire night which for me is about seven eight hours and of course I'm not a physician I'm a scientist everyone needs to figure out what's right for them but many, many people who have recommended this to have told me that in combination with the morning light viewing that their sleep has been completely transformed they thought they were so called insomniacs but they actually were just having a hard time turning off their
thoughts and probably their cortisol was drifting too late in the day.
So to that cortisol point this is fascinating and I just find it endlessly interesting that different forms of magnesium can be so target specific with respect to different issues in the body so so fascinating with respect to cortisol and needless to say I have used a lot of phosphous serine before sleep to help blunt cortisol release but I do cycle I use it as needed really if there's a lot of rumination or I've had a particularly stressful day but do you have any thoughts on whether or not you
would ever do that personally or if you'd be too concerned about side effects or long term side effects I suppose that could be a larger issue if you just never cycling off but do you have thoughts on using different compounds to blunt cortisol release if you're overruminating and what sort of minimize that in this case stress response while you're trying to sleep I have not tried PS I use ashwaganda from time to time if I'm in a particularly long bout of stress one of the things that I think is
relevant here is that we hear about stress but as terrible but of course short term stress buffers the immune system it actually activates the spleen to release killer cells and things that sort we are more robust in fighting off infection in the short term from pulses in cortisol but I
would say we can define long term stress as if you are having sleep disruption or you're feeling like you're in that wired and tired mode we don't really have a technical name for this for more than two or three days you're starting to enter the realm of long term stress and that's where buffering cortisol can really help and that's where I start to take
some ashwaganda late in the day there's good evidence that can buffer cortisol I do cycle it so I'm not going to take it every night or every day I would probably stop after a week or so and then just go back to my normal regimen which doesn't include ashwaganda but I always have some on hand I have to say that I certainly use and enjoy the benefits of supplements many of them in fact but the practice that for me has really helped reduce stress and allowed me to fall asleep more easily
and control my state of mind late in the evening is practice that some people call yoga nidra which literally means yoga sleep and that practice of taking 20 or 30 minutes a day and it doesn't have to be done every day and lying down and doing a sort of body scan it involves some long exhale breathing which is very relaxing to the nervous system and really allowing the mind to enter one of these pseudo sleep states we know from work in my laboratory and work in the state of the state
we know from work in my laboratory and work that I'm doing with David speak goes laboratory as well as work from other labs that that state of shallow nap or shallow sleep done in waking allows the brain to and the person to get better at turning off their thoughts and falling asleep in the evening so I use both behavioral tools and pharmacology which of course is really what supplementation is I don't have any problem with buffering cortisol a little bit in the short term so doing that
for a week or two but I wouldn't suggest that people suppress their cortisol long term unless there's a real clinical need to do that long term being longer than two weeks just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show this episode is brought to you by a G one the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health
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vitamin D and five free a G one travel packs with your first subscription purchase so learn more check it out go to drink a G one dot com slash Tim that's drink a G one the number one drink a G one dot com slash Tim last time drink a G one dot com slash Tim check it out you mentioned long exhales in the context of the yoga need your practice is it fair to refer to that yoga need your practices also non sleep deep rest or NSDR those separate phenomena.
Yeah so you need your is one of several what we call NSDR non sleep deep rest protocols admittedly I coined the term NSDR because scientists like acronyms almost as much as the military likes acronyms and I did it deliberately not to rob the beautiful history
and community that is you need your and the you get communities of anything but rather because many people are a verse to doing anything that has a name like you need your and yet it's such a powerful tool to zero cost tool that has enormous effects on not just accessing sleep and calm but enhancing rates of neuroplasticity something we could talk more about also David Spiegel again our associate chair psychiatry at Stanford and close collaborator in friend of mine is a world expert in clinical
hypnosis we are part of a just in in full disclosure we both sit on the advisory board of a company called reverie our EV R I dot com reverie is a zero cost app on Android and Apple that has short hypnosis protocols anywhere from 10 minutes to 15 minutes hypnosis and yoga need
a both fall under the umbrella of NSDR non sleep deep rest and these are protocols that people can use to deliberately access states of deep rest for sake of again falling asleep more easily reducing stress but also for enhancing rates of learning of neuroplasticity
and because these are zero cost tools I and because they're grounded in excellent peer reviewed research I feel comfortable mentioning them and what you find is that if people who are not familiar with meditation or mindfulness or maybe they're not from West LA or the Bay Area
if they hear yoga needra they think magic carpets and they think and they hear hypnosis and they think that somebody's going to control their brain NSDR is my attempt to create a more friendly language which is because all of these things are really just the same thing they really involve two things one self directing a state of calm
that's something that we never learn how to do unless we have a need to do it we suffer some trauma we have chronic stress we start taking a mindfulness class we self inducing a state of calm through respiration and vision is the whole mark of yoga needra and hypnosis and frankly of all meditative practices our thoughts follow our vision and breathing and I can explain why that is in a moment in addition these NSDR type practices involve not just self directing calm but they also involve directing our practice
we also involve directing our focus to something we generally have a hard time falling asleep because we think we have to turn off our thoughts completely like a switch but the transition to sleep involves allowing our thoughts to become fragmented and then we become relaxed and then the brain enters the state where space and time are very fluid and not under our conscious control
these are things that we can teach ourselves so yoga need your scripts are found all over YouTube there's some great apps out there the zero cost ones that I use are any of the stuff by comedy K.A.M. I.N.I. decide D.E.S.A. I like her voice very much some people like my sister loves Liam Gillan's voice another zero cost yoga needra tool Liam Gillan a double LG I L L E N
you have to find a voice that you like the referee app is David's voice he has a very hypnotic voice and there are scripts in there for smoking cessation stress and anxiety sleep et cetera these I really want to emphasize in addition to being zero cost art very powerful tools if done regularly there are two papers that were published in the last two years from cell reports and cell press journal excellent journal showing that a 20 minute non sleep deep rest protocol
after about intense focus or intense attempt to learn anything skill learning or cognitive learning accelerates plasticity by about 50% so you are learning faster much faster and retention of that information last much longer and that's because these are sleep like states and we know that neuroplasticity the brains ability to change in response to experience is triggered by high focus by deliberate periods of very high focus
but the actual rewiring of neurons the formation of new synapses and the re ordering of the circuitry that leads to that skill or that cognitive ability becoming reflexive that happens in states of deep rest and non sleep deep rest ns dr whether it's hypnosis or yoga needra or a shallow nap of about 20 30 minutes those things will all accelerate learning
let's hop around just a little bit yoga needra first on the ns dr study that you mentioned in the increase in plasticity which I'm assuming is measured by retention recall et cetera the perhaps it wasn't if you could send afterwards a link to that study output in the show notes for listeners who who might interested
we've touched on breathing in a few different capacities I have a term in front of me that seems kind of self explanatory but I don't know what form it takes physiological size contrast with other breathing methods for stress reduction could you define what that is
a few years ago when my laboratory got interested in studying stress in humans we asked ourselves what are the patterns of breathing that allow for the most rapid reduction in stress levels and more importantly what are the patterns of breathing that can be done in real time
so that people can adjust their stress while they're still engaging in life right breathwork classes running off to excellent for a weekend is a magical experience but life demands pressing on you that's typically when you feel stressed so
it is still true that vacation long meditation retreats and massages or a nice drink if you're of drinking age still work but they're slow and they take you offline the physiological side is a pattern of breathing that was actually discovered by physiologists in the 30s and that was essentially rediscovered by professor jack felledman at UCLA a world expert in the neurobiology of respiration and by my colleague Mark Krasno at Stanford who studies lung function
the physiological side is a pattern of breathing that we all engage in in deep sleep when levels of carbon dioxide in our bloodstream get too high we or our dogs you can see your dog do this will do a double inhale followed by an extended exhale
children or adults for that matter that are sobbing and lose their breath so to speak will also do a double inhale exhale that's the spontaneous execution of what we call the physiological side the reason it works so well to relax us is because it off loads a lot of carbon dioxide all at once and the way it works is the following our lungs are not just too big bags of air
we have all these little millions of sacks of air that if we were to lay them out flat there would be as big as about a tennis court or so the volume of air therefore and the volume of carbon dioxide that we can off load is tremendously high except that we get stressed as carbon dioxide builds up on our bloodstream and is kind of a double whammy these little sacks deflate now when we do a double inhale
so I'll do this now twice your my nose or you could do this or you could do it through your mouth but it works best for the nose it's inhale and then you sneak a little bit more air in at the very end when you do that you re inflate those little sacks and when you exhale then you discard all the carbon dioxide at once so the simple way to describe this protocol is that unless you are under water you do a double inhale followed by an extended exhale
and you off load the maximum amount of carbon dioxide and we found in our laboratory and other laboratories have found that just one two or three of those physiological size brings your level of stress down very very fast and it's a tool that you know you can use any time I do hope that people kind of watch other people or dogs as they start to relax or go down to sleep you'll see this pattern of breathing but again it can be consciously driven
the other thing about breathing and the reason why exhales are so vital is the following I know there's a lot of interest nowadays in heart rate variability well most people don't realize this but your breathing is actually driving heart rate variability so when you inhale this dome shape muscle beneath your lungs your diaphragm actually moves down because the lungs expanded moves down when you do that you create more space in the thoracic cavity
and you actually the heart gets a little bigger it actually expands as a consequence blood flows more slowly through that larger volume and the brains quickly sends a signal down to the heart to speed the heart up
the short simple version of this is inhales speed the heart up when you exhale the opposite is true that dome shaped muscle the diaphragm moves up the space in your thoracic cavity gets a little bit smaller the heart gets a little bit smaller blood moves more quickly through that small volume
and the brain sends a signal to the heart to slow the heart down physicians know this as respiratory sinus arrhythmia but this is the basis of what we call HRV heart rate variability and the simple way to remember this is anytime you emphasize exhales in other words making them longer than your inhales you are slowing the heart rate down your calming your system
anytime you emphasize inhales you make them more vigorous or longer than your exhales you're speeding up your heart I'd like to come back to hypnosis for a second I've never been hypnotized nor well maybe I have self hypnotized and just not realized that's what I was doing what characterizes hypnosis or how would we define that and do the states induced by hypnosis have any shared characters to go back to hypnosis
with some of the states induced by any psychedelics so hypnosis is a state of calm and high focus so context is restricted it's like looking at something through a telephoto lens you're eliminating the surround so it's a state of high focus which normally as we talked about earlier with the aperture the visual system would be associated with a high degree of excitement or stress
but hypnosis is a unique state because you have a high degree of focus but you're very relaxed and just to remind people that neuroplasticity is triggered by states of high focus followed by periods of relaxation later in deep sleep or in non sleep deep rest in hypnosis it brings both those states together at the same time and this is one of the reasons it's effective in accelerating neuroplasticity
I could probably do it right now to see if how hypnotizable you are there's actually a test a clinical test called the Spiegel Eye Roll Test Spiegel's father was a hypnotist and a psychiatrist so these I want to be clear these are not stage hypnotists these are board certified MDS and PhDs who there's a lot of scientific research to support what we're about to talk about so typically when we get sleepy when we're relaxed our eyelids close and our eyes go down and the chin goes down the induction to hypnosis involves doing the opposite of the
hypnosis looking up which actually believe it or not creates a state of alertness and then having you close your eyes so it creates a kind of conflict in the cranial nerves that innervate the eye and eyelid muscles again the eyes and your state of mind are so intricately wired back there in the brain stem so if you could look up toward the ceiling Tim with your eyes open and then just while still maintaining upward gaze if you could just slowly close your eyelids
oh boy you're really hypnotizable so what did you see that was yeah comfortable yeah I know it's a little bit odd so so for those of you listening or watching you sort of look up towards what you know sometimes in yoga communities they or meditation communities they call the third eye center you know we don't actually have a third eye but if we did it would probably be someone decided it would be between our two eyes and our forehead so by looking up you're inducing alertness and then you're creating this conflict where we're I asked you to close your eyelids
which is what you do when you're in a state of sleepiness and what's beagle both Spiegel senior and Spiegel junior have figured out is that it's a very good predictor of how hypnotizable people are you can look up the Spiegel eye roll test and what I was looking for is let's say if somebody is not very hypnotizable what will happen is as they close their eyes they'll have a hard time closing them slowly they'll just kind of snap shut and their eyes will roll forward in other words I'll see their pupils again
what happened when I saw you do this is that your eyelids were closing very slowly and I saw the whites of your eyes your eyes were starting to roll back into your head so you would have a score of probably about a four which is very hypnotizable I'm about a four some people you'll just notice you say look up and then slowly close your eyes and their eyes will just kind of snap shut in their eyes will roll forward right before it snaps shut
so you can do this experiment of sorts on people that you know and it predicts pretty well how quickly you're easily you will go into hypnosis I should mention that no one will go into hypnosis if they don't want to but if you're interested in exploring hypnosis with the
reverie app or with a clinical hypnotist and your eyes roll back the way that yours did Tim then your home free you're going to be long and long before this amazing I could maybe I'll start speaking in tongues to it does have a good good associated look with it how would you explain the utility of hypnosis and then I do want to hear if there are any
sort of correlates to some of the known effects of psychedelics and that's a wide spectrum of class so we could choose we could choose a given compound but what are the clinical applications because in my hypnosis naive mind I think smoking cessation isn't it good for quitting smoking isn't it good for really just these anecdotal reports that I've read a one point or another but what's the clinical what are some of the clinical applications or practical applications of hypnosis.
Yeah so for smoking cessation if people do the practice about a 60 to 80% success rate depending on the study you look at these were all blinded controlled studies in terms of anxiety relief those are tremendously strong effects as many as 90% of people are going to feel significant improvement in anxiety for pain management for chronic pain there's a high degree of success so you know people will vary depending on how hypnotizable they are and how regular they are about the practice but anywhere from the 50 to 75%
of people will experience a significant reduction in chronic pain and if they are using pain meds they tend to be able to take lower doses of pain medications in order to manage that pain so it's quite powerful now for trauma and things of that sort it needs to be done with a clinical I would hope board certified MD clinical hypnotist and there the success rates are quite high as well and if you want more research about this inside the
reverie app there's a long list of resources you could also I can send over a good review article that David's written in these are again published in very fine quality peer reviewed journals of the New England Journal jamah sort and things like that.
In terms of similarity to psychedelics they are quite distinct actually so hypnosis being a state of high degree of focus and relaxation is a bit similar to some of the so-called psychedelics so MDMA assisted psychotherapy which it appears thanks to the support and work of people like you and the maps group and the group of Hopkins in particular Matthew Johnson and I realized there are other people in that mix but it's it I have to just say as a
point it's it's really exciting to see what's happening and the enthusiasm about safe building safe protocols that people can access after so many years of people having to do this kind of renegade or in unregulated
environments. MDMA creates an a very a typical state it's a state of high dopamine release and typically dopamine is associated with a focus on things external to us dopamine being a molecule associated with motivation and reward makes us want to do more of things that brought the dopamine whether or not that's food sex online viewing of any kind etc.
It's not always that but online viewing online viewing whatever that is the best way to describe the effects of dopamine are that there's a book actually quite good book called the molecule of more and that's a great way to describe it I wish I had written that book I read the book and thought I wish I'd
read it on this book it's because I love the neuromodulator systems and it is the molecule of more and actually anyone that thinks that dopamine is about pleasure not motivation or seeking more consider this this is an anecdote I borrowed from my colleague Anna Lemke who's in the Department of
Dietary at Stanford the next time you eat a piece of chocolate or you engage in a behavior that feels particularly delicious notice the sensation and the thoughts in your mind it's rarely about complete presence and desire for staying
present it's usually a desire for more it's this I want more of this please as opposed to really basking in the experience and I should mention that Anna has a wonderful book coming out in August called dopamine nation she was in the social dilemma she's an addiction therapist and psychiatrist and talks a lot about the dopamine system so dopamine makes us want more of whatever feels really good and that tends to places an external focus
serotonin another feel good molecule is exact opposite it tends to make us feel good with what we already have it tends to be the incredible feelings of of warmth that you know holding a child or loved one or time with your dog I have this bulldog cost
still and there's times when I just sit with him and I feel immense pleasure just being there I don't think I want for bulldogs that I definitely don't want for the dogs the snoring is loud enough already but it's about experiencing the here and now in a full and complete way MDMA is unique because it creates huge increases in dopamine and serotonin at the same time and we don't
ordinarily see that in natural experience and it has this unique property of making people feel very excited and positive about their relationship to their internal state and so it has a kind of looping back of a mechanism that normally would place us in the viewing of the exterior what's out there what can I get more of who can I interact with more of what drug can I take more of that's going to make me feel this way so
MDMA is very unique and I mentioned it because it has certain correlates with hypnosis in that it's a very focused state in fact so much so that let's just say I could imagine that if you're hearing music and you focus on that music you can really kind of start to merge with the music whereas if you focus on your internal state you can merge with your internal state and that's why I do think it's important that some of that if people are doing in a clinical setting be guided because otherwise the experience can be sort of lost on whatever is external
other psychedelics of the sort like psilocybin LSD they have a very sleep like state they tend to be more serotonergic in nature and they are very similar to sleep in the sense that space and time become very fluid whatever top down governing mechanisms exist in the brain so called you know executive function some of that seems to be dysregulated enough so that inside of those psychedelic states and
and certainly inside of dreams anything can really happen and you can essentially see and appreciate novel associations that normally wouldn't occur in waking states we should remember that the two extremes of human experience are stress
and or excitement so highly contracted visual window highly contracted time domain everything sliced very finely what's happening next what's going to happen next think you're in the line at the airport and the first in front of you is moving slowly and you got a plane to catch
everything constricted to right there both in space and time and then sleep where in sleep space and time are extremely fluid anything can happen and you are essentially out of control mentally it's just whatever is going to happen
psychedelics are very much like that except that in LSD and psilocybin assisted states your alert so I would say that psilocybin and LSD like states are similar to hypnosis in that way but hypnosis has a little bit more of a rigidity to it it set toward a particular focus like let's work on your control
over stress or smoking or pain and so I would say the three of them occupy neighboring spaces but none of them overlap completely I'd be so curious to see some type of multi modal study and perhaps they've been done but just looking at pharmacological interventions combined with hypnosis right so if we made hypnosis the the default sort of control state and then you had an arm
that was comparing hypnosis plus film the blank not necessarily psychedelics certainly you could it could be an intact agenda and pathogen like mdma could be a trip to mean like psilocybin or could be like a finethylamine like mescalin which has very different effects certainly I think you know Michael Paul does a good job of describing this in his new book your mind on plants is an entire section discussing the the mescalin experience which is really
in a sense an amplification of the real in high resolution certainly dose dependent versus transportation all out the trip to means like LSD or psilocybin that would be very very interesting to see it would I and I have to say you know as usual you're your five years or more ahead of everybody else Tim
and I don't say that it for sake of flattery I mean you have it you have a way of spotting the horizon and I think we are so caught up as a culture now in asking what should we do what should we take what device should I use I would say you've got behavioral tools we all have to eat sooner or later nutrition supplementation prescription drugs off label and on label and then you got brain machine
interface devices for reading and writing to the nervous system and body for measuring things and changing things and we always think of those as separate bins but as you're pointing out I think the most interesting bin is to consider well maybe at some point a learning bout is going to be 300 milligrams of alpha gpc and a particular breathing protocol that will have a synergistic effect I think that's
the real immediate future of beneficial brain change lies and I think even the folks at neural link you know a guy that came up through my lab is a neurosurgeon Matt McDougal is at neural link now and they have other excellent neuroscientists there and you can be sure that they're thinking clinical issues first and they're thinking obviously brain machine interface and chips and robotics and things of that sort but you can bet just given who makes up that company
of roster that they're probably also thinking about ways to accelerate plasticity using a combination of brain machine interface and pharmacology and if they're not thinking about that they definitely should so I think for the typical person who's not going to plant a chip beneath their skull I think you're hitting the nail on the head which is that we need to think about what works
independently and combining those for sake of synergy that's what's going to get us where we need to go much faster I also think just to build on what you said to the kind words that when you look at these possible synergistic combinations you could also end up and then this is not a certainty but it's a possibility having a much more appealing risk benefit calculus in the sense that if you can lower the required dose of a pharmacological intervention if you can lower the exposure necessary
with some type of neurofeedback or neuro stem like a TMS or a TDCS or any of these other tools if you're able to lower the required doses of several things when they're used in combination and get a similar or better outcome it just has such incredible ramifications for the clinical use of these things. Let's take a step back here so now we've covered a bunch of the research we've covered a bunch of the tactical practical implementations of some of the research findings.
Now I want to paint a picture for people who don't who don't know you at all so we've already covered Castello we have not discussed the fact that you have looks like full sleeve tattoos on both arms. I think you're the I think you out in me. Yeah, there's a you're the first. This is the first. Yep. It's true. All right. Birthmark. They're all birthmarks. Of course they're all birthmarks. Kids don't start because they're like potato chips.
And we may get to aquiscaping that's a whole separate conversation so we may get to that but I want to I want to rewind the clock for a second because I read your bio obviously very impressive bio you've received numerous awards you've produced a lot of incredible work with your colleagues and your your lab. Let's go back to what happened to you in July of 1994 so in July of 1994 I was living in a little town called isla vista which is near Santa Barbara.
It's the home of UC Santa Barbara University of California Santa Barbara just as a little bit of background I was not a good high school student I had a very disrupted high school experience despite growing up in a good area. Just a lot of tension and stuff at home so I barely finished high school but I followed a high school girlfriend off to college somehow I got in at the time I want to be a firefighter took fire science courses at mission college in the south bay.
And I thought it be a firefighter and I put that in my entrance exam and somehow they let me in but by the end of my freshman year of college I had terrible marks I had been thrown out of the dormitory living for getting in fights something I'm certainly not proud of and I was basically doing nothing that summer I was living in a squatting I was living in an empty house because a lot of houses were empty I figured why pay rent you know I'm done living in an empty house.
With my pet ferret and to sort of set the context right I was I think I was still grappling with a lot of anger and resentment and confusion based on having a rather confusing teenage years and a lot of disruption. Fortunately I formed a lot of friendships and form to community in the skateboarding and punk rock culture I was fortunate enough to get to know a lot of guys that have gone on to do great like my friend Carl Watson is a data skateboarding I
I spent some time got to know although we weren't close friends with the great Danny way probably the great one of the greatest skateboarders of all time jump the great well China but I wasn't a very good skateboarder I was not a musician I knew how to do essentially nothing well and July 4th 1994 I went to a barbecue with some friends and some guys were robbing the house that we were having this party at we came back from the store and we saw these guys essentially taking a bunch of possessions out of the house
and the thing erupted into this big fight this huge melee I definitely went in excited to fight yeah I've been involved in fights before and I had an adrenaline seeking thing I felt like it was justified I'm certainly not encouraging anybody else to do this but essentially what happened was my friends took off my so-called friends took off and I ended up in a fight with a four or five guys knives came out bottles it's the sort of thing where quickly you realize that I was going to be a real man.
I realized that things could go badly wrong fortunately I stayed on two feet and nobody got badly hurt or killed the police showed up and actually because of the fact that they were robbing us they actually congratulated me I'll never forget this is actually what made me feel worst of all is one of the police officers said you know like nice work or something like that and I just realized that I was in serious trouble you know I'm 19 I barely finished high school I barely scraped through my first year of school
I'm not scraped through my first year of college I'm living in a squat with my ferret my girlfriend had left me I didn't do anything well I didn't know how to do anything well and so that day and I still have this letter I actually sat down and I wrote a letter to myself and to my parents saying that I was going to turn things around I don't know why I wrote to them because at the time I was kind of avoiding contact with them entirely I've since formed a really good relationship with both my parents but I was
I decided that day that I would use the one power that I seem to have which is to remember facts and information and what I did was I I left Santa Barbara I took a leave of absence went back it went to a local community college in the Bay Area I did two quarters there and I
just started studying like a maniac first psychology then biology I eventually fell in love with neuroscience and related themes of endocrinology and the rest is sort of history in terms of eventually going to graduate school and getting a PhD and coming a professor ten years and all that stuff but it was one of those moments where I realized
I am no longer going to be a young screw up I'm going to be a 20 year old screw up and with time people are going to be less and less forgiving and whatever it happened prior no one's going to care it doesn't even really matter and if I do want people to care and it's not like I have a need to talk about the challenges early on but I need to get my act together I need to do something I need to get good at something and so I became a kind of a maniac actually when I read your your book the four hour work week in the
four hour body which I read and loved and own I should say again not for sake of flattery because they but they really helped me there a lot of useful tools in there there were certain things that resonated I figured out that if I drank a lot of coffee and took certain supplements I could focus for many hours and then if I worked out I built another capacity and if I ran I built another capacity for endurance and and I started to explore the crossovers between weightlifting is one thing it's not about building muscles are necessarily maybe it's not
necessarily maybe it's about that it's about really moving against a physical force in real time and really learning how to do that endurance work is about learning how to push through a different kind of barrier and learning the carry over and cross over points so I was the guy that would sit down at my desk I
decided to live alone in a studio apartment and I would set a timer for several hours and I wouldn't allow myself to get up I was allowed to listen to rancid best band ever for me on repeat and Bob Dylan that's all I wouldn't even allow myself to change music and then I would just sit there and I would read my textbooks
underline my textbooks right my textbooks and I just decided I'm going to get straight A marks I'm going to go to graduate school I'm going to get a PhD I should mention there were people that came along the various times and helped me role models mentors people that spotted that but it started with a switch that flipped on July 4 1994 and getting in a bad fight and here I am
deciding to choose a different path so I want to underscore or explore a few things and I really appreciate you sharing this because I think it's very easy for people listening to folks with a bio like yours to sort of assume a certain trajectory to assume that it is always come easy and that you've always since you were two years old known exactly which direction you're heading which is not the case.
One clarification with UC Santa Barbara this might be an important point it might not you did not drop out you took a leave of absence is that right is that material to the story because I know in a lot of cases there are folks who are kind of painted as dropouts but in fact they kept their options open by taking the leave of absence instead so I just want to clarify.
Yes a leave of absence is a mechanism that most universities have I think it was a design for things like family situations if somebody gets pregnant or they have a family member who sick that allows you to leave and come back and it's distinctly different from dropping out although I was pretty close to dropping out of being forced to drop out for reasons related to poor grades and poor behavior fortunately that didn't happen.
I think it's a really important point because we hear that Bill Gates dropped out of college Steve Jobs dropped out of college Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of college I think maybe it was Ryan holiday who I don't know who said something like that the people who are doing poorly in college they're the ones that should stay in college because it's that one environment where everything scripted out for you what you need to do in order to hit the next metric of success and a leave of absence is very different none of those people dropped out of college they took leave of absence is that gave them.
And it's very hard to make it back into a system of any kind but it certainly is much harder if you completely divorce yourself from that system. I am a believer in formal rigorous coursework I am a university professor I know that college isn't perfect for everybody it's might even be the wrong decision for certain people but if you're still uncertain about what you want to do I think if.
It can be a range financially and it's in the scope of things that somebody might want to do I think learning how to sit down in a chair and force yourself to learn and then compete with others in terms of how well you learn that information I think is a great way to evaluate oneself early in life and it sets the stage right.
I agree with that if you're open to it and certainly you can say no or we can talk about it and then you can elect to have it edited out of the conversation but you mentioned tension and stuff at home disruption are you open to sharing a bit more detail about what you mean when you say those things sure so I had a pretty magical childhood really my dad's a scientist my mom wrote children's books and was a teacher.
We ate dinners of family everybody together in the early part of my life I acknowledge that I had great privilege in having that experience and growing up where I did good schools good public schools I completely acknowledge the benefits of that especially early in life around 13 when I was 13 my parents split up and either because of the time in which it happened or because they weren't equipped with the right tools there was a complete fracture of that picture my dad.
My dad was very much out of the picture at that time my mom hit I think a series of challenges adjusting I think it was a mate what could only be described as a major depression I think her view of family was one in which everyone stuck together no matter what she's from the east coast she's from New Jersey like you stick together.
We had an argument the other day I don't think she'll mind me selling this and like we got on and we were ready to scrap and we haven't had one of those in years but I just remembered that at the end of this conversation we're going to be okay and at the end we were closer so we both have that and I think for her the fact that there was a complete disintegration of the picture my sister out of the house my dad out of the house and me there she really hit the skits and home became a very empty very quickly became a very empty and depressing place it was really hard to get a good place.
It was really it was just really sad and I found care and love and community in the world of skateboarding this was the early 90s and there was this collection of mostly young guys at that time who would aggregate at Embarcadero Plaza just in Herman Plaza in San Francisco.
I started going up there and hanging out at the it's now the famed EMB for it's kind of got a golden euro reputation now and that's where I learned that you don't have to go to school there are a lot of guys not going to school there was a lot of drinking lot of drug use lot of wild behavior
but also I should say a lot of amazing skateboarding and amazing characters and personalities and fights and everything it was true street life and so I started staying there I'd stay at people's houses or sometimes we'd even sleep there and I learned a lot about how people outside the cozy suburbs of the South Bay how they lived I'm grateful for that because it exposed me to the fact that many of these kids had no parental oversight from any age.
That they had to scrap for everything but quickly I realized that I wasn't very good at skateboarding I didn't have a future in it and I wasn't going to school my home life was really disrupted and I lapsed into a pretty serious depression. I just remember and anyone who's experienced depression I hope this will resonate with although I'm sorry that it exists but there's this weird thing about depression which is that it changes your actual view of the world.
I remember leaving in Barca D'Aro sometimes and looking up at the sky back then they had the Embarcadero freeway and thinking the sky is so sad. Like not the sky is a third as an separate object but that the scene of the sunset is so sad and actually yesterday I was thinking about this because there's this beautiful sunset where I live and I thought gosh I haven't felt sad at the view of the natural world in so long it's and so it's clearly a shift in my internal state and
fast forward what happened was eventually the school picked up on the fact my high school picked up on the fact that I wasn't going they called me in at some point I was sitting down with a school counselor and they had this guy in the room with me sitting there and pretty soon I realized that I was in a different kind of situation and I realized they were going to probably try and take me away because I was completely true and I hadn't gone to school I was clearly depressed.
So that's what happened against my will and despite an attempt to run away I was taken to a place up the peninsula which was neither a juvenile hall nor a psychiatric hospital but we were under lock and key and I was in there with kids that had dealt with everything from sexual abuse to hardcore substance abuse issues.
I'll never forget this they said the kids in the in the ward next door they're crazy because they're really young and the adults in the ward on the other side they're crazy but you guys you're not crazy and I thought well that's ridiculous because they're probably saying the same thing to the ones on the other side but I had no one to call I called my skateboard team manager out of sympathy not because I was any good I got put on a on a wheel company and a truck company
for skateboarding I called the guy and I said I don't know what to do I'm in this place and and he I'll never forget he said look I can barely take care of myself and you're the most normal guy I know and I realize at that point I'm like I'm really alone here so the long and short of it was I did the work I put my trust in the counselors that were there they seem like good people and you know I did the work but it's part of an agreement for getting let back into school.
Actually it's part of an agreement for being let out I had to do weekly therapy and I was fortunate enough that I got placed working with somebody who understood my particular needs worked with adolescence and really encouraged me to start exploring my mind.
I certainly the situation I was in but encouraged me to start meditating he gave me john cobbets in book wherever you go there you are he saw how much physical energy I had and he encouraged me to start running I was always hurting myself skateboarding and he said well maybe running or swimming and running and swimming are amazing because unless you really do it wrong you can go and go and go it's just and I could burn off all that anger and energy over time and then I started getting to wait lifting and and the weight lifting is kind of a double edge sword I should mention I think it's one of those things that I'm going to do.
I think it's one of those things that is great but you know if you exceed a certain size it can actually make people kind of scared you sort of like the tattoos thing a lot of like a lot of the reason why cover up tattoos is because then people just see the see your tattoos but I it's true I started getting tattooed pretty young the wrong way don't do it this way with India and can a needle this was before this auto claves bad don't do it but I decided at that age that the therapy and this one person who seemed to really care about my men.
I thought my mental and physical well being and would spend the time was really worth investing in and I hit it from everybody because no one did therapy then no one talked about it it's like late 80s early 90s nobody did that and I will confess I don't think I've ever said this publicly but I found a way either through insurance or through my own income I've continued therapy with that same individual now for 32 years.
Wow and so I do I confess I do three sessions a week a psycho analysis remote or in person and I know people have a lot of. The other kind of I roll not the speak a lot of tests but the other kind of I roll when you say psycho analysis I think an exploration of the mind is extremely powerful it has to be done with the right person.
And there's only one person I know who's done this kind of extended work for so many years and that's the late Oliver sacks who's a kind of a hero of mine also worked with a psycho analyst for many many years and so psycho analysis a fight on July 4th 1994 a lot of attempt to both stabilize my mind and also.
Organize my behavior those things go hand in hand of course but also biology to leverage I guess you could call it bio hacking you call it I just call it biology I mean when I learned for instance that taking a thousand milligrams per day of EPA essential fatty acids not just fish oil but getting above that threshold is as effective as antidepressants in double blind placebo controlled studies you know when I saw those papers I realized well I probably have a bit.
I probably have a bit of a leaning toward depression I'm going to do that now did I do that drop therapy know I do that and therapy and I train and I try and work on my sleep it's a constant process but biology and the information contained books like yours and and hopefully and the information that I'm trying to put out into the world now that that stuff helps in a major way to so is a multi prong support system and many incredible mentors along the way but I was definitely at the edge I know you've talked about this public.
I mean there were times when I just thought like why continue and I'm fortunate nowadays I feel very far from that there's a saying in the world of addiction and addiction treatment which is that no matter how far you drive you're always the same distance from the ditch that I would say is true of addiction fortunately at least in my own experience that is not true of depression I have vowed to never go back to a place where living seems.
Meaningless and anyone who's been close to that place all I can say is the work works whether or not it's therapy biology etc you have to do it and there are things that can accelerate that process but it's an ongoing battle to be honest well you're fighting the good fight man I'm certainly right in there with you how does it feel to talk about this stuff it's interesting I always get a little quakey on this I would say there are only two things that will always consistently make me cry and those are the thought of I don't know what I'm going to do.
I don't want to talk about for too long because I prefer not to cry but I want it would be when my bulldog cost all goes that we're very bonded and he's close unfortunately so he's in this final years and the other is when I think about my mentors in particular one passing away talking about this gets me in a mode where it's uncomfortable I'm definitely uncomfortable this moment I'm okay to talk about it because I think these issues are important and I wholeheartedly believe that many people struggle with them you know I'm always conscious of protecting the
people in my life who were doing the best they could with what they had so you know my parents are good people that generation didn't have the tools that I had access to and I do hope the next generation and we'll have access to more tools so I want to protect them they are you know I'm blessed I acknowledge my privilege I and I don't say that for political reasons by the way I just want to say I
acknowledge that I was born into a pretty fortunate or very fortunate situation that provided buffers and I only know my own experience but I acknowledge it as real thanks for sharing all that and a mutual
friend has prompted me to ask about the Hoffman process. Oh yeah the Hoffman process so the Hoffman process is a personal development process it's a full immersion week long process I think it used to be two weeks I don't want to give away too much about it because if one were to go you want to have the experience for the first time without expecting or knowing what's coming it involves a lot of both physical and a kind of emotional purging and what's
interesting is it's generally between 20 and 40 people go you don't publicly share any of the issues that you're grappling with there is a teacher there that you communicate with and who knows a lot about your situation there's a lot of work that you do beforehand paper work so they really know closely what you're grappling with and you do get to know people there but there are strict rules no romantic relationships no discussion of politics no discussion work no
discussion of sports and you quickly find that you realize that you spend a lot of time thinking about talking about those things in the outside world and be that there are other ways to connect with people that are very authentic that don't involve those things Hoffman process was one of several things for me that was transformative for me it was most transformative in the realm of forgiveness I felt completely resolved of my challenges with you know inability of focus
complete work structure etc I solved all that I learned how to work hard perform well by time I went to Hoffman which was in my early 40s I'm 45 now I learned how to control my physical landscape as best as one could or should I went there thinking like why would I go here what's the purpose and going and yet I I realized that I harbored a lot of resentment mostly toward family members but also toward experiences and and people outside my family and I almost got kicked out of
Hoffman the first day not for misbehavior but because I slept through the first day I've been working so hard they kept saying you're trying to escape by sleeping and I'm like I'm just tired I'm like they take really good care they take really good care of you there I've actually never felt so nurtured I'm not somebody who accepts nurturing very easily I like to think I'm more of a caretaker
and a more of a kind of caretaker loner type then I'm being taken care of and Hoffman they I felt comfortable to be taken care of in certain ways and I discovered in doing the work that there were all these resentments and I was able to purge those resentments and I have to say it completely erased all feelings that I was wronged by anybody or anything
and that's powerful and it's completely behavioral nature there's no pharmacology there I would say Hoffman is among the two or three things that were maybe four or five things that were really transformative for me
and there is a price point but they do have a scholarship program that's been established thanks to the generosity of various folks so for people that can't afford the price point they do have a fairly simple scholarship program where you write something out people who are practitioners you know therapists and in the wellness community I think also get a break of some sort I have no business relationship to Hoffman but I've recommended that several people go
and it is powerful and it does last in fact the reason I decided to go to Hoffman was because somebody actually a mutual friend of ours Tim who I don't think went Wendy Yallham who I know from way back when we haven't been in touching years but I think she said something about Hoffman and she said she knew somebody who went and I contacted that person and that person said I went to Hoffman and 10 years later it still has a profound positive effect on my life
and I found it to be more useful than any other therapy or training of any kind that's my Hoffman story and it's powerful and for people who want to hear more about Hoffman I talk about it at length also with Blake Mikoski in the last conversation I had with him so people can find that that episode
you mentioned one of four or five things what are some of the other things that have had a disproportionate positive impact this is a broad category but get your biology right start with sleep figure it out figure out how to get your sleep right because it's the fundamental layer of mental health so get that one right other things in the biological category are learn how to focus learn how to defocus learn how to flip the switch on learn how to flip the switch off get good at sleeping
of course exercise of various kinds is going to be good and all the other things but there's that physical bin and those are the primary levers there I do think some form of exploration whether or not it's psychoanalysis psychotherapy journaling or some sort of internal reflection that's somewhat unregulated but obviously not damaging to you or anyone else
so don't punch concrete walls but have the ability to sit down and data dump and reflect if you can't afford therapy reflect on what you're seeing and reading and feeling have the ability to experience what's internal so that would be the second one the third one is and I realize there's some issues around legality and things and right now everything's in transition
I was part of a clinical trial so I can safely say this you know I do think that there are certain aspects to let's just call it is either plant medicine or I was part of MDMA assisted psychotherapy trial that was extremely valuable there's no question to me that that's a powerful mover of one's ability to feel comfortable in internal state the way I would just briefly describe that experience for me is that I could feel
and perfectly fine from here to here and from the belly button down but I had this feeling always that I couldn't kind of experience things in mind and body at the same time I know this is going to sound really wacko to people who maybe haven't experienced this but somehow in that brief experience I was able to resolve that and I now experience my nervous system as a complete entity
and I do not think people should cowboy this stuff and do it on their own or trying to therapy for their friends or do this on their own I don't think this is something that people should play around with these are very powerful tools you should do this with a board certified MD sign up for a clinical trial hopefully this will be done in the you know in these sorts of medical settings soon legally and you don't have to be part of a clinical trial
but if you struggle ongoing in some way I do think there's utility there so that's another bin and then there's another bin which for me has been very powerful which is stay on the adventure continue to have fun it's so easy to forget to have fun when you're doing all these other things like stay in the adventure and don't get killed doing it but you know really try and keep exploring I do believe these dopamine systems are positively reinforced by not only
by novelty and exploration we know that and by venturing into new territories and that requires getting certain things wrong it means going to a treat that sucks it means taking a class that is not that interesting it means finding out that you know a particular
relationship is not right for you but it's important to stay in a mode of adventure because that's fundamental to the human experience and it's fundamental to these neurochemical systems as well couple of points I'd love to underscore here so the biological piece you've discussed in other places this principle
it's a quote of sorts a maxim that I think is really worth remembering and I'm saying that to myself as much to anyone listening that as you cannot control the mind with the mind and whether or not there might be exceptions to that I think is a general rule using the rationality as you've mentioned sort of body mind mind body and you know when in doubt working through your fuller biology is incredibly powerful I mean for me like to get out of my head I need to
get into my body there's just no meta cognitive way generally for me to otherwise do that or if there is it's just much more difficult I even told my girlfriend I'm like if I'm trying to figure out what is bothering me and I spend more than like half hour on it just tell me to go to the gym and lift heavy things for at least 30 minutes best remedy in the world and then I come out of my yeah that bullshit's fine it doesn't matter and that's what was necessary on the adventure
side actually before I get to the adventure side just a quick note on Castello because I think a lot about my dog Molly and mortality and it's just it's like so easy to get sad and how old is she she's seven but she's had some health issues she's had two spinal surgeries
and if you haven't looked into the canine research with rapa my son I would look into that it's very very compelling so that might be I'll do that I listen to your podcast with Peter Tia and a lot of discussion about rap my son I'll definitely check it out yeah it's it's worth checking out there's also a separate episode with David Sabatini of MIT who is a genius and and it's sort of emtor wizard who said family he has a brother Bernardo Sabatini who's a famous
neurologist Harvard who I know quite well and their dad there's another Sabatini who is it NYU med so those sabatini they're kind of like the cornberg's cornberg discovered RNA his son discovered the structure of RNA they both got no bells and I think their brother is an immunologist something like that so if you're last if you're thinking about changing your last name Sabatini or cornberg is a good one to to select yeah not not not bad yeah they come from the
secretariat stock scientific gene pool on the adventure side so you said don't die or don't let something kill you which I think is a perfect segue to as I'm reading it from a paragraph from outside magazine cube room in was about 40 miles off the coast of Mexico and 40 feet below the
periwinkle surface of the ocean what does this refer to oh my yeah so before I went to Hoffman I was still working out some things the quick backstory this is in 2016 I decided I was going to shift a lot of my laboratory work toward humans I understand the issues of animal research
and why it's important my lab still does work on mice because there's certain things you can only do on mice but I want to work on humans and I want to use virtual reality to induce fear in the laboratory and study stress and fear and other brain states and we realized that VR as it stood
at the time was just pretty lame it was computer-generated images it didn't have 360 video or sound and so I got linked up with a guy named Michael Mueller and you L. L. E. R. who's a very very famous photographer in Hollywood mostly does all the marvel stuff he shot everybody that you just go to his website it's just it's kind of a just a constant scroll of iconic images Mueller and I got to be friends and the reason I was excited about getting to know him is because a hobby of his is
that he takes photos of great white sharks underwater he brings these giant strobe lights underwater and Mueller is you know you hear about the character the Wolverine Hugh Jackman right Mueller is a Wolverine he's kind of hunched over and he's the nicest guy in the world but it was like it was
immediate friendship but he loves adventure he's got he's got a family kids everything but he loves adventure and he said this is my best Mueller personation he's like bro you got to come down to Guadalupe the sharks are there I was like well what are we going to do he's like well we'll just film
them with 360 cameras so in 2016 we went down there and we filmed great white sharks as a stimulus for this fear laboratory that we were building and got 360 video and the way we did that was that Mueller and a couple other guys he's expert great white shark divers would leave the cage you
lower the cage about 40 feet below and they leave the cage to come back in so called cage exiting definitely illegal to do we got permits from the Mexican government because this was for a scientific study I would have loved to see that permitting process anyway continue that was
something else so we we got the footage brought it back built this thing up and then what happened was in the subsequent year the technology for VR really improved so we decided we were going to go back and I decided for whatever reason that I was going to cage exit also I actually
learned how to scuba dive for the first trip but I stayed in the cage and so the second trip we went out there and I brought a good friend of mine who's actually a mutual friend through Blake mykoski pat dos it is a former former seal team guy I brought Brian McKenzie
because Brian learned Brian McKenzie learn how to scuba dive in a lake in Oregon and his first ocean dive was cage exit with great whites now of course the guy has unscared tattooed on his knuckles I know he was featured in in a number of your your books so is Brian Pat
me and some other guys we went out there with the intention of getting better footage to create a very realistic VR experience of great white sharks so what happened was on the first day I decided I'm not going to cage exit today let Pat go he's a seal team guy he'll do it he did it of course
masterfully the first time when a few meters beyond everybody because those guys aren't competitive or anything anyway it all worked out but the first day I was in the cage so I went down I've been in the cage before and you're breathing off a hookal line which is up to the surface
you're not on scuba and the reason you don't bring scuba is because you don't want to take up too much space in the cage so the other divers Muller and a couple other guys had left the cage and I was there just watching the sharks and really enjoying it I'd been down there
the previous year and these great white sharks their girth isn't incredible and they come at you unlike a Volkswagen and they'll stop right in front of you and hover they'll eyeball you and then disappear into the darkness so it's really amazing and I realized as I was down there
I'm like I'm alone in the cage this time I've never been alone in the cage we had a lot of sharks that day so I was moving around and swiveling around a lot and then all of a sudden I had no air nothing just nothing coming through the mouthpiece and I looked up and the
hookal line got all boa constrictor it up so I popped up to it thinking I'll just untangle this thing and it's like hardest concrete so I took another suck of air and nothing and I looked down there safety tanks in the two corners so I spit out the mouthpiece I dropped down in the safety tanks open them up and the needle doesn't move they're empty.
Oh, this is like the biggest nightmare and it's interesting we were talking about Castello I had one thought at that moment a totally inefficient use of mental space but the one thought was I'm going to go home alive I'm going to see Castello he just popped into my head
so this stuff really does happen apparently so nothing off the safety tanks so I decided I got to get out of here when there's sharks everywhere but I've got to get to the surface and you're just desperate for air so I pop up to the top of the tank and I've got a weight vest on and I've got to take that weight vest off if I want to get up to the surface.
Now the sharks actually don't eat you when you're outside the cage if you're swimming toward them they actually if you loom on them they steer away that's the way that these cage exit divers are able to avoid getting eaten or if you're ocean ramsy you just kind of understand
them and you swim next to them but I was genuinely frightened and stressed and so I thought okay I'm going to shoot for the surface I could see the silhouette of the boat I'm going to shoot for the surface I'll either get eaten or I'll drown but I'm certain I'll drown if I stay
here and then what happened was one of the divers his name is Brock saw me and started kicking back toward me and he's carrying this big vacuum cleaner size VR thing and that felt like an eternity you know he's coming back to me back to me slowly so like now I'm just hoping
if I pass out I want to fall into the cage if I float I want to make sure I float up but it was a good 20 or 30 more seconds which doesn't sound like very long but it's not like I got to get an eternity it was an eternity so he made it back we did the share air thing but then we had a
whole other problem which was that we're sharing air those guys are out there we're now on one tank and the safeties are empty so now there's a chance that we both might have to shoot for the surface so fortunately everybody made it back in time and we got up to the surface but I will never
forget that experience I do feel like I'm on borrowed time and I did feel quite traumatized by it and I will say that that night I did one thing in the next day I did something else was that night I was able to sleep I did yoga Nidra and I was able to calm my mind and my nerves
and the next day because I understand a bit about the relationship between trauma and exposure I did go back down the very next day and I cage exited and some people might think that's foolish I certainly didn't do it to be tough or just seemed like I'm tough I did it because
facing the trauma is the best way to purge the trauma we know this and cage exiting for me allowed me I believe to report the experience I feel nothing in my body no tension no stress no quaking or anything related to that so I do think it's been completely purged
I want to dig into what I read as a definition of fear from you and just to hear more about your fascination with fear and where it comes from so here's what I have and you can fact check this place quote fear it's the anxiety that you feel when you don't know what behavior can remove a feeling of helplessness in the face of a threat and quote does that sound right to you?
you can't have stress without anxiety you can't have trauma without stress but you can have stress or anxiety without trauma I think that the key variables are anxiety is a state of heightened alertness contracting the visual field quickly the heart rate breathing all the kind of standards that we
hear sympathetic nervous system activation but the mental component is one in which time is being sliced very finely so you're constantly anticipating and evaluating your environment and your internal state. Because oftentimes people are aware of their so-called interception there are keenly aware of how nervous they are or upset they are and this element of uncertainty of being unable to predict when it's going to pass and this creates a kind of meta stress it's sort of like when people
have trouble sleeping then they create this kind of meta anxiety and insomnia they're now they're stressed about not sleeping and so then it makes it even harder to sleep the same thing was stress the more we stress the more we want the stress to pass and I think that
resolving the uncertainty element is powerful and I think it starts by taking control of the mind through the route of the body when our mind is not stable whatever that means but we're not able to control our mental state or it's not where we'd like it to be we need to look to the powers of respiration of vision of movement of weight training of running to reorient the mind I think it is futile to try and rescue thinking with thinking.
And that's not to say that thinking in an exploration of the mind like with psychoanalysis or journaling is not powerful but for restabilizing our system these brain states of mind and body I think the body is the more powerful entry point and have you always been fascinated
by fear or why did that become a focal point probably because I was the kid that was last to drop in on the ramp probably because I have lived and existed with a fair amount of fear this seems to have gotten better over the years for instance I can remember skateboarding
home there's this bike path that used to connect the school that I went to the back of some houses and I would push back through there at night and I would start to imagine that terrible things were going to happen to me I think that fear was a strong default and I can't assign that
to any earlier experience I think I just had a lot of baseline anxiety and fear and so resolving that and figuring out tools that people could use that I could use also to resolve those things really fast has been a major effort in my life including my laboratory. I'd like to if it's okay with you shift gears a little bit and just pepper you with a bunch of random questions that have absolutely no continuity with anything we just talked about. Sure thing.
All right because I just I have this sort of scratch pad full of these various things that I want to ask about often without a whole lot of context just from various reading and so on so turmeric effects on DHT could you elaborate on this DHT dihydrotistosterone I'm guessing
what should we know about DHT in turmeric effects on DHT and I ask in part because it's something that he was all the time in cooking there seems to be some research to suggest that products like TheraQ human I believe it's called as the brand name might attenuate some risk related to say neuro degenerative disease or Alzheimer's so I'd love to know more about this.
Yeah so brief endocrinology lesson on testosterone DHT testosterone is the Androgen of course that's responsible for also growth deepening the voice aggression sex drive etc. But DHT dihydrotistosterone is made from testosterone through an enzyme called 5-Holver
ductase DHT is the more powerful Androgen anywhere from 300 to 600 times the affinity for the Androgen receptor DHT is the and it's affinity for the Androgen receptor not so incidentally is the basis of Nandrolone Deca known in gym circles actually a female runner that was
a good pick for the 1500 just got a four year ban or Nandrolone positive test she claims and her coach claims that it came from a burrito containing pork with Nandrolone I actually would love somebody to go it's what we're gonna see more of this in the years to come I'd
like somebody to actually analyze meat for Climbuteral and Nandrolone to just see because I'm not happy that this happened or it's a sad situation but we could fairly say that there's been a dark shadow cast by a burrito over the Olympic qualification. What all the sprinters were diagnosed as narcoleptics you remember that with
Oh really? Meda-daphne? Yeah they're all on Meda-finele and various stimulants and so they had these scripts from their doctors and letters saying they're all narcoleptics just amazing the Venn diagram to get them quick out the blocks that's where the race is one
here that gun and get out the blocks that's so Nandrolone is Deca the reason people take it whether or not she took her and I don't know but the reason people take it is because DHT as the more powerful Androgen with this higher affinity is the one that's mainly responsible for libido and many of the cognitive effects of testosterone.
One of the more powerful effects of testosterone is that because of the fact that there are Androgen receptors in the amygdala that it has a fear suppressing component to it and DHT testosterone but really DHT has a property of making effort feel good. That's probably the main psychological effect of testosterone aside from its effects on libido
and the body periphery. So some people are very DHT sensitive. If you're somebody for instance that takes creatine and experiences hair loss very quickly, you're probably DHT sensitive. That's because creatine increases DHT. DHT will promote hair loss on the scalp like my hair lens retreating quite nicely and out of because of DHT receptors here and it promotes beard growth so it has these inverse effects on the face and on the scalp.
But turmeric is a fairly potent DHT antagonist. Now whether or not it does that by occupation of the Androgen receptor or some other mechanism I don't know people will vary in their sensitivity. I am very sensitive to turmeric. If I take turmeric my DHT levels plummet and I'm not taking Nandralone nor am I eating pork burritos. But the sensitivity will vary
and you can kind of predict that sensitivity by how you react to creatine. If you're somebody that takes low doses of creatine which many people do and experience hair loss, chances are when you take turmeric you're going to see a reduction in DHT. Means that your five-off or a ductase system and or this interaction between turmeric and the Androgen receptor are for whatever reason more sensitive in you. Some people take turmeric and feel perfectly fine.
I noticed an immediate blunting of all the good stuff let's say that DHT and testosterone do when I take even a minimum of turmeric. Now that doesn't mean I can't have a little bit of turmeric in a drink like a juice drink or something but dosing turmeric is not something that I do or that I recommend for people. Now women do make a little bit of DHT. It might be a whole different story with them but I think for men you probably just want to do the experiment. It's quickly reversible if you stop
taking turmeric so you can evaluate this. Some people will be fine. You can do a blood test, you can do it subjectively. Is a finasteride propitia that is often used for mitigating hair loss? That is I think it's a five alpha reductase inhibitor. Would that also have the effect of decreasing DHT levels? I want to say there are anecdotal reports and people please do your own turmeric.
Go to PubMed and do some research but I want to say that least among strength athletes that I've heard anecdotal reports of propitia use correlating to decreases in strength gains for male athletes. Absolutely and it certainly can reduce DHT levels. Certainly more for those that
are sensitive to it. Just to underscore how powerful DHT is we have what are called primary and secondary sex characteristics secondary sex characteristics are like body hair deepening the voice etc. But the primary characteristics like the presence of a penis or not and this is independent of gender. This is just biological sex. It's encoded by the Y chromosome. That's entirely controlled by DHT during development and masculinization of the brain is a separate pathway.
But there's this phenomenon that I think is in the Dominican Republic. A genetic disruption in some of these pathways and there that people can look this up the so called Huedosis. This is a famous story and energy of children that look female at birth by genitalia and then because of a surge in DHT later they literally sprout a penis at about and testicles descend at about age 12. And there's a whole story there.
It actually was part of the story that helped neuroendocrinologists and developmental biologists understand the role of five alpha reductase in testosterone's conversion to DHT. Fascinating biology there. Much too much going to now in detail but people can look it up online. DHT is powerful in development and it's powerful throughout the life span. So you want to keep levels of DHT appropriately high. But don't take nangelone if you're sprinting in the Olympics.
So that's not the way to get your nangelone is not the way to get your DHT. Yeah. Even if you do get it through through anabolic Piggies. Just like there's so many more cost effective ways to make pigs grow. Deca-derablin injections is probably not high on the list. They need natty menus, right? They need menus that are like if you're Olympic athlete, please just prepare your own food. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So so many directions to go here.
It makes me wonder also if anyone has looked at turmeric or curcumin or whatever the actual compound is responsible for this DHT inhibition, whether it's via five alpha reductase or otherwise, on pregnancy and birth gender. I'm wondering if that would have any effect. If DHT is pressed in a woman who is pregnant if that would have any effect on birth gender. Yeah, that's a topic that I don't think the experience ever been done. But my postdoc advisor, Ben Barris, was transgendered.
And it's an interesting story. Briefly, he was an identical twin. He from a very early age, he felt entirely uncomfortable in a female body. He knew he wanted to be male from a very young age, but I got a lot more puberty. His sister, who I've interacted with as well, is perfectly happy being a woman, enjoys being woman and their identical twins. And their mother was actually treated with an angiogenic drug during pregnancy. Then, unfortunately, passed away
of pancreatic cancer a few years ago. He was an incredibly accomplished neuroscientist and physician. His name is Barris B-A-R-R-E-S. There are a number of obituries. I wrote one for nature that life and his transition and some of the biology. But nonetheless, Ben and I spent about a year before he died. I recorded a lot of conversations with Ben that I haven't released yet talking about what it was like to be a girl, what it was like to be a woman, what it was like to
be a man later in life. Just as I, he's a close friend of mine. I want to understand that. And he described that this was an immediate effect. As soon as he knew there was a difference between boys and girls, he knew that he was in the wrong body. He likened it to, if you woke up tomorrow and you were in a gorilla's body, that's how uncomfortable it was knowing
that that's how he described it. And he thought that perhaps, you know, this early energetic drug treatment might have shaped his brain differently than his sister somehow. Um, where is so many, so many interesting questions about, you know, phytoestrogens or sort of these zenoestrogens and the environmental inputs that could affect that entire biochemical cocktail to different, different outputs testosterone. So we've talked a little bit about
DHT. There's a goldilocks range depending on your gender and your objectives for testosterone. Are there any particular supplements that you use to, I hesitate to use this word because it's so gold dependent, but it's optimized your testosterone or DHT levels or reduced sex hormone binding, globular or whatever. If you're sort of toying with your androgens, how do you like to do it? Optimizing and or understanding testosterone,
I think is vital for men and women because it's so powerful. Obviously get your sleep bright. That's an important one and you do that through. So that's an indirect effect. That's keeps stress, chronic stress to a minimum. That's an indirect effect. Train hard, but not too long. That's an indirect effect. Mostly. In the supplementation space, there are two things that have worked very well for me and that I've recommended to a number
of people that have worked well for them. And those two things are Tongat Ali, which at 400 milligrams per day is thought to reduce sex hormone binding, globular because of, for those that don't know testosterone can exist in a free or bound form. People here
binding globulins and they bind up testosterone and prevent free testosterone. They think this is terrible, but actually, albumin and sex hormone binding, globulin are wonderful because they ensure that whatever testosterone you make will be delivered to your tissues over a long period of time and different tissues need different amounts of testosterone.
And so you don't want to plummet sex hormone binding, globulin, but Tongat Ali, either through reducing sex hormone binding, globulin or through direct effects on increasing androgen release will increase your testosterone. Now, the way to explore this, and I'm not saying anyone should do this, you definitely want to work with your physician, but the way to explore this is 400 milligrams per day, taken once per day early in the day because
it can have a little bit of a stimulant effect, make you more alert. That works well. It doesn't need to be taken chronically. It tends to work better as you get into the second and third month of use. And I don't see any reason to cycle it unless somehow something's spikes on your liver enzymes or something. The other supplement that is quite useful is Fodogia Agrestis. Fodogia Agrestis is one of these plant alkaloids that, I think
it comes from a Nigerian shrub. I might have that wrong, but Fodogia Agrestis acts as a luteinizing hormone mimic. So it actually stimulates the testes to produce more testosterone. So it's like HCG, it's like a bit like HCG, but for whatever reason, it doesn't seem to increase estrogen, which is unique because HCG will increase estrogen. Now, just anecdotally,
I started using those in combination. So it's 400 milligrams of Tonga Ali. I have no relationship to the company, so I can mention where I get it from, although I hope they don't sell out as a cons, they will sell out as a consequence. A solar a makes a good version of this. Sometimes these things are packaged in with other things, but solar a has a pure form. And then Fodogia Agrestis, I think it's herbal elixirs makes a Fodogia
Agrestis. And some people make the mistake of taking far too much Fodogia Agrestis. I think on the bottle, they recommend two to three times a day, one 425 milligram capsule. I believe is more than sufficient. And anecdotally, for me, what this did is it increased my total testosterone by about 200 points. So I fell kind of in the middle of the range. I was
neither high nor low. I was at about 600, hovering somewhere around 600. These two supplements consistently bring it up into the high sevens or low eights, which is in the direction that I wanted to go. Do you think Fodogia Agrestis, if it is luteinizing hormone similar, meaning it's a mimic of sorts, do you think that would have any, I guess it probably would have a sort of downregulating effect on endogenous production of LH?
Well, what's interesting is when I've done my blood work twice a year, at least for me, it did not downregulate LH, which is nice because things like HCG definitely would downregulate LH. People who take testosterone, SIPI-8, so-called TRT, or similar, we'll see a downregulation in luteinizing hormone. So Fodogia and Tonga Ali, I mentioned because they're sort of an intermediate between doing nothing with respect to supplements or taking things that don't really work. There are
a lot of those out there, or taking the full plunge into TRT. And I'll just mention if I may about TRT, there's a lot of interest in excitement in TRT. They now even have what's called sports TRT, which is not- And just for people who don't have the context, if I'm not sure if you already kind of named it out, but testosterone replacement therapy, TRT. So what's sports TRT? Is this like med spa type stuff?
Yeah, so people are probably wondering, wait, you're a neurobiologist, why do you know so much about this stuff? Well, I have the good fortune of doing work with various high performing communities, and there's just a lot of discussion around hormone and neural augmentation. And so I'm not
making recommendations. What I generally do with those communities and what I'm doing now is point people to the fact that there are things that lie somewhere between doing nothing and going the prescription drug route. Eating pork baritas. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. In the realm of TRT, testosterone replacement therapy, the typical dosages that people use are 160 to 200 milligrams a week, but the way it's administered doesn't match the
biology. I think this is a serious problem that needs to be dealt with. Typically, if you get a prescription, you'll go in, they'll give you one injection of anywhere from 160 to 200 milligrams, and then you go back two weeks later and you get another injection. The testes normally make anywhere from about 5 to 10 milligrams of testosterone a day.
So, if you're taking 160 milligrams of testosterone on one day, you're going to set an motion, all sorts of cascades of aromatization and estrogen conversion into DHT that you might feel terrible than great four days later and then so, so two weeks later. The way people are doing this now more intelligently is to do their injections at home, either into subcutaneously or into muscle and every third or fourth day to take a low dose of maybe 40 milligrams and to dose
it more evenly because these long lasting forms like CIPI-8 do release over time. But sports TRT is this intermediate that's been created on the internet where people are neither doing testosterone replacement therapy to get levels up to normal or high normal, nor are they doing what the gym rats call blasting. They're not taking three, four, five hundred.
They're taking 200 a week or 300 a week and the amount of self-directed pharmacology that's happening out there is pretty incredible and like I don't pass judgment, everybody, it's your life to live, but there are a lot of horror stories too. You can really mess yourself up by getting androgen levels too high. I'm a fan of gently moving into the supplementation space for this, seeing how it works, doing a blood test and then if people want to do
TRT over time, that's certainly their right. That's not my place to judge and you need any prescription anyway. Yeah, I'll talk to a doctor. Yeah, and just a couple of additional thoughts on all of this stuff. Well, first, the lower
dose higher frequency regimen can also be applied to many things, right? Growth hormone would be another example from the same sort of portfolio of interventions slash augmentations a lot of folks would use and separately, I would say and please, please feel free to correct mere fact check on this. But whether you're eating pork burritos, injecting yourself with anabolic of different types or eating deer antler velvet or whatever the latest fat is
that people claim increases testosterone. If you dramatically increase your testosterone levels, if you are not taking an anti aromatase, you are also going to increase your estrogen levels, even though it depends on the anabolic obviously in andro loans, very different from different types of testosterone and so on, which you know, some are more anabolic, some are more androgenic. But if you suddenly wallop yourself with much higher levels of testosterone,
you are also going to a portion of that will be converted to estrogen. And so it's just something to be aware of, right? It's very hard to get a biological free lunch. And if you're feeding yourself a bunch of stuff and your testes like the Siberian, what were they albino rats? Yes, Siberian hamsters. If your balls go from whatever your comfortable ball diameter is down to like raisins, you may require post-cycle therapy, PCT, various
drugs to successfully off ramp from these types of interventions. Unless like some power lifters, you're just going to be loaded all year round, 365, 247, which is obviously your choice if you want to do something like that. But it's a waste of time. I'm glad you did. Good idea to get medical, medical supervision for all these types. Definitely. And along those lines, I should just mention, well, I will say that Fodogia tends
to have the opposite effect on the testicles. It actually will cause a fairly not pronounced, but it increases testicle size. That's a pretty strong effect or a media effect of Fodogia. The other thing is that right now there's a lot of excitement about peptides. People are like, oh, the so-called secretogogs. It sounds like synagogue, but it's secretogog. Whereas these are not taking growth hormone, but taking peptides that promote growth hormone
release. And then people are taking gastropeptide this. And here's the deal. Things that make us feel more vital, like testosterone, DHT, growth hormone. Generally, we'll shorten your life. I know that's a bit of a controversial statement, but if you step back and use this, just ask yourself, what is the most vital, energetic phase of your life? It's puberty. When all these hormones are really high. And puberty is the most rapid period of aging
that any of us go through. I was talking about this recently with the longevity researcher and I, and it's kind of interesting that all the longevity, the attempts at increasing life span are like starving yourself, which is catabolic, reducing blood sugar, which is catabolic. And that's on the opposite side of all these things like testosterone,
which is anabolic, insulin, which is anabolic, growth hormone, which is anabolic. And so, animalism sounds like a great thing, although it does sound remarkably similar to cannibalism, but growth and vitality, libido, strength, etc. That all it sounds wonderful and in its proper form and context is wonderful. But the reason why I think we see people dying early who do a lot of growth hormone into testosterone is because they've effectively
created a third and fourth round of puberty. You're accelerating aging. And so, I think vitality and longevity always have to be balanced with one another. Totally. And we could go for hours just on this one topic. One other cautionary note, well, two, actually, number one, unless you're type one diabetic, don't inject insulin,
there are athletes who do this, but you can very easily kill yourself. The second is, if you're taking a lot of growth agents, some of them are not selective discolplomussel tissue. And you may as a male end up looking like you're in your second trimester from enlarged organs. And guess what? When you get off of those drugs, your organs don't automatically resume their smaller size. This is also why certain baseball players and so on have gone
up multiple helmet sizes. It's not from porporitas. Those effects are durable. You can't just hit undo on those things. So very, very good points. Pays to be cautious. All right. So two, a few other things, cognitive enhancement or cognitive boosting supplements, much like
the testosterone playing field. There's a clown car full of ridiculous propositions. There are, of course, then the prescription and medical route where there are certain things that will help some things like nicotine can be tremendously effective, but come with some possible downsides associated. Do you have any particular thoughts on cognitive enhancement
or how you think about that specifically on the pharmacological supplement side? I know there are many other things that we can also talk about. Yeah. I'm glad you mentioned it. Many other things. I won't list them out again, but I do believe that the most powerful, neutropic and cognitive support is going to come from
quality sleep and 100 percent agreed. Yeah. So that's night and day. On the pharmacologic side, I think alpha GPC has real effects that are supported by quality peer reviewed studies, including some studies looking at offsetting age-related cognitive decline. So generally, it comes in capsule form of 300 milligrams or so. I think taken occasionally or more than
occasionally provide it fairly early in the day. It does increase focus without increasing the kind of sympathetic arm of the nervous system, in other words, without increasing arousal and alertness too much. So I do think alpha GPC is a useful supplement and I use
it from time to time. If I've slept well, I don't take it. If I really want to push a workout hard or a work session or writing session or data analysis session hard, I'll take 300 milligrams of that and drink a couple of espresso or drink some mate and some water. Stay hydrated. Hydration is a big one for cognitive function and it's one that
people often overlook. But the simple rule is that this is what I call the galpin equation because Andy Galpin, who's a great exercise physiologist, came up with this for physical work, but it turns out to work for cognitive work too, which is that basically your body weight and pounds divided by 30 will give you the number of ounces of water that you should drink about every 20 minutes when exercising or doing mental work. Might seem like a lot. There
might be an extra trip to the bathroom or two, but it's worth it. Dehydration is a subtle, but very pernicious creep where you start having a hard time focusing your eyes. You just feel like you want to go to sleep. That hydration factor is real. So drink plenty of fluids, especially if you're ingesting caffeine, which of course is a diuretic. My personal favorite vehicle for caffeine remains yerba mate. I just absolutely adore
the effects of yerba mate. I'm not saying it's for everyone, but you have the caffeine and I might be getting the pronunciation off. You also have a belief theophiline, which you would find in green tea and theobromine, which you'd also find in say dark chocolate, side note trivia for folks. Theobromine from theo as in theosophy, theobroma, food of the gods. So that's kind of fun. But yeah, but the pharmacokinetics of those are all different.
So unlike coffee, which I have a love-hate relationship with because I metabolize it so quickly that I get this sort of snickers bar sugar high of caffeine for very short time, 20 or 30 minutes. And then my baseline of sort of subjective perceived energy is lower than
when I started. So what happens then? I become a crackhead who drinks eight cups of coffee a day, not so with yerba mate, especially when you're kind of titrating it in in the way that they would consume it in a place like Argentina or Uruguay, where you're just kind of sipping it slowly. It's great stuff. I found a brand that I don't have any relation to them, but I found one that I particularly like. It has a weird name,
but it's Anna Park. It's an organic and a part of a mate. I don't know who Anna is or her park or maybe her name is Anna Park, but it's nice. It has the right amount of that tobacco flavor, but it's not burnt to the point of feeling kind of overwhelming. The other thing about caffeine that's kind of interesting is that most people would benefit from waiting 90 minutes to two hours after waking to ingest their caffeine. The way caffeine interacts
with the adenosine receptor. Remember, you get sleepy because of time of day with that sort of whole circadian clock mechanism, but also because of the build up of adenosine in your system. That's the sleepiness factor, really. And when you wake up in the morning, if you immediately compete out any residual adenosine, you lose the benefit of that
cortisol pulse, essentially clearing out the rest of the adenosine. And so a lot of people, despite the pain of having to do this the first day or two, feel much better throughout the day, less of that cracked out kind of rise and crash feeling on caffeine. If they delay their coffee or mate, or about 90 minutes to two hours after waking. Oh, that's great to know. Side note for people who may want to do some further research
and reading into caffeine. The name, role and Griffiths has come up multiple times on this podcast. He's an incredible scientist and researcher based at Johns Hopkins, who is he is one of the most, I would say, esteemed researchers alongside, say, Matt Johnson Roland has just been at it for longer with respect to psilocybin and psychedelics. So he's associated with that. But prior to psychedelics, he was one of the world's foremost experts
in caffeine metabolism. And so he has published and performed studies related to caffeine that are intensely interesting. So for people who want to dig deeper into that, Roland is Roland Griffiths is a great resource. One thing I've been wondering because there are drugs that you can use to counteract other drugs. So if you go to Bellevue and the
psych ER and someone comes in just high out of their mind on cocaine, right? There are medications they could be given to try to take them down a notch or two or three or ten like halidol or not sure if that's used any longer. But there are many different drugs that could be used in the case of caffeine. Let's just say someone named Jim Barris, for sake of argument, is working on his laptop at a restaurant and said restaurant has
excellent service, which means they also have the never ending cup of coffee. And so before he knows it, he's had five cups of coffee even though he only ordered one coffee. Is there a way to reverse or counteract the effects of caffeine on a denocene such that you can actually get to sleep? So if you hit the golf ball and you're like, oh, fuck. Looking at the half life of caffeine, there's no way I'm getting to sleep until like three in
the morning. Is there any way to address that or is it just fate a complaint and you're more or less screwed? Yeah, one direct and two indirect. The direct way to do that is increase your glucose. You know, the whole notion that you can soak it up by eating some bread. You will see a blunting of the stimulant effect. Now whether or not that's also due to some, I don't know, increase in serotonin or something from
the carbohydrate isn't clear. But yeah, you could have a bagel or two or whatever it is that you're the compatible carbohydrate. These days carbohydrates are such a complicated thing for most people. I like carbohydrates, especially late in the day. I do the either fast and go low carb, no carb during the day because that lets me focus. And that's a meat and salad during the day or not eating for portions day. And then at night, I eat
pasta and rice and I eat very little protein, sleep like a baby. That's what works. But the other way is to take theanine. So before we were talking about theanine in reference to pre-sleep supplementation, 30 or 60 minutes before sleep, but 100 to 200 milligrams of
theanine will take the shitters out of a caffeine experience. And in fact, so much so that a lot of energy drinks now are starting to include theanine as an attempt to get you to ingest more of those energy drinks because they understand that at some point people hit threshold and they feel so wide-eyed and wired that they're not going to consume more. So they're
tricking you this way and it does indeed work. The other thing is, if you ever really need to sleep, I mean, again, be cautious, do what's compatible with your physician's advice. But GABA, you know, you can buy GABA and glycine in capsule form. So a gram of GABA, a gram of glycine in combination. That's more of a heavy hit over the head. But if you're having a hard time getting to sleep, that can help. I don't recommend people take those chronically
because GABA, of course, is a neurotransmitter. And I don't believe really in taking things that are very close to the actual thing that you're trying to manipulate. For instance, I'm not a fan of taking aldopa. Why would I do that? I don't have Parkinson's. But people take macuna purines, which is essentially 99% aldopa. And you'll get really, really elevated,
but then you'll really crash for a day or two. So I think that pulling on the marionette strings a little bit from a distance is better than taking the specific compound that you're trying to replace unless there's a clinical need, of course. One more topic and since we're at about two hours and 30, we'll wrap up in just a little bit. But the vagus nerve, what is the vagus nerve, what is the latest and greatest, why
is it of interest? So the vagus nerve is a nerve network. It's many nerves. It could even be thought of as its own major branch of the peripheral nervous system. It comes out of the brain, basically, and connects to all the organs of the body. And this is the pathway by which a mental state can influence our digestion, our heart rate, our breathing. We talked earlier, but our V heart rate variability, the vagus is an important component to the slowing
down of the heart rate when we exhale. It's a very important pathway, and it's bidirectional. So the organs of the body that I just mentioned, the lungs, the gut, the heart, et cetera, the spleen, they also send nerve connections back to the brain. And there's been a lot of interest in the vagus as a purely calming system. And that's simply not true. The medical textbooks call it appropriately cranial nerve 10. It's in the parasympathetic arm of
the nervous system, which suggests that it's all calming, but actually it's not. It has branches of it that are kind of stimulating as well. So in the kind of wellness and self-help community, you hear, oh, you know, you should do this thing of rubbing in front of your ears. That's a branch of the vagus. It calms you down or stimulate the vagus to calm down.
Now in neuroscience laboratories, and even in some human neurosurgery laboratories, the way that you get people more alert, in fact, a form of depression treatment, is to stimulate the vagus, and it makes people more alert and more positive and excited. So vagal stimulation can easily cause increases in alertness. How do they do the stimulation? This is a beautiful story. A colleague of mine, perhaps, in at least to my mind, the most
impressive neurobiologist. I know a guy by name, Carl Diceroth, he invented, discovered, and invented channel red options, which are these from algae, essentially, that are light sensitive, clone the genes. You can put those genes into neurons. You have to do this by viral injection. And then you have a little blue light diode that will allow you to stimulate just those neurons locally. Carl's a psychiatrist, a bioengineer, and a neurobiologist operating
at the very highest level. Actually, there's a book that he just published that I'm listening to now that is, it's just can only be described as beautiful. It's a description of the landscape of psychiatry and his attempts to build tools that are better than drugs to manipulate the nervous system. It's called projections. And it's a beautiful read. You'll learn a ton of neuroscience. Carl is well on his way to win every big prize in science. He's got
all of them right now, except the last one. And I'm not on the committee that votes for those, but he's remarkable. Also has five children happily married. I mean, he's like one of these. His wife is a phenomenal scientist in physician. These people are, as one of the reasons I like being at Stanford is because the mean is so very high, but Carl shifts the mean like he's that dark way out there. In any event, Carl, there's a beautiful article
that I can reference. Send you the link to in the New Yorker where Carl is sitting there talking with his patient and she has suicidal depression. And she's describing her lack of desire to live. And then he cranks up the intensity on this stimulation of the Vegas. And in real time, she starts describing how she actually would be interested in applying for a couple of jobs this year. This is happening in the order of seconds by stimulation of
the Vegas. What is the machine? What is it actually? How does it connect her? That one is an implanted electrical stimulation device that's placed probably on their many branches of the Vegas. And so on a branch that isn't going to impact breathing. Sometimes people have challenges with swallowing. So there are problems with doing that. Carl, a big part of his mission is to create very small light diodes that can stimulate nerves without
the need to inject viruses and things of that sort. So that I think at a time not too far from now, thanks to his work and the work of other bioengineers, we are going to be able to stimulate, for instance, just the serotonin neurons in the Raffa that lead to active coping. This is a well known phenomenon. Whereas when you take prozac or Zoloft or one of these other drugs, it will stimulate those neurons, but will also stimulate the serotonin
receptors on the spinal neurons that control the sexual response. And that's why they have sexual side effects. So more precision is coming. So as it relates to Vegas, the other way in which the Vegas is stimulating is something that we do quite often. We have neurons in our gut that we all hear about the gut brain axis. And people say it's your second brain, but very seldom does anyone actually describe how the second brain actually impacts
the other brain. And the simple way to put this is we have these neurons that live in the mucosal lining of our gut. And those neurons sense three things. They sense fatty acids. So they like fat. They sense amino acids. They love that umami flavor. And they love amino acids because that's vital to protein repair metabolism, et cetera. Protein synthesis excuse me. And they like sugar. And when you eat something that has fatty acids, amino
acids or sugar, these neurons send a signal. They're part of the Vegas nerve up to a little cluster of neurons in your neck called the no dos ganglia, no D O S E. And the no dos ganglia then stimulates your deep brain centers to release dopamine. And the amazing thing about
this, these are data from a guy named Diego Borges at Duke University. The amazing thing about this system is that even if you numb the mouth, even if you just gavage a person or an animal and put these substances into the stomach, you will seek more of these foods. And so you're actually seeking sugar, amino acids and fat more when you ingest those foods
independent of how they taste. And so this has a whole set of implications for hidden sugars and the fact that so many of the foods we eat, we just find ourselves eating more of them. We think this doesn't even taste. I don't even know why I'm eating this. It's because these neurons in your gut are stimulating dopamine release. And as we talked about before, dopamine isn't a molecule of pleasure. It's a molecule of making you want to do whatever
led to dopamine release. Yeah, the molecule of more, the molecule of more. So the Vegas is multifaceted. And we will soon hopefully subdivide it into some more meaningful pathways. I don't like to knock on anyone else's work. But I do think that most of what you read out there about the Vegas and what it does and various theories about it are partial truths to total nonsense. But they are partial truths to total nonsense that
were grounded in the biology as we understood it at the time. And just a lot more has been understood in the last 10 years or so. So no disrespect to those people, but it's time for a revision. Maybe two or three more questions, then we'll go get some food. And something along those lines. The first is what books have you gifted the most to other people? Or are there any books that come to mind that you've gifted often to other people?
I love poetry. And it's almost cliche now to say this because so many people like his work. But I think David White's work is just beautiful and is a wonderful kind of entry point to poetry. I'm also a big Wendell Berry fan. I was written a lot about farming and the natural world. And I've never met him. But I'm a huge Wendell Berry fan. So I'll
sometimes give Wendell Berry books as gifts. The book that I think is perhaps at least to me the most beautiful book of all is Longitude by Davos Sobel about the history of the
discovery of timekeeping at ocean, which is not a trivial problem to solve. And it's just a beautiful story of how scientists, or in this case a particular scientist, merged the quest for a technology with a scientific problem with adventure and going out on boats and risking one's life for the sake of science is something that resonates with me a bit. It's a beautiful short book and it's very accessible to anybody whether or not you have
a background in science or not. And she's an absolutely wonderful writer. And so that's the one I gift most often. Is there a particular David White book or starting point that you might recommend? You know, I own several of his books, but I confess that I'm forgetting the titles now. You know what's interesting about David White is that his poetry is best consumed by listening to him. Read it because he does this thing of repeating things twice and his cadence is
so impressive. And so I would even though I I loads to kind of push people toward online and do buy his books, but I would suggest just going online and listening to a YouTube video or watching YouTube video of David reading one of his poems, he's on to something. The thing about poetry that's so fascinating to me is the same reason why I love anything sung by Bob Dylan or Joe Strummer is that the words don't necessarily make sense in the
pure cognitive landscape. They're tapping into some sort of deeper layer of the nervous system that defies the normal structure of sentences and thoughts. And so I think they good poets are accessing the subconscious and has nothing to do with rhyming. It has to do with accessing some layer of neurobiology that we just don't have a name for. Andrew, this question is sometimes a complete dead end and I'll take the blame for that if it is,
but just just to go fishing and see what we catch here. If you could put anything on a gigantic billboard metaphorically speaking to get a message out quote an image or word could be anything. I quote from someone else, anything at all, two billions of people, what might you put on that billboard? Well, assuming this is a big billboard, I could probably squeeze two things on there, but I would diminish the impact of either one.
So it's so simple, but it's the most use at least has been the most useful thing in life to me, which is credit goes to the Oracle, which is know thyself. If there's one thing that's a really useful pursuit is to take a really good stock of what you've come into the world with and where you happen to be at present, get really honest about that with yourself. And in doing that, it illuminates the path to filling in the gaps and improving
oneself and knowing myself is a dynamic process. And the answer is to knowing myself and what that is will change over time. But that is the question that I think everybody as soon as we are able to should be asking ourselves and constantly updating. No thyself. What was second pick? You can put it on the other side of the billboard. Yeah, the other one was far weaker as the one I think, but use the body to control the
mind. I really worry about this current state of the world where people are so unable to regulate their autonomic nervous system. They're stressed, they're angry, they're pissed, and look, I suffer from this too. So when sometimes a comment on whatever I'm mostly on Instagram, but sometimes on Twitter and I notice all this anger and stuff and you start
getting pulled into it from time to time, I regulate my behavior. I don't respond, but we're all subject to this, but almost all harm, almost all self harm and unfortunate things in life are the consequence of a poorly regulated autonomic nervous system. We say the wrong thing, we do the wrong thing, we're impulsive, et cetera. And I think controlling the autonomic nervous system is simple in one sense and challenging in the other. Simple in the sense
that the tools exist. I do believe that respiration and vision are the two ways to control the autonomic nervous system in real time, the best ones. And at the same time, it's very hard to do. So we have to remind ourselves, that's why I'd want to put it on the billboard, that when your mind isn't where you want it to be, use your body to control your mind. I love that. I'm going to use that on a long hike with the pooch over the little later
today. And we'll also include for everybody listening, show notes with links to various resources, all the resources that we've discussed. So the Yoganidra, the various types of breath work. I'll also add a name, which is Leah Lagos, Dr. Leah Lagos has done a lot of really good work looking at resonance training using breath work for improving HRV. Although improved HRV is really just a proxy for all of these other desirable outputs and effects in the
world and in life. So we'll include all of that in the show notes. Andrew, we've covered a lot of ground. Is there anything else that you would like to mention or say or point people to and you request to the audience, anything at all that you'd like to add before we wrap up for today? We mentioned some of the things at the beginning. I teach neuroscience on Instagram at Hubert Minlab. Those are resources brief snippets anywhere from one to three minutes
about neuroscience, exciting papers. I see a lot of tools be wonderful if people want to check out the podcast. We cover a lot of topics, not just neuroscience and we batch those by month so that we do four or five episodes in one thing like hormones and then move on to something else. And I suppose one request would be we have the saying in a laboratory.
It's certainly not unique to laboratories, which is watch one, do one, teach one. And what would be most gratifying for me would be if people find tools that they find useful and they that they learn about them, that's the watch one part that they do them. They apply them in their own life and modify them if you like. And then I think the way the world works best at least in my view is when people go on to teach those tools and attribution
isn't required. I didn't as I always say, you know, I wasn't consulted that the design phase and I don't know anyone else that was either. So, you know, mother nature and deserves and biology deserve credit for all this. And so if people would like to learn, practice and teach, I like to think that the world can improve by virtue of sharing of tools. I love it. A dig it man. And there are a number of places people can follow you and should
check you out. As you mentioned, the Huberman Lab podcast, Hubermanlab.com and Huberman Lab at Huberman Lab on Instagram and Twitter. This has been so fun. And I really appreciate all the time. It's been a real pleasure spending time with you, Andrew. And I look forward to many more conversations of feeling that people will want a round two. So until then, thanks to you and thanks to everyone for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off and that is five
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