LIVE EVENT Q&A: Dr. Andrew Huberman at Plenary in Melbourne

26:59You will see a dramatic reduction in cortisol under those conditions. This blue and UV pathway picked up by a certain set of neurons in the eye, the intrinsic photosensile, melanobs and cells, etc. is a real thing and it's designed to activate you. This is why so -called seasonal effective disorder lamps, sad lamps are basically bright, blue, white -ish light. So when you're doing that shift work, if you can get into red or orange or amber light conditions, if that's great, you can do this very inexpensively by the way. By just getting some party lights, it doesn't have to be any fancy red light.

27:36This is not time for red light panels. The other thing, of course, is when you get back to your non -work environment, you need to do some work to think about when is best to sleep, when is not best to sleep. It's the best to sleep all day and be up all night or get that sunlight in the morning. I talk about that in the shift work episode. I attempted to go down that rabbit hole now, but I would just encourage you to take a look at that episode. I'll just cue you all to a resource. The hubraminlab .com website allows you, thanks to our wonderful engineers, to put in multiple topics. So you could say shift work, red light, or shift work, dopamine, or shift work, sunlight, and it will take you to the exact time stamps across all the episodes where those specific topics occur.

28:23It's all zero cost. As opposed to having to go and peruse all these different episodes. A lot of people have said, why not shorter episodes? It's like, well, the idea was to create a library of information that now AI is, and better engineering of websites can allow you to just pull the relevant information just like you would a book. I used to go to the library for those of you like me, old enough to remember, you actually took this thing called a book off of shelf, you zero copied it. In any event, it's very archaic, and very expensive, and you'd always get the margin of the book in the middle, like the spine, it sucked.

28:57Now you can go to the website and just get that information, and then we also just launched an AI .hubraminlab .com website, it has all zero cost, you can just say, hey, what should I do for shift work? But I want you here to come here tonight, so I didn't tell you that until you got here. No, I'm just kidding, I'm just kidding. Okay. And there are a few other tools about adjusting, eating schedules, and why not for shift work, but hopefully that gets you going, Julia. Thank you. What's the difference between NSDR and meditation? Thank you for this question. I am a huge, huge, huge believer and proponent and practitioner of NSDR, non -sleep deep rest.

29:37What is non -sleep deep rest? Well, to be fair, yoga -needro, which translates to yoga sleep, is a thousand -year -old practice, thousands of your little practices in which you lie completely still, keep the mind awake. You're not thinking in a structured way, it's more of a body scan, directed relaxation, et cetera. I discovered this in 2015 when I was doing some research for a book that I still can't manage to seem to finish on trauma and addiction, and I went, I have a friend, very talented trauma therapist, who's managed to help people with all sorts of addictions, who could be on the podcast in the not too distant future.

30:14I went down to this clinic in Florida, and everyone there spent the first hour of the day doing yoga -needro. This is pretty wacky. I was still in my pure scientist, quote unquote pure scientist, naive, scientist lens, and I thought, what is this about? He said, well, you know, so much of addiction is about an inability to regulate impulses, to deal with agitation, especially in the early days of trying to get sober or being sober, and it just helps people learn to regulate self -direct their nervous system in terms of relaxed, self -directed relaxation, it also seems to help with their sleep, it also has these components about time, and sort of, because he said, you know, it's kind of interesting, if you take a step back, if you can tolerate craving for a second, you just did it, so why couldn't you do it for another second?

31:05It's not as if it necessarily increases linearly or over time. So, you know, what's going on, and so again, sort of our ability to realize and regulate our states across time, and to realize there's this funny thing where when we feel terrible, we think it's going to go on forever, and when we're happy, we're like certain it's going to stop, there's a kind of asymmetry in our nervous system that we don't understand, we showed, he started talking about yoga -needra really seems to help addicts recover and stay sober, if they do it regularly. Well, this is cool, what is it? I'm a neuroscientist, we start studying it in my laboratory.

31:39We discovered that the brain goes into these states during yoga -needra that are similar to sleep, body still, mind alert, and that seems to be very beneficial, maybe even accelerates neuroplasticity and learning, and indeed there's evidence for that, and there's evidence that yoga -needra, out from a laboratory out of Scandinavia, not my laboratory showing that it can increase dopamine levels in the striatum, basal ganglia, by up to 60%, using human positive -tron emission tomography, imaging, so we're talking about how to increase dopamine through non -pharmacologic means, something about body still, brain active, very powerful way to do that.

32:20I made up this term, this acronym, non -sleep deep rest, because I have tremendous respect for yoga -needra and the yoga traditions, but I was concerned for a lot of people, unfortunately, when they hear yoga -needra, it sounds esoteric and they're not going to approach that practice. Also, yoga -needra includes intentions and some things that are on the mystical side, and I knew I was going to take some heat for it, and I feel badly about it, but that bad feeling is offset by, I think, when you call something non -sleep deep rest, it tells you what it is, and then more people are likely to come to the practice, and I felt like it was worth, you know, kind of putting myself, you know, jumping on the grenade for that one.

33:01So, non -sleep deep rest is very effective at restoring cognitive and physical vigor, and can, indeed, offset some degree of sleep loss. It also gets you better at falling and staying asleep, and it's very simple and very easy to do, and it's zero cost, and if you want to try it, you can go on to YouTube and put NSDR in my last name. There's a woman named Kelly Boys, B -O -I -S, who has a much more pleasant voice than mine, who does them as well. These are all zero cost protocols. She's also in the waking up app, and there are many of them, comedy, desire, as another person who has, you know, wonderful yoga -needra scripts.

33:40So, you can find these things, and they're really about 10 minutes to 20 minutes, sometimes 30 minutes long. You can do it for an hour, but most people won't do that consistently. You don't have to do them every day, and they're very, very effective, ever -storing, mental, and physical vigor when you're feeling depleted, and getting you to be a better sleeper. So, I figure that's a zero cost tool that is grounded in good mechanistic science, and makes sense logically, so why not? Meditation, typically, and there are many different forms of meditation, but if you're, let's just say, kind of, standard, if there were such a thing.

34:17Third eye meditation, closing your eyes, focusing your concentration on a point just sort of at your forehead, concentrating on breathing, redirecting your attention to your breathing, if you're attention drifts. We know, based on work from Wendy Suzuki's laboratory at New York University, and some work out of the University of Wisconsin, can improve memory, can improve focus, and does seem to have some stress offsetting effects, but it's more of a focus exercise as opposed to an energy replenishing exercise. Now, some people meditate and feel better afterwards, they have more energy, but then it's sort of, well, compared to what.

34:56I don't think that's the major effect of meditation, and while we're on these topics, I should just say that self -directed hypnosis of the sort that my colleague David Spiegel studies is more about solving a particular problem. Hypnosis is more about engaging neuroplasticity. Remember earlier we said that neuroplasticity and adulthood can be activated by focus followed by rest. It seems that in the self -directed hypnotic states, the brain enters kind of pattern of activity in which neuroplasticity can be accessed more quickly, we think, because the brain is both focused and relaxed in a particular way, merging that focus and rest state.

35:34And of course, the hypnotic script is not about getting you to do crazy things on stage, that stage hypnosis, but self -directed hypnosis is, for instance, smoking cessation. By the way, the success with smoking cessation from hypnosis is far greater than the cessation with smoking, from pretty much any other protocol. But unfortunately, it has the name hypnosis, which makes people think about stuff that people do on stage, that's kind of wacky. So we need a new name for it, because unfortunately, names are a problem. Their names can be differentiators as opposed to integrators. When people say I'm going to hypnotize you, or you should try hypnosis, people like yum -yok -mat, they're like yok.

36:15So by the way, does everyone here remember how you know if you're highly hypnotizable? Do you know that the Spiegel Eye Roll Test, it's not what teenagers do, David Spiegel and his father, psychiatrist, discovered the clinical application of hypnosis, it's a clinically approved tool. There's brainstem neurons that cause elevations and alertness and focus, and they're associated with moving the eyes up. They're brainstem neurons that close the eyelids and push in essentially drive the eyes down, that are associated with parasympathetic states, which is why you look this one you're tired of, you're out there, I'm sure.

36:52If you are capable of keeping your gaze upward and closing your eyelids, you score on a particular end of the so -called Spiegel Eye Roll Test, which makes you highly hypnotizable. Because that state of hypnosis is one in which you're what, alert but very, very relaxed. So if you go to Spiegel's laboratory, they're going to look at you and say, look up at the ceiling and then close your eyelids, and if you can still see the whites of your eyes as your eyelids close, then you're in the highly hypnotizable realm. Interesting, right? There's all nervous system related, and you can see this stuff as this is like real clinical tools.

37:31Okay, how do we stop ourselves from mindlessly scrolling on our phones? Hard questions. I didn't look at my watch because I'm bored, I'm just thinking how much time do you have?

37:44Well, on the way here to Australia, my Rob, who you met earlier, my friend and podcast producer, he said, okay guys, everyone's deleting social media from your phones. For the whole trip, the whole trip. I don't know if I can go on this trip, Rob, no kidding. We have one guy who's kept on his phone so that we can post things, and we continue to. Honestly, I think that's what it takes. If it's social media that you're scrolling, I think you should do a delete and reinstall. Come on, a delete and reinstall every day. Because I think, and then you have to limit the amount of time. And one of the members of my podcast team experienced this, he said, I just picked up my phone a minute ago, and I went to hit the Instagram tab.

38:36And it wasn't there, and I know it's not there. And that's where I say, yeah, at some point it becomes more compulsive than addiction. These are just reflexive behaviors. It's like walking into the refrigerator, I could do it every day of my life all day. I was like, I walk into people's homes and just look in the refrigerator. I don't even know. I get into people's cars, I look in the glove box. I just do this. I've got to look around. I'm not going to steal anything. But it's like the teenage boy in me. I just can't walk in. I'm going to open your refrigerator. So I think it gets to the point of reflexive, and it's compulsive, and it might be addictive.

39:13But it can't be good when it's like that. But I think social media can be really useful. So I think if you can set timers, you can try to grain out the screen, getting rid of the color thing. There's all this stuff, but I think if they're particular apps that you're struggling with, I would just delete them from your phone and do a reinstall. Because that's enough of a behavioral barrier. There are enough steps involved, enough sequencing to put the thing back on there each day and each time, maybe twice a day, that you're going to vastly reduce your use. To be honest, I think that's probably the best way to do it.

39:49And there are probably people in this audience that are thinking, this seems crazy. Don't turn it on. Just don't open it. And look, if I was 65 years old, I'd say that too. But it doesn't work that way for certainly the younger generation. It doesn't. I know this because I gave a talk at Santa Clara University a few years ago. I was talking about limiting social media use and phones. And this kid came up to me afterwards. He said, you don't get it. He's like, you're like, back then I was like 43. He said, you don't get it. He said, for you, the phone was a thing that you like integrated into your like post 90s high school life.

40:28Like you watched the Breakfast Club or so. I don't know how we knew that movie. I was like, you're right. I did watch the Breakfast Club a bunch of times. And he said, but for us, it's like life. I roll my eyes and I thought, wait, no, listen, I'm going to listen because no one knows what it's like to be 16 years old or 24 years old in 2024 unless you're 16 or 24. I'm like, okay, here we go. Listen, he said, when my phone, he said, when my phone powers down, I feel the energy drain out of me. And when it comes back up, I feel life energy come back into my body. And I thought, oh my goodness, like we are host.

41:09But that's, but that's the reality. And I'm of the mind, you know, I was a camp counselor. I worked with Atrice Kids. I was a wild kid. And you learned something, especially when you work with kids like me, when I was a teenager, I was a hellion, is be a channel, not a damn. You cannot block this system that's emerged. This is here and it's here to stay. So I think things like leading the app is putting it back on there is the only way to go. And we have to listen. I think we have to listen, understand that, you know, after all, adults created these technologies. And these kids are using them.

41:44And I don't think we're going to see a reversal. I don't. So we have to really, I think what he said to me as scary as it was to me, I think reflects the reality. It's part of their life energy. It's part of their connectivity. And we're going to have to come up with better tools. And I doubt those tools are going to be to the effect of eliminating it. You could say unfortunately, you know, all the adult, I last I checked, I'm an adult, people in my life have argued differently. But I think we're going to have to learn to be a channel, not a damn with this. I do. If resources and ethics were not an issue, what would your dream clinical trial to run?

42:22Oh my goodness. This is a hard question.

42:30Okay. Dream clinical trial. What's that? Oh gosh, the action is tuned. More cuddle fish. Yeah, more cuddle fish. Like cuddle fish. I like the idea of more cuddling. Physical contact. So key. I think we're all still recovering from the years. We had a few years of just like no physical like physical contact. So minimal. I mean, there's the classic, hard low experiments, right? The wire monkey versus the cloth monkey. I mean, primates go to the cloth monkey, even if they don't get food there. I mean, it's such a critical component of, you know, how our nervous system forms. I think this is a, this is a, you know what?

43:20I'm going to do something I've never done before. I'm going to turn the question around. I actually would, seriously, I'm not sure to avoid answering this, but you know, we've worked on all sort of, I've worked on cuddle fish. We worked on respiration practices. We worked on vision. We worked on neuro regeneration. You know, I've enjoyed working on a great number of different things. I'm sort of curious what people, what do you think we need more of? I've never done this, but I really want to know. I don't know how we're going to do this in any kind of non -chaotic format, but what the hell? It's late enough in the evening, we just do it.

43:54Like really, I mean, so now there's trials on psychedelics. Maybe we do this by kind of like, all throughout some options, and then we'll do it. So right now it seems that psychedelics are a big thing. Do they increase plasticity? Yeah, I'm excited about it. I'm a convert, but I do think that one has to be careful. And there are certain people in populations, like people who suffer from certain types of manic bipolar or schizophrenia that really need to avoid these things. Kids, I mean, being a kid is basically being in a psychedelic state. But you know, lateral connectivity of the brain is extensive.

44:28And you know, I don't encourage you. I mean, the trials with MDMA and PTSD are incredible. What's happening with maps is incredible. You know, 60 plus percent remission rates. It's done with licensed physicians, of course. I don't get cavalier with this. So okay, so I'll just ask. So, I mean, it's going to be hard to draw out the dissenters, but more work on psychedelics, psilocybin, etc. As ways to ameliorate depression are people like more like, yum -yuck or man. Is it like yum? Okay. We're like, yuck. Don't be afraid to say, yuck. I like a good argument. Is anyone like, yuck on psychedelics?

45:05Sorcery. It's sorcery. I heard that. Okay. All right. Interesting. Okay. So psychedelics get a strong push. I think we have enough evidence that changing patterns of respiration changes brain states. But I think that that's an interesting area. Can you just shout it out? Just shout it out. Okay. First over here. Yes? Oh, God. The accent, you guys are so good. I love the accent. Listen, I don't drink. I don't drink anymore. But when I used to go to bars, I'll just say the Australian accent never fails in the US. Yeah. Time chambers. Time chambers.

45:51Oh, hyperbaric chambers. Yeah, hyperbaric. That's an interesting one. Yeah. I mean, when I think of ways to modify physiology, you think temperature, light, neuromodulators. Right? You think, by the way, anytime you want to think about changing something in the body or brain, you think mechanical and chemical. So, this is kind of changing the chemistry of the brain and body through hyperbaric chambers. Thank you. Appreciate it. I think I reckon. Did we run into each other at the gym the other day? No. Anyway, I think I recognize you. The. Okay, I'll get to you in one second. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, love that.

46:33Okay, so protocols for childhood trauma. Yeah, so I mean, I think we're finally at the place where we, as a world where like this word trauma actually is meaningful, like because we knew it before, but I think before people thought if like if you hadn't lived in a war zone, which obviously is trauma, now I think people appreciate that trauma is inherent to a lot of life. By the way, I love your shirt, I own that. Sure, it's like, yeah, as a lawnstale, sure, it was against racism. Hey, I love that shirt. You know the history of that shirt, right? It's like lawnstale was co -opted by some Nazi groups as a brand, so lawnstale came out with against racism in hate shirt, which is like the best like, oh, to that, which is, I guess.

47:14So anyway, a little side note there, not sponsored by lawnstale, but rad shirt. Yeah, I think childhood trauma, you know, trauma can be best defined as an adverse event that changes the nervous system in a way that causes maladaptive function and going forward. It's not every bad thing, right? But it certainly happens, and I think we need to learn to rewire the nervous system. Let's face it, whether or not psychedelics or it's talk therapy or it's hyperbaric chambers or it's cold plunges, what we're talking about is neuroplasticity. We're trying to rewire the nervous system. So I love that one.

47:48We need some very structured tools. And there's all sorts of stuff about so -as, release for trauma. And you know, there's little bits, like little silos of things that are all very interesting, breath work, you know, release work. But so far, there isn't like a structured framework for treating trauma, different groups, doing different things EMDR, et cetera. I think they all have merit. Okay, there was the shouting out, consciousness, the big C. Yeah, in my house, Costello was the big C. He would always remind me of that. But consciousness, I think that, and now with AI, we have to ask ourselves, like what is consciousness?

48:27And I think we need a clear definition of what that is. Do you guys know this story of like, they were gonna solve consciousness a few years ago and they didn't do it. There was this bet in neuroscience that it was gonna be solved by 2015 or something like that. So I think we need, and it's not, obviously. So we need better definition of what that means. But I think it's a very important problem, indeed. So thank you. Maybe a free will, yeah, that's a tough one. That's when I usually avoid. Robert slammed me on that one on the podcast. What was it in the back?

49:05I heard it as an adaptive technique, but, oh, yeah. You know, we hear, yeah, we hear so much, I'm agreeing with you. The, we hear so much about ADHD these days without an understanding like, what it really reflects, except in the extreme clinical cases. So I think a better understanding. I did two episodes of the podcast, by the way, on attention in ADHD. One focused mainly on behavioral and nutritional tools. It was positively received by about half of people and then the other half were like, this is garbage, what about all the drugs that are useful? Then I did one about all the drugs that can be useful.

49:41And people said, this is garbage. You're putting kids on meth and I'm like, wait a second, hold on, we try and cover it all. So, because I favor balance, I heard excellent things. There was, we're all male voices. We kind of got a sampling bias here, unless I'm got a high frequency cut off. Thank you. Something negotiation, sorry. Science of negotiation. Yeah, so people being able to resolve differences better. Lord, please, yes. Oh my goodness. I mean, this is yes, thank you. If ever, there was a call to action. It's like, this is a big question. I'm a neuroscientist, not a historian, not a futurist or a politician, but I'm thank goodness.

50:38Imagine what a terrible job I would do. I like being outdoors, I hate meetings. I like dressing like this. And I don't like the news. It'd be the worst. But yeah, if ever there was a need and a question, it's, are we just gonna continue in these iterative cycles of like when the economy is good, things are mostly good, and then a lot of people are still suffering, and then it's like these cycles of, and, or are we going to finally just sit back and go, okay, what are we good at as a species? What are we really bad at? What are we like kind of good at? And start coming up with some tools to try and function better on the whole.

51:17With the understanding that there are bad actors out there that are constantly trying to exploit and manipulate, but there are also a lot of good actors too. And by good actors, I don't mean actors in the stage acting sense. I mean, I think that look, we're a smart species. We can think in past, present, and future terms. We can look at mechanism, we can communicate better with each other better than any species, except maybe the cuddle fish. And so, I think the question is, are we, you know, is there gonna be some sort of sitting back and finally just saying like enough? Like let's just figure out a way to dialogue.

51:56And I love that. You know, it's a, it's a, it's a science way that there are problems and there are hard problems. And honestly, I think it's gonna come about, if it comes about, it's gonna come about through groups, not through individuals. I don't think we're gonna get the like the world leader or world leaders of 12 people like, let's get it done. Let's get it done right this time. I think it's gonna be a more collective consciousness. You know, I'd like to see fewer individual leaders and more groups and panels leading things. But anyway, that's my bias and you know. Genetics?

52:42I, genetics? Genetics? Love it. Yeah. Okay, well, there's, okay, I'll say two things and then I think my team's gonna make me close out. Wait. What? I'm being a whole network.

53:06Rad, okay, awesome. Now it's turning into like a science punk rock show. So, the, genetics, why I think the big things in genetics are we're soon gonna be in the place where we can do genetic, well, right now you can take human embryos and screen them for mutations by whole genome sequencing. It's very inexpensive compared to a few years ago. It's still expensive and you can do selection. You can select out based on lack of mutations, maybe even based on over representation of certain genes. That's interesting. Has some ethical considerations, but soon we'll be, you can do CRISPR. You could, in theory, you could modify the genome of adults and certainly babies.

53:52And so that's where we're headed. It's already being done in certain countries. It was done in China. It was not looked upon kindly by the International Ethics Committee's. But it was done. A mutation in the HIV receptor. So those babies exist. So it's happening. It's gonna be interesting times. The microbiome I think is really exciting. Here's my big call to action is that there's a microbiome in the gut, but there's also microbiome on the skin, in the nose, in the mouth, in the genitals, like all these little niches, and well, I guess it depends a little, or not so little niches, depends. I was thinking about the nostrils.

54:35The night's getting long. There I go again. They are all important and there's a lot more to understand. I think the gut microbiome is just one of the microbiomes. So, and female hormones, certainly important topic. It's received far less, sadly, far less attention than male hormone therapy or understanding. Things are starting to change there. It's been slow. It's been, can you believe it? It was only like eight years ago that the National Institutes of Health in the United States was like, hey, maybe you should start studying female mice too. Like this, I mean, we're just modern science is very far behind.

55:18We're very far behind. And I think it's a resource issue. It's also, there's a bunch of sociological considerations in science. Anyway, I'm trying to change the story there, but one person, and I hope to live a very long time, but should I get hit by a bulletabuster cancer tomorrow? I want you to know that it's going to be, or late long time from now, to have natural causes. Sorry, I have a morbid sense of humor. I worked with the physicians. They all talk like that. I hope to live a very long time. But it's a collective effort. So I just want to, before we wrap, I want to say a couple of things we can get on with the rest of the night.

56:00First of all, it is a collective effort. As I've mentioned several times this evening, I look no differently on the massage therapy versus chiropractic versus whole genome sequencing. It's just all different lenses to look at. The same sort of set of goals through. And yes, there's a range of quality and rigor and communication styles and personalities. But if you can maintain some level of curiosity and discernment about what works for you or doesn't work for you, where you think there's merit, that's great. But it's going to be a wonderful thing when we can all start to dialogue and see where the points of convergence are, where you're basically talking about two different groups, talking about the exact same thing through different language.

56:45I think that's where things really can move forward. The discourse of public science and health communication, obviously, is something I'm very passionate about. I would love to see more podcasts, believe it or not, not just my podcast, but they're more podcasts. If you have something to say to the world, please say it. Please put it out there on social media. I do think that there's value there. So I'm encouraging the every person, not just usually they go. The young people, but like the every people, to get information out there and to support the efforts. Also want to say thank you so much for coming out on a Saturday night here in Melbourne.

57:22And for listening to the podcast. Yeah, it really means a lot to me. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you.

57:42I really appreciate it that the podcast is indeed a labor of love. I feel oh, so blessed to do it. And my hope is that the tools, protocols, and information will radiate out as far and wide as possible. I don't need or want credit. I just want people to have the information. I really mean that. And to share it where you think it can be useful to people. And last, but certainly not least. Thank you for your interest in science.

58:23A very powerful excuse from evolutionary strength.