LIVE EVENT Q&A: Dr. Andrew Huberman at the Sydney Opera House

0:00Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science -based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Recently, the Huberman Lab Podcast hosted a live event at the Sydney Opera House in Australia. The event was called the Brain Body Contract and featured a lecture followed by a question and answer session with the audience. We wanted to make the question and answer session available to everyone regardless if you could attend. So what follows is the question and answer session from the Sydney Opera House in Australia.

0:36I also would like to thank the sponsors for the event. They are 8 Sleep and AG1. 8 Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling heating and sleep tracking capacity. Now one of the key aspects to getting a great night sleep is to control the temperature of your sleeping environment. And that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature actually has to drop by about 1 -3 degrees. And in order to wake up in the morning feeling refreshed, your body temperature actually has to increase by about 1 -3 degrees. 8 Sleep makes it extremely easy to control the temperature of your sleeping environment at the beginning, middle, and throughout the night and when you wake up in the morning.

1:09I've been sleeping on an 8 Sleep mattress cover for nearly 3 years now and it has dramatically improved my sleep. If you'd like to try 8 Sleep, you can go to 8Sleep .com slash Huberman to save $150 off their pod 3 cover. 8 Sleep currently ships to the USA, Canada, UK, select countries in the EU and Australia. Again, that's 8Sleep .com slash Huberman. The other live event sponsor, AG1, is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also contains adaptogens and other critical micronutrients. I've been taking AG1 daily since 2012, so I'm delighted that they decided to sponsor the live event. The reason I started taking it and the reason I still take it every day once or twice a day is that it ensures that I meet all of my quotas for vitamins and minerals.

1:52And it ensures that I get enough probiotic and probiotic to support gut health. Now of course I strive to consume healthy whole foods for the majority of my nutritional intake every single day. But there are a number of things in AG1, including specific micronutrients that are hard to get from whole foods or at least insufficient quantities. So AG1 allows me to get the vitamins and minerals that I need, probiotics, prebiotics, the adaptogens, and critical micronutrients. To try AG1, go to drinkag1 .com slash Huberman and you'll get a year supply of vitamin D3K2 and 5 free travel packs of AG1. Again, that's drinkag1 .com slash Huberman.

2:29Thank you to the Sydney Opera House for hosting us and for making this event possible.

2:49What are the latest findings on the physiological mechanisms behind stresses impact on the body and brain? And what are some practical tools or techniques for managing stress effectively? Well, thank you for that question. I'll deliberately not repeat what I said earlier about physiologic size panoramic vision, et cetera, and raising stress threshold because we covered that already. But I think that one of the most interesting findings, two most interesting findings in the field of stress in the last five years or even three years. I think the work from my colleague Ali Krum at Stanford, she's been a guest on the podcast.

3:24She works on mindsets as the following result. Students, Stanford students, that is, come into the laboratory. They view a, I think it's a five minute movie about how awful stress is for the mind and body, all the things it does like deplete your immune system, make you miserable, deplete certain aspects of the reproductive axis and on and on. And then a separate group comes in and watches a video also five minutes also true about all the things that stress can do to enhance performance, both cognitive or physical, like, or additional energy, additional cognitive power, access to certain memory sets, albeit narrow memory sets, et cetera.

4:06And what you find is that the results point directly to the fact that whatever you believe about stress provided the information you have is true is what happens. So if I tell you that stress improves your memory, focus attention, one observes that. If I tell you that stress depletes your immune system, et cetera, one observes that. So this is something that we don't quite yet understand as neuroscientists and the psychology of it makes more sense, frankly, than the mechanisms. But it's becoming very clear that what we believe about a given phenomenon strongly impacts how it shapes our response to that.

4:49So I find that very interesting. Now, of course, you can't delete information about stressing bad for you. So what does that mean if you want stress to be enhancing as it's called? There's literally now called the stresses enhancing mindset that the thing you can do is to learn more about how stress can be enhancing. We're not talking about lying. We're not talking about placebo effect. We're talking about real knowledge based in fact that one can absorb. And I find it amazing and wonderful that the mere learning of something can actually change how we respond to something at a core physiological level.

5:24The second, I think very important set of findings on stress relate to a structure that I've talked about recently on the podcast. And I talked about with the one and only David Goggins, most people presumably have heard. Like he's on his way, he's running here right now from Central America. That guy, I'll tell you, that guy is every bit as intense as he comes across. I met him for the first time in 2016 at a gathering in Silicon Valley, we're just doing a little bit of work for this company. At the end of the day, he leaves for a minute and he changes into his shorts and his shirt. He's like, I'm going running, I gotta go to the airport.

6:05I'm thinking I'm going to go running, then I'm going to go to the airport. He was running to the airport. Seriously, like 14 miles from the airport, which I realized 14 miles from Marathon or No Big Deal, but he's got his bags. And I'm thinking myself, this guy is nuts and I love him. I mean, he's really that guy. It's actually very refreshing. You know, I think one reason we love the Rick Rubens and the David Goggins is they truly love him. They really are different, but from one basic standpoint, they just don't kill this shit. They just do what they're going to do and they trust that they're doing right for them and for the people around them.

6:45And it's awesome. It's really awesome. And I think that it, again, brings about that, you know, that word that, you know, doesn't come about very often for me, but you just kind of stuns you into like, behold, David Goggins, Rick Rubens, the cuttlefish, whatever. You know? So, hmm. But I talked about this with David. There's a structure in our brain, and these are recent discoveries, not by my lab. I wish I'd discover these, but actually a colleague of mine at Stanford, Joe Parvizi, who's in the Department of Neurosurgery, has made these beautiful discoveries about the anterior mid -singulate cortex.

7:22The anterior mid -singulate cortex. There's a structure in the brain. There's a lot of subdivisions, but when Joe put a little stimulating electrode into this area, because he had patients that needed neurosurgery and they probe around asking questions, what do you feel? How do you feel? What are you going to do? And sometimes they hit an area. I've seen these experiments. They're unbelievable. Stimulated an area and the person says, you know, I feel like I'm about to go into a rage. You're like, okay, let's back off. Let's move over here. Enter a mid -singulate cortex to stimulate, and the patient, the person says, I feel like I'm heading into a storm.

7:58You know, that doesn't sound good. And they say, no, but I'm ready. I'm leaning in. A different patient, you stimulate their anterior mid -singulate cortex, and the person says, I feel like I'm going to get up out of my chair and do something really, really difficult. Okay, so this is interesting. Across multiple people, you're seeing the same general kind of forward center of mass, kind of response. I'm leaning into challenge and challenge specifically. And then there's now scores of studies in just the last three to five years, showing that, for instance, people who successfully overcome a challenge of any kind, fitness challenge, cognitive challenge, enter a mid -singulate cortex, expands or at least increases its baseline levels of activity.

8:37You see people that fail to meet that challenge, less enter a mid -singulate cortex activity. So there's a bidirectionality of the response. And on and on, and it seems that doing things that are difficult, that we don't enjoy or that we have to push ourselves to do, grow and enhance the activity within this anterior mid -singulate cortex. And the beauty of it is that it generalizes. That the anterior mid -singulate cortex can be applied, or the growth of it can be directed towards lots of different things. Which is, I think, a call for, of course, seeking pleasure, seeking comfort, seeking relaxation, seeking sleep every night, seeking sunlight in the morning, et cetera.

9:18But also, deliberately seeking out challenges, that is challenges for us. The importance of doing hard things in a safe manner, psychologically and physically safe manner, of course, is truly beneficial toward our ability to manage ourselves in what would otherwise be called stress. So I think those, the work of Ali Krum and the work on the enter a mid -singulate cortex by Parvizi and a bunch of other labs, I think are the two areas where I feel like things are happening really quickly. We're making big strides as a field, and we're moving away from kind of conjecture about how to better ourselves in lots of different ways.

9:59Can you talk about time perception? Why is it that in some instances time moves very slowly, while in others it seems to move very fast. Thank you. Tonight has been so fun. Thank you. I have had fun too. Is this something I'm trying to do more of? Not necessarily live, that too, but someone recently, who I love and admire very much, said to me, we're going to have so much fun. And I thought, oh, I'd be whole. No one's ever said that to me. No one's ever said that to me. All my years growing up, I mean, I love, I'm with all due respect to my parents. I can't remember anyone ever turning to me and saying, we're going to have so much fun.

10:42So I'm trying, that to me just kind of blew me away. I'm thinking, yeah, like, you're allowed to have fun. So time perception is a topic that I am, you know, as obsessed by as I am many other topics, but one that is really near and dear to my heart, because I've always been struck by this observation that is certainly not uniquely mine, that, you know, if you're sitting waiting for an appointment at the doctor's office, it feels like time goes by really slowly, like really slowly. Whereas if you have a really full day with lots and lots of activities, it seems like time went by really fast, like, oh my god, I can't believe it.

11:28It's so much time has gone by. Sorry, so much has happened, excuse me, but not a lot of time has gone by, which means that our frame rate on life is highly dynamic. And in fact, it is, and in fact, it's set by, you guessed it, our visual system, at least for sighted folks, for people who are low vision or no vision, and by the way, I always reference that because my laboratory has worked on low vision, no vision issues for a number of years. It's through the auditory system. But for, say, co -generalizing now, simplicity will talk about the visual system. So it is a fact that when we focus on things up close, think a watchmaker, think about looking into your phone, our perception of time is more fine -grained, that is our frame rate is higher.

12:15Okay, so more frames per second than when we view things at a distance. You might think, well, how could that possibly be? How could that possibly be? But it makes perfect sense. You know, when we think about the time space coding in the brain, we need to anchor ourselves to something, the rising and setting of the sun. Of course, you know, unless you're a flatterer, you know, we're going around the sun. No, no, we've got no flatterers. One flatterer in the audience. Okay, cool. I don't think that's what they were saying. But we need to anchor ourselves in time, and our visual system is the way that we anchor ourselves in time.

12:54We have facts about past, present, and future. So we have knowledge. But at an unconscious level, we need to anchor our frame rate, set our frame rate. And so this is why if you go down to Bondi and you lie at, can you look up at the clouds and the clouds are kind of moving in an unpredictable way, whenever we're looking at a landscape which has some lack of predictable features, like waves or rustling of trees, where you could predict that if the wind's blowing this way, the tree's going to go this way and then back again, but you're not really in a mode of trying to anticipate just how far, in the same way that, for instance, if you call an uber, or you're waiting on a text message, you know, if you're ever waiting on a text message, you'll find slice.

13:38Okay, dot, dot, dot, ones that then come and ones that think you're find slicing time. As your level of autonomic arousal goes up, your frame rate goes up. As your level of autonomic arousal goes down, so you're sleepy, or if you're viewing things that have kind of an unpredictable aspect to them, then your frame rate expands. You're at the passage of time changes, or your perception of the passage of time changes. This is why, one of the reasons why I love Aquaria, you know, and one of my favorite things to do since I don't have a fish tank at home right now, but that's going to change soon, is I'll go on YouTube, and there's this beautiful live video of this Aquarium in Japan, and I'll just zone out.

14:27It's the most relaxing thing ever, and every once in a while, a whale shark, they have a whale shark, you know, aquarium. Every once in a while, a whale shark will go through and go like, whoa, and then it disappears. And then a little fish and the kelp, and it's immensely relaxing. What it does is it slows your frame rate down. And then I find that resets me after just five or six minutes to go back to doing this, you know, high frame rate type stuff, which is what we're doing when we're texting, when we're typing, when we're social media. By the way, it's tuned to a frame rate. It's really interesting that keeps us engaged just up into the point where then we want to swipe to the next thing.

15:01It's the algorithms are designed. And by the way, I have a somewhat benevolent, semi benevolent view of social media, I think it'd be used for good. I think you'd be used for not good. I think you're limiting one's time on there is good, but there's some good content on there for sure. A lot of my life is spent on there, indeed. So frame rate is set by where you're looking. The further out you're looking, the larger, the longer sort of time bins you're capturing, bigger time bins. Okay, less resolution. Closer in, and the more you're trying to predict the next outcome, sort of fine green analysis, predicting what we call DPO's duration path in outcome, what's going to happen for how long or, and what's going to happen is something that you're thinking about and wondering about, then frame rate goes up.

15:49And there's actually a wonderful movie, a Hitchcock movie. The name escapes me at the moment in which Hitchcock understood this. And it's a movie that's only about 90 minutes long, but in the background, the sun rises and sets. And the way that people move through the scenes of this movie gives you the feeling by the end of this 90 minute movie that a full 24 hours past. It's really interesting. You feel it in your body as if it was a much longer movie, even though if you look at your watch, that happens. And now the cannabis smokers again are thinking, yeah, where you sit there and you're like, whoa, that was a really long time you look at, it's like three minutes went by and you're like, wow, psychedelics will do this as well.

16:32They certainly do, they distort our time perception mainly through the deployment of large amounts of the neuromodulator serotonin, which is intimately involved in a kind of clock perception mechanisms. There are a bunch of other things that can set sort of intrudence and grids of my city of our auditory system that also adjust our frame rate. I think one of the reasons why 40 hurts tones can be valuable for doing cognitive work is that they tend to entrain the certain circuits within the brain for doing the kinds of work that most people call work. We have to type things out, think logically, kind of if then kind of analysis.

17:07Very different than, say, writing new sheet music or coming up with poetry where, you know, here again, we can think back to the, you know, the Rick Rubin thing or the, you know, being stationary, right? You're like, the wall or sitting with the movement and the brain going forward. There's something about adjusting frame rate for capturing new ideas versus implementing ideas. Implementation of ideas tends to be carried out on higher frame rate type time perception. And now you can understand why visual perception said about the distance of a laptop or phone would be good for that or a conversation.

17:41You know, remember that whole thing of like looking at somebody's face and having a conversation as opposed to looking off into the distance, walking and allowing one's gaze to go panoramic. So hopefully now you're starting to sense some themes. So that's all I'll say about time perception now, but of course humans have throughout history and still now, frankly, also embarked on a lot of pharmacology, if we're honest, in order to try and adjust frame rate for sake of productivity, but, you know, caffeine will adjust frame rate in the predictable direction. But also things like alcohol and various drugs like, you know, cannabis in order to adjust frame rate.

18:15I'm certainly not suggesting you do those things. I'm not a cop. You do what you want. Just know what you're doing. Can you please talk about the jet lag protocol you followed when arriving in Sydney? Oh, yeah. Well, this one was a little bit easier for me because obviously it's not that far off is just your full day head from where I live back home in California. But nonetheless, I suffered tremendously from jet lag and once actually in 2017, I went to Abu Dhabi, 12 hour flip from where I was living at that time in the Bay Area. And I was a wreck. I barely make it to the meeting. I was crying.

18:53I was really messes me up. I slept great the first night and then just didn't sleep for two days. I was a mess. So jet lag is something that I really had to work hard on. And there are a couple things worth noting. I mean, we've done a whole episode about this about kind of hit a few key bullet points. And maybe it's relevant to you, even if you're not traveling at any point soon, because many people are jet lagged without traveling because of the way that they stay up late. In fact, most everybody in the world now qualifies as a shift worker. Did you know that? And here no disrespect, only reverence and gratitude to the actual shift workers at stay up all night doing emergency work and hospital work and caring for children and things like that throughout the night.

19:33So I'm not trying to take anything away from them, but we are all shifted enough by virtue of artificial lighting and electronic devices that we are effectively shifted and shift working because we're staying up engaging our cognizant. And we're all getting into the same kind of systems and ways that frankly we didn't evolve to which I'm not saying is bad, but it's just the reality. Okay, what to do for jet lag? The key thing is this. And actually this is very valuable in general for sake of sleep. So this is something I haven't talked enough about on the podcast. Ask yourself what time you normally wake up without an alarm.

20:09I realize there's some variance day to day. But you know, for me, it would be about, let's say 6 am. So let's say for you at 7, you know, just pick your typical wake up time. If you subtract from that number, so for me 4 am, that almost with certainty is what's called your temperature minimum. Your temperature minimum, we could measure it. You could put a thermometer in your mouth or if you come to the laboratory, unfortunately they have to do it rectally. 4 am would be my temperature minimum. Maybe for you if you wake up at 7, typically around 7, it's going to be 5 am. Okay, so we're not actually measuring your temperature in this kind of good onken this thought experiment.

20:53What we're doing is we're trying to find a time. So here's what's interesting. If you expose your eyes, not your skin, but your eyes to bright light in the two hours or so, maybe 3 hours prior to that temperature minimum time. So if you wake up at 7 am, 5 am is your temperature minimum. So in the two hours, maybe 3 hours prior to that, you're going to shift your wake up time and you're to bedtime, what's called a phase delay, a shift in your circadian rhythm, by about an hour. Interesting. Given that if you view bright light in the two to three hours after your temperature minimum, you advance your clock.

21:41Meaning you pull back your clock to want to wake up a bit earlier and go to sleep a little bit earlier. By about an hour. For every time you do that, you think, well, okay, I wake up in the morning at 7, let's say I'm using you as an example or me at 6, and I usually try and get some sunlight in my eyes, especially on overcast days, etc., etc. You've heard me blab about this many times before in the podcast and elsewhere. So how come I'm not going to bed earlier and earlier every night and waking up earlier and earlier every morning. And indeed you would, you would keep phase advancing your clock if you did that, except that in the afternoon, if you got sunlight in your eyes, as presumably you did today, it was beautiful sunny day on your way here, you phase delayed your clock a little bit.

22:27And as a consequence, you wake up and go to sleep at more or less the same time every day. It's an amazing mechanism. And guess what? Viewing sunlight in the middle of the day does not do the same thing. It doesn't shift your circadian clock. They don't tell you that in school, but they should. They're telling you like all the other stuff. The reason it doesn't do it is that middle of the day period is what's called the circadian dead zone. Sounds very dramatic, very ominous. Getting sunlight in your eyes during the middle of the day is great for moods, evident that is also important if it gets on your skin and healthy not burning amounts.

23:03Levels that it would induce burn, then it can enhance testosterone, estrogen levels, etc. in healthy ways, healthy ratios. Nonetheless, that morning sunlight viewing after your temperature minimum advances your clock, makes you want to get up earlier, go to bed earlier, viewed before delays your clock. Makes you want to get up later, go to bed later. So this is very useful if you ever want to shift your clock at home before you travel to get on to a new schedule for work or school or if you're traveling. What it means is that when you arrive in a new location, like I did in Melbourne the other day, believe me, I practiced that for at least an hour.

23:43And with two off -season, they kept telling me I was doing it wrong until finally they're like, no, I'm just joking with you. You got it right like the fourth time. You guys have a wicked sense of humor down here. The, that's again, I'm tougher than I look. The key thing is that if you land, you have to ask, let's say at 8 a .m. local or noon local time, the key is to ask yourself, hmm, what does my body think? What is my temperature minimum back from back home? So for instance, if you land at 5 p .m. but it corresponds to time before your temperature minimum and you go outside and you're like, whoa, beautiful, setting sun.

24:31I'm supposed to get sunlight in my eyes. Well, guess what? You might delay your clock if you want to go to bed earlier. That's probably not a good idea. Whereas if you want to, if you want to advance your clock, you would view sunlight at a time that is corresponding to the two hours after your temperature minimum. I realize it's a little bit tricky, but that's all you have to ask yourself for the first three days. First three days that you travel to some location because then you can shift very fast. So what that requires is sometimes saying, oh, I don't want to shift myself. So I'm actually going to wear sunglasses and a brimmed hat to avoid shifting because I'd like to be on the local schedule.

25:03Or in some cases, I think, oh, I really want to wake up here and I'm in the perfect opportunity to wake up because it's the middle of the afternoon and Sydney. And back home, I would have just hit my temperature minimum. And so I'm going to get sunlight in my eyes. Well, that's going to wake me up and it's going to actually make me want to go to bed a little bit earlier so I can go to bed at local time. So I'm not going to be up until, you know, 3 a .m. So you might have to work this out a little bit on paper. But this is the way that military and this is the way that shift workers who are educated in the mechanisms of this stuff, that's the way they do it.

25:36It also helps to eat on the local schedule because food is another what we call zeitgabre. Another one of the time keepers for the circadian clock. So if you force yourself to eat on the local schedule, that can help you shift. Activity can help you shift and social rhythms can help you shift as well. But that temperature minimum and the role of light before or after the temperature minimum either delaying or advancing your clock, that's the heavy hammer in this whole process. So I did that and these days I do a lot of red light time in the evening when I want to go to sleep. And I don't mean red light panels like the expensive stuff that has a whole other set of uses.