LIVE EVENT Q&A: Dr. Andrew Huberman at the Chicago Theatre

0:00Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science -based tools for everyday life.

0:08Recently, the Huberman Lab hosted a live event at the Chicago Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. The event consisted of a lecture entitled The Brain Body Contract, followed by a question and answer session. We wanted to make sure that the question and answer session was available to everybody, regardless of who could attend in person. I also want to make sure to thank the sponsors of that event, which were AG1 and 8 sleep. 8 sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity. One of the key things to getting a great night sleep is to make sure that the temperature of your sleeping environment is correct.

0:40And 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 feeling refreshed and energized, your body temperature actually has to increase by about 1 -3 degrees. With 8 sleep, you can program the temperature of your sleeping environment in the beginning, middle, and end of your night. It has a number of other features like tracking the amount of rapid eye movement and slow wave sleep that you get. Things that are essential to really dialing in the perfect night sleep for you. I've been sleeping on an 8 sleep mattress cover for well over two years now, and it has greatly improved my sleep.

1:11I fall asleep far more quickly. I wake up far less often in the middle of the night, and I wake up feeling far more refreshed than I ever did prior to using an 8 sleep mattress cover. If you'd like to try 8 sleep, you can go to 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. AG1 is an all -in -one vitamin mineral probiotic drink. I've been taking AG1 since 2012, so I'm delighted that they sponsored the live event. The reason I started taking AG1 and the reason I still drink AG1 once or twice a day is that it provides all of my foundational nutritional needs.

1:52That is, it provides insurance that I get the proper amounts of those vitamins, minerals, probiotics, and fiber to ensure optimal mental health, physical health, and performance. If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1 .com slash Huberman to claim a special offer. They're giving away 5 free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3K2. Again, that's drinkag1 .com slash Huberman to claim that special offer. And now, without further ado, the question and answer session from our live event at the Chicago Theatre in Chicago, Illinois.

2:41I turn 70 soon. What is your best advice to keep my brain healthy in old age? A terrific question. The advice I would give to you as somebody about to reach 70 is the same advice I give to anybody, which is that essentially all of the things that improve cardiovascular health and perfusion of your bodily tissues are going to improve functionality of the brain. Because, of course, the brain has a rich consumer of fuel requires very good portals to deliver those fuels and that capillaries, microcapillaries, and arteries, and so forth need to be clean and clear. That's the big one. This is why I think the prescription now is generally accepted.

3:25And here I'm borrowing from my friend Peter Atia, but about 150 or maybe as much as 200 minutes of so -called zone to cardio per week. Movement that you can just barely carry out a conversation is going to be very useful. One thing that's often not discussed is that load bearing exercise of some sort is going to be better provided your body can tolerate it, but you should do something that you can do consistently over those long durations without injuring yourself. But there's a very interesting literature about how load bearing movements actually generate the release of hormones. Yes, hormones from bone that actually cross the blood brain barrier and may influence health of neurons in brain areas such as the hippocampus.

4:07And there I'm extending from preclinical data and animals to humans, but there's some human data starting to emerge that that's true. It's also true, and there's a wonderful paper out just today or yesterday from Dr. Andy Galpins lab and collaborators talking about how if you look at cognitive health, it's highly correlated with things that relate to strength. And that is not to say that you should just do strength training exercises, but we know that all people, truly all people, should be doing some sort of resistance training two or three times per week. And we know that grip strength and increasing asymmetry and grip strength between the two hands is one of the indicators of deficits in control from the brain out to the periphery and it's correlated with cognitive decline.

4:52There's also some interesting data about how when the feet become floppy and kind of flaccid or the lack of ability to extend one's toes. I'm still working, I've been wearing this toe spreader thing, as anyone tried those, those hurt. Those hurt, I broke this foot a bunch of times, but I'll tell you, when you get better at spreading your toes, it's really exciting. And it's really exciting for several reasons. It's really exciting because there's more stability in your feet, you can run and move and do things better without pain. But in addition to that, believe it or not, just as one of the first things that they're going to do when you come into this world is scrape the bottom of your foot and look for the Babinsky reflex, which is a neural transmission reflex as all reflexes are.

5:32But it's testing the essentially the health of the nervous system that over time, you know, again, there are many correlates of dementia, many, many correlates of dementia, but an inability to finally control the extremities is certainly one of them. So, strength training, cardiovascular training, these are kind of stereotyped answers for your question, and yet those are really the prime movers against cardiovascular and cerebral vascular disease. And then of course, there's, you know, I'd be remiss if I didn't throw in something that was a little bit more edgy because that's what I do. You know, there are interesting data about the use of drugs to increase the seat of colon transmission, right?

6:12I mean, I was visiting a Nobel Prize winner at Columbia to learn about his incredible work some years ago and saw that he chewed no fewer than five pieces of Nicarac gum, something I don't recommend during this short meeting. And I said, what is this all about? He said, well, you know, I don't smoke anymore because I don't want lung cancer, but, you know, he said nicotine is, you know, protective against Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. I was like, how can that be? And he said, well, you know, it decreases in neuromodulation. Dopamine is cytokoline correlated with cognitive decline, keeping your brain sharp and so on and so forth.

6:45So, I'm not encouraging people to take nicotine, it increases blood pressure, it is a constriction. But it's an interesting consideration, you know, some of the emerging colonurgic and dopaminergic drugs, the ways to increase acetylcholine and dopamine are certainly intriguing. And I won't tell you who that person is, but his name is Richard Axel. Next question. Yeah. How can I optimize sleep while working 24 hours shifts as a firefighter, 24 hours on, 48 hours off? Okay. And this probably also pertains to new parents and it probably also pertains to anyone that's going through a particular, particularly stressful time where you're micro -waking throughout the night, so not just firefighters.

7:25So, what do we know? We know based on really good data that shift work is bad for us. It's just bad. We're a diurnal species. We're not nocturnal. But thank you, thank you, thank you, shift workers because you essentially keep us all safe and make the world go round. And so, we need you and we want you healthy. So, one of the main things is that you can make sure that you stay on the same sleep wake schedule, schedule, excuse me, for at least two weeks. It's the swing shift that's really the worst. You can tell your boss, I said that. And if they won't agree and you're doing this 24 hour on 24 hour off, there are a couple of things that are really important.

8:08First of all, the main way to wake up your nervous system, even though it might not feel like a triple espresso is going to be that light exposure to the eyes. And if you can't get it from sunlight is going to be from any bright artificial light. I'm not a huge proponent of the daylight simulators. They're very expensive. You can simply buy a 900 lux LED far more inexpensively. I don't have any relationship to any company that sells these, but you can find them on Amazon or wherever you happen to prefer to purchase things. Or you can just get really close to a bright light. Any time you're trying to wake up, even if you don't feel that it helps you wake up very much, mostly for the melatonin suppression, because bright light will very acutely suppress melatonin.

8:52And then the real question from shift workers always seems to be, should I catch up on sleep? Or is that going to be problematic? Should I just stay up into the next cycle? And the answer there is a little bit nuanced, but the best answer I can give across the board is if this is a pattern that you're going to be in regularly over say months or years, then get whatever sleep you can. Get whatever sleep you can. If it's something that you're doing somewhat acutely like you're traveling to Europe and you're just going to force yourself to stay up a day and a half, then in that case I would say no need to get the maximum amount of sleep.

9:28Just try and stay with the local schedule. We have an entire episode about shift work that somehow maybe didn't get as much recognition as it should have for shift workers and we'll try and get it out in better form. We don't always succeed in top -carding things in a way that gets them out to the most people. One thing I will say is an opportunity to announce that our website, HubermanLab .com is completely revamped so it's highly searchable. We'll take you to exact time stamps and now you can segregate out time stamps from newsletters, from all this stuff. Thanks to a lot of effort by my amazing team, you can now navigate that site with it to real precision.

10:06If you want to say ADHD, Adderrol, Kids Yes No, for instance, it will take you to precise time stamps that will address those issues. How does hypnosis therapy work? Well this is a very interesting topic to me because my colleague associate chair of psychiatry at Stanford, David Spiegel, is a world expert in hypnosis and its neural underpinnings and its use for clinical applications. His father was a hypnotist, also a psychiatrist. When people hear hypnotism, they think of stage hypnotism and being up on stage and doing things you don't want to in front of other people. But really it's when we're talking about clinical applications or wellness applications of hypnosis, we're talking about self -directed hypnosis.

10:56I really wish there was a better name because I don't think hypnosis is going to advance very far as a field, frankly, because everyone thinks hypnosis and it would be like a psychedelics were just called drugs. We were taught in the 80s that drugs are bad and that your brain on drugs looks like an omelette and that's bad. If you like omelettes, they're still bad and drugs of abuse are bad. Actually, I hope we can talk briefly about psychedelics at some point because I do think there's a little bit of a runaway train around the topic of psychedelics now. I think we need to be very careful how we approach that entire landscape.

11:32But hypnosis essentially works by allowing someone to place their own brain into this very unique state. Earlier we were talking about neuroplasticity and we talked about the fact that neuroplasticity involves intense focus followed by deep rest in the form of deep sleep or non -sleep deep rest, maybe even Rick Rubin and just kind of like lay in there. Hypnosis is different because hypnosis is in a state in which your focus is very narrow, the context is very narrow but you're very, very relaxed. So maybe the Rubin example of being brain active and body very still is a bit more like hypnosis to be fair.

12:15Why would it be the case that David Spiegel and his dad have literally a tool that is approved by the psychiatric association where they can figure out how hypnotizable you are by having you look up and try and close your eyelids while continuing to look up the so -called Spiegel eye roll test. This is like tick tock level wacky. Well the reason is you have cranial nerves, so they sit more or less near your neck, that allow you to direct your focus, your eyes upward and then you have cranial nerves that have your eyes go down and the ones that the cranial nerves that drive your eyes up are associated with alertness and eyes open.

12:57And the cranial nerves that are associated with pointing your eyes down and closing your eyelids are associated with what, with drowsiness sleep and lack of alertness. There's sort of a push pull in the autonomic nervous system. And Spiegel, Spiegel's daddy and him figured out because they're geniuses that if somebody can maintain upward gaze while closing their eyelids two things happen. And then if someone has a little bit of a problem with the eyes and they're not able to see the eyes and their eyes open, you'll see the white to their eyes and it's pretty creepy. Two, that means they're highly hypnotizable because that is a reflection of the probability that they can enter a brain state in which they are both very awake and very relaxed.

13:35Pretty cool. Now if that sounds kind of wacky because you're just looking at the periphery, keep in mind that one of the primary entry points for diagnosing concussion is to shine a light in one eye and have that pupil constrict. And then see whether or not the other pupil constricts, the so -called consensual or pupil Larry reflex. Although technically and I've been bothered by this from day one, it should be called the non -consensual pupil reflex because the other eye doesn't have a choice if everything's working.

14:05In any case, if you have a hard hit to the head, you'll see that you shine light in one eye and pupil constricts and the other one stays really dilated and you go, okay, get this person in the emergency room. Because there's been a severing of the connections between the two sides of the brain. So looking in the eyes and trying to deduce what might be happening more centrally within the caverns of the skull and the brain is not a new thing. It is a primary diagnostic tool in neurology. It's also how your parents knew that you were taking drugs when you came in the door because your pupils were like that big.

14:37And that reflects a difference in autonomic arousal. It basically stimulates, as people dilate their pupils, this is also why the story about Beledona people intentionally dilating their pupils to trick people into thinking that they were attracted to them, thought about this one a lot too. It's like not a precursor to good relationship. It's like someone's using their physiology to pretend that they're attracted to the other person. Things that they're attracted so that they might become attracted. Anyway, it's a recipe for failure almost as bad as most of the dating apps. Oh, I would know I'm not on them, but from what I hear.

15:11Okay. So where were we hypnosis? When you are in a state of elevated attention but very relaxed, guess what? Neural plasticity occurs much faster because you're essentially marrying the two states that are normally divorced, which are heightened levels of attention first and then depress. You're essentially putting the nervous system into a more, I wouldn't call it hyperplastic state, but a more plastic state. And for people that are highly hypnotizable, the success rates at, for instance, smoking cessation, pain relief are pretty impressive. The Spiegel lab has published a number of these. So I think self hypnosis is a very interesting tool.

15:53I just hope that they rename it so that it stands a chance of getting off the ground. I mean, one of the things that you learn as a public facing educator is that what things are called has a great impact on whether or not they achieve any kind of use in the world. Hence why I decided to swallow the difficult pill of partially renaming Yoganidra as non -sleep, depress. I don't like to do that. Yoganidra has more than a thousand year history, but when people hear Yoganidra, unless they are very open -minded, they hear magic carpet. They hear levitation, and it's unfortunate, and that's not how I feel, but for years I talked about Yoganidra.

16:32It's so cool, it's like sleep state, but it's like, yeah, Yoganidra, okay. But if you come from a culture where that's discussed, they're all about it. And so non -sleep, deep rest, I felt like, all right, leave my name out of it. I'll be dead eventually. I mean, I'm in this line of advisors, I'm approaching 50. I'm winning in my lineage. But should I be fortunate enough to live past bullet cancer or car crash far enough, then NSDR hopefully will persist. And I don't need a piece of it. It's just the hope is that people will learn to put themselves into brain states that can be adaptive for them.

17:09So be nice if someone could come up with something other than hypnosis, I think, speak or would agree. Super interesting psychedelics as medicine to be done with somebody with experience, worried about unlocking mental health conditions. Yeah, you should be. What does the research say and what are your thoughts? Okay. Barb Dwyer question, we like that. Psychedelics. Let's just back up a little bit and acknowledge one thing that's more important than psychedelics or anything else when it comes to rewiring the brain, which is that ultimately rewiring of the brain is about shifts in neuromodulators.

17:52Dopamine serotonin epinephrine, norepinephrine aceto calling and it's no coincidence that SSRIs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, have been one of the major entry points for attempts to treat things like depression over the last 20, 30 years or more. When I was in college, that's when the book listening to prosa came out, but prior to that, there's a long history of drugs, prescription drugs, in that case, to change levels of neuromodulators like serotonin or aceto calling or dopamine in an attempt to cure or treat a disease. But keep in mind, despite the varied success of SSRIs, the topic unto itself, that there's a strong belief and there has been for a long time that if SSRIs work, it wasn't because the depressed brain is deficient in serotonin, but rather because increasing serotonin offer the opportunity to increase neuroplasticity.

18:48It's a different way of thinking about it, and that's a segue for saying that when you say psychedelics, that's a broad category of drugs, nowadays people even lump ketamine into that, although technically it's not a psychedelic, but it's sort of classic if you will psychedelics or LSD, my surgical acetythamide and psilocybin, aka mushrooms, although it comes in other sources as well. The major effect of psilocybin is to stimulate a particular serotonin receptor, which has elevated density in particular brain areas, and indeed there are many recent clinical trials, many, let's just say, let's say 12 to 20 good sized clinical trials done in diverse locations on the planet, many at Johns Hopkins and UCSF, some in Switzerland, showing that there's a lot of drug use in the world.

19:40But enhancing, and here you're noticing that mechanistic language, enhancing the transmission of the release of serotonin and activating particular serotonin receptors leads to an opportunity for more what, neuroplasticity. Now, I say it that way, not to add a bunch of word suit, but because the real question is whether or not the experience that one has while under the influence of psychedelics is critical to the clinical outcome, or a growing idea just as a hypothesis I think is equally interesting is that it's the serotonin itself, and that the things you see, the things you hear, the things you experience, are not relevant.

20:26Now, I have some experience with psychedelics, I had a bad time on psychedelics as a teenager, I was also pretty wayward youth, but I've had a bad trip on LSD, for years I was scared that people were going to dose me with LSD after that, it was so bad. I think across the board we can say kids doing psychedelics just seems like a bad idea, their brains are already hyperplastic. If you have a predisposition to bipolar type issues or schizophrenia, it can exacerbate those issues. Certainly, certainly, if you don't have adequate support in the form of somebody that can guide you through the sessions, as well as the pre -sessions, which are not done with psychedelics, as well as the so -called integration afterwards, it can be a really slippery slope.

21:15I know examples of people really suffering in the aftermath of psychedelic journeys. Now, there are a few interesting points as well, and it wouldn't be fair if I didn't say that several, if not many individuals, who have had so -called treatment -resistant depression, at least in these clinical trials, have reported feeling far better after psilocybin therapy, but that psilocybin therapy was done with several pre -sessions, then the psychedelic sessions, then after sessions, and it's not always the case that things turn out well. So, I think it's early days. What is interesting, and I think important, is to recognize that psilocybin and the structure of psilocybin is very similar to serotonin itself, very similar, but it activates particular receptors.

22:01A lot of people don't realize how similar to serotonin it is, and that microdosing psilocybin, I should say the data on microdosing psilocybin, something that's increasingly popular, is not particularly compelling. It's not clear what it does, it's not clear if it's of any use, and I think the danger here is that we end up in a situation as we did with, frankly, with cannabis. And by the way, I'm not somebody who demonizes cannabis, I think it has its uses for certain people, but very high -THC concentration cannabis can be a problem, especially with people that have a predisposition of psychosis, and anyone that tells you that cannabis is addictive, just say, great, don't smoke weed for a week.

22:42Let's see how you do. Yeah, and let's go on a plane trip together. And how are you sleeping? I think the chronic cannabis users are starting to take note of some of the issues it causes, but again, there are some clinical applications. Now, when it comes to the sort of the high -speed train psychedelics, like DMT, and that's far fewer, far less data available there. And then MDMA, assisted psychotherapy for the treatment of PTSD, they're the data, I think, are more robust. And I think we're likely to see legalization, or at least decriminalization in the next few years, but keep in mind that MDMA is methaline -dioxymethanphetamine.

23:22So for people that like dopaminergic states, it's a particularly compelling state to be in so much so that they could overindulge in MDMA, and then there's the issues of purity, and I could do a five -hour podcast on this right now. So I think the important point is approach with caution, kids absolutely not. And I think it's an exciting landscape, very exciting. And whereas a discussion like the one we just had would have gotten me fired a few years ago, I mean Stanford has big programs now, a lot of philanthropy, federal grants, and many laboratories focused on the study of psychedelics. So I would say stay tuned, but keep in mind that increasing neuromodulator levels very acutely, whether or not it's with a prescription drug or whether or not it's with psychedelics is really what lies at the heart of the recovery, the potential recovery, I should say, or the negative effects that happen to occur in anyone that embarks on the psychedelic journey.

24:22Do people who meditate need less sleep than people who don't? Oh, that's interesting. Well, we know that from a study by Wendy Suzuki, who I believe if NYU made the right choice, and I think they did, is now the dean of arts and sciences at NYU, she ran a memory lab for a long time. She has data showing that even 10, I think it's 13, but as little as 10 minutes of meditation, so to be sitting still, breathing, focusing on your breathing, directing one's attention to third eye center, et cetera. We don't have a third eye, the pineal is not to be the third eye, but I don't know why. It's a light -sensitive tissue deep in the brain, but maybe that's why they call it the third eye.

25:04But in any case, that type of practice has been shown to increase memory, focus, aka learning. But there's some interesting footnotes in those papers, which point to the fact that when people meditate too close to bedtime, oftentimes they have trouble sleeping because basically meditation is a focusing exercise. It's a perceptual exercise. I don't think meditation is anything mystical. It's a self -directed shift in your perception to what? To your interoception, to your internal state, as opposed to anything beyond the confines of your skin. There's nothing mystical about that. And then in that state, your brain starts to generate patterns of activity that are distinct from when you're sharing your attention between what's going on internally and what's going out, what's happening out in the world.

25:48I think we need to demystify what people have cloaked as mystical. And when I say cloaked, I don't think that the people that meditate for thousands of years thought that there was anything mystical about it, but sometimes what we experience there can feel mystical. So if you have trouble sleeping, I recommend doing some sort of non -sleep deep rest practice, like NSDR, BK, Yoganidra, although those are different. NSDR generally lacks the intention piece. And the ones that I put into the world, we've stripped away the intentions and we've stripped away any kind of language that would make you think that there was some sort of, let's just say, cultural aspect to it.

26:33Which again, is admittedly a bit unfair to the origin practice of Yoganidra, but the problem again is that in Yoganidra you're going to be doing intentions and hearing language that for some people not all might divorce you from the wish to do it. In any case, non -sleep deep rest, on any time of day, but especially if you fall asleep in the middle of the night, is going to be useful for helping you fall back asleep, whereas meditation again is going to enhance your level of focus. So I don't think it's a good practice if you have trouble sleeping now to finally answer a question, if you meditate, can you afford to sleep less?