How to Improve Memory & Focus Using Science Protocols | Dr. Charan Ranganath

In this episode, my guest is Dr. Charan Ranganath, Ph. D., professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California, Davis, and a world expert on the neuroscience of memory. We discuss how memory works, what causes diseases of dementia like Alzheimer’s, and science-based strategies to reduce age-related cognitive decline. We also cover the essential role of curiosity and the dopamine-curiosity link that can assist memory formation and neuroplasticity. We then discuss challenges with attention and focus, and how to overcome them, as well as how to manage task-switching and create home and work environments more conducive to cognitive health and longevity. Additionally, we explore the emotional aspect of memories, tools for overcoming rumination, and strategies for reframing past negative experiences. This episode will be of interest to anyone seeking to improve and maintain their cognitive health, focus, and memory across their lifespan, as well as for those struggling with ADHD. Access the full show notes for this episode at hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman David Protein: https://davidprotein.com/huberman Levels: https://levels.link/huberman Waking Up: https://wakingup.com/huberman Function: https://functionhealth.com/huberman Timestamps 00:00:00 Dr. Charan Ranganath 00:02:06 Sponsors: David, Levels & Waking Up 00:06:48 Memory: Past, Present & Future; Sleep 00:13:23 Self, Memory & Age, Neuroplasticity 00:18:50 Tool: Curiosity & Dopamine 00:26:55 Dopamine, Forward Movement 00:33:09 Sponsor: AG1 00:34:22 Dopamine, Learning; Curiosity & Appraisal 00:40:31 Memory, Hippocampus 00:43:34 Prefrontal Cortex & Memory, Aging 00:50:07 Aging, Prefrontal Cortex & Memory; Depression, Rumination 00:58:53 Sponsor: Function 01:00:40 Tool: Lifestyle Factors, Minimizing Age-Related Cognitive Decline 01:09:39 Exercise, Brain Function; ADHD 01:17:26 Sense of Purpose, Tool: Values, Goals, Navigating ADHD 01:23:31 Forgetting, Intention vs. Attention 01:30:10 Tool: Smartphones, Task-Switching, Forgetfulness 01:36:36 Tool: Pictures, Memories, Intention 01:45:46 Deep Focus, Dopamine 01:49:36 Hearing, Vision, Oral Hygiene, Inflammation, Brain Health, Alzheimer’s 01:59:51 Déjà Vu 02:09:00 Serotonin, Reframing Memories, Trauma 02:19:05 Psychedelics, Neuroplasticity, Perspective, Group Therapy 02:27:53 Rumination, Trauma, Nostalgia, Narrative 02:30:30 Music, Pavlov’s Dogz Band 02:36:27 Zero-Cost Support, YouTube, Spotify & Apple Follow & Reviews, Sponsors, YouTube Feedback, Protocols Book, Social Media, Neural Network Newsletter Disclaimer & Disclosures Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

• 0:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Charan Ranganath. Dr. Charan Ranganath is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California Davis. He is one of the world's leading researchers in the topic of human memory. And memory, of course, is an essential component to our entire lives. Memory isn't just important for remembering things that we learn, it's also vitally important for setting the context of our entire life. Meaning, only by understanding where we come from, who we were, and who we are currently, can we frame what we want to do in the next moments, the next day, the next years, and indeed, for the rest of our life.

• 0:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  This is why, for instance, that people who have deficits in memory, either due to brain damage, or due to age-related cognitive decline, or diseases like Alzheimer's dementia, suffer so much, not just in terms of not being able to remember things for sake of daily tasks, but also for sake of placing themselves in the larger context of their life. Recognizing family members isn't just about being able to relate to those family members on a day-to-day basis, it's also about understanding the full context of all one's memories with those people, and what meaning a given interaction brings to any of life's experiences. So today, you're going to learn how memory works, you're going to learn about things like déjà vu, you're going to learn ways to offset age-related cognitive decline,

• 1:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  what the research really says about that, and ways to prevent things like Alzheimer's dementia. We also talk about ADHD, or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. And Dr. Ranganath shares his own experience with ADHD, how it relates to memory, and the tools that he has used in order to combat his own ADHD. Dr. Ranganath has an exquisite ability to describe research studies in clear terms, and to combine that with his own narrative and life experience, in a way that really frames for you practical tools that you can apply in your daily life. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public.

• 2:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is David. David makes a protein bar unlike any other. It has 28 grams of protein, only 150 calories and zero grams of sugar. That's right, 28 grams of protein and 75% of its calories come from protein. This is 50% higher than the next closest protein bar. These bars from David also taste incredible. My favorite bar is the cake flavored one. But then again, I also like the chocolate flavored one and I like the berry flavored one. Basically, I like all the flavors. They're all incredibly delicious. Now, for me personally, I try to get most of my calories from whole foods. However, when I'm in a rush, or I'm away from home, or I'm just looking for a quick afternoon snack,

• 3:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  I often find that I'm looking for a high quality protein source. And with David, I'm able to get 28 grams of high quality protein with the calories of a snack, which makes it very easy to hit my protein goals of one gram of protein per pound of body weight, and it allows me to do so without taking on an excess of calories. Again, I focus on getting most of my food from whole food sources throughout the day. But I typically eat a David bar in the late afternoon when I get hungry between lunch and dinner. Sometimes also mid morning if I get hungry then. And sometimes I'll use it as a meal replacement, although not a complete meal replacement. It can get me to the next meal. So if I need to eat in a couple of hours, but I'm really hungry, I'll eat a David bar. As I mentioned before, they are incredibly delicious. In fact, they're surprisingly delicious. Even the consistency is great.

• 3:44Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's more like a cookie consistency, kind of a chewy cookie consistency, which is unlike other bars, which I tend to kind of saturate on. I was never a big fan of bars until I discovered David bars. If you give them a try, you'll know what I mean. So if you'd like to try David, you can go to davidprotein.com/huberman. Again, the link is davidprotein.com/huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by Levels. Levels is a program that lets you see how different foods affect your health by giving you real time feedback on your diet using a continuous glucose monitor. And one of the most important factors in both your short and long term health and your energy levels each day is your body's ability to manage blood glucose. To maintain energy and focus throughout the day, you want to keep your blood glucose level steady without big spikes or crashes.

• 4:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  I first started using Levels about three years ago as a way to understand how different foods impacted my blood glucose levels. And it's proven incredibly informative for determining what food choices I make, when best to time my food intake around things like workouts, both cardiovascular training versus resistance training, and when and what to eat close to sleep or not so close to sleep, when I wake up in the morning, if I'm fasting or breaking a fast, et cetera. Indeed, using Levels has helped me shape my entire schedule so I have more energy, more cognitive focus. My workouts are better, my sleep is better. Everything got better when I understood how different things, especially food, were impacting my blood glucose levels. So if you're interested in learning more about Levels and trying a CGM yourself, you can go to levels.link/huberman.

• 5:12Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right now, Levels is also offering an additional two free months of membership. Again, that's levels.link/huberman to try their new sensor and two free months of membership. Today's episode is also brought to us by Waking Up. Waking Up is a meditation app that offers hundreds of guided meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga nidra sessions, and more. I started practicing meditation when I was about 15 years old, and it made a profound impact on my life. And by now, there are thousands of quality, peer-reviewed studies that emphasize how useful mindfulness meditation can be for improving our focus, managing stress and anxiety, improving our mood, and much more. In recent years, I started using the Waking Up app for my meditations because I find it to be a terrific resource

• 5:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  for allowing me to really be consistent with my meditation practice. Many people start a meditation practice and experience some benefits, but many people also have challenges keeping up with that practice. What I and so many other people love about the Waking Up app is that it has a lot of different meditations to choose from, and those meditations are of different durations. So it makes it very easy to keep up with your meditation practice, both from the perspective of novelty. You never get tired of those meditations. There's always something new to explore and to learn about yourself and about the effectiveness of meditation. And you can always fit meditation into your schedule, even if you only have two or three minutes per day in which to meditate. If you'd like to try the Waking Up app, please go to wakingup.com/huberman, where you can access a free 30-day trial.

• 6:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  Again, that's wakingup.com/huberman to access a free 30-day trial. And now for my discussion with Dr. Charan Ranganath. Dr. Charan Ranganath, welcome.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 6:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  Speaking of memory, we go way back.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  We do, we do.

• 6:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  I was a graduate student when you were first hired as an assistant professor, which for those that aren't familiar with the academic nomenclature and trajectories, assistant professors are professors that have not yet received tenure, but now, of course, you're a full professor. And you are a world expert in memory, something that I think occupies the minds of all of us, even if we're not trying. So that's actually the segue to my first question, which is, as we move through our day, how much of our cognition, our perception, is focused on things that are happening in the present as opposed to being driven by prior memories?

• 7:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  You know, has studies ever been done that evaluate how often our brain, you know, switches to thoughts about the past? Of course, we learn about things that are in our present. I know this as a cup because I was taught that at some point. But what I'm referring to is how much of our thinking on a day-to-day basis is literally in the past?

• 8:01Speaker 01

  Well, it's interesting that, I mean, it's first of all, it's a great question to start off with. And it's interesting because I actually don't think memory is about the past. I think memory is about the present and the future. It's about taking selectively what you need from the past to make sense of the present and to project to the future. I know you're a vision guy, right? And so if you look at people's just eye movements, right? The first time I came into this room, I'm sure I wasn't aware of it, but I'm sure my eyes were going all over the place. Now, if I came back to visit you, say, if you're like, oh, that was an awesome interview, whatever, right? Hopefully, but maybe not, but let's say I do, right?

• 8:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  Chances are.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I go and my eyes will probably go right to the Rick Rubin photo. Then I'll go right to, you know, something else, like to the espresso machine. And so my memory allows me to make predictions about where things are. And it's almost pre-conscious so that it's happening without our awareness. And it's like confirmatory. We're grabbing the important stuff and making sure everything is where it's supposed to be. And you can see this play out in phenomena also like change blindness. That's a little bit of a different phenomena. But basically in change blindness, there's a famous example where they show a video of people playing basketball and they're passing the ball back and forth. And then this guy in a gorilla costume just walks behind them.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  And about, I think it's 40% of the people who watch this video don't see the gorilla. And the reason is, is that you're generating these serious expectations about what's in front of you. And so you're not literally seeing what's in front of you. You are creating an internal model, a simulation really, of what the outside world is. And memory, whether it's semantic memory, which we'll talk about, I'm sure, your knowledge about the world, like the cup thing. If it's episodic memory, which is your memory of what happened, let's say, just a minute ago. It's all coming into play in terms of your sense of where you are, right? If I just ask you, what day is it? You will use episodic memory for that. Tomorrow morning, I'm going to wake up in a hotel room.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  If I don't have episodic memory, I will freak out because I'll be like, where am I? Did I get kidnapped? Why am I here? And that's really the experience of people with memory disorders. I mean, they have to be in really familiar environments because it's frightening otherwise, right? So even, I wouldn't necessarily say that we were never seeing the present. Of course we are, right? But our understanding of the present is so informed by the past that it allows us both to focus on what's important, what's non-redundant with what we already know, and it also allows us to detect surprises and find out the things that are unexpected and grab the most informative

• 10:53Speaker 01

  stuff as well.

• 10:55Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yesterday, I took a brief nap in the afternoon. I do this practice of non-sleep deep rest.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 11:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  In the afternoon.

• 11:01Speaker 01

  I guess you teach this to me sometime.

• 11:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  Um, yeah, it's, it's very restorative for mental and physical energy, I find. But I fell asleep toward the end of it. And when I woke up, I was in a dark room, but I didn't know where I was for about, it felt like 10, 15 seconds. Somewhat scary, but I, I'd forgotten that I was in my solo studio. I had turned the room lights down. What is it when we have these lapses in memory as we emerge from sleep? Or sometimes if one has been severely jet lagged, you can experience this disorientation of place? Do we know what that is?

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Well, a lot of your sense of where you are comes from episodic memory. Now, there's a school of thought that says that episodic memory, which is your ability to remember past events, is comes from your ability to understand where you are. And we have some interesting data from sea lions, actually, that speaks to this issue.

• 12:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  Sea lions?

• 12:00Speaker 01

  Sea lions, yeah.

• 12:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay, we'll get back to that.

• 12:02Speaker 01

  We'll get back to the sea lions. But I would argue that to remember like where you are when you first get up, you have to engage in an active episodic memory retrieval. That is, you have to figure out, well, how did I get here? And that takes a moment, orienting yourself takes a moment. And that, because it's a little bit of a controlled memory search, right? It's not something that's in front of you that reminds you of where you are initially. And you're also in this little bit of a fog when you wake up. I don't know enough about sleep to say, but I would suspect that people probably are in some kind of a stage one-ish or just high alpha. These brainwaves that are like very much associated with kind of grogginess as you're getting up.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  Neuromodulators are probably super low, so you're, you know, so basically...

• 12:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  Not much epinephrine, not much adrenaline.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so that's going to lead you to really be slow in doing that memory retrieval that you need to orient yourself. So like in the clinic, if you want to ask, if you want to understand whether someone has a memory disorder, one of the simplest things is to ask them, what day of the week is it? What month is it?

• 13:12Andrew D. Huberman?

  Who's the president?

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Who's the president? Yeah.

• 13:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right now, that's a...

• 13:16Speaker 01

  That's a loaded question.

• 13:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well, it depends on what time of year relative to the election you ask, right?

• 13:20Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah.

• 13:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  Very interesting. I'm curious also why it is that most all of us have a stable representation of who we are. So my understanding is that even people with very severe memory deficits don't wake up in the morning and wonder, you know, who am I? Or who is this person in this body? That somehow we remember that we have a self, that we are separate from other selves, that that kind of knowledge might be innate. We might be born with it. And that the representation of self in memory is very stable. Is that true?

• 13:57Speaker 01

  Well, here's what I'll say, it's a really interesting and complex question. Everything's, you always talk to a scientist, you get that it's complicated. But I'll give you as simple of a thing as I can, which is, so if you look at patients with amnesia, so they have a memory disorder where they can't form new memories, they have a sense of who they are, as you mentioned, right? It's not like they don't know who they are. And I mean, like, they know their names, they know their biographies and so forth. But what happens is, at the time, let's say if you had gone swimming and you nearly drowned, you had a hypoxia incident, or a cardiac arrest, or, you know, you had like a traumatic brain injury, severe memory deficit, right?

• 14:40Speaker 01

  Your sense of self doesn't update, it gets kind of stuck. And so there is kind of a sense of looking and not expecting yourself to be as old as you used to be, as you are, because like, you're stuck in your sense of who you were. And I do think, I talked, my good friend, Rick Robbins at Davis, is a personality psychologist, and he studies the development of personality. And it does develop, you know, it kind of stabilizes in these adolescent years, and that's actually also, interestingly, related to memory. But it does change, people do change in really interesting ways. So one thing is that people grow more optimistic, on average, as they get older.

• 15:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  Is that right?

• 15:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that's true. So Laura Carstensen, your colleague at Stanford, actually, has done some really cool work on that topic.

• 15:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  They become more optimistic, and yet, I would argue that we become more "set in our ways," because neuroplasticity, the ability to reshape our neural circuits, diminishes with age.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  Well, you know, so I think that's overdone a little bit. I think you're right. You know, you definitely see less dopamine activity, for instance, as people get older, and, but what I'll say is that people have gobs, if you have a healthy aging person, they have gobs of neural plasticity. But often what happens is, is yeah, you get stuck in your ways, and that could be related to a few things. One is that you get changes in the prefrontal cortex, and that leads you to be less cognitively flexible. It can be also because people just build up so much prior knowledge about the world. That it just becomes kind of ingrained that this is the way it is and it's harder to be surprised. I mean, you kind of see this with old scientists, right? They go

• 16:25Speaker 01

  like, nothing's new. Everything, everything's been discovered in 1960 and nothing new has happened since then.

• 16:32Andrew D. Huberman?

  And by the way, for folks listening who are considering a career in science, nothing could be further

• 16:36Speaker 01

  From the truth.

• 16:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  From the truth. In fact, prior to recording, you told me a saying that I've never heard before. I don't know if it's cynical or optimistic, but if I recall the quote that Dr. Ranganath passed along, which does not come from him, it descends from somebody else, not to be named, is that, quote, "Science progresses one funeral at a time." Very, very, actually, very interesting statement. It could be examined from a number of directions, but I agree. I agree. I mean, there's some wonderful, let's call them aged scientists with tremendous knowledge and excitement. I mean, one only has to listen to like the Nobel Prize winner, Richard Axel, talk about his love of olfactory system and perception, and you can sense

• 17:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  his delight. And he's getting up there. Sorry, Richard, but it's true. You're in your, he's in his 70s, right? Hopefully, he'll live a very long time. But, and certainly, science progressed as a consequence of him being alive and

• 17:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  working on the olfactory system. But I think what you're referring to is really important. Neuroplasticity doesn't necessarily shut down as we age. It might even stay open to the same degree as early adulthood. But if I understand what you're saying correctly, you believe that it's because people tend to seek out less new knowledge as opposed to lacking the ability to create new knowledge.

• 17:54Speaker 01

  I believe that's true, but that's kind of, that's an opinion. I don't have data on that per se, but someone's probably looked at this. But that would be my sense is, is that a lot of what happens with the way people's lives play out as they get older have to do with their environment and their experience. And that's not to say that, I mean, yes, neuroplasticity does change as you get older, but it doesn't account for the degree to which sometimes people can get stuck and set in their ways. And you know, your example of the scientists is such a beautiful example, because I look at the scientists who don't get stuck in their ways, right? And they constantly challenge their beliefs. They surround themselves

• 18:35Speaker 01

  with a diverse group of people who stimulate them, and they're also open to prediction error. That is, they're open to saying something could be violating my knowledge of the world or my, my understanding of the way world works. So here's just an example, and this is, I know I'm going to be free associating all over the place. Please. Get into that. But it's like, one of the coolest studies that we ever did, and I totally credit my postdoc, Matthias Gruber, for this. He came into my lab, originally German, came in from University College London, and he told me he wanted to study curiosity and its effect on memory. I'm like, this is just, I am being totally closed minded. I said, this is just a dumb topic.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  You know, it's, everybody knows if you're curious about something, you'll remember it better, just because you're interested, right? So he said, no, no, no, this is really interesting. And so he did this experiment, and I got on board with it. I, you know, we really kind of collectively, it was just this beautiful thing, where I was exposed to something new and I got excited about it. And so, the idea was, we would give people these trivia questions. And so it's kind of like a pub quiz, right? You sit in a pub quiz, sometimes you get a question and it's like, I don't know the answer. Sometimes you get it, you know, I know it. Sometimes you go, I don't know, but god, I really need to know the answer to this. And you get this itch, right? Or sometimes, your listeners, I mean, they're probably very curious people, and that's why they listen to this. And maybe some of them go to your show notes afterwards, because they want to learn more,

• 20:01Speaker 01

  right? So, we actually scan people's brains using functional MRI. And so, we scan them when they get questions, and sometimes they'd said, I'm really curious to find out the answer to these questions. Sometimes they weren't curious. And then we make them wait about eight seconds, and then, or 10 seconds, I think it was, something like that. And then we show them the answer. So they're kind of in suspense, kind of like, you're watching, like Breaking Bad or something back in the day, people at commercials, and so you're like, oh, now I gotta find out what's gonna happen to Walt, right? So you're in suspense, you need to know the answer to this, or you don't care. Sometimes you just don't care, you're just sitting around. So we show a little face, and we say, hey, how likely is it you think this person knows the answer to the question?

• 20:43Speaker 01

  Now, this is a totally dumb thing to do, because they don't know this person, they're just looking at a face, they're just making some arbitrary decision. But I'll get to why we did that because that was, I think, the coolest part of the experiment. But let's first get back to the trivia question. So we found that when we looked at brain activity, when we give people the question, right afterwards, there is a burst of activity throughout the so-called reward circuit of the brain. There's a serious, it's not really a reward circuit, as we've discussed offline. It's really these areas of the brain that process the neurotransmitter dopamine. And unlike many other neuromodulators that go all over the place, dopamine is much more restricted in its effect.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  And so in the midbrain, near the ventral tegmental area, sorry, I'm geeking out on this.

• 21:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  No, we've talked about that in this podcast, is a particular, I think the key statement that you made that people should hold on to as we progress through this is that dopamine is not dumped everywhere. It's not sprinkled all over the brain. It's released in a fairly restricted sites in order to drive particular processes.

• 21:50Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 21:50Andrew D. Huberman?

  I think that's sufficient for now.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And so when we look at functional MRI, we can't measure dopamine. But what we see is activity in the dopaminergic midbrain area, meaning the area of the brain around the midbrain. And you see it in the nucleus accumbens, or what's called the ventral striatum, which is another area that's a super high dopamine reward processing area. The more curious people are, like on a one to six scale, the more activity you see. It's just like this beautiful relationship, right? And it's not driven by the answer. Now, there's a reason we probably didn't get it for the answer, but it's driven by the question. So it's not like they're like, oh, I learned something new. It's like, I want to get this knowledge. And so that's part one of the story.

• 22:36Speaker 01

  Part two of the story is, we show that face right after the question. And if people are curious to find the answer to the question, they get a bump in memory for the faces, relative to if they're not curious. Now, the faces have nothing to do with the trivia question, but it's being in that curious state that drives this dopaminergic activity in the midbrain. So there's a whole lot of other studies, findings from that study. But basically, I think, God, I gotta...

• 23:08Speaker 01

  You know, sometimes you do a lot of studies, and I published like 180 studies. So it's like, I'm trying to remember the exact, I think it was like functional connectivity between the hippocampus and the red brain during the face was predicting better memory for these faces in general, something like that.

• 23:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  We can put a link to the paper, of course, in the show note captions. So let me make sure I understand that the, when people are prompted with a question, that drives the release of dopamine. The amount of dopamine is proportional to how curious they are to get the answer to that particular question. And then the dopamine itself, if elevated, because they are very curious, can increase the probability that they will remember the answer. It creates a milieu, an environment for better memory. But that can confuse us and make us think that dopamine improves our memory, but it's that curiosity increases dopamine, which increases the capacity to store information that comes subsequent to curiosity.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  Beautiful synopsis, but I'll do two cheerful amendments. So, one is, technically, we're not measuring dopamine, so I have to be very clear about that. This is bold signal, meaning it's metabolic activity, but it's following all the usual suspects of where you'd expect it to be. The second thing is, I do think that dopamine is playing a part, and I mean, it definitely facilitates plasticity. So I do think it helps in learning the answer, for sure. And there's a whole theory called synaptic tagging, which basically says that if you just release a bunch of dopamine, and then you have these potentiated synapses, that you can drive plasticity in those synapses, even if it's not happening at the same time.

• 24:51Speaker 01

  But what's really cool is, the face has nothing to do with the trivia question. The theory that we have is, when you get that bump in dopamine activity, you're motivated, you're energized to get the answer, and you're driven towards a state of plasticity. And now, giving you something that has nothing to do with this question, and boom, you got it, you know?

• 25:13Andrew D. Huberman?

  So when people ask me, and they ask me a lot, how best to elevate their brain dopamine,

• 25:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  One reasonable answer, based on this study, is curiosity, to engage curiosity. Do you know the quote by Dorothy Parker? "The cure for boredom is curiosity." There is no cure for curiosity. I believe it was Dorothy Parker.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  I love that.

• 25:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  If it wasn't, I'm sure we'll find out quickly in the, uh, in the comments on YouTube.

• 25:44Speaker 01

  Older people show the effect just as much as younger people do. Kids show it just as much as older people do. It's just something that sticks around. So, I mean, speaking to your point, if you are surrounding yourself with things that will stimulate your curiosity, and if you're open to that curiosity, and we could talk about knowledge gaps and all these things that stimulate curiosity. Novelty is another one. Richard Morris has some beautiful data on this with rats, but Emer Dussel and I too have some data with humans. Surprise, all of these things, I have a whole chapter in my book on this, drive that system.

• 26:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  The dopamine system.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  The dopamine system. So basically, if you expose yourself to opportunities to be proven wrong, you expose yourself to new people, places, situations, and you allow yourself to be energized by these things and not be scared and anxious, not be like, oh, this person's saying something that I disagree with, I can't deal with this, you know? Or, oh, we figured this out 30 years ago, we don't need, nothing's new here. If you can be open to that, I would argue that you're going to be engaging lots of plasticity, and that's something that's preserved in old age.

• 26:55Andrew D. Huberman?

  Recently, we had one of the world's experts on romantic relationships on this podcast, Esther Perel, to be specific, and we talked about a lot of things related to romantic relationships, but she said that one of the most sustaining factors for romantic relationships over long periods of time is a sense of curiosity, both about the other person, but also about oneself and how one changes in the context of the relationship, and also curiosity about where the relationship could eventually go, where one to continue to invest in it. So this word of curiosity seems to be a resounding theme. I'm struck by, although it makes total sense, that curiosity would drive dopamine release

• 27:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  in these pathways, that novelty would drive dopamine release in these pathways.

• 27:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  And that also, in the physical realm, dopamine is so important for physical movement.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 27:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  I don't think this is a coincidence, right?

• 27:50Speaker 01

  No.

• 27:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  Somehow, evolution organized this neuromodulator, dopamine, to be involved, the way I think about it, is in both a physical movement, it's required for it, in fact, as well as cognitive movement. What we're really talking about is cognitive forward movement, if there is such a thing. Is there a, we're both neuroscientists, but you're the memory researcher. Is there, is there sort of a word or a framework for thinking about cognitive movement forward? Meaning, as opposed to just recycling past ideas and memories, the notion of taking memories and actually putting them, as you said earlier, into the present to anticipate the future, actually, forward mental movement?

• 28:30Speaker 01

  Huh, that's a really interesting question. Well, first of all, I want to be careful in not to say dopamine does this, because it's kind of, it's a trap, right?

• 28:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well, to be clear, you observed heightened activity in a dopaminergic circuit.

• 28:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 28:45Andrew D. Huberman?

  So the idea that it would not involve dopamine is a bit of a stretch, but you didn't directly show that it was dopamine.

• 28:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 28:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  So you're being very exact.

• 28:53Speaker 01

  I wouldn't be exact and just say that assigning a single function to a chemical is, you know, risky. But that said, I do believe there's a link. One of the things that you see is in Parkinson's disease, dopaminergic neurotransmitter mission is shot. And depression is also a symptom of Parkinson's disease. It's quite a severe one, in fact. And so what I think one theory goes is that dopamine energizes us to seek rewards or to seek information, right? So a big part of movement is you move to get something. It's approach, right? They talk about approach and avoidance as basic kind of things that you want to program. And so a person with Parkinson's disease has a problem

• 29:37Speaker 01

  with willful movement, tremors and stuff, too. But I think that dopamine is involved in this kind of energizing you to move. I think it's involved in energizing you to seek information. I think it's involved in energizing you to seek rewards. And so I do think there's some kind of a common pathway there. And it speaks to this issue of the difference which you've talked about and I talk about a lot, is wanting versus liking. And so Kent Beridge at Michigan is great work on this recently. Gobs and gobs of manipulations of dopamine activity. And what he finds is an animal, let's say that's deprived of dopamine. It will go for rewards just fine.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  It just won't work for them. It won't do the work that you need to get a reward. But if you just put it in front of them, they'll take it. So what dopamine, it is heavily involved with these opioid systems that does drive reward responses and it's heavily involved in learning about rewards. And that's why you get a big dopaminergic bump when an animal gets a reward. Because you're learning about the reward and what predicted the reward. There's a little bit of a credit assignment process that takes place. What's interesting is you get this too with actually my colleague at Davis, Brian Wilchin. Some beautiful work where he's looked at trace conditioning, which is when you have like a, let's say if you play a tone and you wait a long time and then the animal gets a shock. Right?

• 31:06Speaker 01

  And so what you, what you find is, is that the animal learns to be afraid of the tone. But it's such a long time in his thing, I think it's on the order of 10 seconds or above. The animal has to be somehow doing something to be able to blame that tone for getting shocked. Right? And so what he found was that there's this burst of dopamine activity in the locus rilius, which is actually known for norepinephrine, but there's really cool work on dopamine in the LC now modulating hippocampus. Sorry to get all nerdy here.

• 31:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  No, no, that's, trust me, this audience likes nerdy.

• 31:42Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 31:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  I think that's why, part of why they're listening. A locus rilius is just a area of the, of the brain that tends to sprinkler large brain areas with epinephrine, which is, or norepinephrine, noradrenaline for alertness. So somewhat distinct from the dopamine system, but you're telling us it can also release dopamine.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  Yes, that's right. And sometimes they co-release from the same neurons, from what I understand. And so. What seems to be happening is, and he's studying this now, but what seems to be happening is it's not that the animal's going, "Oh, I just heard a tone, I heard a tone," and then they get shocked. It may be more like they get a shock and then they get an immediate, "What just happened?" and then they get a memory retrieval of the tone, and that allows them to put the two together to learn that this tone caused the shock, right? And dopamine seems to be playing a part in that learning process, too. So it's not just about reward. It's really kind of, you know, the next time you hear that tone, you might, if it were a real threat, you could actually escape from it, right?

• 32:43Speaker 01

  And there's this whole active avoidance literature that you can look at with these approach circuits. They're actually quite useful for avoiding threats and avoiding punishments. So it's really, to me, I see this role for energizing, and that's often rewards. I mean, I like rewards as much as the next guy, right? I mean, look at how much coffee I drank when I got here. So it's not that, but it's just that it's mobilizing you, I think.

• 33:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. By now, many of you have heard me say that if I could take just one supplement, that supplement would be AG1. The reason for that is AG1 is the highest quality and most complete of the foundational nutritional supplements available. What that means is that it contains not just vitamins and minerals, but also probiotics, prebiotics, and adaptogens to cover any gaps you may have in your diet and provide support for a demanding life. For me, even if I eat mostly whole foods and minimally processed foods, which I do for most of my food intake, it's very difficult for me to get enough fruits and vegetables, vitamins and minerals, micronutrients, and adaptogens from food alone. For that reason, I've been taking AG1 daily since 2012, and often twice a day, once in the morning or mid-morning,

• 33:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  and again in the afternoon or evening. When I do that, it clearly bolsters my energy, my immune system, and my gut microbiome. These are all critical to brain function, mood, physical performance, and much more. If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.com/huberman to claim their special offer. Right now, they're giving away five free travel packs plus a year's supply of vitamin D3 K2. Again, that's drinkag1.com/huberman to claim that special offer. One thing that we talked about just briefly earlier was this non-sleep deep rest protocol that in...

• 34:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yoga tradition is called yoga nidra or yoga sleep because you lie down, it's self-directed relaxation, long exhale breathing to slow your heart rate, et cetera, et cetera. I called it NSDR, not to appropriate it, but because the language of yoga nidra is a little bit of a separator for people. It sounds a little bit esoteric, right? And non-sleep deep rest tells you what it is, right? There's a study at the University of Copenhagen, I can provide a link to it in the show note captions, and I'd love your thoughts on it. They show that people who do this practice, this is a PET imaging study, suprachiasmatic entomography, for those that don't know, and they see significant increases in striatal dopamine in the condition of people that do this self-directed relaxation as opposed to a more traditional

• 35:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  meditation. And this is why I say that NSDR is useful for restoring mental and physical vigor, which translates to this idea that dopamine prepares us for, or is a reservoir for potential movement, typically toward rewards. And I love that we're talking about some of the other facets of dopamine, because all too often people think about it as pleasure or motivation, and certainly it's involved in motivation. And I'm very happy to learn that it's also involved in learning.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  Oh, seriously?

• 35:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  That's a novel perspective on dopamine. We hear so much about dopamine. Do you think that when dopamine is released as a consequence of curiosity in a way that primes the memory system, that we become entrenched in particular behaviors or routes of pursuing curiosity to the exclusion of others? What I'm thinking about here is a kid, we've seen these data, kids with ADHD actually have terrific ability to focus if it's something that they're really excited about, really curious about.

• 36:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  So you give a kid with ADHD who loves video games a video game, and they're like a laser.

• 36:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  So it's not that they lack the capacity

• 36:20Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 36:20Andrew D. Huberman?

  to focus, it's that they have a harder time dropping into focus.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 36:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  But it seems that because of the learning dimension to dopamine, that these circuits could potentially, quote unquote, learn that it's video games that provides that feeling of focus to the exclusion of other things. Meaning, how does one keep a diversification of inputs to the dopamine system so that we're continually driving dopamine through lots of different things as opposed to just social media, or just video games, or just... Pick your favorite.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  Thing, because becoming a functional human being involves the requirement to focus on many things, not just the things we were curious about.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, to me, I talk about this a little bit in the book, but to me, and if you look at the literature too, you can see this, a big part of being curious is the appraisal process, so to speak. And what I mean by that is saying, something happens, right? Let's say something in your environment happens. If you're gonna, you have a decision to make, is this interesting? Is this important? Is this scary? And I think the thing is, is that you need to be open to that possibility that it's interesting. So like, so let me just give you like an example that I that I often give. Let's say you're walking in a neighborhood, you're traveling like you do for many of your events,

• 37:43Speaker 01

  and you walk into a new neighborhood you haven't been to, it's nighttime, kind of poorly lit, and you hear a loud noise, right? You could be like, well, that's a gunshot, I better hide, or I better run. Or you could be like, oh, maybe there's a club nearby, and there's like a cool band playing, I should go check this out. That appraisal is really critical for how you respond. And so it's not just a matter of curiosity happens, it's a process of cultivation, and it's a process of appraisal. And so, I mean, this is, I think, you know, I'm not a wellness guru or anything, but it's like, I think this is one of the cool things about mindfulness training, is it forces you to take the mundane and be curious

• 38:27Speaker 01

  about it. And when you start paying attention to your breathing, my friend, Mishi Jia, has really kind of turned me on to this. She wrote a book on mindfulness and meditation. And one of the things that happens is, you're breathing, and you realize, wait a minute. This one isn't the same as the last one, right? Or you can do these meditate, I'm sure you've done this, right? This part of, like, this sound is different. I'll sit in the backyard doing, thanks to you, I do this morning 10-minute thing. And so I'll be out in the backyard and I'll be like, hearing some sound and I'll be like, "Oh, that sound, there's a bird there, I didn't even notice that." You know, and then there's some other sound. "I'm hearing the freeway, that's annoying, but I heard it."

• 39:06Speaker 01

  So these, it's really a matter of paying attention in some ways and being open to it. And I think this speaks back to this thing about as you get older, sometimes people find it scary to be in a new place. People find it scary to meet a person who's different from them or so forth. I mean, I love listening to music that's a little bit out of my comfort zone, so people hate it, you know? So I think some of it is sort of cultivating, being comfortable with discomfort.

• 39:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's such an important theme. I feel like nowadays, in part because of the algorithms on social media, we are fed things that feed our progressively greater and greater scrolling and dwell time, as it's called. You know, the algorithms are measuring clearly how long we dwell on a given image and what's in that image and et cetera. But it'd be nice to cultivate an algorithm for curiosity. Surely it can be done. I mean, you got all these smart computer scientists and AI folks. And we come into this world naturally curious.

• 40:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  All primates, including humans, will visually fixate on anything that's novel, right? And study it. And try and make predictions and gain understanding. Maybe now would be a good time for us to discuss a little bit about the circuitry involved in memory, so that we have that as a template to digest some other themes in memory. Most people are probably familiar with the so-called hippocampus, which is, I mean, seahorse. It looks a little bit like a seahorse, although the anatomists had a little bit of an imagination there, in my opinion. But... Hippocampus, let's add to it prefrontal cortex, which you've already mentioned. And then these neuromodulatory systems. So if we were going to assign a one-sentence

• 41:06Andrew D. Huberman?

  definition, functional definition to each of those areas, what would you say the hippocampus does?

• 41:12Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, add a whole lot of other neocortical areas.

• 41:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  Please, and let's add those in. But I think if you can start with three, I think then folks can digest it.

• 41:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the hippocampus is controversial. I mean, it's the most studied area of the brain, arguably, except for maybe V1.

• 41:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  Visual cortex, V1.

• 41:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And, but I believe, and my colleagues do, I wrote a big paper with Howard Eichen, the late Howard Eichenbaum and Andy Onelinus on this, who, you know, from Davis. And we believe that it's about linking various experiences to a context. And what I mean by that is you've got information about smell, high-level vision, high-level semantic knowledge information, right? And the hippocampus's wiring is really set up to not understand what's going on. So the late David Marr, who's a pioneer in computational neuroscience, proposed that what the hippocampus is about is what's he called "simple memory." It's basically saying, "I know Andy Huberman." Sorry, is it okay?

• 42:13Andrew D. Huberman?

  He used to call me Andy, that's fine. Yeah, a long story.

• 42:15Speaker 01

  It's a Davis thing, you would understand. So, so I know Andy Huberman, right? But to have a memory of this moment that's separate from, let's say, I saw you at some neuroscience retreat when we were in, when you were in grad school, I have to have some part of the brain that doesn't know who you are to some extent, right? Because I got to keep them separate. And so there are, the hippocampus, what it'll do is it'll form a memory that's not an Andy Huberman memory. It's an Andy in this place, at this time, in this context. And that's what allows it to support what's called episodic memory, which is your ability to say,

• 42:56Speaker 01

  I went to Washington DC once and I remember going to the Smithsonian. As opposed to your knowledge about what generally happens in Washington DC, oh, the president's there, oh, that's where a lot of politics happen, oh, the Smithsonian is a place in DC. It's a memory of your being there at a particular place in time. Now, there's other parts of the brain that allow you to associate that information in a meaningful way and to be able to actually expand on that context and create these narratives and these stories about it. And where the prefrontal cortex comes in, and it's a huge area, it's about one-third of the primate brain.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  So it's just massive. There are a lot of people who go, wow, there's no real, there's a bunch of different areas and all do different things. And I subscribe to the view that that is very true. And at the same time, there's a global function of the prefrontal cortex, which is what's called cognitive control. It's this ability to say, I'm going to regulate my movements and I'm going to regulate my perceptions and my thoughts based on what's important to me in terms of this higher order goal, right? So when I've tested, for instance, patients with prefrontal lesions, I'm sure Mark Desposito talked to you about this, it's like the hallmark of them, you know, they used to say, well, the prefrontal cortex, it's important for working memory.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  And you could record from neurons in the prefrontal cortex or look at fMRI signal. And if a person or an animal is holding something in their mind, like a phone number, neurons or bold signal in MRI will be highly elevated, their activity will be elevated throughout this period of time where they're holding in mind. But it turns out, if you just ask somebody with a major prefrontal lesion, here's a bunch of numbers, five, two, seven, eight, you know, ask you to tell them back to me in right order, they can do it just fine. But now I start to distract them. I move my hands around. There's a plane going on, you know, flying outside the window. And I had that literally happen once.

• 45:08Speaker 01

  Now they start to bomb it because their attention is not controlled by their goal. It's controlled by the environment around them. And so this is where things get really interesting. So I once tested a patient, and I had heard about this, but until you see it, it like doesn't register. It really blew my mind. So there's a test called the Wisconsin card sorting test, and we don't have to get into all the details of it. But basically, it's this test where people learn some rule about where to put a card on a table, right? And they don't get told the rule, they just learn it. And patients learn this with prefrontal damage, learn it just fine.

• 45:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  Is it that they get a error signal or a correct signal if they're doing it in the right direction? Over time, they just kind of, the brain figures it out?

• 45:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So maybe I'll give a little bit more background, but I don't want to go in the weeds.

• 45:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  No, that's okay. If I'm correct, if I'm wrong, I forget the Wisconsin card sorting task details. But, you know, like they, they're told to just start sorting the cards and that the, the, um, the, the correct algorithm will reveal itself by a series of error and, um, correct signals. And so maybe I'm taking all the red cards and putting in one pile, black cards and putting them in another, getting error signals, so then maybe I go odds evens.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  Maybe I divide by suit if it's depending on what kind of cards they are. Maybe I organize by even odd alteration, and sooner or later, the brain figures it out.

• 46:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. And you don't need a prefrontal cortex to do that. Which is surprising, but you don't. You can do it.

• 46:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  So there's context-dependent action and learning without the prefrontal cortex?

• 46:41Speaker 01

  Yes, but let's, let's unpack this context then, right? So now you've been, let's say, putting all the diamonds in one pile. You've been putting all the spades in another pile, right? So now I change the rule, but I don't tell you, and you put the diamonds, the queen of diamonds in the diamond pile, let's say. And now I say, nope, that's wrong. So now you have to, so wait a minute, that was right all this time. What's going on?

• 47:07Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's like life.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  This is like life, right? The thing that used to be, used to work for you no longer works. So you keep doing this, and a person with an intact brain will eventually figure out, okay, that's not working. I'll try another strategy. And then they'll learn the new rule, right? It's not easy, it's a pain, but people will do it. This patient in particular, Kept on using the old rule. And so you have to give a series of hints going like, hmm. What's your strategy here? And they're like, they'll tell you and putting it according to the color. And then you, okay, well, does that appear to be working for you? And they'll go, no. And they'll just keep doing it.

• 47:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  They perseverate.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  They perseverate. But the interesting thing is he knows it's not working. But he can't help himself from doing it. And so what the prefrontal cortex is, it's not about this declarative knowledge about what you should do. And I think this is very deep because I think often we get moralistic about people's actions, especially for people who have head injuries or something like that. And it's like, you can have all of these beliefs that you want to have, but you need the prefrontal cortex to translate these high order beliefs, things that are very abstract into actual concrete action. Otherwise, what you do is not going to be dictated by that knowledge. So how this relates to memory is

• 48:33Speaker 01

  we're constantly barraged by information. I think it's, I might've said something like 35 terabytes. I don't know, but it's a big number and the estimates get bigger and bigger every year. So we're barraged by information. There's no way you can even pay attention to it all, right? So you really rely on the prefrontal cortex to be able to say, this is what I'm doing right now. And everything else, it's noise. Here's the signal that I need to focus on. And that's super important for memory because one of the things you see in old age is older people are bad at most memory tests. But it turns out in labs, we kind of overestimate that. And the reason we overestimate it is we're giving them a test, which is something hard. It requires a lot of focus and it's not something they do every day.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  But Karen Campbell and Lynn Hasher, who are these great cognitive psychologists, did this cool experiment where they had a bunch of other stuff that people were supposed to ignore. In this memory task where they're studying a bunch of things, they're trying to memorize a bunch of stuff, but there's stuff going on they're supposed to ignore. The older people were just as good as the younger people at remembering the stuff they're supposed to ignore. They were just bad at the stuff that they're supposed to pay attention to.

• 49:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  That's so interesting. Maybe you could say that another time. You said it very clearly. I got it. But say it one more time, because if anyone missed it, this is super important. Older people can.

• 49:51Speaker 01

  They were bad at remembering the stuff that they were supposed to remember, but they were just as good as the older, as the younger people, maybe even better, but definitely as good as the younger people at remembering the things that they weren't supposed to pay attention to.

• 50:06Andrew D. Huberman?

  Gosh, it speaks to almost two parallel processing streams for memory, if I'm not mistaken. Or maybe, so what's going on there? Is it that one form of memory involves the suppression of information and that circuit is actually quite active in these older people and young people? Whereas curiosity for, and the ability to remember and integrate new information is somehow diminished in older people. Earlier, we were talking about how that's not the case, that curiosity, if curiosity is intact, memory is intact and growing.

• 50:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, okay, I should say, the benefit of curiosity on memory is intact in older people. I got that wrong. I don't know, Matthias could tell me if I just email him at a break or something, but I don't know if curiosity itself is as high in older adults, just self-reported or...

• 51:03Andrew D. Huberman?

  I would guess no, but this is why I asked about movement earlier. It's also, curiosity is also linked to your ability to access novel scenarios. Of course, online, you can just thumb scroll or click and access all sorts of novelty. Is there any, there must be data as to whether or not people in their 70s, 80s, and 90s are...

• 51:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  Scrolling social media to the same extent that younger people are.

• 51:32Speaker 01

  I don't know, but I can say two things to this. One is that definitely there's a lot of work on media multitasking. The short answer is bad for memory.

• 51:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay, so scrolling is bad for memory?

• 51:45Speaker 01

  Well, media multitasking is bad for memory. Scrolling, the tech thing is a super fascinating area in general. It's really how we interact with the tech that's bad. But if you're an older adult, your frontal function is not going to be as good. You will be more distractible. You will be more likely to go off course. And so that scrolling is going to be more potent because as you pointed out, the algorithms are all designed to suck up our attention. So psychologist Herb Simon came up with this beautiful term called the attention economy. And so the idea is that the more information that you have in front of you, the more impoverished you are in terms of your attention. So there's no such thing as free speech because it's like you have a limited supply of attention. So everything has a cost.

• 52:30Speaker 01

  And so the more information you have in front of you, the harder it is to pay attention to what's important. And that's where I think the older adults really lose some of their functioning. Because basically, I talk about in the book, and it's not a perfect analogy, is neurons are functioning kind of like a democracy in the sense that, you know, real democracies involve these political coalitions or alliances, right? I mean, people talk about the right and the left, but that's dumb because it's like there's always just alliances between people who like different things. And they just form these convenient alliances with each other. But let's just imagine neurons kind of do this in the brain, right?

• 53:09Speaker 01

  And so you have, in theory, to be able to pay attention to something, some coalition of neurons has to be firing a lot that is corresponding to the thing that you're trying to pay attention to. But if something is salient, bright, shiny, loud, it's just grabbing your attention. What's going to happen is, is that those neurons start to shout down the neurons that are trying to keep you on what's not shiny, but it's important, right? And so what happens is, With the prefrontal cortex, you can bias that competition. That's the term that people have used in literature. That allows you. So what people have found for is just a really cool finding again is you can find in the visual cortex

• 53:54Speaker 01

  neurons that fire when you're seeing something red. Neurons that fire when you see something blue, let's say, right? I'm kind of distorting the picture, but you get the idea. So if an animal is trying to hold in mind something, let's say, hold on a mental picture of something that's blue. What happens is the blue neurons are firing in visual cortex, even though the animal's not seeing blue, right? It's just they're thinking about blue. You damage the prefrontal cortex, nothing. So you lose that selectivity. So what's happening is the prefrontal cortex is biasing the competition and saying, I know blue's not shining in front of you. There's no shiny blue thing in front of you right now, but I need these neurons to stay active.

• 54:37Speaker 01

  And so it's doing this modulation to help out the neurons that are keeping the information that's called relevant. So what happens when that communication goes? Let's say due to hypertension, diabetes, you get all this white matter damage that happens with old age. And this is really a big thing that is very preventable with the right protocols, so to speak.

• 54:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'll just breathe. White matter are the fiber tracks, the wires that essentially that connect neurons across long and short distances.

• 55:06Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah. And so if you damage those long range tracks, the prefrontal cortex is not efficiently able to bias that competition. And so now the inane gets remembered at the expense of the important. That's, that's, I think, the key thing. And a lot of, that's why people talk about the prefrontal cortex as the central executive. As anybody who's worked a job knows, it's like the executives are useless, right? You try to get an executive to do, I mean, except for some who are useful, but then they don't really run companies very well.

• 55:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  There are some CEOs that are doing spectacular things, but.

• 55:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, okay, we won't go there. Controversial, shall we say? But anyway, so like a good executive, their job isn't to micromanage. Their job is to say, here's the big picture. Here's my vision for the company, and I want everyone to be working towards this goal. Not, you know, sifting through the mailroom, not paying the bills, right? And so what happens is, is that when you have certain kinds of things that happen with aging, like damage to the white matter, that happens through essentially tiny cerebrovascular events, most likely. And we've done some research on this in our lab in collaboration with Bill Jaggs, who's now in Berkeley, and Charlie DeCarle. And you can measure this

• 56:27Speaker 01

  in MRIs with a measure called white matter hyperintensities. You use a scan that shows up little bright spots where the white matter is probably damaged. And what you find is, is that these people with white matter hyperintensities actually have memory performance that's as poor as people who have hippocampal atrophy, probably in the earliest stages of Alzheimer's. And they're also bad at controlling information even when they don't have to remember something.

• 56:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  Interesting.

• 56:57Speaker 01

  So it's like a double whammy. And it's kind of like the executive is trapped in a remote place, and they got no internet access and no phone, and so they can't communicate with the company, as everybody's just doing their own thing, right? And that's, that's a little bit of what can happen with aging. It doesn't have to, but that can happen. And you see this to a really great extent in many disorders. This is why so many disorders really affect control and frontal function, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, many kinds of things. We talked about brain fog, and many kinds of inflammatory conditions will affect it. Depression, clinical depressions. I've seen people, older adults with depression,

• 57:42Speaker 01

  who are cognitively more impaired than people in the MCI stage of Alzheimer's.

• 57:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  Really?

• 57:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 57:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  So depression is dangerous for memory?

• 57:50Speaker 01

  It's terrible for memory. And it seems to be a risk factor for Alzheimer's as well.

• 57:55Andrew D. Huberman?

  Do you think that depression is dangerous for memory and a risk factor for Alzheimer's because it is, by definition, anti-curiosity?

• 58:03Speaker 01

  I would probably not say that.

• 58:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 58:05Speaker 01

  And I would say also, I don't know what. I mean, you know, once you kind of get into these things in the epidemiological world, everything interacts with each other.

• 58:13Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right.

• 58:14Speaker 01

  And there's genetics and there's environment and blah, blah, blah.

• 58:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  Depression means poor sleep, which means poor learning, which means etc.

• 58:19Speaker 01

  I think that's a big part of it, you know? I think that's a big part, but you do. Okay, so let's go back to your question because I do think curiosity is affected by depression. I don't know the research on this, but I would be shocked if it isn't. And I do think that dopamine activity is disrupted in depression. And your motivation to get anhedonia is the hall, one of the hallmark symptoms of depression, as is rumination, by the way, which is memory retrieval of preferential negative retrieval of negative events.

• 58:50Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right.

• 58:50Speaker 01

  And cogitating over them.

• 58:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors, Function. I recently became a Function member after searching for the most comprehensive approach to lab testing. While I've long been a fan of blood testing, I really wanted to find a more in-depth program for analyzing blood, urine, and saliva to get a full picture of my heart health, my hormone status, my immune system regulation, my metabolic function, my vitamin and mineral status, and other critical areas of my overall health and vitality. Function not only provides testing of over 100 biomarkers key to physical and mental health, but it also analyzes these results and provides insights from top doctors on your results. For example, in one of my first tests with Function, I learned that I had two high levels of mercury in my blood. This was totally surprising to me.

• 59:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  I had no idea prior to taking the test. Function not only helped me detect this, but offered medical doctor-informed insights on how to best reduce those mercury levels, which included limiting my tuna consumption, because I had been eating a lot of tuna, while also making an effort to eat more leafy greens and supplementing with NAC and acetylcysteine, both of which can support glutathione production and detoxification and worked to reduce my mercury levels. Comprehensive lab testing like this is so important for health. And while I've been doing it for years, I've always found it to be overly complicated and expensive. I've been so impressed by Function, both at the level of ease of use, that is, getting the test done, as well as how comprehensive and how actionable the tests are, that I

• 1:00:20Andrew D. Huberman?

  recently joined their advisory board, and I'm thrilled that they're sponsoring the podcast. If you'd like to try Function, go to functionhealth.com/huberman. Function currently has a waitlist of over 250,000 people, but they're offering early access to Huberman Lab listeners. Again, that's functionhealth.com/huberman to get early access to function. You probably think a fair amount about age-related cognitive decline and Alzheimer's. And I'm just curious, at a personal level, what are the sorts of things that you do to try and offset cognitive decline? You seem to be a very vivacious and curious person. I've known you a long time, and I don't know whether or not you were caffeinated every time we met, but you have a lot of energy, you're a very curious person.

• 1:01:06Andrew D. Huberman?

  You just wrote a book, we'll talk more about, and you're going on podcasts. You're doing a lot of things besides running a world-class research laboratory. So clearly, a lot of curiosity. What do the data say about ways to maintain or enhance one's memory capacity? With the understanding that curiosity is probably involved, as we talked about earlier, but at a really basic level, I mean, a number of things leap to mind, but I'm just curious what your, if you had to pick like three to five things that are clearly substantiated in the data as supporting the maintenance or enhancement of memory as we get older. What are those?

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  I mean, as a memory researcher, I almost find myself ashamed when I talk about these things because, as you know, so many of the most important factors are ones that are related to just health. So for instance, you mentioned sleep, that's a big one. We can, actually, there's a beautiful study that speaks to this that was done. 29,000 subjects in China, and they followed them up for 10 years. Now, at the beginning of, so they divided people into three groups. They said, okay, here's, well, what they said is there's six lifestyle factors that we're going to investigate. One was, I think, engagement in cognitive activities. I think one was social engagement.

• 1:02:27Speaker 01

  One was physical exercise, not smoking, I think no alcohol. But they identified these lifestyle factors that were basically just kind of good lifestyle factors. So they get people who have four to six of these lifestyle factors going versus zero to one of these lifestyle factors, we'll just take the extreme. When they start, they're all the same. Ten years later, the people with four to six lifestyle factors going for them are performing almost twice as high on memory tests as the people with zero to one lifestyle.

• 1:03:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  Wow, so these are people exercising, paying attention to their sleep, social engagement. What are some of the other?

• 1:03:07Speaker 01

  Ah, I believe.

• 1:03:08Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm guessing low inflammatory diet.

• 1:03:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, definitely not smoking. And, uh, and smoking and alcohol, um, I think were big ones.

• 1:03:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  The smoking one is interesting because we know smoking can cause cancer and cardiovascular risk is, is real there, although there are some data, as I understand, that nicotine itself, not smoking, vaping, dipping or snuffing, but that nicotine can be pro cognition and maybe even pro memory. Um, and nowadays, people are using nicotine more and more. I'm not a big proponent of this because of the blood pressure increase and the typical routes of administration are dangerous, but, um, nicotine, I've been told, is protective for Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Is that true?

• 1:03:52Speaker 01

  Well, um, let me, oh, by the way, I just have to say, I forgot, healthy diet. Healthy diet was a big one, too.

• 1:03:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  Which I define as, people wonder, what is that? And there are all these online debates about vegan, vegetarian, carnivore, blah, blah, blah, but I think most people in the world are omnivores, most, and I think it's very clear that the number one thing for healthy diet is to try and get most of one's food from non-processed or minimally processed sources. That sort of sets you in the right direction.

• 1:04:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, so I was actually emailing, uh, with Dean and Ayesha Shurzai, who really talk a lot about this.

• 1:04:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, they do great work.

• 1:04:25Speaker 01

  They do great work, and so they were actually sending me some stuff, and I had known about some of this, but like, Mediterranean diet has worked really well.

• 1:04:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  Olive oil, fruits, vegetables, fish, eggs, limited amounts of meat, although I happen, I'm half Argentine, so I, I'm a.

• 1:04:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, you like your steaks.

• 1:04:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  I do.

• 1:04:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. Which I think, you know, is, let me come back to this point because I think it's super important, but leafy greens were a big one. They, they pointed out a Rush Presbyterian study that I didn't know about that put people on, I think it was called the DASH diet, and it included leafy greens as a big part of it, and that had a dramatic increase in cognit-, I mean, dramatically preserved cognitive performance in people who were on that diet. So, the healthy diet is a big part. Now, nicotine's interesting, so if you notice, a lot of people with schizophrenia smoke. And one of the things that's been found is that nicotine does seem to improve functioning in people, cognitive functioning in people with schizophrenia.

• 1:05:24Speaker 01

  Now, I think the big thing to remember about any kind of drug, and this goes for food effects probably too, but especially drugs, is there's huge individual differences, huge. And so, I mean, just to give you an example, I could not function without that coffee that I had this morning and then coming in here, but my daughter would not be functional after those cups of coffee. Some people really are affected by these different things differently. And then, of course, there's always a dose-response curve, and they often follow these inverted U's. So Mark Esposito, who was my postdoc mentor, did a lot of work with dopaminergic drugs.

• 1:06:06Speaker 01

  And a lot of people had done these drug studies early on on cognition, they would find no effects, or sometimes it'd make people worse. And what he found was, was that if you looked more carefully, there is an inverted U effect, where some people, and it depended on their working memory capacity, were actually benefiting from the drug, and then these other people who were, let's say, I can't remember if it was higher or lower, were doing worse. And there's a genetic component to that, unsurprisingly, dopamine transporters play a role and so forth. And so now you start to get into all of these gene, environment, drug, interactions that are just, I would really caution people against saying nicotine is good, nicotine is bad.

• 1:06:48Speaker 01

  I think it really, really is a much more complex issue, just like marijuana, right? So you can look at smoking weed in adolescents. For people who are at high genetic risk for psychosis, it dramatically increases your risk for psychosis.

• 1:07:03Andrew D. Huberman?

  That's my understanding, too. Although the times I've said that on the internet, I caught a lot of pushback from some of the cannabis researchers, but then, having invited one of them on this podcast, I then got subsequent input from other researchers, which counter their narrative, which we can both say, because we're both research scientists, that's what you call a field.

• 1:07:25Speaker 01

  Okay, maybe cut out any misinformation I might have said.

• 1:07:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  No, no, no, you didn't. You didn't. I think the point is just that it's very clear that there are certain individuals for whom high THC consumption can trigger psychotic episodes.

• 1:07:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, and we're seeing this with-

• 1:07:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  But not everyone.

• 1:07:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we're now interestingly seeing this with psychedelics where it's like all these positive effects of psychedelics are being brought up. But you know, a lot of people remember the negative effects on people like Rocky Erickson from the 13th floor elevators, or like Sid Barrett from Pink Floyd, who became psychotic after doing large amounts of LSD.

• 1:08:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  What was the first example?

• 1:08:02Speaker 01

  Uh, Rocky Erickson from the 13th floor elevators. Great psychedelic band.

• 1:08:06Andrew D. Huberman?

  Oh, psychedelic. Okay, we'll talk more about, uh, Charan is a, himself a rock and roll musician and loves rock and roll, hence the reference to Rick Rubin earlier. And there's a photo of Rick here in the studio that our photographer, Mike Blayback, took. So we were looking at that together. So yes, psychedelics have claimed the minds of certain people, made them, helped contribute to their pre-existing presumably psychosis. I should also say, in fairness to the other compounds out there, methamphetamines have also significantly contributed to the progression of psychosis in many people. So it's not just psychedelics.

• 1:08:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right? And then, of course, there are those who have somehow managed to take psychedelics and become more sane.

• 1:08:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I saw some-

• 1:08:49Andrew D. Huberman?

  Or at least remain at least as sane as they were before.

• 1:08:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, and of course sanity is in the eye of the beholder too. But what I'll say is that, yeah, and you can see this, actually, there's some new concern about Adderall and stimulants. And if you're giving it to people who might be at high risk for schizophrenia, it might also promote psychosis.

• 1:09:08Andrew D. Huberman?

  That makes sense, given the noradrenergic, dopaminergic involvement in schizophrenia, and those drugs are pro-noradrenergic, dopaminergic, in general.

• 1:09:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. So it's really a much more complicated interaction, and I think this is where this whole realm of personalized medicine will be super helpful. But there does seem to be a broad, general effect for certain dietary interventions. Berries seem to be good, leafy greens seem to be good.

• 1:09:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  So eat healthy. We talked about the exercise.

• 1:09:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  And my understanding, I've been looking at this in detail lately, but I'd love your thoughts, is that while everybody-

• 1:09:45Andrew D. Huberman?

  We now believe men, women, et cetera, should both, should do both cardiovascular exercise, so to speak, elevate heart rate for 12 to 60 minutes kind of thing, depending on the intensity, as well as resistance training to maintain neuromuscular function, offset sarcopenia, et cetera. To me, the really impressive effects of exercise on learning capacity and the brain, in terms of brain health, seem to come from cardiovascular exercise. And that could just be because that's what's been emphasized in the studies. But even when one looks at some, compares the best human studies, it really does seem like getting blood flow up to the brain.

• 1:10:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  Getting a nice release of neuromodulators into the brain facilitates learning, and then, of course, people have to do something with that learning. Right? So, do you make an effort to exercise for the specific purpose of maintaining or enhancing brain function?

• 1:10:37Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah, actually, so, I, like, when I finished my book, I limped to the finish line. I had all sorts of crazy stuff happen. I won't depress the readers with all crazy stuff.

• 1:10:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm sure people would be curious, what does it take to finish a book and how much, you mean, you took a toll on your body?

• 1:10:53Speaker 01

  It took, probably, I mean, I don't know, probably lost some, like, biological years and that, but it was really, like, I mean, it was great. I mean, it was really an emotional roller coaster, though, but then I had a bunch of, you know, I'm trying to do science, write this book, basically, in my spare time, which doesn't really exist, as you know how it goes.

• 1:11:13Andrew D. Huberman?

  Sure.

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  And then I had life happen, you know, my mom was in the hospital, my cat died on my birthday. I mean, it was just like, yeah, see, I didn't want to depress people with all this stuff.

• 1:11:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's real life, real life, I'm just sorry to hear it.

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, no, no, it's okay. So then I finished my book, and I was, like, just thoroughly thrashed, and I had a sabbatical because I wanted to have time to promote the book and educate people about what's in the book, and, which I'd never gotten a chance to do before. It's like, doing this, fantastic, right? I get to talk to people. So...

• 1:11:44Speaker 01

  I really wanted to make some changes and actually this gets something we were talking about before we started recording, which is after I wrote the book, it's all, you know, it's going in the proofing stage. I was talking to my daughter and just, you know, out of the blue, she said, we're talking about ADHD and she's like, Dad, you totally have ADHD. And I'm like, what? You know, and I'm like, oh, Gen Z, you know, over diagnosis of ADHD, whatever, right? And then I remembered when I was a kid, my school contacted my parents and said, you have ADHD. He has ADHD. And it was interesting because it was like, I actually was ahead in school by a year and I got held back because I just was so

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  socially bad. I couldn't stop talking in class and I was just like really awkward and impulsive. And, uh, um, and so, but, you know, it was the seventies, nobody did anything, you know, and, and I had all sorts of behavior issues and so forth. And there are other factors going on too. But it really got me thinking, oh my God, I gotta make some changes. I'm living this unsustainable life where I'm jumping from crisis to crisis to crisis. And I say, I don't have time for blah, blah, blah. And so, um, my, again, this is gonna sound depressing, but it's got a happier ending. So my dog had died in 2019 of cancer and that was my first dog. And so I thought I'm never getting a dog

• 1:13:10Speaker 01

  again. And in 2020, in the pandemic, I got another dog.

• 1:13:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  Good for you.

• 1:13:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  What kind of dog?

• 1:13:17Speaker 01

  Uh, she's a, uh, both of these were shelter dogs.

• 1:13:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  Great. Good for you.

• 1:13:20Speaker 01

  They're all mixes. Um, I'm sure there's some pit bull in her because that's every shelter dog either has pit bull or, um,

• 1:13:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  Or chihuahua.

• 1:13:26Speaker 01

  Or chihuahua, exactly. So, but she's, looks very Belgian Malinois and she moves like a Belgian Malinois.

• 1:13:32Andrew D. Huberman?

  Beautiful dogs.

• 1:13:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. And they're so smart and super athletic. I mean, she can like jump vertically, you know, just like it's, so like, it was, I'll come home, she'll like jump up and then push herself off me, which is like a very classic thing. And so that's why they can jump, like she can climb up like seven feet up a tree to chase a squirrel.

• 1:13:50Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah. They use these for military operations in tier one military.

• 1:13:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:13:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  They're trained to jump out of planes.

• 1:13:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  With parachutes.

• 1:13:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. And she's, but she's a smaller dog. So our big, our older dog looked like kind of, she wasn't, she was actually a kelpie mix, I think, but she looked like a, um, Uh, Rottweiler. And so everyone was scared of her, even though she's the sweetest dog. This one, she's like smaller, even though she looks kind of shepherd like. Everyone's like, oh, your dog is so sweet. She's so cute, you know?

• 1:14:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  You're like, but this one's the ninja.

• 1:14:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I mean, all shelter dogs have a little bit of a crazy switch in them, don't they? It's like, it's, it's tough for them.

• 1:14:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  They're, they're like feral people, feral dogs. Yeah. But they have big hearts.

• 1:14:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  They're eternally grateful. You give them a home.

• 1:14:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And you know, one of the things that I was thinking is I missed walking the dog. I missed that activity. And so I make sure to do that every morning. And this is, goes back to some of the activity things that we're talking about. I know I'm totally drifting away from ADHD, which is ironic.

• 1:14:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  No, I see, I see, I see where you're going with this.

• 1:14:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, but this is, this is a little bit different, but it's related, which is, um, having a sense of purpose is very important for healthy brain aging. There's a Trends of Cognitive Science article, I'll send you that. It's one of these things that neuroscientists don't talk about because it's not, we don't understand it. But it's hugely important. It's part of this whole phenomenon, what they call cognitive reserve. And, you know, having this dog that I'm taking care of, especially because, you know, my kid had gone to college, just grown up, living independently. Walking this dog every day, it gives, I mean, obviously I'm married and I love my family and I've got lots of them. I've got a lot of my students and so forth. But it gave me more and I'm exercising in a way that's kind of fun. I'm listening to podcasts and I'm moving.

• 1:15:37Speaker 01

  And so that's something right there. It's not just the exercise, but it's the whole thing, right? I'm not doing something that I hate. So then I'm like, I hate running. I hate, I have this inertia because I've, my ADHD brain doesn't like to do stuff unless it's shiny and fun, right? I could go into work, I could write this book because it's fun for me, you know? But so I'm like, how can I do this? And so I I ended up shelling out for a personal trainer. I blew my advance on a personal trainer who's great. And I go to see her and she tells me what to do. So I don't have to think about it and it's fun.

• 1:16:13Andrew D. Huberman?

  You're in great shape.

• 1:16:14Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you.

• 1:16:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  You're a few years older than I am and I haven't seen you in a while. And I I always have this like slight fear when I run into a colleague again after a while. Because there was this joke that we didn't tell professors until we became professors about the so-called tenured look. You see someone come in as a postdoc, you see them as a junior professor, and then you see them after tenure.

• 1:16:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:32Andrew D. Huberman?

  And tenure is a big milestone, right? It corresponds to academic freedom, etc. So it's a wonderful milestone. It's a wonderful thing that we both have this. But you see some people who got tenure and you just go, oh, goodness. They look like they're, you know, aged 25 years in five years.

• 1:16:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  We also see this with former presidents, not all of them, but a lot of them. And and so to run into you, I well, I saw you on Lex Friedman's podcast, but then to see you, I'm like, Charan's taking great care of himself. It makes me happy. It's not a judgment. It's it's it makes me happy because I I love my colleagues and I want to see them live a very long time. Because I don't subscribe to the idea that science progresses one funeral time of my favorite scientists.

• 1:17:12Speaker 01

  Okay, let's let's not attach that saying to me. It was a joke.

• 1:17:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm saying I'm saying that there are certain scientists.

• 1:17:18Speaker 01

  I love my fellow scientists.

• 1:17:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  I do, too.

• 1:17:20Speaker 01

  If you're out there anywhere, don't hate me.

• 1:17:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  There are certain scientists that you'd love to see live forever, and you're one of them. So so you said walk in the dog, which presumably gets you some sunlight. A lot of sunlight in Davis, even in the winter.

• 1:17:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  Cloud cover is bright up there. It gets you on a regular sleep rhythm. So but you said this sense of purpose, right? So and I'm curious about how you now frame exercise. You said you don't like working out. You made an investment in your health by paying a trainer. So now you you train regularly. And that's also an investment in your brain health. And if we were to go back to this notion of sense of purpose, are you talking about a larger sense of purpose? Like, okay, I want to contribute to understanding of how the brain works. You're a brain explorer after all. And therefore, the exercise and the money you put towards a trainer is linked to the ability to do that. Are you linking these nodes? Or is this are these kind of separate entities? Like, I want to be healthier and here's a way to be healthier.

• 1:18:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  And ergo, I'll be around longer to study the brain.

• 1:18:20Speaker 01

  To me, and again, you know, I'm not a social psychologist of this a little bit off out of my wheelhouse. But to me. The sense of purpose is is kind of this existential thing of like, you know, I got to take care of this dog and I got to, you know, and I, when I look at this dog and she's moping around in the corner, I feel bad, but I feel like it's my responsibility to do something with my students.

• 1:18:45Andrew D. Huberman?

  So duty.

• 1:18:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, with my students, I have, you know, I had, was very, very fortunate to have many people leave my lab after the pandemic, which destroyed so many careers and many people left my lab and I got faculty positions. I'm like so happy for them.

• 1:18:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  Speaks to your mentoring as well.

• 1:19:01Speaker 01

  Well, thank you. You know, you do well because you have good people in the lab, as you know.

• 1:19:06Andrew D. Huberman?

  That's true.

• 1:19:07Speaker 01

  And so, but what was interesting was I had finished the book and my lab was relatively empty and I did feel purposeless. I felt that absence of that sense of this bigger thing. And so part of the work is, you know, and this was like a thing that I felt doing the book promotion is I feel a sense of purpose in explaining science to people. I got an email this morning as I was getting on the plane from somebody who was asking me a question about memory and I was just like, this is so cool. You know, after you spend years lecturing students and some of them are sleeping in class and you wonder is anybody really impacted by this? And it's just been a beautiful thing. So that gives me a sense of purpose. I've come up with, I've really rededicated myself to research and we're doing these huge computational

• 1:19:52Speaker 01

  models of learning and I'm trying to get, we're doing VR stuff and we're going to be doing all sorts of new things in the research. And that gives me a sense of purpose. But a lot of it to me about the connection thing that you bring up is super important because often I find myself, again, because of the ADHD thing, for all of these things that I like, there's things that you have to do that suck. And for me, that suckiness is utterly painful. I mean, and I know there's a lot of people like, I know ADHD is over diagnosed right now for reasons that are interesting. And I know a lot of people, it's very kind of fashionable to say stuff, something like that, maybe, I don't know, people can be judgy about this stuff. But for me, it really is painful. I mean, I've actually found that

• 1:20:36Speaker 01

  it's hard for me to work with certain people if they talk slowly. It's that tough. So I've really had to think about, so I actually hooked up with an ADHD coach, who has been phenomenal for me. And I know coaches are another controversial thing.

• 1:20:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  I don't know, like, I'm not in my world. You want to learn something, you learn something from somebody who's skilled in how to improve somebody at something.

• 1:21:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I mean, I didn't know what to expect because it's like an unregulated world, so to speak, or minimally regulated. But the person I found was just amazing. And the first thing she had me do was she put down, had me write down a sheet of all my values, and order them and rank them. And so I'm thinking, this is such a waste of time. Sorry, Lori, but I was thinking initially, this is such a waste of time. Why am I doing this? I don't really value any, I don't know. I just do things. I don't necessarily value them or whatever. But then I started writing them down. And then later, I was talking to her about, like, this, you know, some of my troubles with motivation and getting things done that I don't want to do. And I'm kind of infamous for having trouble getting things done that I don't want

• 1:21:43Speaker 01

  to do in terms of like administrative tasks and so forth.

• 1:21:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  You're a real scientist.

• 1:21:48Speaker 01

  Well, that's true, I guess. ADHD is-

• 1:21:50Andrew D. Huberman?

  Any scientist that likes administrative stuff, I think I'm willing to call out as, you know, what are they doing in science? Because that's like, you're supposed to be focusing on experiments. So bravo. So, so values, then motivation?

• 1:22:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. So basically, it's like, so then I put the two together. And I said, I'm not giving myself credit for why I'm doing this. So this goes back to the whole, I mean, in a way, it goes back to the prefrontal cortex conversation is, what's my goal? If I'm gonna see someone and have a meeting, and I don't feel like going to the meeting because I'm tired and I'm bored, or I want to just look at this YouTube video, or I want to go on social media, whatever dumb thing that I would waste my time on, right? I say to myself, well, why am I doing this? And I remind myself of that motivation. And it kicks everything in gear because now I have that goal in place because the goal just doesn't pop up for me automatically.

• 1:22:44Speaker 01

  And so relating what I do to values is a game changer for me, but it's a conscious thing that I have to work on to remind myself of those values and connect them. And that's part of what I think people lose when they retire. For instance, I see this in people, people I'm close to who have retired, they feel like work is their only purpose. And so afterwards, they feel purposeless and then they're just doing things like, you know, doom scrolling or, you know, being radicalized on, on the internet or like, you know, going into like, but it's just like whatever captures their attention. And I think, so a big part of that sense of purpose for me has really been to get in

• 1:23:28Speaker 01

  touch with what do I really want? And I mean, this goes back to another thing with memory. And I know this is a total ADHD pre-association thing, but it's like, I can, people often ask me, okay, fine, give me all this stuff for brain aging and we didn't even get into hearing aids and vision testing and oral hygiene and so forth.

• 1:23:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, we'll talk about those three things.

• 1:23:50Speaker 01

  But what I tell people is, I can tell you lots of strategies for remembering names, for remembering where you've been, for trying to remember, like to do something in the future, some of the hardest memory challenges we have. But unless you do them, do those strategies, I can't help you. And the problem is, is that, and this speaks to, I really liked what you said, we do have to talk about some exceptions like retrieval induced forgetting and some interesting things like the pre-testing effect, but your thing on study skills, I listened to that podcast and I was like, the beautiful thing that you did with that, one of them was that you said, assume that you will forget.

• 1:24:32Speaker 01

  Because if you go back to the earliest research on memory by Ebbinghaus, he tested himself and he actually, he created these weird words called trigrams that weren't really words. He tried to memorize them and what he found was within 20 minutes, he had forgotten about half of what he memorized. Within, and I don't mean just forgotten like he couldn't bring it to mind. It took him as long to re-memorize them as it was if he had never done it, right? So sometimes we have partial memory where we can't recall it, but we get some savings and it's easier for us to learn. He didn't even have that for a lot of the stuff. So then, he waited 24 hours and he had lost two-thirds of what

• 1:25:13Speaker 01

  he had memorized, right? So, translate this into the real world. There are some things that are caveats that we do better in the real world, I would say, at the big things, the gist of what we encounter. But the details, we lose most of them. Most of the details of your life will be gone. And this is true for even, I would argue this is even true for people with highly superior autobiographical memory. You don't know for sure, but I can tell you more about that. This is true for everyone who's been studied as far as I know. And so, if that's the case, the question is not like, why am I so forgetful? It's why do we remember the first ones? Why that titled it for the book? And the question

• 1:25:55Speaker 01

  is what do you want to remember? What are the memories that you want to take with you? Whether it's memorizing things for a class like in study skills, or whether it's your kid's birthday party, which I talked about in chapter one. These are, it's about intention is what I say. It's the difference between attention, which can be grabbed by anything, versus intention, which is saying, this is what I want to take with me, right?

• 1:26:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  Let's, let's hover on that. Attention versus intention. We hear these words all the time. Attention is the directing of one's perception to particular sensations or things in one environment, is the way loosely defined.

• 1:26:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  Accurate, but not exhaustive. Intention is understanding why we're having a cognitive sense, maybe a cognitive emotional sense of why I am directing my perception to particular things. Is that right?

• 1:26:48Speaker 01

  Yes, it is directing your attention based on some reason that's an internal goal. Right? And that's where the prefrontal cortex really comes in. So it's very easy in some ways to pay attention to me if I'm like gesticulating and I'm talking very loudly because it's grabbing your attention constantly. I mean, let's face it, I know lots of people in my life who hate this because I'm so loud and gesticulating.

• 1:27:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  You're not loud. Who are these people giving you this feedback? Send me their names and numbers. I have words for them. And listen, I would say, given you run a world-class laboratory, you're successful in your family life, you're successfully raising your second doll, you've written a spectacular book, you're going on podcasts, you're educating the public. I would say you're doing great. So keep going. And whoever these people are, we'll have words with them.

• 1:27:42Speaker 01

  I need like Huberman's like words of encouragement on my phone that I could just open up.

• 1:27:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well, I don't want to take us off track, but you know, I spend a lot of time each morning I first do a non-sleep deep rest or some sort of meditation. Rick Rubin taught me this to get into intention. And there are other people who've come into my life recently.

• 1:28:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  This notion of intention, the reason I said, let's hover on it, is so important.

• 1:28:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  Because we are in a world where things will grab our attention, especially on social media.

• 1:28:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:10Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's basically a war for attention.

• 1:28:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:12Andrew D. Huberman?

  I don't think it's an attention economy anymore, or Simon's brilliant, you know, I'm not trying to take anything away from that, but it's a war for attention. And one of the ways that you rob your competitors is by taking their attention. I used to joke when I was in a very competitive area as a postdoc, I was competing against a big lab at Harvard and this and that, trying to find genetic markers for retinal neurons, et cetera. And I said, if I could just get them excited about The Wire, remember that show, The Wire?

• 1:28:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  Because it'll suck like 15 hours of those postdoc time. So I thought, you know, it'd be really diabolical. I didn't do it, but you know, telling people like, you have to see The Wire, they- You know, this and that, you know, because you get someone on a really good Netflix program. And if they're a competitor, you just got a competitive advantage.

• 1:28:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:28:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  This is being done all day long.

• 1:28:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:28:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  In any case, attention is our ability to, for our perception to be drawn to whatever is most moving most, loudest, most salient. Intention is different.

• 1:29:07Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Yeah, and this is, by the way, this isn't a technical term. This is just, I like it because it rhymes and a friend of mine came up with it. So, but yes, intention is your ability to say, this is what's important to me right now. And that's why I need to pay attention to it.

• 1:29:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  Hence the values list.

• 1:29:22Speaker 01

  Hence the values list, because if I don't keep that in mind, my, so we tend to think of control as being just like willpower or like you want to do the right thing or whatever. It's not, it's really a big, there's so many parts of it really, but a big part of it is motivation. And motivation is not a trivial thing. It's not simply wanting to do the right thing, but being able to keep that value in mind and retrieve that value. Because everything has a value associated with, right? And sometimes things that are, you know, I'm thirsty and there's water in front of me, that has a big value and that should grab my attention. So it's not that having your attention shift, you want it to be flexible, but you want to keep these higher order goals in mind.

• 1:30:07Speaker 01

  And so it's this balance between stability and flexibility. Now, the key is, or let's get to your specific example of like technology, right? So ever since I got a phone, that is a smartphone, my first iPhone.

• 1:30:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  When was that? Mine was 2010.

• 1:30:25Speaker 01

  Mine was, well, you did better than me, I think. Maybe it was around the same, it was iPhone 3, I think was my first.

• 1:30:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay.

• 1:30:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:32Andrew D. Huberman?

  We'll have to look up.

• 1:30:33Speaker 01

  I think I had the iPhone 3, which was whenever that came out.

• 1:30:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:35Speaker 01

  So. Until then, I would check email when I was at a computer. When I'm not, I don't think about it. Now, it's always there and I get, you know, and you get alerts on your phone, right? So let's, let's play this out now. We're having this great conversation. Let's say we leave, we talk about skateboarding and punk rock and like, yes, why didn't we talk about this on the podcast? We're having a great conversation, right? But now let's say I didn't put my phone on focus mode and I start getting all these little beeps on my phone. I know people, I know, I played with, in a band with somebody who had ADHD and he would constantly, anytime we were in a conversation, he would just check his text messages. Sometimes he would text in front of me, right?

• 1:31:20Speaker 01

  So what happens is every time you do that, you're essentially shifting your task. Your mindset changes, your, your intention is somewhat changed by this new task, right? So now I've shifted and there's a cost associated with that. In fact, actually, people who study this, there's like four or five different costs that go on. It makes you slower to do the new thing, right? Now I go back to the conversation. Well, now I have another cost associated with that. And so I'm not there where you are in this moment. I'm several seconds behind you and I'm still catching up while you're talking and that requires even more control to get caught up and get back up to speed.

• 1:32:02Speaker 01

  So I'm straining my mental resources. I'm straining my cognitive control by shifting back and forth. But here's an even worse part of it. So a memory, we haven't even talked about this, but it's like, a lot of our forgetting happens because we have these blurry memories. They're not distinctive. They don't, you don't get a population of neurons that shouts out loud, hey, that's this conversation I had with Andy, right? It's like, it's just kind of this blurry sense of I talked to someone on a podcast. Let's say, not saying that this will happen now because it won't, but um, so I have this blurry memory. Well, why does that happen? Well, part of it is you have to catch the distinctive moments of these events

• 1:32:45Speaker 01

  and you have to associate them together into this cohesive narrative. One of the things we found in our research and other people have found is when, let's say if you're watching a movie and somebody changes the topic of conversation or a character comes in, something that shifts your attentional focus and shifts your understanding of what's going on, you see this big peak in activation in the hippocampus. And what that seems to be related to is encoding a memory for what happened up to that point. And so we call that an event boundary. And so, once you have an event boundary, it turns out you, like you go on to the next event and you have trouble remembering the stuff that happened right before the event boundary. It's why people end up in the kitchen and they're like, what was my reason for coming here? And it's because

• 1:33:29Speaker 01

  they passed through three different rooms and their sense of where they were was changing, their mental context, updated to the point where now they have to work to figure it out, right? So, this is what's happening when we are shifting between different tasks. I'm texting and I'm emailing and then I'm talking to you. Or, as you've probably seen in going to conferences, people, scientists, scientists who know better are sitting, typing emails while someone is giving, I've done this because I'm attentionally impaired, or I'm impaired, actually ADHD is a cognitive control issue, I think, but nonetheless, it's like, I do this, right? So, it's like, I get it, but it's like, you are now creating this fragments of memories where it's not, I have a cohesive conversation, I have a

• 1:34:14Speaker 01

  little bit, I got a little bit more, I got a little bit more. And those fragments of memory don't play together well in memory, they can compete with each other. And that competition is a big part of forgetting. And so, that's why it's super important to just do one thing and then do another. If you want to do social media, fine, do it. Then do whatever it is you are supposed to do for work, right? But it's the shifting that really kills you because it creates, saps your cognitive control, it actually creates these fragmented memories, it also actually increases stress levels. So, there's all sorts of, you know, things. I know there's a lot of tech bros who are just like, oh no, I multitask, I'm great at it, you're not.

• 1:34:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well, I, you know, I'm from the Bay Area and spent a lot of time with those folks, men and women in tech. I think that the best ones, like the truly exceptional ones, are very good at dropping into a trench of attention. They're very disciplined with their phone use. And the ones that are doing a lot of task switching often aren't, don't have complete lives. They really don't. They're they're not taking care of their health also, and they are sort of under the sense that like they're working all the time when they're not. As a graduate student, I didn't have a smartphone. Um, I did something recently. I tweeted about this. Um, you may have commented about it. I don't know, but this has helped me a lot. Um, I took an old phone.

• 1:35:34Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:35:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  Um, and I put

• 1:35:36Speaker 01

  Oh, you told me.

• 1:35:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  social media on the old phone.

• 1:35:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  And only social media, so it doesn't operate as a phone. I can um airdrop things to it.

• 1:35:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:44Andrew D. Huberman?

  If so, I use that for um looking at social media and for posting.

• 1:35:47Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:35:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  That phone is in a box.

• 1:35:49Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:35:49Andrew D. Huberman?

  And then my my main phone is for um texting and other forms of communication. So I still have that distraction around me, but social media is now a dedicated thing that I spend a specific amount of time, and I have a timer on that phone.

• 1:36:03Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:36:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  That so I allow my I allocate myself a certain amount of time each day. So for every moment, I might start that timer.

• 1:36:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:08Andrew D. Huberman?

  Once it hits zero, that's it.

• 1:36:10Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:36:10Andrew D. Huberman?

  And I'm starting to shorten that amount of time.

• 1:36:12Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 1:36:12Andrew D. Huberman?

  The impact on productivity in terms of writing, in terms of researching, in terms of just dropping into conversation.

• 1:36:19Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:36:20Andrew D. Huberman?

  It has been enormous with that um simple switch. Um, and I just find it easier to just segregate

• 1:36:26Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:36:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  social media from the phone. The part of the problem is that the phone is it's like in a walking office. It's not even it's a phone. It's a computer. It's a

• 1:36:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:36:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's I mean, it's just too much access.

• 1:36:36Speaker 01

  Well, and and here's the thing, and this is really gets back to this idea of engineering your environment. And because so much of our lives, we're out of control, even though we feel like we're in control, right? And it's really, if I have a higher order of goals, sometimes you have to do exactly what you did, which is hack your environment to allow to enable you to regain control, right?

• 1:36:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:36:57Speaker 01

  So what I mean by this is it's like, I even though I might not check my phone, I might have alerts off. If I have a habit, I'm thinking about it. And every time I think about it, that urge pops into mind. I'm getting a little distracted. I'm losing a little bit of executive control. So you don't even have to do it, right?

• 1:37:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:37:17Speaker 01

  You can just think about it. So in multitasking is just one thing. There's other things like one thing is, is I talk about in the book is taking pictures. So you've probably been to concerts, I know I have, where it's like, you know, people are like just filming the whole things on their phone. Or like now you see the rise of Instagram walls, where you go into places and there's a wall that exists. So people could post to Instagram. Nothing wrong with this, but most, not all the research, interestingly, and I can get into why, shows that taking pictures actually impoverishes people's memory.

• 1:37:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  Really?

• 1:37:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  What about looking at pictures of, I think it was Larry Squire, when I was down at San Diego, that said that hanging a few pictures in your office of things that are really pleasant memories can really enhance your work environment, because you look at them, you go, I remember that. Thing like, because of all the context it brings about. But you're saying that the act of taking pictures depletes our memory for that experience?

• 1:38:15Speaker 01

  Let me be more specific about this, right? So let's say I'm mindlessly taking pictures. So I go in, I'm seeing the Grand Canyon, I'm just like, ch ch ch ch. A lot of people, like intuitively, on average, will say that they will remember it better because they took pictures. But what often happens is, they're not really focusing on the distinctive elements of their experience. They're just grabbing as much stuff as they can, right? Let's take the concert as another example. If you are filming the concert, and you're just trying to grab what's being sung, you will have a recording of the concert. But what's the memory you want to have? Do you want to have a memory of

• 1:39:00Speaker 01

  the song that you already can stream anytime? Or do you want the memory of how you felt, the friends you were with, the connection that you had with the artist because you were there? I know this sounds real hippie dippy, but it's real.

• 1:39:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  No, it is real.

• 1:39:16Speaker 01

  In the sense that this is what you want to remember, I think. At least, I don't want to lecture people if they want to remember taking pictures of things. That's why I'm sure everybody remembers taking pictures at these things. But what did you take a picture of? And so you can use the phone, and this is where the studies show good effects, is if I mindfully use the phone and I say like, There's something here that will be a good cue that will remind me later of this great conversation. I focus the camera on that. I take a picture mindfully. I use the camera not as a way of spreading my attention and just grabbing everything in this shotgun approach, but rather use it to find what's distinctive and what's important

• 1:39:59Speaker 01

  and actually focus me on it. That's a really good thing. So what I try to do is selectively document, not over document. I'll take a picture of people laughing or people eating. I like to go to conferences now. John Listman used to do this, late John Listman, and so he passed away. It's now I try to do this. I think more about these things. And so I try to take pictures of people randomly, you know, they're drinking a beer and then they spit out laughing or something like that. And these are not things that are like landmarks. They're not things that are tourist stuff, but they are great retrieval cues. And so what happens is the next part of it is seeing the picture. Well, what do you do when you see the picture, right? Do you scroll right? Or do you use it as a cue to

• 1:40:42Speaker 01

  effectively test yourself to recall what happened during that event and integrate it? Now, what's interesting is, is that act of recollecting the event in itself will change the memory. And it can make it more accessible, but it can also make it a little bit more abstract and story-like. And so there is an interesting trade-off where you have these things where you have these memories and you could even document it. But if you use the, if the more you retrieve it, the more accessible it will be. But sometimes it'll be less immersive and more like a story that you've told 100 times.

• 1:41:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  So is it, so it sounds like if we go on a vacation or to a show or something, that taking a photo, as long as it's intentional, of something specific that will look, the key is to look at it later, not just post it, but to look at it later and to spend a few moments or more drawing to mind some of the emotional and cognitive experiences around that memory, that However, changes the memory, right? Anytime we create a story, we're changing the memory. But perhaps, provided it was a good experience, that's better than to not access the photo at all. But I'm struck by, as you are, that the number of people who are taking photos at a concert.

• 1:41:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  A friend of mine, who's a very successful photographer, who shoots a lot of photos of musicians, thinks this is the craziest thing, as if any one of those photos is going to be meaningful, right? That they're outside of the experience of the concert, which is exactly what you're describing. Maybe you just have a memory of taking a lot of photos.

• 1:42:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that's exactly what happens. People will remember something, but it's not their feeling. It's not like the friends they were with and what they talked about, you know? It's more like, you know, I use this example in an interview, so apologies if people have already seen this, but it's like, I just, I got to see The Descendants. And I'm guessing, since you skateboarded, you probably had heard of The Descendants.

• 1:42:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  The band The Descendants.

• 1:42:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So I grew up listening to them in high school, but I never got to see them, because all the great bands I got into broke up right before Black Flag and The Minutemen and so forth. And so, when they reunited, I was like, I had an opportunity to see them in a club in Sacramento. And so I saw them for the first time. And what was, I wasn't one of the kids taking photos, I was actually watching. But then there was a moment where Bill Stevenson, the drummer, who's a super intense guy, and really one of the creative forces behind the band,

• 1:43:13Speaker 01

  he gets up and he starts walking towards the crowd. And Milo's like, "Sit down, go back behind the drums." And he's like, "No, I want to say something." And I was like, "I gotta take a picture of this, because this is gonna be like, he's really connecting with us." And he talked about how cool it was to just be able to have this moment, where he's now, at this age, able to appreciate this connection that he has with the audience that he couldn't appreciate before when he was younger. And I was like, I'm taking a picture of this because that's what I want to remember. You won't remember everything, but if I look at that photo, technically I haven't looked at that photo again, but just taking the picture of it forced me to really think about that. And that's the biggest takeaway I have.

• 1:43:57Speaker 01

  You know, a lot of the songs they played, they did a really good job on. But what I really took away from that was this connection that I really wanted when I was a kid, you know? And re-experiencing that feeling of being a kid and hearing these songs when they were fresh and new for me. And so that's, that's, I know I'm sounding like kind of a hippie or something.

• 1:44:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  Not a hippie, you sound like a punk rocker. It's not confused the two, that's good.

• 1:44:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. I got a digressing all over the place.

• 1:44:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  No, no, it's, I, I have a question that, that I'm hoping binds some of this together. Related to taking photos and memories. I keep many photos, I like printed photos, I have these in a drawer. They mean very much to me. Some of them are in the studio, but I keep most of them in a drawer at home. Polaroids are an interesting example, I think, of what you're describing. The act of taking a Polaroid is more than just clicking or pressing with your thumb on a camera. There's a waiting process, there's a, you actually get to see the photo emerge over time. I would bet, even though I haven't run the study, I would bet that people keep Polaroids more than they,

• 1:45:08Andrew D. Huberman?

  and look at Polaroids more than they keep other photos. Which if you think about it is, if it's true, if it's true, is counter logic. Because, you know, usually people want to do another photo where, because they don't like the way they looked in the previous photo. With Polaroids, you can't do too many of those. Right? It's kind of one and done, maybe two and done. But I feel like the act of taking the, the Polaroid, waiting for the photo to emerge, kind of stamps it in your memory of the experience itself. And the act of taking the photo is more involved, it's more of a process than just a click. That then you see the photo later. Now, of course, with digital photography, you see it, but you can take a hundred, you can take two hundred photos like that. If we were to export this theme of limiting our task switching.

• 1:45:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  As a way to enhance our memory, setting up our environment in a way where we put our phone away perhaps, or, and we also are focused on intention, why we are in something. Do you think that there's something positively reinforcing about getting into a trench, as I call it? Because I find that conversations like this, one of the reasons I do this podcast, the solo episodes and these interviews, is that they provide something that my life prior to it did not provide, which was depth. I mean, we're just here, there's no phones here, and if there are, they're off. Right? And I feel like anytime we go into these trenches, could be a video game, could be

• 1:46:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  an interaction with a loved one of various kinds, but when we go into these tunnels of attention, there's something that's so deeply satisfying about it, especially to those who have attention deficit issues, that it feels like something real happened and the rest is just noise. Is there any relationship of this, of the focus system to release of dopamine? I know release of dopamine can drive focus, but is the reverse also true?

• 1:47:04Speaker 01

  That if you're in a state of focus, do you enhance the release of dopamine?

• 1:47:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  Correct. That's the question.

• 1:47:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. I, well, I don't know. I wish I could give you an answer and say, I don't know. And it would be really hard to disentangle the chicken and the egg, right? Because if you're measuring dopamine activity, you'd have to, well, okay, so here's what I can say, is that I think that we often think of, you know, we think of, like, let's say, an emotion, right? Or any other mental state, and we think of it like it just happens. But in fact, there's a time scale to these things, right? So it's like, There is a basic response that you get when somebody points a gun at you. But then there's an interpretation that you have that can take that threat response

• 1:47:54Speaker 01

  and make it into something more. And then you're like really jacking up your noradrenalic activity, right?

• 1:47:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  You're catastrophizing.

• 1:48:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's like, I mean, well, in that case, it could be a catastrophe.

• 1:48:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  But if you survive, you averted the catastrophe, the question is, does the potential catastrophe live within you or does it die within you? You only need to live within you sufficiently enough that you avoid the threat in the future. Right? But that's the double edged sword of noradrenalic systems is that they capture lots of memory and they open up thoughts about what could have gone wrong.

• 1:48:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  But if it didn't go wrong, it didn't go wrong. You're alive, you only need to remember to avoid whatever puts you in that circumstance.

• 1:48:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, but that can still be scary, right?

• 1:48:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  Sure.

• 1:48:35Speaker 01

  And this is where I think it's like this, we talked about this before, this appraisal is very important, you know? In the case of focus, it's a little bit different, but just to make this very concrete, the prefrontal cortex has top down inputs to many of the neuromodulatory systems. So on average, people tend to think of the neuromodulatory systems like dopamine and norepinephrine as being very bottom up. They just send signals everywhere and set the brain into focus or not focus or whatever. But the prefrontal cortex has some anatomically, at least, some capability of regulating those systems, both directly and indirectly.

• 1:49:15Speaker 01

  And so that does, I think, speak to this idea that if you have a very strong goal focus, you can, in fact, regulate the dopamine system. I think it's a reasonable, and norepinephrine too, noradrenalic system. So I think it's a reasonable thing. And I bet you Amy Aronson has done some related work on this topic.

• 1:49:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'll check it out. Earlier you mentioned, and I want to make sure that we return to this notion of taking care of one's vision and one's hearing. As a way to offset memory loss. Very important concepts. Could you share with us what's known about that?

• 1:49:51Speaker 01

  This is just starting to be a thing, but the effect sizes, for instance, for hearing raids are really strong, both in reducing AD risk, I believe, and in

• 1:50:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  Alzheimer's dementia.

• 1:50:02Speaker 01

  Alzheimer's risk and in just good cognitive aging and keeping your memory as you get older.

• 1:50:07Andrew D. Huberman?

  So don't listen to your headphones too loud, kids. This is right?

• 1:50:11Speaker 01

  Well, actually, okay, so speaking of things I did to preserve my brain health, I'm playing in a band now and we're pretty damn loud. And so I got, I went to an audiologist and I got custom earplugs.

• 1:50:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, all, all the top music, I've been friends with some, some really amazing musicians. They all wear insert earplugs.

• 1:50:28Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah. But I think these custom ones will be more effective at both preserving the spectrum of all the frequencies.

• 1:50:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  Oh, I just mean protect your hearing.

• 1:50:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, but, yeah, but they're related because if you can't hear your frequencies, you might end up turning up, you get this paradoxical

• 1:50:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  Sure.

• 1:50:43Speaker 01

  Things, so too much information, I know. But basically that is, yeah, so there is this issue with, in fact, actually, there's an article that the Shire's eyes sent me on in the Lancet that one of their public health recommendations is to get into a preventative mode for preventing Alzheimer's disease. And one of the things they say is screen for hearing and give people hearing aids and make people use them if they have, encourage people to use them. Vision is starting to be a big one. People who are older get cataracts, get it treated, you know? A lot of this preventative healthcare, which we, our system is not really equipped for it, but it can really save so much money. It can save so much emotional pain for so many people. It's really amazing.

• 1:51:28Speaker 01

  Another one we mentioned, I mentioned briefly is oral hygiene. Gum disease, it turns out, increases your risk for, I believe it's Alzheimer's and also for cognitive brain health in general.

• 1:51:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  I did an episode on oral health and the effects on, as you said, on brain health are amazing. Because streptococcus mutans, which is the bacteria that causes cavities, can funnel its way into the bloodstream and potentially cross the blood brain barrier, which is, I think, why people think it might be detrimental to brain health.

• 1:51:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't know the detailed mechanisms, but I think that makes sense. And there's this vague notion of cognitive reserve, which is basically some people seem to be quite immune to the effects of cognitive aging and some people seem to be very protected against Alzheimer's. So what is it? One of the things that seems to come up as far as depleting cognitive reserve or putting at a higher risk seems to be inflammation, right, neuroinflammation. And so Kim McAllister, as you know, is doing work on this topic of neuroimmune interactions. And basically, the immune system expresses itself in the brain. You get microglia activation that can cause these inflammatory responses. And there's reasonable evidence suggests that it's interacting with tau and amyloid

• 1:52:40Speaker 01

  and this kind of cascade of stuff that happens in Alzheimer's disease, right? And one of the things that we're learning now, and we don't know nearly enough, but the data out there is quite scary, in fact, is long COVID is associated with significant cognitive effects.

• 1:52:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  And is that the explanation for the brain fog that people report many, many months?

• 1:53:02Speaker 01

  Well, they report a subjective brain fog, and you can see this, you can measure this as a significant cognitive deficit that they're experiencing, right? And we've seen in the past, like HIV was, there was actually a whole variety of dementia that was associated with HIV from the viral transmission. We can, like you can see with multiple sclerosis, where you have like autoimmune responses in the brain affect mental function dramatically. We're seeing more and more evidence of this. And so this is, again, another one of those things, it's like, people go, oh, COVID, I don't care about it, blah, blah, blah. I mean, this is a health thing that can really affect people, and it can, I don't think anybody, it's not a political issue to get brain fog, it just sucks, right? Nobody wants this.

• 1:53:47Speaker 01

  So I think that there's a lot we're learning about viruses and bacteria. One of the cool things I was talking about before we started recording is I was at a conference, and I met the coolest guy, and I'm blanking on his name, but I'll send it to you after. But he's, he did this great study, and he was studying the effects of nutrition on brain health and memory, especially cognition. And so I said, what's the most interesting finding that you've gotten? I love to ask people this because I'm curious, and it stimulates my curiosity, and I usually get a good answer. So he told me he did this study where he has these rats, and he gives them sugary water during the day, about the equivalent, he said, to a can of Coke a day. So they're getting this sugar.

• 1:54:32Speaker 01

  When they reach adulthood, you know, these teenage rats, they reach adulthood and they have memory problems and they do, they have hippocampal atrophy. So you go, okay, well, the hippocampus is affected, memory is affected, sugar, blah, blah, blah, no problem. So then what he does is he takes the gut bacteria from the sugar animals and puts it in an animal that doesn't get this diet. And he finds the same kind of pathology and the same kind of memory deficit in these animals. So there's something about that process of like the gut-brain interaction that also seems to be playing a part in ways that I don't understand. I think they're still figuring it out. But again, this, this really shows this tight neuroimmune link, you know? We're seeing this now with pollution.

• 1:55:17Speaker 01

  Air pollution is a big factor. So even if people don't believe in global warming, there's nothing good about being in a place with a lot of smoke in the air, you know? It's a, it definitely can, and this is one of the risk factors that is noted in the Lancet report for Alzheimer's disease. One of my colleagues, Pam Lyon, is doing research on this at UC Davis, showing that you get, like, she actually takes real pollution from the Caldicott Tunnel, which connects Oakland and, and

• 1:55:44Andrew D. Huberman?

  Walnut Creek.

• 1:55:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. And finds that rats exposed to this pollution have hippocampal damage. So it's, there's so many of these environmental factors that can trigger the inflammatory response. We talked about blood sugar. Blood sugar also seems to be related to these issues. So, and diabetes is like so bad in so many ways. It's associated with those white matter hyperintensities that we talked about. And so that's bad. We've done some research on that and, but it also affects, it can cause little, you can get, if you get severe diabetic ketoacidosis, you can actually have hippocampal damage from that directly. And it also dramatically increases Alzheimer's risk.

• 1:56:30Speaker 01

  We're in an epidemic of diabetes right now.

• 1:56:32Andrew D. Huberman?

  This probably explains, at least in my mind, why these lifestyle factors like improved sleep, cardiovascular and resistance training exercise, but certainly cardiovascular exercise, you know? Eating a lot of leafy, leafy foods, et cetera. We know all of those things offset inflammation to some degree or another. Right? I mean, one of the best ways to inflame your brain and body is to not get enough sleep and eat, you know, a lot of highly processed foods, for instance. To date, are there any even semi satisfactory prescription drugs or other compounds that can slow the progression of Alzheimer's dementia once it's started?

• 1:57:16Speaker 01

  There are now some drugs that are, I think they're targeting amyloid that are producing some modest effects in stalling the progression of the disease. See, the problem with Alzheimer's, as you know, is once you lose neurons, you're not getting them back. Right? And it's like, yeah, there's neurogenesis and you can run around, but it's not, it's not much. It's not, you don't want to, if you're depending on that, you're hosed, you know? So like, but getting back to the exercise thing, it's neuroprotective. And so like, let's say with a drug, right? I mean, everybody wants a drug. If I told you, I give you this drug, you're 60 years old and it's going to have some terrible side

• 1:57:57Speaker 01

  effects, you're going to get diarrhea, nausea, all this stuff, but it'll reduce your risk of Alzheimer's by 40%. A lot of people would be motivated to take it. Now I tell you, okay, well, here's a lifestyle intervention that's going to involve what Sarah Medden calls down states, doesn't have, we can actually get into that and memory reactivation during down states, but involves sleep, diet, exercise, social stimulation, right? And these things, by the way, also reinforce each other. Having better sleep makes it easier to exercise, having exercise makes it easier, better to sleep. All of these improve mood, right? So these will improve your mental function, your mood, as well as your mental function relatively

• 1:58:41Speaker 01

  soon and reduce your risk by at least 40%, if not more.

• 1:58:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  Wow.

• 1:58:46Speaker 01

  If you go to, I can send you this Lancet article, but it's like the amount, the proportion of variance, meaning the degree of risk that you can reduce with fully preventable or fully in our control lifestyle issues is huge. It's as big or bigger than the genetics.

• 1:59:08Andrew D. Huberman?

  I think people really need to hear and internalize that because I think everyone's waiting for this miracle drug that is unlikely to ever arrive, frankly. I mean, you know, to date, we have some okay treatments for Parkinson's to try and offset the loss of dopaminergic neurons, but they can even transplant essentially dopaminergic neurons into the substantia nigra, but none of those things, Aldopa, et cetera, have proved to be cures for Parkinson's. Not getting hit in the head is helpful.

• 1:59:37Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah. Traumatic brain injury is another one of the big risk factors.

• 1:59:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  So there are a lot of don'ts. I'm grateful that today you're sharing a number of do's, both in the context of offsetting age-related cognitive decline, Alzheimer's, but also in terms of how to enhance focus and enhance memory. I want to make sure that we touch on a few topics related to memory that are a little bit off the trajectory we're on now, but that come up a lot when people start thinking about memory. And one that's kind of intriguing, very intriguing, is déjà vu. Do we have any understanding about what déjà vu is? Is it just like a recollection of something similar that spontaneously gets triggered? What is déjà vu?

• 2:00:19Speaker 01

  Well, it's not fully understood, but I'll give you my best guess that's science-based and not just my wildly speculating completely. But basically, one of the early findings that gave you a sense about what déjà vu is, is Huelings Jackson, who's this great neurologist who did pioneering work in behavioral neurology, observed that many patients who get epilepsy would have this aura, it's this mental sensations right before a seizure, where they would get an intense feeling of déjà vu. It doesn't happen in everyone, but a certain number. And this is associated with temporal lobe epilepsy. And the hippocampus, as you know, is in the temporal lobe, but there's also these areas around it that are super important

• 2:01:01Speaker 01

  for memory, including the amygdala, but also really the perioral cortex is a key, key player in this. And so then you have Wilder Penfield and other people who started to do these surgeries for epilepsy. And they said, well, I want to make sure I'm not taking out good brain, right? You don't want to... So Penfield wasn't responsible for HM, and that was like kind of an irresponsible surgery.

• 2:01:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  HM is a now-dead, famous patient and...

• 2:01:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  Literally chapter in the history of neuroscience that somebody who had his hippocampi bilaterally, one on each side of the brain, removed to treat epilepsy, it fixed the epilepsy, but he had lost all capacity to remember prior events.

• 2:01:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so in fact, he had this dense, dense amnesia, right? And actually, one of the little known things even in memory research is he actually lost, he had what's called a temporal lobectomy, where they just hack off the front part of the temporal lobe. It might have been cauterized, I can't remember the, I think he cauterized it, but anyway, they do that temporal lobectomy, and he actually had the posterior one-third of his hippocampus, but he had lost his perirhinal cortex bilaterally. And that turned out to be Betsy Murray at NIH later, and other people should, turned out to be a huge thing. So, one of the reasons I think that he became so densely amnestic is that it was bilateral.

• 2:02:35Speaker 01

  So if you think about the brain, like you have a side of the brain that's causing a seizure, so you've kind of got a spare tire on the other side, where it's like that other healthy tissue on the other side can sometimes pick up the slack. But if you take out both hemispheres, now you're in really bad shape. So, Scoville did that. He actually did it for people who were, HM had epilepsy and it was a legit operation in that sense, but he did it for people who had, I think, like psychosis, too, depression. I mean, back then, they just did all kinds of crazy stuff. So, but Penfield was like, no, I want to make sure I take out only the tissue that needs to go. So what do you do? You stimulate different parts of the brain, and you see, does it produce anything other than a seizure? And if so, that's not an area you want to remove.

• 2:03:19Speaker 01

  And so he would go into the anterior temporal lobes and stimulate, and people would have, sometimes they would have an intense real memory, but sometimes they would have this intense sense of déjà vu, where it's like they feel this, I feel like I've lived out this whole thing that's happening right now, I've lived it before, when you know that's not true, right? So what is this? Well... A number of people, my lab was heavily involved with this, and Andy Yonlinus at UC Davis was really central to a lot of the stuff, found that the perirhinal cortex, which is this area, as I said, it's a big player with the hippocampus, seems to be very critical for this general sense of familiarity that we have. And so, using the book, an example

• 2:04:03Speaker 01

  of like, if I say, "Have you eaten a rambutan before?" Now, you being a worldly guy, might have, "Have you ever eaten a rambutan?"

• 2:04:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  No, I don't know what that is.

• 2:04:12Speaker 01

  Okay. So, how quick was it that you were able to say no, that you were able to think about it and go, "I've never eaten a rambutan"?

• 2:04:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  Uh, less than a second.

• 2:04:19Speaker 01

  Okay. So, you didn't have to search your entire memory for whether or not you've eaten a rambutan. You know because it's so unfamiliar, right?

• 2:04:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  Correct.

• 2:04:29Speaker 01

  So, things that are highly familiar, like, you know, maybe I'll ask, "Have you eaten a banana before, or grapes before?" You can say yes, because, and partly, you don't even have to remember any instance. It just feels right. You know, those are very familiar things to you. "Have you ever seen a grape before?" Yes, of course you have, right? Apple, very familiar to people. So, we just have that general fluency. And you can look at this like, you go into the grocery store and you see someone and you're like, "I know I've seen this person before. Where have I seen them before?" And then you leave and eventually you're like, "Oh, well, that was somebody who I met at this conference", or something like that. But you weren't expecting them at this context, and no episodic memory

• 2:05:12Speaker 01

  was triggered. But there was something about their features that felt very fluent and natural to you, and triggered that sense of familiarity. And that seems to be processed, and you can see brain activity associated with that in the perirhinal cortex. And people with damage to the perirhinal cortex seem to not differentiate between the rambutan and the banana. It's all kind of unfamiliar to them. They might remember, "I've eaten a banana," but they don't necessarily have that sense of familiarity. And Rebecca Burwell at Brown University did the coolest experiment that doesn't nearly get, you know how in science you get these unsung hero experiment? Well, this was one of them where she...

• 2:05:54Speaker 01

  Stimulated in rats, the perirhonal cortex, at this frequency called the beta frequency, which is kind of a relatively low-frequency oscillation, and basically put two objects in front of the animal. And so typically, if there's a new object, the animal will spend more time exploring it. And depending on how she timed the stimulation, she could make the animal think that a familiar object was novel. She stimulates at a different frequency, I think it was gamma, and the animal now thinks, or actually, it was like, yeah, so she thinks, now the animal thinks that a familiar thing is novel. With beta, it was that it thought a novel thing was familiar.

• 2:06:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  Wow.

• 2:06:39Speaker 01

  So could literally use this stimulation to change the way the animal is interacting with, and presumably a memory-driven way with this object.

• 2:06:50Andrew D. Huberman?

  So for those looking for novelty in different domains of life, maybe this is the solution.

• 2:06:54Speaker 01

  Maybe, yeah. And so, Anne Cleary, just to close the loop here, who's a great researcher at Colorado State, developed this beautiful paradigm where what she does is she said, "Okay, well, does that relate to déjà vu?" Well, let's see. So what she did was use virtual reality. And so in virtual reality, you can create these environments and put objects in particular places. And so she creates these virtual environments where there are particular objects in particular places. And let's say one's a museum, right? So a person can go through passively and watch a movie, or they actively navigate through these spaces. And then what she does is she has them go through, let's say, a video arcade. But unbeknownst to the subject, the objects that are in the room

• 2:07:37Speaker 01

  are in exactly the same positions as the objects in the museum. But it's a video arcade, so it looks different. But the room shape, the spatial layout, everything is identical. It's got a different skin on it, so to speak, for video gamers. So what happens is people are much more likely, very likely, to produce a déjà vu sensation when they're in these places, these virtual environments, that look very much like where they've been, but they're mismatching in some critical way. So it's like you've got enough to trigger the strong sense of familiarity, but the mismatch is suppressing recollection. And so that seems to be a crucial part of why you get this uncanny feeling of remembering

• 2:08:21Speaker 01

  is the strong familiarity you get. And by the way, I've watched these movies and I cannot for the life of me see that the museum is the same as the arcade. It just feels so different cognitively. But, you know, I can imagine being like, if I really did it immersively, having that sense of familiarity. So you're really pitting these things in opposition to each other. And so what likely happens with déjà vu is something uncanny that triggers a little bit of memory retrieval or a strong fluency, but then there's a mismatch that suppresses it and prevents that, a context from coming up.

• 2:09:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'd like to talk about the relationship between memory and mental health for the following reason. I'm very struck by the fact that in experiments such as the work that Carl Dyseroff, who was actually the first guest on this podcast, brilliant neuroengineer, of course, and psychiatrist, described in which he's talking to a patient who's depressed. This patient has a stimulator for the vagus nerve, they can crank up stimulation of the vagus nerve. And essentially the narrative goes from this patient, I believe it was a woman in this case, talking about being suicidally depressed, she can't anticipate doing anything of any interest or excitement to her, increasing vagal stimulation, which by the way, folks,

• 2:09:44Andrew D. Huberman?

  does not just calm people down, vagal stimulation actually creates a lot of alertness. So this is a vast misconception out there that vagal stimulation is all about calming. In any case, as the vagal stimulation goes up, her narrative literally changes in real time to, yeah, I could see myself going out and applying for a job, I'm kind of excited about the future, et cetera. So complete transformation of one's outlook.

• 2:10:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:08Andrew D. Huberman?

  But also, in some instances, memory of prior events. So how we cast prior events is so interesting. And the bridge I'd like to build right now, conceptually, is that There are two papers that intrigue me. One is a paper from Lomberto Maffei's lab in Pisa, which had a paradigm for exploring learned helplessness in rodents, which is sort of a model for depression, how long a rodent is willing to swim in water to save its life, right, before it gives up. And there's a learned helplessness that eventually arrives, these yes or not kind experiments. But at some point, they give up and then they've essentially

• 2:10:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  learned they're helpless. And of course, they save the animal before it dies. But these animals, given a, essentially an SSRI, like Prozac, can restore some sense of hope, meaning they'll swim longer after having learned to be helpless. Okay. Is it recovery of depression? We don't know. But in humans, you see some of the same thing when SSRIs have been effective and they're not always effective. You also see this in some of the psilocybin trials, where people have done the psilocybin therapies.

• 2:11:20Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, we gotta talk about that.

• 2:11:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  In the correct context. And now, all of a sudden, people have this completely different emotional version of the same events. Like, yep, a bunch of terrible things happened. Or with the MDMA trials for PTSD, controversial right now, FDA didn't approve it. But a good number of patients described saying, yeah, this really terrible set of things that happened. Those happened. But I accept it and I'm taking the lessons and I'm moving on. And then there's maybe even forgiveness, et cetera, et cetera. So to me, this is a, this is a shift in memory, brought about by a dramatic shift in neuromodulators. SSRIs, of course, increase serotonin, psilocybin increases serotonin. And it's interesting to me that MDMA, while it increases dopamine,

• 2:12:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  most dramatically increases serotonin. Seven X or more in terms of the, now, I'm not suggesting anyone do these drugs at all.

• 2:12:10Speaker 01

  You could blow out the serotonergic system with too much of it.

• 2:12:13Andrew D. Huberman?

  With too much of?

• 2:12:14Speaker 01

  Too much MDA, MA.

• 2:12:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  Although the studies on this is interesting, because the study that claimed that MDMA did that actually was retracted in science. It turns out they had inadvertently used methamphetamine.

• 2:12:26Speaker 01

  Oh geez.

• 2:12:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  Keep in mind, folks, that MDMA is methylene dioxy methamphetamine. So I'm not suggesting anyone do these drugs. I'm using this as a conceptual template.

• 2:12:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, this is abuse we're talking about, too. It's not like...

• 2:12:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right, right. I mean, so in clinical trials, it's clearly been shown, both for SSRIs, as well as for psilocybin, these are still emerging clinical trials, and MDMA. That in a significant percentage of individuals, especially when combined with therapy, people can now feel differently about the same memory.

• 2:12:55Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 2:12:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  So feeling different about the same memory and feeling different about, therefore, the sense of possibility going forward.

• 2:13:03Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 2:13:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  This, to me, is incredible.

• 2:13:05Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 2:13:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  And it speaks to the fact that much of depression, the lack of positive anticipation about the future, et cetera, is based on memories about failures of past.

• 2:13:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:13:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  Or harms of past.

• 2:13:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, rumination, basically.

• 2:13:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right. So what is the relationship between the serotonin system and memory? Or what is the relationship, more broadly, of the, these neuromodulatory systems, or the vagal system, that can create these incredible, like, reversals of what we previously thought of as terrible, as, like, manageable?

• 2:13:36Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 2:13:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  And therefore, we're willing to lean into life again. What is that?

• 2:13:40Speaker 01

  Again, you know, serotonin's like a neuromodulator. It enhances plasticity. And what I mean by that is, is that if you have, like, a transient learning event, you will get a change in the connections between neurons that were active during that event. And super interesting work right now going on in behavioral timescale plasticity and all this stuff. So it's not just cells that are wired together, it's more interesting, actually. Or fire together, wire together. It's more interesting. But those changes can often be transient. And what people, so like Eric Candel, for instance, one who studied serotonin in particular, and emphasized this, but basically, many neuromodulators, if you give a little bath,

• 2:14:24Speaker 01

  bathe these neurons in serotonin or other neuromodulators, you stabilize that plasticity. And that allows, you know, increases in receptor density between these neurons that allow them to communicate more effectively. Now, you can get weakening in LTD, too. We won't get into that. But serotonin definitely promotes plasticity, right? And so, one of the things I talk about in my book is that memories are, I mean, we all have plasticity. As I said, retrieving a memory can allow us to change the memory in certain ways. And it can change, when you get into the details of it, it becomes complicated in interesting ways. But... The short version is you can change it. We get a small part of what happened when we remember.

• 2:15:09Speaker 01

  But there's that feeling of the context. There's that emotional response that we have that's both a kind of a basic raw motivational, "my heart's racing" or something like that. That's why people often say, "Well, emotional memories are stored in the body." Well, it's just part of the memory. It's a retrieval cue, so to speak, and it can also be part of the retrieved experience. But you have all of these factors going on that are part of this emotional memory. And then you have a story that you create, a narrative that you use to make sense of it. And that affects all these physiological systems too, right? So every time I talk in the book about an example of how group therapy is so powerful as a means of memory updating and social interactions, where it's like people can

• 2:15:54Speaker 01

  change the narrative. They say, "Well, you know, I gave you this narrative about how I'm loud and you told me, 'Well, I remember hanging out with you and you weren't loud then, you're not loud now.'" And so now I can update these memories maybe.

• 2:16:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  Vagacious.

• 2:16:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. I could reframe it, right? And these framing effects are huge. So in theory, people can take an experience that was traumatic, and many people do, and say, "This made me who I am and I'm happy with who I am now, even though it's a horrible thing. I'm stronger for it." Or, "I'm a survivor." Or, "You know, I couldn't have done anything about it and it's not my fault." And, or you can have these narratives of shame and so forth, and guilt and anger and so forth. Nothing's, I'm not judging anybody's reaction to trauma. But what I am saying is that's part of the emotional response. It's part of the memory that people construct.

• 2:16:49Speaker 01

  The problem is, is that with traumatic memories, when they do stick, it's hard to change because there's so much plasticity driven by the neuromodulators during that event. With PTSD, and we could talk about that, that's a whole nother thing, but just let's just take traumatic memories. There's, it's so intense. And the amygdala response drives the physiology, in many cases, of that arousal, which makes you feel like this immediacy of it, right? And it affects sleep and nightmares, all of a sudden. But anyway, stay out of PTSD for a moment because that's a whole nother thing. But. Those memories are very resistant because of that intensity. And often, the more you retrieve them, we re-traumatize ourselves.

• 2:17:33Speaker 01

  So reframing, in a cognitive therapy sense, is very difficult because they feel this, and their brain is telling them, "I'm under threat." Or, "I'm ashamed," because they've reinforced this narrative so many times. And you can work through the logic, but sometimes you need to create some big prediction error to generate some error-driven learning, which is something we can talk about, or you need some kind of help. So if you're driving neuromodulatory systems, like, that theoretically could give you a broader window of plasticity. In fact, actually, we're trying Prozac on my dog. And one of the things that I've seen...

• 2:18:12Andrew D. Huberman?

  Why?

• 2:18:13Speaker 01

  She's very anxious, and very like, she'll just... And it's to the point where she'll not exercise, even though she's a very active dog. She'll stop on a walk if she hears a garbage truck anywhere. And so, it's a very low dose. And I'm not necessarily saying, "Go drug your dogs." But I'm just saying that the story that I've heard is that you get this period of plasticity where you can kind of rewrite some of these behavioral patterns and make them more open to training and so forth. And so it doesn't even have to be a permanent thing, right? And I think a lot of these things, like you're talking about, learned helplessness studies, probably transient effects of not being on it for years or something. But it's not very effective in terms of SSRIs.

• 2:18:57Speaker 01

  But psilocybin and psychedelics have shown a lot of promises, being bigger effects, right? And these produce massive plasticity. There's two things, I think, that are really interesting about it. So, my neighbor, Dave... By the way, Davis, I will just say, I'm biased, but it's one of the... Top three places in the world for learning and memory research. So next door, David Olson, it turns out, is studying psychedelic effects on plasticity. And so he really emphasizes that there's these massive neurotrophic factors, BDNF, like all these factors that are going on that are promoting plasticity. And for people who've taken them, that's what they report, is that there's this period of integration afterwards where your brain's just like, you know, you can feel it.

• 2:19:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  You change.

• 2:19:43Speaker 01

  You change, yeah.

• 2:19:44Andrew D. Huberman?

  You change, if the integration is guided properly. One thing that I do want to make sure I highlight, and it's not just for, you know, public safety reasons, although that as well, is that people are so intrigued by the idea of quote unquote, "opening plasticity." Plasticity is just an opportunity for learning new contingencies.

• 2:20:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:20:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right? Just taking psychedelics is an experience, certainly, but the learning of new contingencies occurs in the integration phase, as well as within the session. That's why the clinical trials that showed some efficacy for some people were guided intensely by therapists. The mere act of having plasticity, plasticity is an opportunity for learning. It's not the actual learning.

• 2:20:27Speaker 01

  That's right. It opens up like significant opportunities for reshaping. But the second part of it, which maybe I think is really interesting, is there's also a dissociative element of these drugs. So ketamine isn't a psychedelic, but I think there are some interesting plasticity effects, and definitely produces this dissociative element too. But with psychedelics, there's often a major perspective shift. And perspective is hugely important for memory, because a lot of our sense of the emotional impact of our memory is based on a perspective that we adopt when we remember. And research has shown that you can take the same encoding event, meaning like I tell

• 2:21:12Speaker 01

  you a story, let's just take a very simple thing, a very, you know, I give you a story and it's like, I tell you now viewed from the perspective of someone else and you're trying to remember it, you can remember things that you didn't experience, remember the first time around. Changing your perspective can literally change what you remember. It can also change the narrative that you produce. So now, let's say you pull up this traumatic memory, but you're viewing it from the outside, you're feeling, your heart's racing, your eyes are dilating, it's these crazy effects from psychedelics, but you're seeing it and it's not you. There's some deeper self you're feeling, whether it's true or not.

• 2:21:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  Or you have a sense of agency in there.

• 2:21:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:21:50Andrew D. Huberman?

  Some of the psychedelics, I've never tried this one, but there are interesting studies of ibogaine, iboga, where the universal experiences, I understand, is that people, it's 22 hours long, it's actually cardiovascular risk, there's some things that need to be offset there, so don't run out and do this, folks, but people, I'm told, get a high-definition movie of specific events in their life that actually happened, only when they closed their eyes, so no hallucinating with eyes open, interesting, and then they have agency within those movies. And once they exact the change they wanted to have, it rotates like a cube, very interesting, perhaps to a memory researcher, why this would be, and then they get another event

• 2:22:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  of past where they have agency in that event. Incredible.

• 2:22:38Speaker 01

  It's, I mean, you know, there's so much that we don't know, and I think it's, you know, and I will say that some of the psychedelic stuff is overhyped and there's not, some of the science is quite bad in that field right now.

• 2:22:50Andrew D. Huberman?

  A number of papers are being retracted now.

• 2:22:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I do think that some of the concerns they had in the FDA, I take issue with, but what I will say is, is that

• 2:23:01Speaker 01

  You have a drug that dramatically increases plasticity, but it changes dramatically the mental context that you have when you pull up the memory. So you have a real opportunity for memory updating. Now, there's a phenomenon in the animal literature called reconsolidation, where essentially the act of retrieving a memory opens it up to requiring some kinds of neuromodulators again to really promote resealing of the memory, so to speak. But it can also, if you interrupt it, you can erase the memories. And theoretically, if you can do that, you could also change the memories pretty significantly. So if I can vividly access some neural population

• 2:23:45Speaker 01

  that's giving me this, normally gives me this physiological response, it sets off this train of thoughts, and it's associated with this physical and mental context, and I can dramatically, I can access those neurons, but dramatically reshape the context and dramatically reshape the narrative, I've created the opportunity for massive change. And I don't know if that's true, but it sure makes sense to me that that's the case. Now, having said that, if you and me share our traumatic elements of our childhood, I'm sure we could go out for drinks and do this for quite a few hours, right? That in and of itself will also produce some change in our memories. It's very powerful.

• 2:24:27Speaker 01

  And I saw this in the clinic where I was doing group therapy with Vietnam vets. And I'm like, I'm a total fraud. I'm like, I don't know, 27 years old, 28 years old. And I'm like in with these, like, you know, Vietnam vets in their 50s who've really seen stuff, you know, and they live in combat zones now in Chicago. And what I realized was...

• 2:24:53Speaker 01

  Everyone was telling their story. But they're hearing reflections of their story, for me, but also from other members of the group who they can relate to, that are different from their narrative. And now, all of a sudden, what happens is, the memory is no longer theirs. It's a collective memory that's shared by all these people. Because the memory now incorporates elements of their reactions as well. It allows people to remember it in a new context, right? And I mean, and we can just take a much more watered-down version of this, where how many times have you had a terrible experience, and it became a great story? I basically say that there's no point in having a bad experience in life if you don't

• 2:25:38Speaker 01

  get a great story out of it, right? So I talk in the book about a near-death experience I had paddleboarding, and everything about this was stupid. It's like, the degree, I could send you pictures of it, and you'd be like, "Oh, my God, what was he thinking?"

• 2:25:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  I've made foolish errors in outdoor adventures in my past, where afterwards, I thought that was a really dumb move to even go to that location to dive, let alone what we did when we did there, like, you know, I mean, some of the stupid stuff that we did, even as kids, like, bridge jumps, and without testing water depth, I mean, stupid, stupid stuff.

• 2:26:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:26:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  That I don't recommend anyone repeat. But you're right, the surviving stories are, you carry those forward.

• 2:26:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 2:26:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  The problem is, the other stories, we can talk about people who are paralyzed, dead, etc., those stories exist, too.

• 2:26:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, well, so, I mean, to be clear, it's like, I felt horrible during that experience, and it was one of the most immediately fear-inducing experiences I've had. But later, me and Randy O'Reilly of Computational Neuroscience were friends. We both did this stupid thing together. We would tell this story, tag-team it, and we told it to students and friends and so forth, and it just became funny. And so each time we told it, it just became kind of funnier and funnier, and you start to embellish things and so forth. And so that change of perspective was really drawn out by sharing and seeing people laugh and seeing people like, what were you thinking? You're such a smart person and you did this. And it becomes part of the narrative.

• 2:27:15Speaker 01

  And keep in mind, there are people who do this, that they say like, I've had a really traumatic experience, but I've learned from it. I've had a horrible emotionally abusive relationship, but I've learned from it. Right? And I don't mean to trivialize anybody's experience who didn't have that thing and they're just traumatized by it and they carry it with them. But what I am saying is, is that the memory, so to speak, I think in neuroscience right now, there's a big hot topic about n-grams, as if a bunch of neurons is the memory. But every time we have a memory, we're painting a new picture. We're creating a new novel.

• 2:27:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well, and I think this is where people have to be very careful not to cowboy post-traumatic stress disorder treatment in a way that allows the narrative to make it worse. Because people, a previous guest on this podcast has this notion of, in describing this, of story fondling, where people can go further and further into the description of how terrible something is, reinforced by others, and then the memory changes to become much worse than either the real events were, or just simply worse within their body and mind, and then they have to live that forward. So it can go both ways, which is, really points to the key, which is to do this with really trained professionals.

• 2:28:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And it's, it's all about, like, because you can re-traumatize yourself, and this is also why rumination is so bad in depression, is because you recall a negative memory and that gets you in a negative mood because you pull up the context, and then that makes it easier to recall more negative memories. And then every time you recall them, now they're getting more power because they're associated with these negative moods.

• 2:28:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  So recollection is really a double-edged blade.

• 2:28:57Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, I mean, look at, like, so if you take something like reminiscence or nostalgia. So the original term nostalgia, I credit Philippe de Bregard for telling, he's a philosopher, neuroscientist. He told me that nostalgia used to be a term for a disease that was coined by a Swiss physician. And he used it to talk about a kind of post-traumatic experience that soldiers had, where they would get so wistful about their home that it just made them miserable in the places that they were at.

• 2:29:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's been referred to as the pain of an old wound.

• 2:29:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 2:29:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  I didn't say that, someone else.

• 2:29:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And so it can, the research shows it can have very positive effects on mental health, right? And it can have positive effects on mental health if you use that as a way of saying, hey, this is just a great thing that's happened. I'm grateful for that. But it can become toxic if you're like, my life used to be so great and now it's terrible. Even if it's positive reminiscence, if you come into it with the wrong attributions, it can become negative, toxic, and it can contaminate your present, right? I mean, the past has got good and it's got bad in it, just like the present has got good and it's got bad in it. And it's really all about what are the narratives you're

• 2:30:21Speaker 01

  constructing for it in many ways. And that plays a big part in the dynamic, malleable, constantly shape-shifting nature of memory.

• 2:30:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  Incredible. I want to make sure that we talk about something at first glance very different than all of this, but it lands squarely in the conversation we've had until now, which is your love for and your participation in rock and roll. You have a band, right? Pavlov's Dogz.

• 2:30:54Speaker 01

  Yep, actually I have a couple of bands now, thankfully.

• 2:30:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay, what are the other ones called?

• 2:30:58Speaker 01

  Well, so Pavlov's Dogz, also versus like a band of neuroscientists and psychologists, neuroscientists who met, actually, most of us met at a memory meeting, actually. And so we get together at conferences and we'll rent out a club and we'll play, basically... Uh, Brad calls it skinny tie music. It's like.

• 2:31:20Andrew D. Huberman?

  Is it original music or covers?

• 2:31:22Speaker 01

  Covers. That one's a cover band.

• 2:31:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  Covers, okay.

• 2:31:24Speaker 01

  Um, and so, uh, we'll play like the Ramones, the Clash, Gang of Four.

• 2:31:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  Great.

• 2:31:28Speaker 01

  Um, it's, it's a lot of, we're, you know, we added Blondie and.

• 2:31:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  She's still touring.

• 2:31:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, she's amazing, isn't she?

• 2:31:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  A friend of mine went on tour with her. Yeah, there's a band called Surfboard. Surfboard was on tour with Blondie.

• 2:31:41Speaker 01

  I know them.

• 2:31:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:42Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a friend of yours.

• 2:31:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  Danny from Surfboard, no, yeah, that great band, um, and she toured with Blondie. Blondie's amazing. She's still super vivacious as a surfboard and, and, um, uh, and Danny. What instrument do you play?

• 2:31:55Speaker 01

  I play guitar and I also do vocals.

• 2:31:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  Lead vocals?

• 2:31:58Speaker 01

  Uh, yes, or yeah.

• 2:32:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  And, uh.

• 2:32:02Speaker 01

  Reluctant because sometimes it's talking or being off key, but yeah.

• 2:32:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  Can people find, um, links to any Pavlov Dogz live shows or recordings online?

• 2:32:10Speaker 01

  I think we have some recordings on YouTube and if you look on our Facebook page, um, maybe our Instagram too, we have live recordings.

• 2:32:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay. And you have a show coming up. We'll put a link to that. That's, um, because people will listen to this long after that, um, presumably. That's coming up in Chicago on October.

• 2:32:28Speaker 01

  I think it's the 7th. Is it a month? It's the Monday.

• 2:32:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  We'll put a link to that.

• 2:32:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, sorry.

• 2:32:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  But, but for those that can't make it, because most of us aren't in Chicago, including me, unfortunately, um, we'll keep an eye out for, uh, Pavlov's Dogz. I love that you play music and I just have, for sake of time, one question about your love for rock and roll and playing music. When you're playing rock and roll live, are you thinking about anything else?

• 2:32:56Speaker 01

  Sometimes, and that's when I suck.

• 2:33:00Speaker 01

  Actually, you know, one thing, one hack that I came up with, because it's like with the cover band, we practice, like, we cram. It's the worst thing. It's not spaced learning. It's like we, we go through the songs and we keep adding and taking away songs, but it's like, we'll cram for like, I don't know, about eight hours of practices over three days or something. And so it's for me, it's like a constant memory thing because my brain doesn't want to play covers. It wants to play the songs that I've written. And so there's always everything. And then I get nervous. I get really nervous. And so I move a lot. And then that distracts, and then I'll see friends and that kills me because then I start thinking, what are they thinking? And so I started, my last show I did with Pavlov's Dogz, I wore sunglasses and it was great.

• 2:33:42Speaker 01

  It was because then I wasn't attuned to them and I was it just goes back to what we're talking about kind of with the camera and stuff. I was feeling it and I was thinking I was I was not I was in the flow in the zone and feeling it and doing it and not thinking about it. And there's a whole interesting literature choking under pressure that actually relates to this idea of like, you know, sometimes having too much cognitive control going on is like really bad when you're under stress. And if you know something fairly well, you're going to be better off if you just go into an automatic state.

• 2:34:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  I love that. When I do live shows, I like to have the house lights relatively dim. I don't want to see anybody at first. And then as they get more comfortable, I'm happy to have the house lights come up.

• 2:34:25Speaker 01

  Oh, what do you play? I didn't know you.

• 2:34:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  Oh, I don't play anything. I do live events where I talk about science.

• 2:34:29Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 2:34:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  Where I tell stories about science and scientists. Okay, a couple of things are right in the front of my mind, and I'd be remiss if I didn't say them right now. First of all, it's absolutely clear that we need to get you back here for more discussion about memory and learning. There's just so much that we didn't have the opportunity to cover in this conversation, but we most certainly will in a future conversation.

• 2:34:52Speaker 01

  We didn't bring up the turkeys of Davis.

• 2:34:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  No, we didn't. Second of all, I want to thank you for writing your book, Why We Remember, because it's a fantastic exploration of the modern understanding of memory, still some of the mysteries that remain. But this is a field that's evolved a lot, and you capture so much of the incredible findings there over the years in a very pleasurable way. So it's a pleasure to read. And then I also want to thank you for coming here today to share with us your understanding about memory and also your sharing of your experience with ADHD and some of the tools you use, some of the struggles. I think all too often, people hear about these, you know,

• 2:35:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  scientists or physicians or people who are authorities on a topic, and they don't hear about the challenges they face. And I assure you that a great, great many people will appreciate the fact that you yourself have struggled with certain issues related to attention, but that you've overcome them at least as well to be able to be a functional parent and family man, professor, author, now public educator, dog owner.

• 2:36:03Andrew D. Huberman?

  Second time around, and you know, for that and for a great many other reasons, you've educated us and you've given us a great many practical tools. It's also great to see you as a fellow punk rocker and old friend. And I even let you call me Andy. So thank you. So thanks for coming here today and please do come back again, Charan.

• 2:36:23Speaker 01

  Oh, I would love to. Thank you, Andrew. It's just been great to be here.

• 2:36:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  Thank you for joining me for today's discussion about memory and ADHD with Dr. Charan Ranganath. To learn more about his work and to find a link to his book as well as social media accounts, please see the links in the show note captions. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us. In addition, please subscribe to the podcast on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five star review. Please check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast, or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comments section on YouTube. I do read all the comments.

• 2:37:10Andrew D. Huberman?

  For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body. This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience. And it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation. And of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by pre-sale at protocolsbook.com. There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body. If you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman

• 2:37:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  Lab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram, X, formerly known as Twitter, Threads, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science-related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the content on the Huberman Lab podcast. Again, that's Huberman Lab on all social media channels. If you haven't already- Subscribe to our neural network newsletter. Our neural network newsletter is a zero cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as protocols in the form of brief one to three page PDFs. Those protocol PDFs are on things like neuroplasticity and learning, optimizing dopamine, improving your sleep, deliberate cold exposure, deliberate heat exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol that describes a template routine that includes

• 2:38:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  cardiovascular training and resistance training with sets and reps, all backed by science, and all of which again is completely zero cost. To subscribe, simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab up in the upper right corner, scroll down to newsletter and provide your email. And I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Charan Ranganath. And last, but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.