Neuroscience of Emotions & Tools for Improving Emotion Regulation | Dr. Ralph Adolphs

Dr. Ralph Adolphs, PhD, is a Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Biology at Caltech and a leading expert on the science of human emotions. We discuss how emotions shape our attention and decision-making, whether emotions are truly “stored” in the body, and whether facial expressions are truly reliable signals of emotion. We also cover tools for improving emotional regulation, including cognitive reappraisal and deliberate cold exposure. This episode provides a modern scientific explanation of how emotions are created and regulated in the brain and body, their many impacts on other aspects of brain function, and practical tools for improving emotional wellbeing and processing. Get tickets to Huberman Lab live events: https://www.hubermanlab.com/events Pre-order Andrew's book Protocols: https://protocolsbook.com Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman Function: https://functionhealth.com/huberman Helix Sleep: https://helixsleep.com/huberman LMNT: https://drinklmnt.com/huberman Rorra: https://rorra.com/huberman Timestamps (00:00:00) Ralph Adolphs (00:02:54) Emotions; Qualities of Emotions: Priority, Valence (00:10:00) Qualities of Emotions: Scalability, Persistence (00:15:25) Sponsors: Helix Sleep & Rorra (00:18:17) Do Animals Have Emotions?, Conscious Experience (00:22:58) Monitoring & Regulating Emotions; Emotional Granularity (00:31:22) Emotional Regulation, Tools: Situational Avoidance, Ice Baths (00:37:11) Ultramarathons, Perseverance, Adversity; Awe (00:45:04) Sponsor: AG1 (00:46:17) Perception of Emotions, Amygdala & Fear, Facial Expressions (00:51:59) Interpreting Others' Emotions, Prediction (00:57:52) Emotions as Adaptations to the Environment, Types of Fear (01:00:13) Feeling Emotions in the Body, Pain, Insula (01:08:05) Brain & Body Connection; Marketing & Emotion (01:12:34) Sponsor: Function (01:14:11) Art, Music & Emotion (01:17:43) Interpreting Facial Expressions, Developing Emotions, Flexibility vs Reflexes (01:25:11) Emotional Intelligence, Context-Dependent Social Intelligence; Autism (01:33:31) Sponsor: LMNT (01:34:51) Autism & Social Dynamics, Eye Contact (01:42:01) Change Your Personality?, Body Movement & Thought, Social Interaction (01:47:18) Emotion Regulation, Tool: Training Mental Stillness (01:53:46) Task Switching, Tool: Meditation, Breathing Techniques (02:02:07) Illness, Diagnosis & Emotions, Gratitude & Awe (02:06:52) Zero-Cost Support, YouTube, Spotify & Apple Follow, Reviews & Feedback, Sponsors, 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I see somebody come up behind me. They can see I'm trying to park. They can move over. No, they come right up behind me, go on the horn. And you know, you immediately feel just an immediate anger response. Right? Well, after the ice bath, it's flat. So there was an immediate, automatic down regulation of my autonomic emotional response to a psychological stressor, to somebody honking at me, that was trained and generalized from the ice bath. It's an experiment of one. I'm not claiming this as a published study, but so I think there's a, there's a direct autonomic training component as well, in terms of the strength and the automaticity, the ease with which you can regulate emotions, that they can become kind of automatically regulated.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  You don't have to overthink it. It becomes smooth and effortless to some extent. And that's, that's the place where you, where you, where you want to get.

• 0:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  Hey, everyone. To celebrate the launch of my new book entitled Protocols, I'm pleased to share that I'll be hosting three live events very soon. The first live event is in New York City at Radio City Music Hall on September 17th. The second event is in Los Angeles at the Dolby Theatre on October 8th. And the third live event is in San Francisco at the Masonic on October 28th. At each of these events, I'll be discussing topics from the book and my favorite part, taking questions directly from you, the audience. To get tickets, you can go to hubermanlab.com/events and use the code PROTOCLES to get early access. Again, that's hubermanlab.com/events and use the code PROTOCLES to get early access to tickets.

• 1:35Andrew D. Huberman?

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

• 1:44Andrew 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. Ralph Adolphs. Dr. Ralph Adolphs is a professor of psychology, neuroscience, and biology at Caltech University, and a world expert in the neurobiology of emotions. Today, we discuss what emotions are, how they grow and shrink in our brain and body, and why some emotions seem to recruit our behavior and decision-making, and some simply don't. We also discuss where and how emotions are mapped in the body, and we dispel common myths about the brain-body storage of emotions from our past, which is a very commonly discussed topic that frankly, as you'll learn today, many, if not most, people get wrong.

• 2:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  We also discuss why some people are able to observe but not react to their emotions, and what tools may assist in helping you build better emotion regulation. As you'll soon realize, Dr. Adolphs is uniquely positioned to explain the real neuroscience and psychology of emotions, and how to put that information to use. Today's conversation therefore ought to be valuable for people of every age and profession, and for anyone interested in improving their emotional life and understanding of others. And now for my conversation with Dr. Ralph Adolphs. Dr. Ralph Adolphs, welcome.

• 2:57Speaker 00

  Thank you, Andrew. Pleasure to be here.

• 2:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  Longtime admirer of your work, because you're one of the few people who has studied these things we call emotions, brain states, cognition, and much more in humans. There've been others in the field of neuroscience, of course, but I would argue a few people have combined a real grounding in neural circuits with an interest in what most people think of as a psychological set of issues, in a way that also takes into account the animal data and really the broadest picture of this thing that we call emotions. I'm just going to start with a statement of gratitude. Thank you for doing that, because it's so easy for people to stimulate a brain area, see an animal or a human behave or speak in a certain way and say, oh, this is the brain region for this. And you've long been pushing back on that.

• 3:38Speaker 00

  It's a tall order, you know, and one impetus for the work that I've been doing in the book that I co-wrote with David Anderson, the book that I have forthcoming with Princeton University Press, is precisely to do what you just said, is to kind of integrate and pull together findings on emotion from animal studies, findings from social psychology. Typically, those people in those fields don't talk to one another. They do very different studies, have very different methodologies. And so trying to integrate across disciplines that are that far apart to really try and get a, get a sense for what are emotions in a sense that would satisfy psychologists and lay people about human emotions, but they would also speak to the mechanisms that you can study in mice, for example, or flies, as David Anderson does.

• 4:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  So how do you think about emotions? And how do they relate to brain and bodily states?

• 4:28Speaker 00

  The basic answer is that I think of emotions as functional states of a particular type. They should be understood by what they do, their function, rather than how they happen to be constituted in the human brain, or differently, in an octopus nervous system, or in an AI, which we should talk about. And so the way to situate them is to think of control of behavior in response to particular types of environmental challenges. So at the sort of simplest level, you'd have reflexes. You know, I put my hand out on a hot stove, or you tap the patellar tendon on my knee, and there's like a very rigid behavior that's adaptive, that's very rigid, but just for that particular circumstance, or withdraw my hand, that's a reflex.

• 5:11Speaker 00

  At the opposite end, you would have, you know, goal-directed, general volition and planning, everything, you know, the stuff we do all the time, that's extremely flexible. And so if you have a bear, or a tiger, you know, something charging at you, that challenge requires a control of behavior that's intermediate between those two extremes. I can't have a reflex for a bear if it's far away, or if it's close, or if it's a rattlesnake, or a tiger, or all the different kinds of potential threats out there. Instead, I need something that's more flexible, which emotions are. So that's the sort of big picture, that emotions are functional states that have particular features or operating characteristics for dealing with certain types of environmental

• 5:55Speaker 00

  challenges, like running away from a bear. I mean, first of all, I think the question, what is an emotion, is a good and a valid question. It's not an ill-posed question. You occasionally run into the view that, well, emotions don't really exist, or we don't really, you can't really say anything about them, the question is just ill-posed or meaningless. I don't think that's the case. Paul Griffiths, philosopher, wrote a book some years ago, I think 97 or so, What Emotions Really Are, where he first kind of made the claim that, well, they don't really exist, you know? And you could see how people come to that conclusion if you survey all the different theories that are out there, Joel Ledoux, or Lisa Feldman Barrett, or Paul Ekman, they look pretty different.

• 6:38Speaker 00

  And so you might come away with the impression, look, even the experts can't agree on what emotions are. The words we have for emotions predate modern science, so it's just a confused concept. I don't think that's the case. I think, I mean, there's room for revision, but I think everybody kind of knows what emotions are, and I think it deserves a straight answer that science should provide. I think the question is well-posed enough to admit of an answer. And then how could you start getting to an answer? So let's just start sort of from the simplest case, would be to list some examples. So you could say, well, you know, emotions are anger, fear, disgust. You could list specific examples that are uncontentious, I would hope, where pretty

• 7:22Speaker 00

  much everybody agrees, okay, these are examples of emotions, right? You could do the same if I asked you, what's a car, right? And you would say, well, you know, it's a Mercedes, and a Honda, and a Toyota. Or if I asked you, what's a bird? And you would say, it's a robin, and a hummingbird, and an eagle. So you could list examples. That's not an answer yet. What you would then want to say is, well, what is it in virtue of which these examples, what makes them all instances of an emotion? What do fear, anger, et cetera, share in common? What features do they have that makes them emotions? Just like what the cars or the bird species have in common that makes them cars or birds. And so David Anderson and I did that in our book a decade ago or so, Now the Neuroscience

• 8:07Speaker 00

  of Emotion, where we listed some features of emotions that helps to answer the question and sort of get a handle on what is it that these all share in common? I elaborate on that and have a longer list and really go into detail on, okay, so what are the features of emotions in my forthcoming book? Maybe I'll just list a couple to go through them quickly. So one feature of emotions is priority, which is that they can take over your behavior. That they share in common with reflexes. If I put my head on a hot stove, you know, I can't help but withdraw it. And if you're suddenly confronted by the bear, you can't help but run away, or crawl into a ball, or whatever your adaptive behavior is. So they have priority and interrupt your behavior, which is something that the Nobel

• 8:52Speaker 00

  Laureate Herbert Simon already pointed out in a paper back in the 50s or 60s, that they're interrupt mechanisms of a certain kind. If you're just going about your business and normal, goal-directed behavior, you always need to be monitoring for the bear, or the tiger, the predator that's out there. And if you detect that, emotions have to take over, or you're dead. So priority is sort of one. That doesn't distinguish emotions from reflexes or fixed action patterns, they, they share that. Another one is valence, that psychologists ubiquitously mention, which is sort of the simplest dimension along which you can organize emotions in terms of their similarity. So anger, disgust, fear, you might say, are more similar to one another than either of

• 9:36Speaker 00

  those is with, say, happiness. There's some similarity structure, some emotions cluster together, some are further apart. And the simplest dimension, which is one that Charles Darwin already mentioned in his book, The Expression of the Emotion in Men and Animals. They called it the principle of antithesis is valence, which is approach or avoid, pleasant or unpleasant, this basic valence dimension.

• 10:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  Are there any neutral emotions? I ask this because your colleague at Caltech, who I respect tremendously, Marcus Meister, once wrote a review where he said, you know, a good way to think about sensory systems and maybe neural systems of all kinds is that they're encoding for yum, yuck, or meh. And the meh is a very interesting one, just like an animal or including us can go forward, backward, or stay put. Now, we can go side to side too, of course, those are just different versions of forward in this context. And I sometimes wonder, because algorithms are repurposed across different neural systems, if there is indeed a meh emotion, or maybe the emotion is meh. I don't want to take us down a philosophical path, but does that make sense?

• 10:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  Because as long as we're talking about valence, anger and happiness, clearly, you know, sad and happy, okay, opposite ends of the spectrum, but what was it, apathy? Is there a state of prioritization of doing nothing?

• 10:54Speaker 00

  It's a really good question. I mean, I think, you know, when you list these features, like priority, valence, I'll get to some others, one question is which of these are necessary? You know, like a package of all of these features that emotions have, do you need all of them? Or can, are some of them sufficient? And I think the answer is some of them are sufficient, but there's some that are necessary. I think priority is necessary. I think valence, maybe not, as you were alluding to. I could imagine there's still valence, but it's at a neutral region of the of the spectrum. But then there's other ones, which are the ones that David Anderson has studied in particular in the hypothalamus in mice, and I think goes into great detail in the podcast that

• 11:37Speaker 00

  you had with him, which are scalability and temporal persistence. And so scalability would be that an emotion can scale in intensity. One of the best examples of that has been, is for the case of fear and the bear coming at you. So typically, it would scale from anxiety and monitoring, you know, there's the bear sort of out there, to fear, where you might run away or hide, to panic. So that's a threat imminence scalability. And that's something where emotions are different now from reflexes, because reflexes are binary, it's all or nothing. I either pull my hand away or nothing, the knee jerks or not, it's not, there's not like some scalable package in there. And then temporal persistence is even more something that's essential to emotions and

• 12:22Speaker 00

  speaks to their function, which is you have this internal state, let's say of aggression or of fear, that has to last some time, because the bear might be around for some time. So you might be running away, or you might be attacking in anger, those are phasic little bouts, but the actual internal state that is motivating those persists for quite a long time. So temporal persistence is really important, and it allows the person or the animal to incorporate lots and lots of information that's coming in, and to have a motivational state that would be suited for that kind of environmental challenge. It's not like a hot plate, where if you pull your hand away, you're done. The bear is out there, and it might come back, it might still be lurking in the forest, so you better be afraid for some period of time.

• 13:07Speaker 00

  David Anderson has studied this a lot in terms of what neural circuits, what properties of neurotransmitters in the brain could actually implement persistence. Would you have really slow neurotransmitters like norpeptides, for instance, which is what he's studied. But my colleagues at the University of Iowa actually did a really cool study in humans that showed the temporal persistence of emotions, independent of memory. So here's a study. They took patients with amnesia, so these were like four or five people who had medial temporal lobe hippocampal damage, they live in a time window of maybe a minute or so. I used to study these patients when I first started as a postdoc at the University of Iowa with with Damasio.

• 13:49Speaker 00

  And, you know, you can talk to them, they can process information, but if you go to the toilet and you come back five minutes later, they would stand up and shake your hand and introduce themselves to you, because they would have no recollection of having met you before. So just no memory, very strong antergrade amnesia, as it's called. So they had those and controls. They showed them really sad movie clips, in all cases. The patients can understand and watch the movie clip, they get really sad and weepy. Right after watching these sad movie clips, everybody rates how sad do you feel? The amnesic patients feel really sad, the controls feel really sad. You wait five minutes. You then ask the controls, well, how do you, how sad do you feel? And they say, yeah, I still feel a little bit of sad sadness in me, because I remember

• 14:34Speaker 00

  having seen the movie. And if you ask them, why do you feel sad? They say, well, because you showed me the sad movie five minutes ago. The amnesic patients, you ask, how do you feel? They say, I feel really sad, and I don't know why, I have no idea. And you ask them, do you remember seeing a movie? They say, nope. There's like no declarative memory of the movie, but there's still the temporal persistence of the sadness, it lasts some time. So I thought this was a really cool study, because it showed very clearly that there is temporal persistence in emotions, and sadness probably has one of the longest time constants, as we know from personal experience, but it's separate from just declarative memory. It's not that you're remembering that the bear is there, that's going on too, but independently of that, the emotion state has its own temporal persistence.

• 15:18Speaker 00

  The state has to last some time, and again, that's something that reflexes don't have. It just goes straight through, there's, there's no temporal persistence.

• 15:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep makes mattresses and pillows that are customized to your unique sleep needs. Now, I've spoken many times before on this and on other podcasts, about the fact that getting a great night's sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health, and performance. When we aren't getting great sleep on a consistent basis, everything suffers. And when we are sleeping well and enough, our mental health, physical health, and performance in all endeavors improve markedly. Now, the mattress you sleep on makes a huge difference in the quality of sleep that you get each night. How soft it is, or how firm it is, all play into your comfort, and need to be tailored to your unique sleep needs. If you go to the Helix website, you can take a brief two-minute quiz, and it will ask

• 16:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  you questions such as, do you sleep on your back, your side, or your stomach? Maybe you know, maybe you don't. Do you tend to run hot or cold during the night? Things of that sort. You answer those questions, and Helix will match you to the ideal mattress for you. For me, that turned out to be the Dusk, D U S K mattress. I've been sleeping on a Dusk mattress for more than four years now, and it's been far and away the best sleep that I've ever had. If you'd like to try Helix, you can go to helixsleep.com/huberman, take that two-minute sleep quiz, and Helix will match you to a mattress that's customized for you. Right now, Helix is giving up to 27% off their entire site. Helix has also teamed up with TrueMed, which allows you to use your HSA/FSA dollars to shop Helix's award-winning mattresses.

• 16:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  Again, that's helixsleep.com/huberman to get up to 27% off. Today's episode is also brought to us by Rora. Rora makes what I believe are the best water filters on the market. It's an unfortunate reality, but tap water often contains contaminants that negatively impact our health. In fact, a 2020 study by the Environmental Working Group estimated that more than 200 million Americans are exposed to PFAS chemicals, also known as forever chemicals, through drinking of tap water. These forever chemicals are linked to serious health issues, such as hormone disruption, gut microbiome disruption, fertility issues, and many other health problems. The Environmental Working Group has also shown that over 122 million Americans drink tap water with high levels of chemicals known to cause cancer.

• 17:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's for all these reasons that I'm thrilled to have Rora as a sponsor of this podcast. I've been using the Rora countertop system for almost a year now. Rora's filtration technology removes harmful substances, including endocrine disruptors and disinfection byproducts, while preserving beneficial minerals like magnesium and calcium. It requires no installation or plumbing, it's built from medical-grade stainless steel, and its sleek design fits beautifully on your countertop. In fact, I consider it a welcome addition to my kitchen, it looks great, and the water is delicious. If you'd like to try Rora, you can go to rorra.com/huberman and get an exclusive discount. Again, that's R O R R A dot com slash huberman. It is striking to me that maybe 30 years ago or so, there was discussion about whether animals have emotions.

• 18:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  Based on these criteria, priority, valence, scalability, and persistence, is it generally...

• 18:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  Agreed upon that animals have emotions. I believe they do because I love my dog and other animals and I want to believe that. But as scientists, if we step back, do they meet the criteria for emotions that you're setting up here for us?

• 18:41Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Yes. So if you have those criteria, those functional criteria, and you would add one or two others, many states in animals, and certainly the states that we would ordinarily interpret as emotions in our pets, in our dogs, cats. By the way, I loved your dog.

• 18:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  Oh, Strummer.

• 18:58Speaker 00

  Just out in the waiting room there.

• 18:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, he's just hanging out.

• 19:00Speaker 00

  They would meet those criteria and they would have functional emotions. We should talk more about this. There's also the the claim now from anthropic that large language models have functional emotions as well.

• 19:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  That's so wild. We have to return to that because I think it it kind of boggles the mind. You know, how could a machine have emotions?

• 19:17Speaker 00

  Right. But again, these are functionally defined emotions. And there's, I think there's no problem assigning to AI, to some extent, and certainly to many animals, those functional emotions. Where it gets complicated is that in us, and also by assumption in animals, I have no doubt, they also have conscious experiences of emotions. And most people take the conscious experience of the emotion as the ground truth for the emotion. Emotions without conscious experiences of emotions sound like an oxymoron. It's like you can't have that. The conscious experience is the emotion, which is what William James said, which is what Joel Ledoux says. And I think it's implicitly there across essentially

• 20:00Speaker 00

  every psychological theory, is the assumption that emotions really are types of conscious experiences, which I think is the intuition. That if I ask you, how do you know, what's the ground truth, right? How do you know you're having an emotion? You would say, because it's a certain type of conscious experience because of how it feels. And if I asked you more specifically, how do you know it's sadness versus anger versus fear? You would say, because of how they feel. They feel different. And so we take the conscious experience, our own introspective axis to the conscious experience, as the ground truth. That has a lot of problems associated with it, deep philosophical problems. But just practically,

• 20:40Speaker 00

  it has two big problems that I think science should avoid. One is, it gets really problematic to know whether or not animals have emotions, because we don't know how to test whether or not they have conscious experiences. I have no doubt that they do. It's just that there's no scientific way to test currently. So we should have different criteria. And the other question is, if you tie emotion to the conscious experience of emotion, that is, you equate, you conflate emotions with feelings, well, then you're not studying emotions, you're studying consciousness. We spoke about Christoph Koch earlier. Great respect for people that are studying consciousness, but I don't want to study consciousness. That's too hard. And there's lots and lots of debates and disagreements. So if we can

• 21:24Speaker 00

  avoid that and study emotions in the absence of needing to study conscious experiences of emotions, we can move forward with the science, which is what every other discipline does. So if you're a vision researcher, right? So you study vision. You study consciousness? No, you don't need to. I mean, you can. But there's a huge amount of work that people do studying vision and how that works in the brain, studying memory, you know, any other cognitive process, without needing to study conscious experiences. They're typically accompanied in humans. And if you if you talk to the layperson on the street and you say, I'm a vision researcher, they take you to be studying the conscious experience of seeing,

• 22:06Speaker 00

  perhaps. Or if you say, I'm a memory researcher, they take you to be studying the conscious experience of recollection. But scientifically, most people working in those fields don't study consciousness. And it's perfectly valid to study vision and memory, you know, in horseshoe crabs or aplesia, where nobody has any claims about consciousness. We should do the same thing with emotion, and then we can have an integrated science across species that can move forward without needing to tackle the difficult problem of consciousness. Again, yes, for sure, we and other animals have conscious experiences of emotions, and that's very important. But we also have conscious experiences of seeing and memory. As a scientific discipline, we should separate the conscious experience from the process, from the emotion.

• 22:51Speaker 00

  And that's the way we make progress. That's the one of the main arguments that David and I had in our book and that I reiterate in the forthcoming book.

• 22:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  At risk of taking us in a philosophical direction, I'd like to actually ask a biological, psychological question. Given these criteria, you know, priority, valence, scalability, and persistence, but really focusing mainly on priority, I think all of us have had the experience of an emotion coming on, but not in its kind of overtaking maximal form. Like, okay, we feel ourselves getting annoyed, and we can observe the emotion growing. The arousal state is familiar to us. We understand. Let's assume in this example that we understand why it's happening. Maybe you're in line at the store and the person ahead of you is taking everybody's time by doing something that's really unnecessary and kind of obnoxious to us in that moment. And so our frustration is is rising, and we are observing the emotion,

• 23:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  even though the emotion is us, right? It's within us. And then at some point, we might blurt something out, or we might feel compelled that we have to just say, excuse me, like, could this maybe be taken care of?

• 23:53Speaker 00

  But you have some control.

• 23:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  You have some control. And there's this almost like running together of two consciousnesses. Like, there's like two of us in there at the same time, observing self, observing the outside world. And then at some point, the prioritization gets to the point where like we just do something. And sometimes it's a decision, and sometimes it overtakes us. Now, at the opposite extreme, we've all observed, and you can just go on X, the social media platform, and for some reason, the algorithm likes to serve up a lot of examples of people like on planes, losing it, people going unhinged, like, you know, I like people just like completely melting down. And it's and it's very, in our language, hypothetical, right? And so people are drawn to that.

• 24:31Speaker 00

  I have an antidote to those people. They should take ice baths. I can tell you more.

• 24:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  Oh, well, listen.

• 24:36Speaker 00

  They should take ice baths. I think this helps. Seriously.

• 24:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, well, ice baths, yeah, let's definitely talk about ice baths. And ultra, ultra races, because you're training for one.

• 24:44Speaker 00

  No, but I think I think what you said is exactly right and extremely important for humans and probably unique to humans as opposed to other animals, which is that we can be conscious of and monitor our own emotions. And by doing so, we can regulate them to some extent. So emotion regulation and control and monitoring emotion, being aware of what emotion you have, those two go hand in hand. And your Stanford colleague, you know, James Gross, spawned this huge field in the 90s, I guess, when it started of emotion regulation that is now huge. I just finished my term as co-editor of this journal, Affect of Science. And I would say like a quarter or so, or a third of the submissions are about emotion

• 25:28Speaker 00

  regulation. It is so important in in in humans. And most of pathologies and difficulties about emotions are not about the emotion per se, it's about our ability or disability to control them, to regulate.

• 25:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  If you don't mind, because of your understanding of emotions and states and neuroscience, but also your experience as a human in the world, has anything you've learned changed the way that you watch your emotions grow, decide when to step in, when not to step in? You don't seem like an impulsive person. So we're not, most people aren't. We're not talking about pathology here. And I'll cede this question by saying, you know, I have a few friends who were in tier one special operations, and you know, that's high risk, high consequence work. We've had Alex Honnold on the podcast, high risk, high consequence endeavors. And they all say the same thing, which are that emotions cloud logical judgment. So they're somehow far from emotions, or their emotions don't get prioritized. But

• 26:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  of course, these are the, all of these people that come to mind have, you know, healthy marriages now, you know, healthy families, they're loving people, they have anger, they have they have emotions, but they they've sort of categorized emotions as cloud judgment in the professional or, you know, peak performance context. Therefore, they don't allow them to be prioritized. Sounds a little bit robotic, sounds a little bit mechanical, quote unquote, on the spectrum. People like will say these things, right? But in some ways, provided they're allowed to allow themselves to be emotional, emotional, and let emotions, quote unquote, take over in the right context, that's kind of the ideal circumstance, right?

• 27:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  So what do you know that allowed, that has impacted the way that you think about emotion regulation that perhaps people could consider, if not benefit from?

• 27:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's, you know, it's a mixture. On the one hand, you absolutely need emotions. If you have no emotions, as we know from Antonio Damasio's original work in his book Descartes' Error. Which he put out just as I was starting as a postdoc in Iowa, 1994, I think. You know, if you have massive frontal lobe lesions that make it the case that you're no longer emotionally responding to stimuli, the consequences are devastating, which is that you cannot make decisions, complex decisions in your life. You can't organize your life. You're not motivated to take the right path through life because you don't feel one way or the other about the different options that are available. So it's clear that not having emotions is very bad. And certainly if you're out facing the bear, which may

• 27:55Speaker 00

  not happen to too many people these days, that would be very bad. On the other hand, being able to regulate them and control them is definitely a human skill that's very important and that helps you a lot. The first part is what you were talking about first earlier, which is the ability to monitor your emotions, to identify your emotions. I think Lisa Feldman Barrett actually first did the main work on this. It's a topic called emotional granularity. It's like, at what, how fine a grain can you conceptualize and be aware of your own emotions? And then, once you're aware of them, you can bring various emotion regulation strategies, mostly cognitive reappraisal type of strategies

• 28:38Speaker 00

  to bear on the emotion and thereby, to some extent, control your emotions.

• 28:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  How important is it to use language to provide that granularity? I've certainly experienced like feeling a bunch of things around a particular scenario and it, if you can't separate out the elements, it can feel overwhelming. People always say, if you can name the emotion, but I, I find that a little tricky because sometimes it's not one emotion. It's a bunch of things. It's confusion, it's frustration. Are those the same thing? I don't know, you know? And, and I think many people, myself included, sometimes just like, it just feels like too much, not because the emotion is so big, but because it's such a tangled jungle of, of where there isn't really language to disentangle it.

• 29:22Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Yeah, I don't think you need to put it into language. And I think people's strategies vary. Some people, you know, some people think in words, some people think in pictures. Most people are a mixture. And if you look at different languages, you know, if you're French or German speaking, like me, bilingual, we have different words for different emotions. But you need some sense of the concept, which I think the concepts for emotions are pretty much universal across languages. So, you know, there, there are all these different examples of emotion words from different languages, like schadenfreude is one that people know. Now, you know, joy at another person's misfortune from the German. Gigil, I think, is often trumpeted as another example. I forget what the culture is, but

• 30:04Speaker 00

  this is the emotion you feel if something is just unbearably cute. There's a great book, Tiffany Watts Smith has a book, I think it's called The Book of Human Emotions, which is basically like a little dictionary, an entry from A to Z of all the different emotion words in different languages. But the fact that we don't have a word for gigil or for schadenfreude in English, you perfectly well have the concept. I just described it to you. You have no problem understanding what the emotion is. And so I think as long as you have some kind, some concept which need not be put into words, some way to think about and differentiate the different emotions that are going on in you, that gives you a purchase on your ability to, to some extent, evaluate them and say, this is an emotion

• 30:49Speaker 00

  I want, or this is an emotion that I don't want, and then to act on it through various strategies, cognitive reappraisal, for example, or acceptance, depending on what your strategy is.

• 31:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, the psychologists seem to disagree here because many people, some who've been on this podcast, all of whom are experts, will say, you know, if you don't allow yourself to feel the emotion, then it grows. And other people will say, well, if you focus on something, then it grows. And, and this is where I think neuroscience can be of great help because probably both things are true and it depends on the context. But

• 31:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's exactly right.

• 31:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  Maybe this is a good opportunity to talk about sort of dynamic attractor states, which is, and I don't throw out that language to confuse people. But there is this idea in neuroscience, right? Like if we, you and I both, you know, talk about this cup and I slide it forward and then we start looking at it, and you know, more and more brain, brain circuits are going to be devoted to it. We could spend several hours. It's not a very interesting conversation, but we, if we do that about an emotion we feel because of something somebody said to us at work or online, I think we're all familiar with the idea that we can go down these rabbit holes within our own mind.

• 31:51Speaker 00

  Absolutely, yes.

• 31:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  And it's a very dangerous way to live. And just knowing that it exists perhaps can be helpful. Because it's almost like if you go far enough down a path, it's like a horror movie. If you go far enough down a path, it's very hard to extract yourself.

• 32:05Speaker 00

  Absolutely, absolutely. I think, I mean, cognitive reappraisal or any other sort of complex reappraisal strategy for emotions, it is a double edged sword and it, it's trainable. It's, as you say, if I really focus on, okay, now, you know, I'm starting to feel sad. I really don't want to feel sad. I really don't want to feel sad. I really don't want to feel sad. Well, the more I think about it, the sadder I get, right? Or same with anxiety. Some emotions are probably more prone to going down this rabbit hole than others. But again, it's a trainable skill that there are other ways of dealing with it where you can kind of just stop that process from going down at all. You want to stop it at the earliest front end. I mean, one quick answer to the question of what's the most successful strategy is the earlier you can stop that process, the better. And

• 32:48Speaker 00

  so in the first place, don't get yourself into a situation where you're going to be anxious or guilty or sad or whatever emotion you want to avoid. So situational avoidance, just in terms of structuring your environment, would be one strategy. And then, once you're in it, I think it's idiosyncratic to a large extent. So you would have to figure out what works for you. But it's definitely trainable. Two parts are trainable. One is the specific strategy, so you can do cognitive reappraisal without overthinking it and going down the rabbit hole and actually feeling the emotion even more. And the other one is just the strength and automaticity of control that you have, which brings me to the ice bath. Shall I briefly talk about the ice bath? Because this is relevant, actually. So I,

• 33:29Speaker 00

  I started doing these a while back. One of my former colleagues, Justin Feinstein, who now runs a float clinic on Maui, I forget how it came about, but we were talking about floating ice baths. And he mentioned you, and he mentioned Wim Hof. And so, you know, take a look at these guys. And I saw, you know, Wim swimming in some frozen lake. Looked kind of interesting. Anyway, so I started doing ice baths some time ago. They weren't that popular yet back then. And now my wife bought on Amazon like a horse watering trough or some big thing, insulated it.

• 34:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's a lot safer than being out on a lake, too. We'll talk about that.

• 34:05Speaker 00

  And I get, you know, these 40 pound ice bags every week. They know me very well at Joe's Ice up there. Every time I go in, they say, hey, boss, having a good party again tonight, eh? I'm like, yep, I need a lot of ice. But so this is the interesting thing. When I start, first week, it is terrible, super painful. You know, you go in, it's like a whole body cold press or tusk, right? Second week, it's also, you know, your breathing goes up, your heart rate goes up. But gradually, and kind of with some automaticity to it, now I go into the ice bath immediately. My heart rate goes down, my breathing goes down. I get, I get super relaxed. So this is the interesting part there, apropos of emotion regulation. It generalizes for me. This is an experiment of one, but for me,

• 34:49Speaker 00

  it generalizes. So previously, prior to the ice bath, I'm driving around Pasadena and I don't know, in the last year or two, this seems to have risen somehow. I'm trying to park on the street. There's a lane next to me. I have my signal out. There's a parking space. It's clear what I'm trying to do. I see somebody come up behind me. They can see I'm trying to park. They can move over. No, they come right up behind me, go on the horn, ee. And, you know, you immediately feel just an immediate anger response, right? Well, after the ice bath, it's flat. So there was an immediate, automatic down regulation of my autonomic emotional response to a psychological stressor, to somebody honking

• 35:32Speaker 00

  at me, that was trained and generalized from the ice bath. It's an experiment of one. I'm not claiming this as a published study, but so I think there's a, there's a direct autonomic training component as well, in terms of the strength and the automaticity, the ease with which you can regulate emotions, that they can become kind of automatically regulated. You don't have to overthink it. It becomes smooth and effortless to some extent. And that's, that's the place where you, where you, where you want to get.

• 36:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  I've known Wim a long time. And although I sometimes, in my opinion, unfairly get tacked to the, the deliberate cold exposure, as we call that thing, a little too much because we talk about many things on this podcast, not just that. I do find it very useful. And years ago, my lab had collaborations with the special operations community. And they'll tell you that the, one of the reasons it's such a wonderful tool is it's so reliable. You always get an increase in adrenaline, norepinephrine in the brain. And to some extent, and this might surprise you, perhaps not, you get often reductions in cortisol, which is kind of paradoxical. But when people practice, it's very reliable and provided it's not so cold or it's an open lake where you

• 36:38Speaker 00

  It's reliable and super efficient.

• 36:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  And safe. Unless you're doing it in a lake or you're doing hyperventilation first.

• 36:43Speaker 00

  Five minutes after a shower, it's extremely efficient. So I

• 36:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  Five minutes, that's a lot. That's good.

• 36:47Speaker 00

  Well, after five minutes, I see, you can look at my body mass index. After five minutes, I get hypothermic, so I can't stay in very long.

• 36:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  That's a good long while and even in a cold shower. And there is now evidence of improved resilience to subsequent stressors of the sort that you described. And there are some okay papers. I think it's a wonderful tool, especially for this buffering, this immediate stress or anger response. Very powerful. Before we went on, Mike, we were talking about a different type of stressor, which is the ultra marathons that you're currently training for, a hundred mile race, which is, by the way, super impressive even just to shoot for it. I know you've done others.

• 37:23Speaker 00

  Trying is the operative word here.

• 37:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay. Well, I have, I have confidence in you.

• 37:27Speaker 00

  Talk to me in two months.

• 37:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yes, I will. I have confidence in you. You're going to finish this hundred mile race. But we were talking about something that I think is relevant to bring up now, which is You were describing how, you know, at some points during the, these races, you just feel like complete garbage. But then you start to feel better. And so then the next time you feel like complete garbage, you have the cognitive knowledge that you felt terrible, then better again. And so you're starting to integrate over longer periods of time. So here's another example of emotion regulation, but over much longer time scales. It's a little bit harder to access for most people than a cold shower.

• 38:03Speaker 00

  No, but I think this is one thing, one, one reason, many reasons, but if there's one reason that I, that I love these ultra marathons and sort of identify as an, as an ultra runner, even though I didn't do it for decades and I'm just now getting back into it because of that non-linearity. You have these major ups and downs and you know, sort of mantra that ultra running has co-opted is, you know, relentless forward momentum. But the sort of psychological equivalent is just relentless optimism, like optimism in the face of adversity. You have to just keep that mindset and everybody there is like that. You know, you, you come around like mile 40, mile 50, mile 60, you come around some curve and you look and feel like crap. People go, looking good. Nobody says, well, looks like you're not going to make it. No, nobody says that, right?

• 38:47Speaker 00

  So everybody is super positive. You're hanging in there and it is really hard and you know, you've just been going downhill. Your knees are shot, you have blisters, you've been vomiting, super tired and you extrapolate and you think this, this is not going to work. But if you refuse to give up, doesn't always work, but about half the time or so, it levels out and it starts going back up again and you keep going. I mean, you feel wrecked at mile 50, I feel wrecked or earlier, mile 30.

• 39:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  I wouldn't know, I've never run 50 miles.

• 39:17Speaker 00

  And so trying to think forward and say, well, I have to do this over again. This is like not fathomable. So it's a really interesting exercise in not giving up and being able to do something that you think is impossible to do. For that matter, all of your listeners would think it's impossible. If any, any of your listeners went running with me, they would conclude two things. One is they're faster than I am and two, I'm not going to be able to do a hundred miles, which means if I actually finished the hundred miles, all of you would be able to do so as well, which I think is true. I think anybody can do it. Anybody who's basically healthy, if they only wanted to, which is the key, could actually do it. So it's just a really interesting exercise. You know, it's only 30 hours, well, only, but it's only 30 hours.

• 40:02Speaker 00

  It's not like, you know, years. How hard can it be? How bad? Well, it's, it's hard, but it's doable. It's definitely doable. And so it's just in that sweet spot of something that seems impossible and is just unbelievably hard, but doable. And that's attractive somehow, if, if you can do it, which of course doesn't happen all the time.

• 40:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah. And I don't know if there are any data on this, but there, for people that have lived through really hard things and come out better, or have pushed themselves to deliberately do hard things of the sort that you're describing, I do think that the memory of that can recall our body and brain's ability to lean into other hard things.

• 40:42Speaker 00

  I think so.

• 40:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  I mean, it must be the case. I don't know of any good experiments on that, but you know, was that post-traumatic resilience, I guess they call it, you know? I mean, some people come out of very difficult circumstances. Maybe they do quote unquote, the work they need to or not, and, and they just say, okay, like I'm better for life because I'm out of it. Other people carry the wounds of that forward in a way that, that they're, you know, their psychological and sometimes their physical health is a downward trajectory. It's a very interesting thing of like, how do, how should we conceptualize pain and pain ending? Like some people seem to live in the discomfort of the pain having even happened.

• 41:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. You can certainly persevere and overcome, you know, severe adversity if it's time limited. And I think just your own sort of belief in yourself and your capability to overcome adversity, as you were saying, is one important component. Another one is something like gratitude or awe and you get to appreciate and just value, you know, just the fact that I'm here talking to you. I mean, I'm just, I'm actually grateful and feeling some sense of awe right now at just existing. And so getting to that point where you're just, every morning you wake up and you have this sense of, I guess gratitude and awe, some combination of those emotions.

• 41:57Speaker 00

  I think that's a really valuable thing to carry out of all of this. And you know, it takes time to kind of accumulate, but I like living that way.

• 42:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  I want to get back to the emotion system, but I'll just, I feel inclined to mention, we had Dacher Keltner on the podcast.

• 42:12Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. Well, he's worked on awe.

• 42:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  On awe. And he defined it so beautifully. He said, it's when we bring our attention from a small spatial scale to a large spatial scale.

• 42:22Speaker 00

  Right.

• 42:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  Or from large to small. But then during the course of our discussion, he added that this is also true in the time domain. So when we live our life day to day, we start to feel kind of lost in time.

• 42:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  And awe becomes less common. But when perhaps we run a hundred mile race across 30 hours, we realize how much can happen in 30 hours. One could say, oh, well, then you finish the race and the rest of life seems trivial, but it seems the opposite is true.

• 42:47Speaker 00

  Right.

• 42:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  That we realize that time is this very elastic thing, at least in our minds. And all of a sudden we have awe for the fact that we have so many days of life to live forward. It's very interesting and it almost speaks to the ice bath again, like you have this very compressed stressful experience that gives you that gap, that gap between stimulus and response that seems very hard to access unless we subject ourselves to these kinds of things.

• 43:09Speaker 00

  No, and I think that capability, the, I mean, people think, you know, chimpanzees maybe can feel awe, but I think it, I think it's a uniquely, at least as we have it, it's uniquely human emotion. And it's based on a broad sort of meta cognitive ability we have, which is to detach our conscious experience from the here and now and do like mental time travel. It's pretty derivative to the need to understand other people. So I could put myself into your shoes right now. I can, I can do that. I could imagine sitting where you're sitting and I'm seeing Ralph Adolf's here. You know, I could imagine zooming around and adopting another person's perspective in space. We certainly zoom around in time and reminisce, you know, stuff from the past, imagine things in the future. And I think awe is like that too.

• 43:52Speaker 00

  We adopt a different perspective that's not just tied to the here and now, which I think is probably a crucial ability that distinguishes the nature of conscious experience in humans, which is that we have some control over it. I can simulate what it's like to be you. I can imagine being in the past or in the future. I can zoom out broadly when I'm feeling awe. And I think animals are more just stuck with whatever the senses are delivering to them right now. That's the content of their conscious experience. We can use it flexibly and that's, I think, why we can plan and write novels and fiction and think about most of the time, right? When, what, if I ask you, what's in your consciousness, what are you thinking about?

• 44:37Speaker 00

  It's not stuff that's in front of you. You're daydreaming, you're like all, all kinds of places. And that really gives the human mind the power that distinguishes it from any other animals. And it's, it's the reason we have everything that we have that makes us so, so different. So awe, I think is an example of a uniquely human emotion that derives from that, that ability to adopt a vast point of view or a point of view that's not tied to just whatever the senses are delivering to you.

• 45:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. I'm excited to share that AG1 has just launched their newest formulation, AG1 Pro. AG1 Pro takes the clinically backed AG1 formula, which is a blend of vitamins, minerals, probiotics and adaptogens, and adds three important new ingredients, creatine monohydrate, calcium HMB and zinc carnecine. Each serving has five grams of creatine monohydrate to support muscle strength and performance, as well as brain health. Calcium HMB to support muscle recovery and reduce muscle breakdown and zinc carnecine to support and improve the lining of your gut. All three of these ingredients have compelling science to support them and therefore I love seeing them added to the existing AG1 formula.

• 45:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  As most of you know, I've been taking AG1 every day for nearly 14 years now. I started taking it long before I even knew what a podcast was. It's a great product and it's now made even better with the new AG1 Pro formula. If you would like to try AG1 Pro, you can go to drinkag1.com/huberman to get a special offer. AG1 is giving away a free bottle of omega three coenzyme Q10 with your first subscription. Again, go to drinkag1.com/huberman to get a free bottle of omega three coenzyme Q10 with your first AG1 subscription. As long as we're talking about assessing the emotions or the perspective of another, what are some favorite experiments, either yours or others in the field about perception and assessment of emotions?

• 46:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  You know, I've seen a number of studies like, oh, you know, people with lesions here or there, see scary faces, it's not that scary. What's, what's the sort of general conclusions about those studies now in 2026? Because I have a feeling a lot of what was in the textbooks when I was a graduate student may, may not still hold up.

• 46:45Speaker 00

  When I started as a postdoc in the early nineties with Damasio, I started my career on that topic by studying this, this famous patient, SM, who had selective bilateral amygdala lesions and the finding was that she's unable To perceive fear in emotional facial expressions.

• 47:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  Perceive fear, could she feel fear?

• 47:04Speaker 00

  Subsequently, we also did that. It took, for some reason, because it's just harder to do. It took some years. Justin Feinstein, who has the Float Clinic in Maui, was the first author on that paper. So some years later, we took that same patient to haunted houses. We took her to an exotic pet store where there were snakes and spiders. We showed her horror movies, a whole bunch of things, and found also she doesn't seem to consciously experience fear either. So there seemed to be this very specific deficit for fear tied to the amygdala from one patient. So that's a big caveat. Does this generalize? Well, yes, the amygdala is important for fear, but just saying it's a center for fear is overly simplistic. It's embedded in a big network of structures. There's individual

• 47:48Speaker 00

  differences and so on and so forth. The perception of emotions has been studied a lot and probably has been the topic of the most acrimonious debates to some extent. So Paul Ekman, back in the seventies, famous, by the way, I dedicate my forthcoming book to him because he probably had the biggest impact on modern emotion science of any single person. But his claim to fame was, he went to New Guinea and, you know, these non-Western cultures and claimed that universally across all cultures, people recognize these so-called basic emotions from facial expressions. If you Google this now, you know, emotional facial expressions, you will find pictures of emotional facial expressions. Lots of AI companies and computer

• 48:32Speaker 00

  algorithms are predicated on the idea that you can read out the emotion from somebody's facial expression. He had six of them: happiness, surprise, fear, anger, disgust, and sadness, sometimes contempt added in there. Well, it turns out it's more complicated than that. And actually, Lisa Feldman Barrett, of all people, co-authored a paper with me and three other people a couple of years back, that the title was something like Emotional Facial Expressions Reconsidered. We took stock of the whole literature and asked, is this really true? Is Ekman's claim really true? Can you tell how someone feels from their facial expression? And the answer is, well, not nearly as well as you would think, and in general, not. And the reasons are methodological. And once you think about it, they make a

• 49:15Speaker 00

  lot of sense, which is that the emotional facial expressions that Ekman pioneered, I used them in the first 1994 Nature paper with this amygdala lesion patient, those aren't actually what you normally see walking around the world. People don't have those facial expressions. They are posed facial expressions by actors. Yeah, they're very extreme. And then the task is like, well, here's a list of emotion words: happiness, fear, anger, disgust, et cetera. Pick the one that matches the face. That's the typical task.

• 49:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  So it's multiple choice.

• 49:44Speaker 00

  So look, if I gave you a bunch of emoticons and a bunch of emotion words and asked you to match them, you could do that very easily. It wouldn't show you anything about emotions. It shows you that there's, by convention, there's some association between these things and these things. That's it. So when you actually see real-world facial expressions, and when instead of giving a list, you just ask people, just generate freely a word that describes that, you get something that's much, has much more variation, much more heterogeneity, which then was part of the ingredient for Lisa's whole claim that variation is the norm and that in fact, emotions are in some sense constructed, rather than packages to be found in nature, which I disagree with that part. But for the emotional facial

• 50:29Speaker 00

  expressions, for the perception of emotions in others and in animals, I was just talking before coming in here to one of your colleagues about your cute dog, and they've done studies, there's several studies now, where dog owners, if you ask them, can you tell if your dog feels guilty when you come home because it did something bad? Dog owners are pretty convinced they can tell. Well, if you do a controlled experiment, they're a chance. They think they can tell. So our conviction that we can tell something about people or animals, their emotion states, just from looking at the facial expressions, our conviction vastly outstrips our accuracy. We're pretty convinced we can do it, we're mostly not

• 51:10Speaker 00

  so accurate. Which makes sense, because ordinarily, it's not just some facial expression. You know, if I see you now and you look sad, I wouldn't stop there. I would say, Andrew Huberman is sad. I would ask you, how are you feeling? What's going on? I would probe you and get a lot more information. Maybe you would say, oh, no, I'm just this drink I had tasted bad or something, you know, that caused me to make a certain facial expression. So in general, these artificial lab situations where all you see is a picture of a face and asked for the emotion, we don't do that in the real world anyway. We would probe further, we would take into account the whole circumstances, we would ask the person, and then you can disambiguate these emotions. So it's not that we cannot tell what emotions

• 51:53Speaker 00

  people or animals feel, but we don't do so normally just from a single slice, like a facial expression.

• 51:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  I feel like, at least in the context of romantic partnership, so much more of our assessment of another person and their assessment of us is actually a mathematical integration of noticing when frequency of speech or frequency of text is heading in a negative direction, relative to the mean, right? At a particular time of day. And I think the brain is really good at saying like, like normally, somebody is pretty communicative in the morning, but less at night, for sake of example. But suddenly, they're like a little more terse with us in the morning, but maybe not even harshness. There's just fewer words exchanged. And then the brain doesn't think, oh, like they looked angry or they looked frustrated. They, you go, oh, like they were like, it's a little quieter this morning than usual. And if it's

• 52:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  a very quiet person, you have fewer data points to work from. But we become exquisitely tuned to this.

• 52:49Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 52:49Andrew D. Huberman?

  Much more than like, oh, they're carrying their shoulders differently. At the extremes, I think we see this. Somebody walks in the door and you can tell like they're sad, they're defeated.

• 52:57Speaker 00

  We're looking for change.

• 52:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  You're looking for change.

• 52:59Speaker 00

  It's a time series.

• 53:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  And the number of times, or even just like, you've probably had this experience, like in an email with a colleague, let's move it to a different domain. There's a certain kind of language that's used in an email that's different than the usual language. Like, they've never really used these words before. You don't even identify which words those are. Years ago, there was this chart that some graduate student or postdoc put out, that if the director of a lab signs off with their name, it means one thing. If they punctuate their email, it means like, let's meet, you know, like you're in trouble. You know, if there's just a dash with a first initial, you know, there's all this. And you kind of, I laughed too. And then you realize, wow, like, they're really paying attention to all these subtle cues. But those seem like the kind of cues that we rely

• 53:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  on, much more than than like, do they look sad? Do they sound happy? And I think we vastly underestimate this. I don't know if there are any good studies of this, but this feels like the more relevant in the real world.

• 53:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, we just finished a study like this where people texted. That's all they had. But it's dynamic. It's a conversation. There's like a whole transcript. And then the question is, what can you tell about a person, both in terms of their stable personality and their current mood, just from that text? It turns out you can tell a lot. So people did the study recently where people generated, I think it's about a page or so of sort of diary-type written text, and asked just large language models, like GPT or Claude, to analyze that text without knowing anything else, and just tell me the personality profile. And it's as good as the ground truth or as another person or a clinician would be.

• 54:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  As good as a clinician?

• 54:32Speaker 00

  It gets close to the ground truth, and it's as good as like a good friend or a person who knows the person. So if you score the big five, which is what they did in that study, extraversion, conscientiousness, neurotism, et cetera, you can tell that. AI can tell that just from a transcript of text quite well. So the information is there clearly in what we say, what we write, and the order in which that progresses, that tells a lot about a person. Enough that AI can basically diagnose your personality from just text.

• 55:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's almost like our brain is very tuned to when we don't get what we were expecting to get in terms of the amount of interaction. Like, I have some people that clean up the graffiti on the street where I live. And there's always an exchange of hello or like a hi if one of us is on a call or busy. And I can say with certainty, because this happened the other day, that if I looked over and the person saw me and then turned away, even though we, I don't know their name, well, maybe I do now, but that there's very little familiarity except with, we always acknowledge the other's presence. If they were to do that, I would think, gosh, like, this person's like, maybe upset?

• 55:42Speaker 00

  That's one of the key ingredients of Lisa Feldman Barrett's thinking, certainly in recent years, which is prediction, that the, most of the information comes from when there's a mismatch between what you're predicting about a circumstance and something that's just different, because that carries information. Something changed, right? Like what you were saying. And Lisa's work, Lisa's thinking on emotions incorporates prediction in a big way these days, that there's something that you're predicting about the world, but suddenly, you know, there's a tiger or something unexpected, and you need to incorporate that, and that carries important information. But absolutely, we're always predicting and there's, we're taking into account things that change, like the facial expressions. You know, the original studies, like the ones I started doing as a postdoc, where

• 56:27Speaker 00

  you just show these static Paul Ekman pictures of facial affect. Well, we never see that in people. It's always dynamic. The face is changing. And so Philip Shins, Rachel Jack, colleagues in Scotland, for instance, have studied this in great detail and used dynamic, actual videos of people making faces and asked, at what point does the brain start to represent different emotions depending on not how the face looks, but how the face is changing?

• 56:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  Interesting.

• 56:55Speaker 00

  Dynamics are everywhere. It's super important.

• 56:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  Because when we look at babies and they start to smile for the first time, or they express what we think is, you know, humor or something like that, we are so tuned to faces because they can't really do much. And whether or not they're interacting with us or not is really dependent on our behavior. There's a lot of control there. We're putting them in front of us. As they develop more autonomy, then these sorts of dynamics really emerge.

• 57:20Speaker 00

  The face, I mean, the face is visible and the face, the human face, has way more muscles and control than other animals do. Great apes have similar sets of muscles, but monkeys or your dog, you can't make those kinds of faces.

• 57:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  He side eyes me every once in a while and I project on to him what that's about, but he's a real sweetie. I had another bulldog mutt, they're both mutts, who was much, much more coarse, less affectionate. This one is like pure butter. But of course, I don't know what's going on in his head. He could be thinking like, this guy's the biggest jerk in the world, you know, like, I wish we were walking right now. This patient, S.M., who had bilateral amygdala lesions, could she experience autonomic arousal? Could she experience stress? Could she experience anxiety under any conditions?

• 58:03Speaker 00

  She could. And that's really important. So it's, you might think that, you know, it's just like the whole emotion system is gone. You just sort of denervated the entire autonomic nervous system. And that's why you don't have emotions. But it's much more specific than that and fits with thinking about emotions as evolved functional modules for dealing with particular types of statistically recurring environmental challenges that share some challenging feature in common. So she doesn't have fear to external stressors. Like, we went with her into a haunted house. She poked the monsters and wanted to touch things. Same with the snakes and spiders in the pet store. But we did a study, again,

• 58:47Speaker 00

  Justin Feinstein, I think was the first author on this one as well, with her and with a couple, two maybe or three patients who had similar lesions in collaboration with Rene Herlman from Germany, where we put a mask on them and had them inhale carbon dioxide. If you do that, you get a panic attack in about half the population because it makes you feel like you're suffocating. So as soon as you get that carbon dioxide in, it changes the pH in your blood that's detected by the brain. And you get this massive air hunger, like you suddenly can't breathe. That's what your, so your brain goes into this alarm mode of some suffocation, like a panic. And she and the other amygdala patients had a

• 59:30Speaker 00

  full-blown panic attack when they inhaled the carbon dioxide. So this interoceptive signal seems not to depend on the amygdala and to depend on other brainstem circuits. So we had a very important association between different types of fear, which is, I think, a bottom line story for the way that the science is informing our folk psychology, which is these categories we have, like anger, or fear, or disgust. There are many varieties. It's much more finely differentiated than that. Once you look at the science and once you look at the brain systems, there are distinct brain systems, in this instance, for fear to something out there in the world versus panic of something happening inside you, like having a heart attack or not getting enough air.

• 1:00:12Andrew D. Huberman?

  I see. Maybe we could talk a little bit about the bodily representation of these things we're calling emotions. Years ago, I posted on social media a picture of a figure from your paper with, from your book, excuse me, with David Anderson, which was describing a study where people self-described, so it's purely subjective recording, reporting, as I recall, where in their body they felt different emotions.

• 1:00:36Speaker 00

  Oh, the bodily maps of emotions.

• 1:00:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  So it's kind of like a heat map in the forehead for certain emotions and in the whole body for others. And there were a wide range of emotions. And admittedly, it's subjective report. But does this hold up? Like, I think to myself, like, where do I feel sadness, like heartache? Well, I tend to feel it around my heart, but maybe that's because it's called heartache. Where do I feel anger? Well, extreme anger, I'm going to feel as a whole body experience. Same thing with awe. So what, if anything, is important about the regularity and/or the variation in where in our body we feel emotions? Some people would say this is like their whole experience of life. They feel things in their body all the time. Some people feel, I think, are more cerebral. They kind of think things more than they feel things.

• 1:01:22Speaker 00

  You know, I think it's a great, it's a great question. I mean, that figure that you're alluding to came from a paper, I think in PNAS by Lowry Newman, my and colleagues in Finland. And he and his colleague, Heini Sari Maki, they've done some of the great, great recent studies also on experience of emotions in humans using functional MRI. But what you mentioned, so the experiment is, I just give you a word, right? I'm not actually making you feel the emotion. I'm asking you sadness, draw, you know, where on the body you think you would feel that emotion. So if you think about it, it's certainly not about actual physiological changes in the body. Nothing's measured in the body. They don't have electrodes on the body, whatever. There's people just drawing on a little mannequin

• 1:02:05Speaker 00

  where they think they would feel the emotion. It's also not about conscious experiences of emotion. I'm not making, I'm not showing you sad movie clips or anything like that. I'm giving you a word, a single word. So it's about concepts. It's about where in the body people's concept of sadness or happiness or fear, where that corresponds to changes in the body. Now, that's an interesting question, but you have to narrow it down to that, which is a fundamental problem with most emotion study, including that one. I think the title, I forget what the title is, but it's something like bodily maps of emotions or bodily maps of subjective experience, maybe even. It should be something like people's concept of where in the body emotion words are associated with changes or something

• 1:02:49Speaker 00

  like that. What's interesting about that study is that Lowry has gone on to look at it in different cultures. He's looked at it developmentally across children and asked how do these concepts and where in the body would feel emotion develop? So it's super interesting work, but it's ultimately about people's concepts of how emotions correspond to changes in the body, not the real, actual changes in the body. But then, as you were saying, of course, there are real changes in the body when you really feel an emotion as well. And that's harder to study, but people have studied it quite a bit with a focus on the part of the brain that gets a lot of input from the body, which is a part of cortex called the insula. And so there's lots and lots of work on the insula. It gets

• 1:03:34Speaker 00

  input from all the organs in your body, everywhere in your body. So, you know, from your heart, from your liver, from your kidney. I had a kidney stone not too long ago. We should talk about the kidney. Have you had a kidney stone? Don't. It's really interesting.

• 1:03:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  You have to pass it?

• 1:03:49Speaker 00

  Eventually it's passed, but it's, it evokes very interesting adaptive behaviors. Well, just as an aside, before I forget it. So normally for pain, extroceptive pain, like we were talking about the hot plate before, you know, you pull your hand away or there's some kind of reflex. For the kidney stone, that's not adaptive. There's nothing to pull away. So my wife, this was in Switzerland, we're in a remote little town in the middle of the night. My wife sees me curled up into a ball, right, on the floor, just kind of breathing loudly and kind of curled up and making rocking motions. And goes, what's wrong? And I tell her, well, I have a kidney stone. And then she asked me, can't you just stop that behavior? Or can we get on a plane and fly to the US? You can get ultrasound, maybe get treated for the kidney stone? Can you stop curling up into a ball and, you

• 1:04:33Speaker 00

  know, making rocking motions? And I was kind of thinking about that through my haze of pain and said, well, no, it's kind of like the hot plate and pulling away. It's a really strongly motivated behavior to just kind of withdraw, basically. So it was a very interesting adaptive behavior. And she called, you know, the equivalent of 911 and in the middle of the night, some guy came down and, you know, put a bunch of opiates into me. And he kept having the scale of, you know, on a scale from zero to 10, how painful is it? And I would sort of go from 10 to 9.5. And it was extremely painful. But eventually they got me to our clinic there. I passed the stone and it was an interesting experience.

• 1:05:17Speaker 00

  I mean, it's pain, but just like what we were talking about for emotions, pain is not pain. If you have a pain in your eye or you have a pain from a hot stove, this is a very different type of pain and one that's, I would say, worse than the hot stove. It's like, because you can't escape.

• 1:05:32Andrew D. Huberman?

  When you can't rub it.

• 1:05:33Speaker 00

  You can't do anything. You just curl up into a ball and pray. I mean, it was horrible. At any rate. So at that moment, had I been in an MRI study, my insula would have been strongly activated. So this, you know, this is a region of the brain that according to theorists, but Craig was the first, Antonio Damasio has theories in a similar vein, this would be the substrate for the conscious experience of the emotion or of pain in your body. So it's getting all this input from your body and representing the changes in your body as a conscious experience. This was the original theory that William James had back in 1884. He wrote this paper in mind, what is an emotion? And his theory

• 1:06:15Speaker 00

  was that you see the bear, you run away, your heart rate goes up, and then you feel the emotion, which is a consequence of you perceiving all the changes in your body that happened first. Now, that's, I think, the conscious experience of emotion, yes. And a lot of that depends on representing, perceiving everything that changes in our body. But to my mind, that leaves the question of what the emotion is. That's still antecedent to that. You first have to trigger all the changes in your body and run away. What's doing that?

• 1:06:45Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right.

• 1:06:45Speaker 00

  That's the emotion. The conscious experience may well come later and unfold over some time. But the emotion state, separate from the conscious experiences, I've emphasized, would be the one that actually motivates all the behaviors and all the different changes in your body. So a long answer to your question, there's these two. Different ways of talking about the role of the body. The one that you alluded to in this figure from Lai Lumenma and colleagues that we reproduced in her book is about people's concepts of emotions, and they're certainly tied to changes in the body. Whether or not those are accurate, I think we just don't know. So is it the case that those drawings that they have in the figure that we were speaking about, if you put electrodes on, you measure blood flow changes, that's actually where

• 1:07:29Speaker 00

  things change when you have awe or anger? I think we just don't know. I think that's a set of studies that remains to be done. But then in addition, there is the fact that all of the changes in your body are represented in your brain, in the insula. And that seems to be a big part of the substrate for feeling the emotion, for the conscious experience of the emotion. And other things, nausea, pain, kidney stones. So it's not limited to emotions, but the strong feelings that we have, like you have a tightness in your chest, if you're feeling really sad, for example, that would be represented in your insula.

• 1:08:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  Because in Eastern medicine, there's strong beliefs about different organs being associated with different emotional states, even like gall, you know, someone has a lot of gall, the gallbladder, you know. But then again, I always have to remind people that a key feature of schizophrenia and psychosis of other kinds is clang associations, two words sound alike and some, and people link them. And so we also are subject to this in a much milder way in the world of health and science, and especially in the public discourse. People will say, oh, you know, a walnut looks like a brain, walnuts are good for your brain. Well, they have some fatty acids that are probably good for neurons, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the shape of the walnut. It's amazing how these ideas can kind of perpetuate.

• 1:08:46Speaker 00

  Well, and I think there is some truth to them. I think it just has, the honest answer is it has not been tested. So if you ask someone like Lisa Feldman Barrett, has made this point repeatedly, that there really is no systematic association between specific emotions and specific changes in your body. Well, if you look at those studies, people put a few electrodes on, they measure, you know, heart rate changes, blood pressure changes, et cetera. It is extremely crude. You're looking at a tiny, tiny slice of what's going on in your body. What you would want to do is have a detailed, high dimensional readout of, okay, your gallbladder and your liver and your kidney and your heart and changes all over your body, and look

• 1:09:27Speaker 00

  at that and ask, is there, is there some kind of association between specific emotion states and changes, some kind of complex change in your body? And I would bet that there is, but we just don't have those data yet. So those studies remain to be done.

• 1:09:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, they really should be done because I could make up a story where if someone or an animal feels extreme anger, like of the sort that they would have right before they were in a fight, that certain immune organs would deploy a bunch of things that prepare for wound healing or prepare for resilience in the aftermath. That just stands to reason. Of course, I have no data for that, but.

• 1:10:04Speaker 00

  Well, and the link between the brain and the body, I mean, we now understand that that is so detailed and so intricate that really brain and body are very, very tightly coupled. And we do know that there are signatures that are distributed, they're complicated. But Lisa Feldman Barrett herself, in collaboration with Tor Weger, has published neuroimaging studies showing that for basic emotions like anger and fear and sadness and so on, there are reliable signatures of brain activation. They're distributed, they're spread out, they're complicated, they're not just like in one place. But given that, given that association between emotions and patterns of the brain, and the fact that the brain and the body are so intimately tied together, I think it's a completely reasonable

• 1:10:47Speaker 00

  hypothesis that you would find a similar high dimensional signature of changes throughout your body that are systematically associated with certain types of emotions.

• 1:10:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  I had a thought spring to mind based on our earlier discussion, from the perspective of media and advertising, it makes perfect sense why all media and advertising is incentivized to get you to prioritize an emotion to the point where it takes over behavior, to go click and buy something, or to vote a certain way, or to hate a certain group, or to like a certain group. And so really what they're fighting for is this prioritization thing. Like the path to behavior is through the prioritization of emotion.

• 1:11:26Speaker 00

  It's basically an attentional capture. It captures your attention, which is what emotions are designed to do. And once you've captured people's attention, you have a captive audience and you can control them much more.

• 1:11:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  And in some sense, it's obvious, right? You get people emotional, they're more likely to behave in a certain way versus another. But I think we underestimate the extent to which all day long we are bombarded with these signals. Like subtle advertising doesn't really work well.

• 1:11:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  Someone said, I don't know who said it, but, you know, all A B testing leads to like, you know, sex or violence. Because if you really just look at what's likely to grab people's attention, you know, eventually you regress into the hypothalamus, the more primitive states like inspire more attention, which tells you a lot about the world, you know, and there are ethical lines and there are societal lines where you say, no, no, that's, that's too extreme, too much violence, too much skin. But it's all veering in the, like toward the hypothalamus, so to speak. It's all getting more and more primitive.

• 1:12:21Speaker 00

  There's a lot of processing that goes on in all these subcortical structures, and certainly what we understand best in terms of emotions are all these subcortical circuits. And a lot of that is below the radar of our conscious awareness.

• 1:12:34Andrew D. Huberman?

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• 1:13:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  In a follow-up test, I could confirm that this strategy worked. My blood lipids are now back exactly where I want them. Comprehensive lab testing of the sort that Function offers is just so important for health. I mean, how else are you going to know what's going on under the hood? And while I've been doing blood work for years, it used to be time consuming, complicated, and expensive. In fact, I used to spend thousands of dollars per year trying to get this kind of data, and the data, frankly, were not all that good. But now with Function, it's extremely easy and affordable. A Function membership is only a dollar a day, $365 a year. And if you think about the information it provides, and the health challenges it helps you avoid, and the proactive things that it can do for you to enhance your health, I truly look at it as a savings.

• 1:14:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  To learn more, visit functionhealth.com/huberman and use the code HUBERMAN for a $50 credit towards your membership. Again, that's functionhealth.com/huberman. At the opposite extreme, what happens when I go to like the MoMA and I see a piece of art that just for some reason makes me feel a certain way, maybe sadness, maybe happiness? Do you think that art of that sort is, is able to capture the circuitry related to particular emotions across people? So not just about my unique experience. And art is a subjective, right? So there's things related to taste. But let's assume this is abstract art. So there's no apparent faces or animals or no depictions of scenes.

• 1:14:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  But let's say out of 100 people, you know, more than half say, yeah, I look at that and I just feel peace. Is it the case that some art can tap into neural circuits or some music can tap into neural circuits?

• 1:14:58Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:14:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  Independent of the lyrics, I mean, we don't have the brain imaging presumably, but there is a kind of a more sophisticated example. We're not regressing to the hypothalamus.

• 1:15:08Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 1:15:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  But this is the stuff that like the richness of life is also about that, right?

• 1:15:13Speaker 00

  Sure. And so the interesting question is which particular features in the music or in the abstract art is it that are driving those generalizable emotion responses? And they're certainly there. One of the earliest studies on emotion actually was done by Anne Blood and Robert Zatory in the mid 90s or something, I believe using, I'm pretty sure using positron emission tomography PET rather than FMRI at the time. And what they did was they played music to people, and I think they set it up so that you and I could hear the same piece of music. In your case, the music really does something for you. And the particular measure was, does it send shivers down your spine? Do you get like chills, goosebumps from listening to the music? And it does that for you, but not for me. And in your case, same auditory stimulus, different emotion.

• 1:15:58Speaker 00

  And from the imaging, they showed that the insula, the structure we were just talking about, the amygdala, several of these emotion related structures are indeed activated when you have shivers, chills down your spine, listening to music. For abstract art, my Caltech colleague John O'Doherty had a paper a little while ago, where again, he found something generalizable. He decomposed abstract art into the constituents of visual features. You can feed it into a neural network and get a representation of all the different, you know, shades and colors and the basic visual composition, basic visual features that constitute that. And from that, you can reconstitute whether or not it is liked or not liked, whether it's

• 1:16:41Speaker 00

  a pleasant, whether people find it pleasant or unpleasant. So it doesn't come out of nowhere. Yes, there's something about, even if it's abstract, even if it's abstract music, or if it's abstract art, there's some auditory or visual features there that are generalizable and that can be used to evoke emotions. And the big question then is, can we link that back? Obviously, the emotions didn't evolve in order to appreciate abstract art, but they evolved to detect tigers and bears and other things. Well, are there similar kinds of visual features? Presumably there are. So there's some visual features in the real world that, for which particular emotions

• 1:17:21Speaker 00

  evolved, that can also then find, find a place again in abstract art and evoke similar emotions. That's the basic story. But the answer to your question is yes, even for these very uniquely human sort of abstract kinds of stimuli, people have done work and found particular features in those stimuli that will trigger emotion states in humans. And they're great stimuli to use.

• 1:17:44Andrew D. Huberman?

  Talk a little bit about hardwiring versus learned emotional states at the brain level. We know there are brain areas that process faces, just the organization of two dots and a vertical line and a horizontal line below it. There are neurons that like that organization of features. And I should know the answer to the next question, but I don't. Are there neurons that are tuned to a smiling face versus a frowning face at the level of like, almost like, like very sparse emoji-like level? We call them units in the brain. Are there units that are tuned to frowning faces or smiling faces? And of course, you'd love to be able to do the experiment in somebody who was, you know, had never been exposed to them for the first time, but that's impossible to do. So

• 1:18:26Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 1:18:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  I have to assume the experiment has been at least thought about, if not done.

• 1:18:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. I mean, you know, with respect to face processing in general, the sort of consensus is it's both hardwired and innate in some sense that there's something there in the brain already at birth that's experience independent. But then it also depends on normal maturation and development and experience. And so people like Rebecca Sacks at MIT, for instance, has done functional neuroimaging studies on babies and shown them faces and asked the question, how does this pulse system develop? It's always a mixture. People tend to think in terms of black and white. It's, you know, it's hardwired and innate, or it's learned. Nothing is either or. It's always both. A good example is the visual word form area. So there's regions in the brain

• 1:19:15Speaker 00

  that, like, like the ones that my former Caltech colleague Doris South studied that are specialized for faces. But there's also a region in the brain typically on the left in most people that's for recognizing words, letters. Now, that couldn't have evolved because, you know, we had a long history of brain evolution before language, written language was ever there. So the question is, how does it come about? It can't be hardwired or innate, because there wasn't long enough evolutionary time to evolve a region of the brain for figuring out words. But if you take a look in pre-verbal infants, at the connectivity of this region that's going to become specialized for processing

• 1:19:55Speaker 00

  words, once the infant can read, it's already wired up in a way to other brain regions that predisposes it to be able to do those computations that with experience, it can later be used in order to recognize words.

• 1:20:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  I see.

• 1:20:10Speaker 00

  So there's certain preset innate systems. Coming back to your question, smiling versus frowning faces, there are two parts to it. The first part is, I can find you a single neuron in the brain that responds selectively for anything you like. There's like no shortage of them. But those in general, those single neurons don't do anything. They aren't important to understand how the brain works, because the rest of the brain that is getting its input from all these neurons and all the downstream processing is not like a reflex. It's not listening to only that one neuron. It's getting input from tens of thousands of neurons. So at the population level, if we record from thousands of neurons and we

• 1:20:51Speaker 00

  ask, from that, is there information in a thousand neurons from which the rest of the brain listening to those thousand neurons, or we as the scientists could decode smiles versus frowns? The answer is yes. We've done that in collaboration with Uli Rutta-Sauer and Shua Wang and colleagues, where we can record from epilepsy patients, like what Eddie Chang does, same kind of work. And so you have information. And of course, if you think about it, there has to be information in the brain neurons that would distinguish frowns from smiles, because you can distinguish them. So where else would it come from? It has to be there in the brain. But it's not there mechanistically at the level of single

• 1:21:33Speaker 00

  neurons. They're very noisy. They typically respond to many different types of cues. So you always have to think about hundreds or thousands, a large ensemble of neurons, because that's really the kind of unit of relevant information, because that's what the rest of the brain listens to.

• 1:21:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah. I was thinking about how, you know, in a hierarchical system, like the visual system, like we have neurons that are tuned to circles, more or less, you know, center, surround, we talk about that. But circles, then bars, then oriented bars of a particular angle, then moving bars, et cetera, et cetera. And so built up from, from simple stuff to more complex stuff. So you can build feature detectors for lots of different things. I guess I was wondering, when we come into the world, are there cells in the fusiform area that not just like faces, but that are prepared to respond to two dots, the eyes, a vertical thing, the nose, and then a bar that is either, you know, bent up at the edges or bent down at the edges? And then we build on that scaffold. I don't know that anyone's done these experiments.

• 1:22:31Speaker 00

  Not that exact experiment, but I think that in broad strokes, the answer would be that at birth, it's crude, and it becomes more, much more refined and more granular through experience. And then indeed, exactly what you said happens, you know, and coming back to emotions, if you think about, so how does the state of fear come about in the brain from seeing the bear or the tiger? Well, at the level of the retina, it's just a bunch of pixels. It's some, you know, blobby black shape that is looming and coming closer, et cetera. But then progressively, you have to construct more and more abstract representations. And you all know how this works in the visual system and artificial systems, deep convolutional neural networks that do object classification, do exactly

• 1:23:14Speaker 00

  that. They take just, you know, pixel-wise input, but then build something abstract. Like right now, I recognize Andrew Huberman there. If I look over here, you know, I can still recognize you, whether you're on the left or the right, whether you're close or far away, that would be able to recognize you invariably with respect to those details, even though at the level of the retina, like a camera taking a picture, the detailed pixels can be vastly different. You can be left or right or close or lit in different ways. And you need to abstract from that and invariant representation regardless of the details. Same thing for emotions, regardless of whether it's a bear, or a tiger, or a big armed pickup truck coming at you, or lots of other kinds of stimuli, they all need to funnel in to

• 1:23:59Speaker 00

  a central abstract representation. That's another key feature of emotions. They require abstraction. And that's what makes them so flexible. And that's where you can get, David Anderson and I have described it in our book as this sort of fan in, fan out architecture. I can get to the emotion state from seeing a bear, or smelling a bear, or hearing a bear, or hearing a twig snap, hearing somebody yell, there's a bear, zillions of different inputs, completely unlike the rigid reflex, which only has one input, and that's it. You get the central state of fear, and then the outputs are also diverse. I can hide, I can run away, I can defend myself. And so that flexibility that the central emotion state affords, you can get to it in many different ways, because many different

• 1:24:43Speaker 00

  sensory cues are informative about a potential threat. And then you can behave in very flexible ways that are context dependent. That's exactly what emotions allow you to do and what makes them so different from reflexes. Reflexes is just a single path through. There's only one way to trigger it, and there's only one behavior. So if you had only those, you would have to have a separate reflex for the bear, and for the tiger, and for every possible, you know, large threat out there, which you couldn't possibly have. It's not efficient.

• 1:25:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, the fan in, fan out visual is very, very useful. And it gets to the next topic I'd like to ask you about, which is building social intelligence and emotional intelligence, because we define that different ways. People who seem unable to read the room, so to speak, versus people who are hypersensitive to other people's emotions, not necessarily responding to them, but they're really in tune. I'll go out on a limb and say that some of the happiest, most functional, and when I say functional, I also include in that they take great care of the people around them, their families, their coworkers, people that I know and have observed, are not super emotionally in tune with the emotions of others. Meaning, it doesn't seem like they're clocking every little nuance. And

• 1:25:55Andrew D. Huberman?

  some of the more, I'm generalizing here, less functional, more labile, people that I've known are really in tune with like, what everyone in the room is feeling, who did this, who didn't do that. And going back to our earlier conversation, that so much of how we gauge other people's emotions is an integration over, you know, how often they tend to acknowledge us when they, when we walk down the hall. If the first time I met you, you walked right by me, which, who knows what would have happened, and the second time, and the third time, and then the fourth time, you say, good morning. I'd say, oh, this is a really delightful person. If you did the opposite, said hello, hello, hello, three days in a row, and then the fourth time, just like, looked at me and rushed right by, I'd probably think like, ah, that's weird, you know? So there's some

• 1:26:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  advantage, actually, to not being in tune with all the subtle cues of everyone around us. What in the brain is known about social awareness, about reading the room? We talk it up these days, because indeed empathy is important, but this is a tricky one. I'm going to get some heat for saying this, but there's also a lot to be said for like, walking into a room, acknowledging, okay, great, and then like, getting your work done. You don't want to be wrapped up into people's emotional states because, unnecessarily, because they're labile. They're all over the place. There's a cost.

• 1:27:10Speaker 00

  Well, I think it's extremely heterogeneous. And so it's not sort of one size fits all, and there's not the one type of emotional intelligence skill that fits all occasions. And many different kinds can work. They depend on the context, they depend on the circumstances. Initially, when James Gross at emotion regulation, it was sort of focused on some basic mechanisms, like Suppression, reappraisal, acceptance. And now, the big two topics on emotional regulation are variability and flexibility. So there's not just one way, but you need to be able to have many, many different options. And you can vary, vary your emotion regulation responses. But the other big part of emotion regulation, which is obvious, once you think about it,

• 1:27:53Speaker 00

  any, any parent would think about it, is it's interpersonal, it's between people. You regulate other people's emotions. And you have to pick up on other people's emotions and you influence other people's emotions. It's a bidirectional interaction. And so I think a big part of emotional intelligence comes from being able to read that, probably in a fairly automatic way and in a context-dependent way. And depending on the context, it can be the case that what's most adaptive is if you really get involved with other people and you really talk to them a lot, you're very empathic, or you just take over. And that can work too, depending on the circumstances. So there are multiple strategies. And I think for any of these social intelligence, emotion regulation, any of these sort of

• 1:28:37Speaker 00

  meta-cognitive skills, the most successful skill is if you don't just have one, but you have variety and you can switch between them and you can use context to switch between those. Just like physiological heart rate variability, you don't want to train to just be able to have a low heart rate, you want to be able to train to have a variable, a big range. Same thing with emotions. What's most adaptive is being able to have a big range of emotions and being able to switch adaptively, depending on the context between them. And I think that's where, in a real, long-term, context-dependent social intelligence for people that really come out ahead. It's not one tiny slice where they do well and they don't do well in lots of other circumstances. It's the ability to be really adaptive and flexible and switch around.

• 1:29:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  Which requires a, a keen sense of oneself, like where we are in our internal state, and a keen sense of, of context. In fact, I observed a really impressive physician recently, like moving through the hospital environment. I mean, he was just like all agency, but then with the patient, it was as if he dropped into a bubble. And the patient was understandably a little nervous about what was to come. And, and it was remarkable. I was like, okay, that is superb bedside manner. But then it comes time to do the actual work and that's not a time for emotion. It's just like 100.

• 1:29:57Speaker 00

  You have to be able to switch.

• 1:29:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  100%. Like, I mean, the, the life and wellbeing of the patient relies on being absolutely focused on the task at hand.

• 1:30:05Speaker 00

  I mean, it's, it's related again to the presumptive association between emotional granularity, what Lisa Forman Barrett pioneered decades ago, the ability to differentiate and be aware of all the variety of emotions in you, and emotion regulation flexibility, that you're able to adopt many different emotion regulation strategies. But in order to do so, you need the emotional granularity to be able to be aware of all the different emotions that are going on in the first place. It's pretty two things. One is an ability to differentiate at a very fine grain. And the other one is to step back and have some kind of meta-cognitive oversight and control. So you can see, okay, here's this full spectrum of things I could do.

• 1:30:48Speaker 00

  And you can take a look at all of those, incorporate the context and pick one, the one path amongst many that you could take that's the most adaptive.

• 1:30:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's interesting. Some of my favorite scientists are very emotive people. And then some of my favorite scientists, thinking of one in particular, when I was down at UC San Diego, when my lab was there, most people would probably label as a little bit on the spectrum. I won't mention his name. He would walk into a faculty meeting where someone else was presenting and he would say out loud to me, like sitting there, like, is this any good?

• 1:31:17Speaker 00

  I have encountered people like that too.

• 1:31:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  And, you know.

• 1:31:19Speaker 00

  It's very disconcerting when you're giving the talk.

• 1:31:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's disconcerting when you're giving the talk, but I was gonna say, there's also something incredibly refreshing about it. Because it's almost like they're, they're asking the questions that they, they need to ask. You're a little embarrassed for them, but you're, but it's liberating. You feel like, ah, we've broken the social mold here a little bit. And someone would say, excuse me, so-and-so, so-and-so is presenting, be like, oh, sorry. And then we'll just sit down and then listen. I mean, they're entirely polite, very actively engaged in the conversation. But I sometimes wish like, how cool would that be? Like, I'm sure there's a cost, other areas in life, but how cool would that be? You lose, this person has a little bit less context-dependent, you know, flexibility around emotions. And I have to imagine that they move through life in a way that's kind of like liberated.

• 1:32:05Speaker 00

  Well, they wouldn't have this huge cognitive load all the time.

• 1:32:07Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right. And he's extremely smart. Now, that's correlative, right? But like incredible, actually a physicist turned neuroscientist. And I just thought, man, that's pretty cool. And then the more you go into engineering and science fields, the more of these people you encounter. This is true. You see fewer of these people in the performing arts, for instance.

• 1:32:25Speaker 00

  My lab studies autism amongst other things. And you certainly would have the case that as a spectrum, yes, indeed, you would have mathematicians, engineers, lots of people who are very successful, who are on the spectrum to some extent. And I think, you know, coming back to what you were saying, it's sort of liberating or simplifying. If you had to really effortlessly cognitively think about how to regulate your social behavior and make all the right moves and not offend anybody, you were worried about that all the time, it would be overwhelming. And I think it is overwhelming for many people with autism, that you need to somehow internalize it and it has to be relatively effortless and automatic. It has to become automatic at some level. And then you can move through life fairly smoothly in a socially very complex way.

• 1:33:08Speaker 00

  And that's what's difficult for many people with autism, that they lack that part. They can compensate to some extent, but the cognitive load starts really being an impediment. Because if you have to track everything, you have to remember, okay, I should make eye contact, I have to remember turn-taking. If you have to cognitively remember all those things, it's just overwhelming. So you have to be able to somehow have it be automatic at some level.

• 1:33:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium, all in the correct ratios, but no sugar. Proper hydration is critical for brain and body function. Even a slight degree of dehydration can diminish your cognitive and physical performance. It's also important that you get adequate electrolytes. The electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium are vital for the functioning of all cells in your body, especially your neurons or your nerve cells. Drinking Element makes it very easy to ensure that you're getting adequate hydration and adequate electrolytes. My days tend to start really fast, meaning I have to jump right into work or right into exercise.

• 1:34:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  So to make sure that I'm hydrated and I have sufficient electrolytes, when I first wake up in the morning, I drink 16 to 32 ounces of water with an Element packet dissolved in it. I also drink Element dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise that I'm doing, especially on hot days when I'm sweating a lot and losing water and electrolytes. Element has a bunch of great tasting flavors. In fact, I love them all. I love the watermelon, the raspberry, the citrus, and I really love the lemonade flavor. So if you'd like to try Element, you can go to drinkelement.com/huberman to claim a free Element sample pack with any purchase. Again, that's drinkelement.com/huberman to claim a free sample pack. Let's talk about autism. And I'll just put the mention up front because this is a topic that sometimes gets people triggered.

• 1:34:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  Let's leave out for the time being, not because it isn't important, it is important, let's leave out severe cases of autism where people need lifelong care, they can't care for themselves. And let's talk about the rest of the spectrum. Already in that statement, I'm sure I violated some of the newer nomenclature. But let's just liberate ourselves a little bit, come at this from a place of benevolence and trying to understand social dynamics, social processing in the brain. So we're not talking about people with severe stereotypes who just need lifelong care even, et cetera. We're talking about the rest of the category. So something like this former colleague of mine in San Diego, a little bit on the spectrum.

• 1:35:33Speaker 00

  For all I know, he would have been one of our participants.

• 1:35:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  Maybe. And, and he's a, I mean, a delightful person, happy marriage, happy family. Everyone in his lab adored him and brilliant scientist. And by my read, a highly functional in all aspects of life, but definitely not tuned in to what other people are thinking or doing. And, and context mattered, right? I mean, he understood what not to do in a, in a broad sense, but, you know, he was free of this burden that you described. So there's a lot of emphasis nowadays on kids who have autism of the sort that we're describing and the need, we're told, to train them to make eye contact and read faces. So this lands square in your work.

• 1:36:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  Maybe you could just fill out a bit of what's now known, what's thought, what's not known.

• 1:36:23Speaker 00

  It's a great topic. I mean, the way that I personally have approached it is not with a primary interest in autism. I don't have a family member who has autism and not, you don't have any personal experience. It's really been, just like with the amygdala lesion patient, it's the, my main motivation has been to just understand the mind, cognition, emotion in general. And with respect to autism, by understanding individual differences. Everybody's different from everybody else. And autism is one particular dimension that we just have a lot of tools to look at that is, you know, social interaction, social awareness, ability to read other people's emotions.

• 1:37:02Speaker 00

  And so that dimension of social variability maps onto one of the facets of autism spectrum disorder. And so that's why we've looked at both people who do not have any diagnosis of autism, there's still, there's a range of autistic-like traits that you can quantify with questionnaires that are well-regarded. And then once you get to a DSM-5 diagnosis, you have more and more severe cases of autism with respect to social functioning, that again, you can quantify using tools like the A D O S, et cetera. But it's a spectrum that I personally look at as a particularly interesting and important dimension of individual differences in social interactions. And other people in my lab that have different motivations, they have family members with

• 1:37:44Speaker 00

  autism, for instance, so they're personally interested in autism as a psychiatric category.

• 1:37:51Speaker 00

  But coming to your question, there's a lot of really interesting work and a lot of opportunities now that we've been actually using in our lab as well to look at the question of processing about faces, eye contact, et cetera. Right now, how much eye contact are you making with me? How much eye contact am I making with you? It is extremely variable. I mean, the eyes move around, they carry a lot of information. You know, socially, there's a gigantic range there. It's data that are now fairly easy to quantify and collect in hundreds or thousands of people using their webcams. And so we have a study going on where people watch, for example, a Zoom video, other people interacting, talking,

• 1:38:34Speaker 00

  and we use the webcam on their laptop to record where they are looking on the screen when they have that Zoom video going on. So we can quantify across large numbers of people. And the basic finding has been that people who are further along have high, who score higher on this dimension of the autism spectrum of social interaction with just questionnaire-based measures or a psychiatric diagnosis, make less eye contact and as well as other features. So we're looking at contact with the person who's talking, distraction to other things. We have experimental features where there's a person talking, they're making eye contact, there's like TV or something that goes on in the background, and we can quantify to

• 1:39:17Speaker 00

  what extent is your visual attention, your gaze, that we can quantify from the webcam, captured by somebody looking, somebody talking, somebody smiling or laughing, the TV going on in the background as a distractor. And we can put all of that into a big model and ask, what is it that normally drives visual attention? And what is it that distinguishes people with autism and where they would look? And the basic answer is that the social features, like eyes or who's talking, have less of a weight on where autistic people would look than the distractors, but they tend to be more distracted. And that that is, we've been doing this study every month now for a year, that seems to be a temporally

• 1:40:00Speaker 00

  stable personality trait-like feature of autism spectrum disorder. So it fluctuates to some extent, and we're trying to quantify, does it interact with whether you've slept badly the night before, or you're stressed, or other things that can change? Those do have an effect. But the answer seems to be it's fairly temporally stable, and it's almost like a signature for individuals. So there's some people that are real face lookers, and they look at faces a lot. And there's some people that look at faces hardly at all. And that seems to be stable across time and like a basic personality trait.

• 1:40:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  In this population of people diagnosed with autism?

• 1:40:37Speaker 00

  Across the board, for everybody.

• 1:40:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  I see.

• 1:40:38Speaker 00

  If I just take the general population, on average, it's the case that those people who would have a diagnosis of autism or who score higher on autistic traits, even if they don't have a diagnosis, look less at faces. But across everybody, it's the case that some people look a lot at faces, some people don't, and that that's temporally stable. So in general, right now, if you quantify it from this podcast, how often do I make eye contact or look at you? And then you ask, you know, like in a classroom or in the lab meeting, how often do I make eye contact? It would be similar proportion that I'm just like not a face looker or eye looker, and you might be, it's like a stable personality trait. And it's associated coarsely with this dimension in autism spectrum

• 1:41:20Speaker 00

  disorder. But of course, the million dollar question is, what else is it associated with? Is it predictive of career success? Is it predictive of anything else? And so we don't know. We're measuring everything else and getting lots of questionnaires on these people to ask, what are the associations? And is there any causal hypothesis that we would come up with? That if you don't look at faces a lot, there's some consequences. If you look at faces a lot, there are other consequences. If that were the case, we're not there yet, that would make very interesting predictions, which, well, maybe I should be looking at your face all the time.

• 1:41:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  No, no.

• 1:41:57Speaker 00

  The podcast would get a million hits, or who knows what.

• 1:41:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  Just be you, is what we say.

• 1:42:01Speaker 00

  Well, that's, I mean, that's another big question, which we're looking at in these longitudinal studies, which is a question of, to what extent can you change who you are? And, you know, your emotion, we were talking about emotion regulation, you can regulate your emotions, you can have this meta cognitive insight, you can have some control. Can you change if you're extrovert or neurotic? Can you change your personality? And the answer seems to be, to some extent, for some variables more than others. But we're trying to quantify that. So we have this big longitudinal data set where we give people tons and tons of questionnaires about their personality, about their mood, about lots of things, and are asking, to what extent, over time, do they get pushed around and

• 1:42:42Speaker 00

  that can change? And which ones stay constant and constitutes you have the core of their personality that's unchangeable. But I think it's a super, super interesting question. What parts of you can change and what parts of you cannot?

• 1:42:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, I think about this all the time. I feel like some people, this is pseudo-scientific, what I'm about to describe, they seem to have very high autonomic, what I call like RPM. I have a, it's more of a former colleague, because I haven't been working in that field for a while. But have you ever seen Botan Rosca from Basel give a talk? Like, he moves a lot. He's very electric. He's also very thin, and he moves, and his brain, he's exceedingly smart.

• 1:43:18Speaker 00

  He has a high basal metabolic rate.

• 1:43:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  High basal metabolic rate, and he's

• 1:43:21Speaker 00

  Like a hummingbird.

• 1:43:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, but he moves a lot, right?

• 1:43:23Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 1:43:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  And then other people, they move less. I think about this all the time because I'm fascinated by, and I love dogs. I go to this AKC, Meet the Breeds thing every year. I don't go every year, they do it every year, but I highly recommend people go, even if you don't want a dog, because you get to see all the different genetic variation, which of course relates to body size, but also temperament. And if you just look at a

• 1:43:43Speaker 00

  Bulldogs are probably more on the, on the slow, mellow side compared to Yorkshire terriers that are more

• 1:43:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  Very little spontaneous movement.

• 1:43:50Speaker 00

  [laughing]

• 1:43:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  I think it's one of the reasons why people feel comfortable approaching a bulldog, whereas like a, you know, pit bulls are always kind of like winding around and moving. But some dogs, it may, relates to other things, cuteness and whatnot. But some people just seem to have a lot of spontaneous movement. Other people

• 1:44:04Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:44:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  are more stable in their bodily movements. And it does seem to relate to kind of how excitable they are or not excitable they are. So you can imagine, like, if you're, if you're humming at a higher RPM, you can, like, more prone to action or speech.

• 1:44:16Speaker 00

  It's a super interesting observation, because the question, of course, is to what extent does it relate to how their mind is working, right? I mean, as we're talking now, and as you were just talking, you know, we're moving our hands, we're moving our body, we're moving our face, you're not just sitting there speaking. So to some extent, all of these bodily movements are interfaced with thought. If I had to sit completely still and not, you know, move, it would be pretty hard to have this conversation, right? So to some extent, bodily movements actually help us structure our thoughts. It's not just like a large language model. It's not just language going on. It interfaces with the body, and it punctuates thoughts to some extent. So I think it's super interesting, and it's certainly the case that the way that somebody moves their body does say something

• 1:45:00Speaker 00

  about how they're thinking as well.

• 1:45:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, I've been reading my audiobook, and I asked them, the sound technicians, to allow me to stand while I read it. Much easier to read an audiobook and to put inflection. You actually can lean in when you want to emphasize something, and you can, you know, point to the words for a moment. But then, when you need to work through a passage that needs to be very finely structured with little emotion, because that happens too, if you clasp your hands and do it. So our friend Eddie Chang tells me that the hand representations in the brain are very close to the language center. So these were probably our first tools of language, or at least they co-evolved.

• 1:45:36Speaker 00

  Well, your mouth and your hands are the most dexterous and overrepresented in the brain.

• 1:45:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right.

• 1:45:40Speaker 00

  You can, you know, control the world with them, and you can move them the most. Yeah, when, you know, when the COVID pandemic started 2020, we weren't allowed to go on campus at all. So we sat around in our apartments, I sat at home, we had lab meetings on Zoom, only Zoom, and lectures. All the classes were on Zoom prior to that, and then Zoom took off, and now it's, most meetings are hybrid. But before that point, everything was face to face. I would stand up and lecture, we would talk face to face. And suddenly switching to just seeing a bunch of often little just black squares, right, for the, for the whole classroom there on Zoom, that was a hard switch. That lack of an interactive nature, which is something that we're looking at now, I think it's going to be super cool. I have a graduate student just starting this. The experiment is this, I would see your

• 1:46:25Speaker 00

  face on a screen in that set, I would see a video of you, I would Zoom with you right now, and we could be having this podcast over Zoom. I actually thought we were going to have this over Zoom, so I'm very happy. It's not over Zoom.

• 1:46:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  Always better in person.

• 1:46:35Speaker 00

  And then you're here in person, right? And it feels different. It feels different. And so we're sort of trying to parameterize that degree of social realness, of social interaction. And then we're doing that with people with autism, asking, where does it change? And how difficult is it for people with autism to interact with another person? Is it equally difficult over Zoom? Is it equally difficult over Zoom if you have the selfie camera turned off, the other person can't see you, and you know that? And so we're trying to look at the degree of actual social interaction as a relevant dimension. And I think it makes a huge difference. I mean, it feels completely different being face to face, than if you're on Zoom, let alone if I just watch a video that's not actually aligned in time.

• 1:47:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  The way I described the kind of higher or lower RPM before, perhaps made it sound like one or the other was better. But I think sometimes about like Alex Honnold, who again, who was a guest on this podcast, and there've been claims that his amygdala doesn't react as much. Anyway, we could, we could talk about that. I think Alex kind of like, maybe chuckles a little bit at those studies, because he does experience anxiety and fear, just not in the context of this, like, highly trained situation he's put himself in every single day for so long. But I do have to wonder whether people who go out on long runs, for instance, there's not a lot of talking going on, or Alex, he's devoting his physical and mental energetic resources toward climbing and figuring out these, how to navigate high-risk, high-consequence situations.

• 1:48:01Speaker 00

  There, you're probably just in flow. You're just like totally absorbed in what you're doing.

• 1:48:04Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:04Speaker 00

  If you're Alex Honnold-type climbing.

• 1:48:06Andrew D. Huberman?

  Once he's got it, but like to work out the puzzle of, like, with ropes first, of how to maneuver, so that he can actually free solo it, is, is a remarkable thing. But I almost get the impression that if people speak less, that they're able to devote more mental and physical resources to the thing they're doing. I never ran ultras, but I recall, like, running, you know, I used to run, like, a long eight to 10 mile run on Sundays, used to be a thing. Now it's getting shorter and shorter run, I have to go get it back. But come back from those, and there's a fatigue component that confounds what I'm about to say, but one is a lot less reactive. When you spend a bunch of time just in your own head and you've learned to tolerate the voice in your own head. I find that I'm much calmer after I've spent a bunch of time alone because I've gone through

• 1:48:49Andrew D. Huberman?

  that kind of initial stage of the mind fluttering and then you want to communicate with people and I'll lock up my phone in a box these days to do real work. And I come out of it and things come my way and they're sort of out there and over there. And unless they really demand my attention, they kind of just don't grab me. Whereas I think when we're highly engaged with in our own mental dialogue, it's almost like we're trying to converse with the world. So I think there's real value to doing these solo treks and to devoting time to getting past that need to engage with the world. I think it's very, very useful.

• 1:49:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I'm sure it's idiosyncratic. It'll vary, but I think that particular aspect that you mentioned, that you can just be comfortable in your own mind and that that's beneficial. I think that's a big part. It's a big part of lots of training techniques and big part of lots of meditative techniques that you just. But again, it's very individual. It's not just sort of one size fits all, but the ability to not just be driven by sensory input and be comfortable with your own mind. It's not like you're doing nothing at all. You're training. You're training your own mind to be comfortable. And I think the consequence of that is then subsequently, when you encounter challenges in the world, you're actually better equipped to deal with those and better equipped to regulate your emotion. But when you're just at peace with yourself, if you're not doing nothing, your brain is

• 1:50:06Speaker 00

  being trained all the time and it's being trained in a useful way. And I think the ability to detach and decouple from the constant challenges and sensory information that's normally coming in, it's like sleep allows the brain to actually train itself and focus on particular internal regulation strategies that are then subsequently useful for dealing with the world later.

• 1:50:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  Could we say that one form of potentially useful emotional intelligence or social intelligence training is to just spend some time in your own head, either moving or not moving? You could do it meditating or you could do it running, but to just resist the temptation to get pulled out into the world and just get good at just sitting with these things that we call emotions and thoughts?

• 1:50:48Speaker 00

  I think so, especially it's again, it's going to be individual and it's going to vary, but I think so, especially if you can get some kind of meta cognitive or reflective awareness and work on what is going on in your mind. And ultimately it's training control. It's training control of your emotions and training control of your thoughts. And if you're constantly bombarded and just dealing with stuff coming in, you don't have time to do that.

• 1:51:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's called social media.

• 1:51:15Speaker 00

  Exactly. Yes, of which I have none. And so if you're just by yourself, you know, if you're running or if you're meditating or if you're trained up, if you're in an ice bath, I think you actually get a particular type of internal training that you just don't have the leisure to get if you're bombarded by social media, for instance. Yes. You know, every beginning of my lab meeting now, people have their laptops open and their phones out. We put them down and we actually have five minutes of silence, a sort of meditative silence to people to clear their minds.

• 1:51:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  Really?

• 1:51:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, five minutes or three minutes at the beginning of every lab meeting, we have a short meditative session. I put a picture up of some beautiful beach on the north shore of Kauai and people, in case people want to look at that, but many people just close their eyes. People can do whatever they want. But the idea is to clear your mind and focus and relax and get into a frame of mind where you're actually now most receptive to listen to the research presentation that's coming up. Because you know, you come in and your mind is all over the place and you know, there's an email here and the phone is going and you're just, your mind is buzzing. So quieting that, finding some focus and then being able to engage subsequently much better with the real world, listening to the talk.

• 1:52:30Speaker 00

  I think that's, that helps and we do that every lab meeting, Mondays at noon seems to work for people.

• 1:52:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  How long have you implemented this?

• 1:52:38Speaker 00

  We started it in 2020 when George Floyd was killed specifically to remember George Floyd. So it was, there was a very specific starting point because many people were upset and we figured we needed some kind of remembrance or just a moment of silence to acknowledge things. And then it morphed into, you know, you can remember whatever you like, you can just relax. And then it sort of morphed into this idea, well, you know, let's just have a moment of silence and just like recalibrate from the busy world and everything that's just been going on to now, you know, I mean, it's good to do on average every day in any case, but certainly right now before we launch into the research presentation at a lab meeting.

• 1:53:20Speaker 00

  So it's sort of morphed from a moment of silence to remember somebody to a short meditation, essentially.

• 1:53:27Andrew D. Huberman?

  I love it. My neuroscience colleagues are doing ice baths, training for 100 mile races and doing.

• 1:53:33Speaker 00

  The question is, is it helping by, am I getting more nature papers as a consequence of any of these?

• 1:53:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  That's a different metric. That's a different metric. You seem like a happy, vital person.

• 1:53:42Speaker 00

  I'm happy.

• 1:53:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  And you're writing books and you're doing public education here in addition to all that. I'd like to actually stay on this meditation thing for a moment. Rick Rubin, famed music producer, came on this podcast. He also happens to be a friend of mine. And right as we sat down, he said, can we do some coherence breathing first? He plays it's like a tone and you do some inhale, exhale. And you know, he, he likes these transition.

• 1:54:05Speaker 00

  Breathing exercises are great.

• 1:54:06Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, these transition tools and they will increase your heart rate variability and these kinds of things. But I think that one of the most interesting and understudied things in our field is task switching, whether it's emotional task switching or cognitive task switching. Like we assume the brain operates in step functions like, oh, I'm out on the street, I navigate traffic, I park my car and I come in and I podcast. And what you're doing at the beginning of this lab meeting, on the one hand is a meditation, but it's you're pivoting the brain circuits toward what comes next.

• 1:54:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:54:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  I don't think we talk enough as neuroscientists about the fact that the brain doesn't just immediately switch over, that you're carrying residual activity from whatever you were doing before.

• 1:54:47Speaker 00

  Yes. And there's a cost to that, a well-known cost. So as soon as you switch into something, there's a cost carried over from the previous task and you're much slower and it's more difficult for the couple of next trials on the new task. So there's always a switching cost, which shows you that switching is hard in some, for some reason, and there's a couple of theories for why it should be hard. There's some residue, some sort of inertia being carried over previously. There's some reconfiguration in the brain required between what you were doing, the previous task and the new task, but all of those would seem to require some effort. And it's definitely a skill and something that people are looking at a lot in brain recordings in humans and thinking a lot about how to design into AI.

• 1:55:28Speaker 00

  That ability to switch quickly and knowing how to switch, anticipating when to switch is a hugely important skill.

• 1:55:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  And we don't teach it. Like here we are talking about emotional intelligence, social awareness and these kinds of things. And I think most people think, oh, we should sit down and look at a bunch of faces and learn to detect the subtle cues in faces, or we should make more eye contact. And what I'm hearing today is while some of that might be true, most things are pointing in a different direction. We had a guest on this podcast, DJ Shipley, who's a former tier one SEAL Team operator. That's another high risk, high consequence world, but then he's out now, he's no longer deploying and he talked about his routine for coming home. It's like he knows he's rehearsing as he comes out of the car, just like as if it were an op, you know, I'm going to hit the door, my daughter's going to come running from this direction, my other daughter's going to come in, Patsy's going to be in the kitchen.

• 1:56:16Speaker 00

  Bulldog's going to come charging at you.

• 1:56:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, and but he's rehearsing and he knows exactly where he'll set his bag so he can scoop his daughter up.

• 1:56:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:56:22Andrew D. Huberman?

  People either chuckled or I think were kind of taken aback by that until he said, but this is the way that I know I can drop everything from the day and be at my best when I enter that environment. And you know, this is the kind of a quote unquote, like hyper Y chromosome version of kind of, of home and family life. But it was remarkable what the comments when we ran this clip on social media, the men were all kind of like in awe, like you have a system, dude, and you follow it. And the women were like, yes, fantastic. Like this is somebody who's prioritizing how he shows up. He's leaving everything else outside, which is a kind of, you know, it's more of a 1950s version of.

• 1:56:59Speaker 00

  But that's skill, being able to switch is super important.

• 1:57:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  It was super important.

• 1:57:03Speaker 00

  And it's trainable. It's largely trainable. And I think if you have meditative exercises, they train exactly that. It's a huge switch, right? You're switching from like constantly being bombarded and dealing with stuff in the world to suddenly putting all of that aside and just being inside. And, and it has health benefits, you know, Richie Davidson, for instance, I don't know if you have.

• 1:57:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, we had him here. Yeah, phenomenal guy.

• 1:57:26Speaker 00

  He's studied Tibetan monks and long-term meditators who've meditated 10,000 hours or whatever, which we can't afford to do, but he has a lot of studies on even for the rest of us, you know, short stretches of meditation, regular meditative exercises, you know, these done well-controlled studies have demonstrable health benefits for sure. So again, it comes back to this issue of variability, being able to switch and having lots of variability and training that is definitely beneficial. It's beneficial for just basic physiology, it's beneficial for emotion granularity and emotion regulation. It's beneficial for control of thought is when you're being externally oriented versus meditating.

• 1:58:08Speaker 00

  All of those are to a large extent trainable skills in variability and, and control.

• 1:58:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  So the experiment I'd love to see done, maybe your lab will do this, would be what is the cost of task switching if you do or do not insert this five minutes of silence? Like because you're, you're spending five minutes and we know the transition is choppy into the next thing that you're doing. So there's some overlap there, but by introducing the period of silence, you reduce the amount of time in order to switch your brain over to this new mode. Presumably you're seeing positive effects in these lab meetings of doing.

• 1:58:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, we should, we should do a study. It would be, you know, we would have to think about the right controls. We are looking at task switching, actually in these brain recordings in epilepsy patients, we're looking at single unit recordings and how those representations change when you switch between tasks. It's a great study. We're just working up the analyses now, but we don't have the intervention that you were just speaking about. So we don't have, half the patients are getting meditative training and half are not. But the extent to which an intervention like that can improve your ability to switch or some other concrete metric, I think that's, yes, those are exactly the types of studies that should be done. I think Richie's probably doing studies like that.

• 1:59:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  They did a, a study of five minutes of meditation per day and showed that people experienced tremendous increases in anxiety during the initial phase of the study, like just having to sit there with your thoughts and let everything stir. I actually think of short meditations like that, at least initially. As another version of the ice bath.

• 1:59:40Speaker 00

  Well, it is. And I think when we started and, you know, we have new summer students coming in, a new kid in the lab, I say, okay, I don't usually say too much. I say, okay, we're gonna just like three minutes of silence. And everybody's like this. And these summer students are looking around, what's, what's going on? It's very stressful, right? And if you just tell them, well, just like, don't do anything. I mean, this is obviously extremely difficult for young children. Don't do anything, right? Just be completely silent and quiet for one minute or five minutes. It is hard to inhibit behavior. It's really hard to do. But it's trainable. It's completely trainable. And a big part of it, you know, we're in this same conference room that David Anderson has his lab meetings in, which is where I can always see that he goes on for hours and hours. It has glass walls. And

• 2:00:23Speaker 00

  so people are walking around outside, looking at us sitting there in silence, pretty wondering, not much progress being done in that, that lab meeting. So there's that whole social perception aspect. But again, once you get over that and get used to it, it's, it's very easy to, to do these exercises. And it's definitely a trainable skill, for sure.

• 2:00:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, we were on the East Coast in Annapolis at the Naval Academy. These are very accomplished students, almost 4,000 of them. And one of the most incredible things about that environment is everyone goes into the cafeteria for lunch, and all of a sudden, a bell sounds, and you could hear a pin drop. But there's thousands of people around you.

• 2:01:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:01:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  You hear a bell again, the meal begins. Walking into the auditorium, it shuffle, shuffle, shuffle, talking, talking, talking, talking. Boom. It's a step function. They're training this in themselves.

• 2:01:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:01:12Andrew D. Huberman?

  And the other thing, no phones. No one has phones during the day. They get, I think they get an hour where they can access their phones.

• 2:01:18Speaker 00

  I normally, my, my phone, it's on right now because you guys wanted to text me. But normally, my phone is off, or I don't have a phone on me. And, and zero social media. Not on X, and not on social, not on Facebook, and not on Instagram. Zero. I just, and, you know, whenever people ask me, they say, oh, you know, can I hook you up with, what's that thing? LinkedIn, or whatever. I'm not on LinkedIn. I don't, I don't care what LinkedIn. And they're always surprised. And they say, well, why are you not on these social media? And I say, why would I be? I'm already above 100% in terms of people emailing me. I don't need more. So I'm, yeah, zero.

• 2:01:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  Love that you've given yourself permission to do that. I put social media on a separate phone, so that I can really track my time on there. And I just use it only to post, read a little bit, and then I'm out.

• 2:02:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:02:06Andrew D. Huberman?

  I just, I can't take the mental noise. Before we started recording, you mentioned that you fortunately successfully overcame a bout of illness.

• 2:02:14Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:02:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm curious whether the process of going through that, the diagnosis, the treatment, and then emerging from it, thank goodness, healthy, had you at times thinking about the science of emotions? I mean, that's an emotional experience, to say the least. You don't have to share with us exactly what it was. But were there times when, what your knowledge of the brain's ability to process emotions, for better or worse, was a useful tool to you in that context?

• 2:02:40Speaker 00

  I guess so. I mean, you know, only in the most indirect sense. But I guess it's about emotional regulation. Well, it's about two things. I think it's about emotional regulation. So, you know, initially, when you get a diagnosis that reminds you of your mortality, is sort of a mixture of, you know, fear, sadness, worry, you know, all these negative emotions. And so you're regulating that. And it's interpersonal, for sure. So interpersonal emotion regulation between me and my wife, us talking about it. So that's like a huge part of the process. You're not regulating those negative emotions anymore, but you're, you're buying into, you're getting more other emotions, like awe, gratitude,

• 2:03:25Speaker 00

  acceptance, all of these emotions we were talking about before, that I think are largely uniquely human, that really make you appreciate and be just grateful for what you have. So that whole process of regulating the sort of, you know, immediate stressors, and then coming to having more gratitude and awe in everyday life. And then, you know, also, I mean, I think one big consequence of anything like that is that you, it can have this meta cognitive perspective on your, your lifeline, and, you know, where you are, how much time you have left, and how to value that, and what to do, and what to plan, and how to allocate your time to things that are worthwhile. And so in my case, one of those components

• 2:04:07Speaker 00

  was, you know, signing up for this 100 mile ultra marathon, starting to train for it, and then just pushing through all of that. So, you know, one of the consequences of the, of the therapy for this was I had lots of joint pain and lots of fatigue. So I tell my doctor about that. He says, that's, that's great. That means it's working. It's just like, yes, but the side effects are preventing me from training for a 100 mile race. And so pushing through that, I think it just, it makes you grateful for what you have, and makes you just be in awe of the fact that, you know, we were briefly talking about consciousness before, that there's a world there at all. You tend to have this perspective that physics gives us of the way the world works, that, you know, the world is going on, and when

• 2:04:50Speaker 00

  you die, you get plucked out of that, and everything else goes on. But from a neuroscience perspective, it's kind of the opposite. You get this sense that the whole world is actually a construction of stuff in your brain. And as you get older, little things drop out, and various people die, and you're unable to do things. And eventually, you lose the whole world. So rather than thinking of death as we normally do, as the world loses you, the neuroscience perspective is the inverse, which is you lose the world. So you have like, you know, a couple of decades left, and then you're gonna lose everything. And that's coming. So live it up.

• 2:05:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  I love it. And thank you so much for being willing to answer that question. Throughout today's conversation, I'm struck by the fact that your work plays such a prominent role in your life, and your life and your work, even if we weren't necessarily connecting the dots in that way, that the fact that you do practices specifically to tap into your autonomic nervous system emotion regulation. And at the same time, the fact that you look at neural circuits and, and do extremely well-controlled studies to explore the, the mechanics that translate to everybody. Like, this is a, in case anyone hasn't told you, and because I sit at a unique vantage point, both having done academic research, and now in public health communication, people need to hear this and see and experience scientists

• 2:06:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  like you. So thank you so much for coming here today, for being willing to open up about some of this, and frankly, for doing the work that you do for so many years and such, at such a high level. And I'm so grateful that you're writing yet another book. If it's not out yet, we can't put a link to it just yet. But when it comes out, I'll surely get a copy. And even though you're not on social media, I'll be sure to, to talk about it after I've read it. Because as I did the, the prior book that you wrote with David.

• 2:06:36Speaker 00

  Thank you very much, Andrew. It was a pleasure being here. We'll stay in touch. And maybe at some point, I can tell you that I finished a 100 mile race and the book got published.

• 2:06:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  Excellent.

• 2:06:44Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 2:06:44Andrew D. Huberman?

  I have no doubt that you will. Whether I join you for that 100 mile race is a completely different story. But thank you so much, Ralph. Appreciate you.

• 2:06:51Speaker 00

  Thanks. It was a pleasure.

• 2:06:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  Thank you. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Ralph Adolphs. To learn more about his work, and to find links to his previous and forthcoming books, please see the link in the show note caption. 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 follow the podcast by clicking the follow button on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review. And you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple. Please also 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 podcasts, or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please

• 2:07:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  put those in the comments section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. 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

• 2:08:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  for the Human Body. And if you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram, X, 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 information on the Huberman Lab podcast. Again, it's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. And if you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network newsletter, the Neural Network newsletter is a zero-cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries, as well as what we call protocols, in the form of one to three-page PDFs, that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize dopamine, deliberate cold exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training

• 2:08:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  and resistance training. All of that is available completely zero cost. You simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down to newsletter, and enter 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. Ralph Adolphs. And last, but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.