 Every once in a while, skip the reward. Every once in a while, you get there and you're like, yes, suppress the dopamine response a little bit. And so I have some friends who've done very well in the entrepreneurial space and some of them, you know, you get the phone call, what do I do now? It's like, oh, poor you, you know? Someone's like, you know, what do you do? And I always just say, give it away. What you wanna understand is that the brain and nervous system are connected and sure and experience could be associated with a body part. I happen to know people that have had their limbs blown off north of the knee. Do they not feel? Of course, they have feelings about that experience, but they're every bit as cognitively connected as other people. People have all their limbs removed. So there is something special about the real estate in here. As far as the brain from going zero to 25, 25 plus, can you explain how that works as far as neuroplasticity? And then after 25, how it works for people as well? Yeah, so some of your audience may already know this, but neuroplasticity is this incredible feature of the brain's ability to change in response to experience. We should probably broaden that definition to say the nervous system because the brain is obviously amazing, but that's just the part of the nervous system that's housed in the skull. You've also got all these connections with the organs of the body that control breathing and heart rate, those can change too. When you hear about things like muscle memory, actually muscle has no memory. It's the nerve connections that change when you learn something and you relearn it. Would that be connected with fascia at all? Yeah, so fascia can, they receive fascia, which is stuff wrapping the muscles really tight. They receive some neural innervation. The fascia kind of talks to the nerves, not so much the other way around, but I'm sure now that I said that, someone out there is gonna correct me, but and they're probably right. Most things in the body are bi-directional. So like the heart is communicating to the brain how fast it's beating. The brain is also controlling heart rate. The lungs are communicating with the brain, brain are communicating with the lungs. So the reason I am hesitant to say it's all one direction is that typically when one looks a little bit more closely, you see that it's a two-way conversation. So anytime we talk about neuroplasticity, we're talking about the nervous system changing in some way to make the nervous system function better or worse. So a head injury will give you neuroplasticity, but it's called maladaptive plasticity. It doesn't make you better. So typically when we talk about plasticity, we're talking about adaptive plasticity. Some change in the nervous system that allows you to be better, think better, perform better, any of that, that means something changed. And you asked about the zero to 25 versus 25 and older. It's a pretty well accepted principle of neuroscience that the nervous system changes very easily from the time we're born until about age 25. It's not like on your 25th birthday, you get the gift of no more plasticity. It tapers off. And for some people it'll be 27 and some people it'll be 24. But from birth until 25, the entire nervous system because of the chemicals that are circulating because of a number of things, it just wants to change. And so it changes through just passive experience. So a child goes to their first movie or watches their first movie and it changes the way they view the world forever. And you can unlearn things. That's also neuroplasticity. But all you need to do as a young person is be exposed to something and it will change your brain. Provided it's novel or it's interesting enough or it makes you alert enough, you'll change. Now after age 25, you can still get neuroplasticity but the mechanisms completely change. The chemicals that are involved completely change. The ways to get neuroplasticity shift and there are a couple requirements. The first one is that it has to be self-directed. We love the idea that we tell people to change and they're gonna change. But the only change that comes after age 25 is self-directed change. You can shape a child for better or for worse. You can literally shape their brain and their nervous system. I mean, I would just watch the Tiger Woods documentary. He was shaped as a child to become the best golfer and he obviously contributed to that. But you can't take an adult and make them the best golfer in the world unless they want to be the best golfer in the world. So there's a little bit of a contractual thing with the nervous system. Is there a reason why that happens? So is it just because children are more malleable? Is it because there's, what's the actual reason for that? Yeah, great question. So when you're born until about age 25, the connections between neurons, we call those synapses. It's a little bit of a tricky name because we're talking about as connections but they're actually spaces between the neurons. They're like these little gaps and the neurons spit chemicals back and forth across those gaps. Those synapses are the communication points between neurons. And anytime you learn something or unlearn something, anytime you acquire new language or motor skill, the arrangement of those connections changes. It's like new roads through a city kind of thing. So when you turn roughly 25, there's a significant change in the amount of space between neurons and they literally don't have as much space to move around. It's called extracellar space and it's not like cement gets poured in there. But there are a bunch of things for the aficionados. These are like glycoproteins and they can have all these fancy names that pair neuronal nets and that kind of thing if people want to learn more, they can look that up. But you fill in that space and it literally makes it harder to move things around. So the brain early on is it has some things that can't change, like the areas that control heart rate or breathing. You don't want those to change because you want your heart rate functioning in the background all the time. But it's a little bit more like a Lego set. You can move things around a particular foundation. Now, after age 25, it's more like you've got the model glued together and you can steam away some glue and move things around but it takes work. And the work consists of focus. It requires intense focus. So a child, you can just put them in front of an experience or put them in an experience and it'll shape their brain. But as an older person, meaning 25 or older, you have to really concentrate on what it is exactly you're trying to change. And this again is referring to adaptive plasticity because again, a head injury will change your brain but for the worst. So today, if I'm talking about plasticity from here on, unless we say otherwise, we're talking about adaptive plasticity. So there's less space for things to move around. You need focus and there's also this interesting thing that you need focus and then you also need deep rest afterwards because that's actually when the changes occur and the re-sculpting of the brain. And the focus is key because the focus on what you're trying to learn causes the release of particular chemicals. Let's talk about those if you like. And those chemicals send a signal to the brain, ah, something needs to change. And if you think about it, there's no reason for your nervous system to change at all. Why should it? And these chemicals that make us feel alert or surprised or anxious or afraid or very, very excited, those aren't just for our emotional experience. Those mark time in the brain and say, wait, something's different now than it was a few minutes before this happened. And now there's this opportunity to learn. And then the brain starts looking around for, well, what should I learn? And we could talk about what the steps are for changing but it's really a chemical and an actual physical difference in the brain between zero to 25 and after 25 that underlies the shift in what we call passive plasticity early in life. You just passively go through life and for better or for worse, by 25, your brain is gonna be the way it is. And then you can still change it, but you have to dig in and put some effort. Right, which is important because most people think, oh, I just, you can't teach an old dog new tricks. I just am the way that I am. And so I guess it makes sense in the sense that, if a hundred thousand years ago, you and I are walking by and you decide you wanna go get water from a lake and alligator takes you, that's gonna be a very heightened state. There's gonna be a lot of focus that's gonna come to that. It's gonna tell me next time I go near something like this, I need to be more careful. So it seems like it can be an evolutionary trait to make sure that people, for safety, I guess, long term. But is the chemical at your time out of acetylcholine that's released from the brain when immediately we need to focus on something? Yeah, so acetylcholine is one chemical in the cocktail of chemicals that allow the brain to change as an adult. The example you gave of the alligator or the crocodile grabbing your hiking partner and pulling them away, it's a really good one. Actually, if that happened, a couple of things would be clear. If something really bad happens, you get what's called one trial learning. You will never forget that happened. For some people they think, oh my goodness, I've had these traumas, how will I ever forget? You can unlearn the emotional relationship to it, but you will never forget. It's kind of remarkable. It's kind of the stinger of biology because you wish that you could have that for other things that were more pleasant. But not only would you not forget the alligator event, but you would remember all the things that led up to it, even though you weren't thinking about those as it happened. So that morning, you putting on your shoes in a particular way, the trajectory you took to get to that lake, all that suddenly would be called up to memory and packaged into this experience. And so this is, it gets to a lot of things related to trauma where people will start, or PTSD people will start to have all the physical symptoms of a trauma that have nothing to do with the actual traumatic experience. And we always hear the kind of cliche example of a car backfires and then the veteran who's come back thinks that they're in a battle. It's actually, that can happen, but more typically it's they get up in the morning, they're making up a cup of coffee and bam, all of a sudden the emotions hit, the physical symptoms hit. And it probably relates to the fact that things that happen, actual traumas that happen, capture elements in time before, during and afterward. And so your, the nervous system wants safety. Fundamentals like Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs starts in the nervous system. Everything's anchored first in the nervous system. And so you would capture that entire sequence of events. Now for positive things, so the negative events are triggered that the, sorry, the highlighting of negative events I should say is triggered by the release of epinephrine which is adrenaline. So adrenaline comes from the kidneys in our body that makes us breathe faster, makes us pupils dilate, all the physical symptoms of stress and anxiety. In the brain, we call that exact same molecule epinephrine just to confuse people. I didn't name them. So, you know. And then there's norepinephrine, that's something that's not the same thing. Norepinephrine, which is similar, but not quite the same. But we'll call it epinephrine or adrenaline interchangeably. So that causes alertness and it has no bias towards positive events or negative events. So if you see somebody that you really enjoy seeing and you didn't expect to see them, epinephrine will be released into your body. As well, acetylcholine, which was the neuromodulator that you mentioned is released. And acetylcholine acts like a spotlight. So as I mentioned, when we're excited by something and we're stressed, our pupils dilate, which actually causes us to go into a bit of a tunnel vision. We don't always experience it as dark around the edges kind of tunnel, but we don't see the big picture, literally. It changes the optics of our eyes. We get much better at seeing individual things. If you've ever been in love, you've experienced this because the person just seems to occupy your entire visual field and your entire emotional field as it were. So there's this kind of so distraught view of the world. Not always bad, it can be good as in falling in love or being excited about something. And acetylcholine is a molecule that's released in the brain that is marking or highlighting the specific areas of the brain that are active during a particular event. So one way to think about this is if you decided that it were important to you to say learn a particular language or to learn all there is to know about something that's very vital to your life for some reason, the information would literally be highlighted as you read it in your brain and that would make it easier to learn. But the actual learning doesn't take place while you have that acetylcholine swimming around in your brain and highlighting things or the epinephrine, the adrenaline, it happens later when you go to sleep. The reorganization of the brain happens in deep rest, sleep and things like it. And so this is why sometimes people will work very, very hard at trying to make a change and it's just not happening, it's not happening, it's not happening. And then they'll take a little bit of a break or a week later they come back and they nail it. That is because the changes don't actually occur during the attempt to learn. And maybe one other thing that I don't think I've ever really talked about terribly much on podcasts is that errors and making mistakes is key. And that's not just as a thematically like, oh, errors are good, you learn from errors, you know, what is the Michael Jordan thing? I've missed whatever 10,000 of the shots I didn't take. I can never remember the quote. Anyway, making errors is good, but at a neurobiological level, plasticity is faster when you make errors. And here's why, when you do everything properly, you get up from your chair, you go get a glass of water, you speak the languages you speak, why should your brain change? It has the complete operating manual for what you need to do. When you make a mistake, it feels terrible because you release epinephrine and most people will tilt away from the experience at that point. They wanna walk away. But if you can focus on what just happened and what you're trying to do, you bring acetylcholine to the learning experience. And when you make errors, there's something called top-down processing. It means that the higher order areas of your brain send signals deep into the brain, whatever you're about to do next is really important. And so it's probably best thought of as throwing darts at a dartboard because it's just so straightforward to use as an example. So if I throw a dart, misses the dartboard and tile it. I've been that guy, by the way, at the bar in college, like really bad. I have not great binocular vision, which is ironic because I study vision. So if I close one eye, I'm actually better. And I throw it, okay, so then I'm off from the bull's eye, I'm off from the bull's eye. And I'm getting frustrated, you know? And I wanna walk away from it. But if I keep doing that, what's happening is, my brain is queuing up all sorts of things without me realizing it, like what trajectory my arm is taking when it goes left, what trajectory my arm is taking when it goes right, why suddenly I think I'm doing everything right and it hits the wall again. And if I were to go away from that for a short while or maybe continue to just throw errors, I'm learning faster than if I get closer on the first try. So the brain takes error signals and says, okay, we need to correct this and that's plasticity. So to make it really concrete, making errors isn't just good because we tell people it's good and you have to fail in order to learn. It's actually the best portal into learning. Your brain will not change, your nervous system will not change unless you're making errors. And this is actually what kids do really well. The kid learning to walk is falling down all the time. And the brain is updating, okay, what was different? And a lot of it's subconscious. The kid isn't thinking, oh, I have to bend my left knee a little bit more, I need to flex a stabilizer, muscle in my tibialis, they don't think like that. The nervous system is very smart and it just figures it out. So focus errors and rest, focus errors, rest, focus errors, rest, and then pretty soon you have fluency in what you need to do. Hey everybody, this podcast is sponsored by Athletic Greens. Let me tell you about how I start my day every day. I go to the bathroom, brush my teeth, drink Athletic Greens and meditate. 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From a limited time, my listeners can go to grove.co.co slash rob, and you'll get a free gift with your first order of $30 or more, but you have to use a special code. That's grove.co slash rob to get your exclusive offer. That's grove.co slash rob. So one of the most mind blowing things that I've heard you say when you talk about acetylcholine, first off, you say what you just said, where it feels stressful. So like I think back to, where this really clicked for me, I heard you saying it at one point in time where acetylcholine comes from the stress part of the brain, right? And I've been at the point before I've been playing guitar since I was 15. And it's easy for me to sit down and just play songs I've been playing forever. But then I sit down, sometimes I'm like, I really want to learn this Pink Floyd solo and I can feel myself getting like, oh, shit. Like I don't, I just want to go back to playing the easy stuff. And then I'll be like, oh, just let me lay back. Let me go back to the easy stuff and forget about playing, you know, forcing myself. But at that point, it's actually that it's marking my brain to start to change is what you're saying. And that's usually the point people get to the wall and they're like, I'm not supposed to do this. That's right. That's right. So one of the worst things that has happened are the movies where people suddenly have skills they didn't know they had. It does not exist. It doesn't. Now there's crossover, right? Athletes that are terrific in one domain can be terrific in another domain. But if maybe Framie this way, which you just did very nicely, will help people if they're trying to learn, which is when you feel agitation, that's the brain and nervous system queuing up the things it needs in order to create change. But you cannot, you will not experience the feel good molecules, dopamine and serotonin until you hit a new landmark, until you hit a new milestone. That does not happen. There's no feel good entry into real learning. Now that doesn't mean that learning has to feel terrible, but there's no positive reward from failure at the chemical level, except there is one little twist, which is, which basically is a chemical neurobiological explanation of growth mindset, which is my colleague in Stanford, Carol Dweck's discovery and obviously naming that that's hers. But growth mindset is about the idea of course, that you may not have a skill, but that you could, it's the idea I can't yet, but as well it's also about adopting the mindset that the learning process, the friction process itself can be rewarded subjectively. So what this means is that when you're trying something new and it's stressful and there's a lot of agitation, there's no natural reason why the nervous system should give you any dopamine release to feel good or serotonin release, but we're smart animals. We can subjectively say, wait, the effort process itself is what's gonna get me where I want to go. And in doing that, you can start to weave in some of this dopamine release. Now we know that because dopamine and its release in the brain, which makes us feel good, tied to motivation, et cetera, is extremely subjective. And we know this because what's funny to you might not be what's funny to me. What's important to you might not be what's important to me. There's probably some overlap there, but there's probably some difference too. And we've all experienced dopamine before. You're feeling absolutely miserable. Something's terrible. And then somebody cracks a joke. If it's not funny, it tends to send you further down the trench. If it is funny, you feel an actual lift and you feel like you have more energy to go on. And that is not a psychological thing as much as it is a chemical thing. Dopamine is an amazing molecule. People think of it as the molecule of pleasure, but it's mostly the molecule of motivation and drive. And dopamine is the precursor, literally the chemical precursor from which epinephrine and adrenaline are made. What this means is if you can subjectively tell yourself, I'm doing well. I'm excited. This is, oh, this is super frustrating, but you know, I don't know. Huberman was blabbing that this is the entry point to learning and failures are supposed to be good. If you can start to say, you know, I kind of like this. What ends up happening is you actually have more chemical energy, neural energy, in concrete terms, to continue. Because what's rate limiting in terms of how long we can push is epinephrine. There are great studies that show that not done by my lab, but other labs that show that the ability to persist and endure is dependent on a reservoir of epinephrine in the brain. It's not so much about adrenaline in the body. It's about, it's fuel. And dopamine is like a re-up on that fuel. It's like a buffer. Yeah. And I know this sounds a little, whenever something's very concrete, like a breathing technique or a vision technique, it's, you know, you just list it out. And it's very intuitive. With this subjective thing, what can help people is if they start to understand, you know, the mind has really got its hardwired mechanisms. Like when something is stressful and I can't do something, it's gonna feel not great. But if you can recognize that and you can start to incorporate the subjective part of learning, which is that that is the first door to learning and the feel good process that lies on the other side. And people who learn how to tap into this, I guess Tiger Woods would be another example. Clearly, I don't know him. I remember when he was at Stanford, but I don't know him, but it's clear in watching his trajectory over the years with golf is that hard work and focus and effort were inherent to his process. And all great performers, whether not it's in science or music or athletics or business, they learn to associate the hard work, not just with the reward that's coming later, but it becomes its own form of reward. The process is reward. And that can go off the rails and can become a problem. You know, people become workaholics. I've been an accused of that before. They're wrong, but no, I'm just kidding. But you know, within a healthy range, that's really, if there is a kind of a secret sauce or like the whole thing, it's the dopamine that you can control the release of. And so I always say with dopamine, you have to be very careful. This is also the molecule of addictions. This is the molecule of great self-destruction if you're not careful with it. But if you can learn to regulate it through hard work as well as celebrating rewards, then you essentially have open field on whatever it is that you wanna learn and you stand a far greater chance of succeeding because otherwise it's just gonna be grind, grind, grind. Oh, I hope this works out. And then if it doesn't work out, you don't have the gas to continue. And if you really are about process and result, not just process and not just result, chemically you have all the machinery going to take you through three lifetimes of hard endeavors and fun endeavors for that matter. Yeah, so if we're boiling it down, if we just go back to like the guitar example, so I'm gonna sit down and play some guitar and I know the chemical cocktails are now gonna happen inside of my brain. I know I'm gonna probably hit a wall that's gonna feel like I wanna stop in its resistance. And that is the point where my brain is starting to want to change. And instead of me going, okay, when I learned this entire Pink Floyd song, which could take me days, then I'm finally gonna feel good about myself, which will finally give me the dopamine. It's like, if I can spend the next two minutes learning just these three parts and then I get those past those two minutes and it's almost like a mini celebration inside my head, I can make myself give myself dopamine, which then gives me more drive and motivation to continue to keep learning the rest of it, right? Absolutely. So chunking, breaking things down into their elements is something we hear about all the time. It's a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. How do you need an elephant? One bite at a time. This kind of thing. What's missing in those statements about chunking is that they never tell you to reward different elements of the process. And there's some other tricks you can use and that can accelerate this process. One is, let's say you decide, I don't play music, so I'm gonna mess up the language around this, but I'm gonna learn one chord or half a chord. Can you do half a chord? One chord, I'm showing my musical ignorance here. One chord or one bar of music. And you reward that, you're like, yes, okay, that was really challenging. But if you understand that kind of the excitement that you feel at that point is the opportunity to continue. These are, and we can talk about how this is rooted in ancient mechanisms, not mechanisms to allow us to learn music, but mechanisms that allow us to find mates and build shelters and build civilizations, all sorts of things. But if you can do that, but every once in a while, skip the reward. Every once in a while, you get there and you're like, yes, suppress the dopamine response a little bit. And the reason is, the best learning schedule is the one that the casinos leverage, which is intermittent reward. If your body and brain start to expect dopamine on a regular schedule, and that can be a regular schedule in time, or a regular schedule like every time I get the A or every time I learn a bar of music, it will start to have a diminished effect over time. And so I have some friends who've done very well in the entrepreneurial space and some of them, you get the phone call, what do I do now? It's like, oh, poor you. Someone's like, what do you do? And I always just say, give it away, just give it away. And if that feels good, great, or give half away. And they're like, wait, what? Some of them do give it away or much of it, never all of it, but much of it. So they're good people, but people who develop a relationship with dopamine that's attached to effort, pick a milestone, reward yourself subjectively. How do you know if you've done it correctly? There's always the question I get. How do I know if I've done it correctly? You'll know because you have energy to continue and you'll have a kind of a pervasive feeling of satisfaction. But the idea is to push into the next vista, to the next milestone. Then every once in a while, just remove the reward. Remove the reward because in doing that, your dopamine system, it's never really adapting to a particular schedule because the next bar of music in this solo might be really hard. And you might not actually get it that day, but you need to be able to come back the next day and continue. And so this is something that your mind can really shape itself. And this is the most amazing thing about the brain as opposed to all other organs or the nervous system compared to other organs is that your liver can't say, oh, I wanna change myself for the better. So we have, people argue about free will and all this stuff. I don't like arguments like that. They're silly arguments, frankly, for reasons we could get into. They don't have any direct biological underpinning that we can point to yet. But this stuff about dopamine for rewards and acetylcholine for focus and epinephrine for agitation, those are as true in your dog and my dog and every person in the world as it was 100 years ago. And we always like to think about, oh, you know, 100 years ago, all these chemicals were there because we were being chased by saber-toothed tigers. No, no, no, no. People had breakups 100 years ago. People died 100, dogs died 100 years ago. Terrible things happen and great things happen. These are mechanisms that were designed to be applied to any scenario, whether or not it's Bitcoin or basketball or university work or whatever it is. And so the elements of the nervous system, the kind of ingredients to work with are very basic. And once you understand them, you can start to rearrange them however you like. We all know the feeling of immense dopamine release, huge milestone or big surprise. Someone sends you a check or something you didn't think that was gonna happen that's positive happens. And just one thing I wanna mention about dopamine that I don't think I've ever mentioned before is dopamine and its release is also how we fragment time. So there's these beautiful studies that have been done where they've had people watch sports games where people are very vested in their team winning and they measure dopamine release in the brain. And every time there's dopamine release, it kind of resets the way that you focus on the world and your ability to extract more information. And this is I think why celebrations mark kind of time for us. Great things and bad things mark time, when someone died, when they got married, et cetera. So when you're playing with dopamine in these ways, what you're doing is you're taking control of a process that if you don't take control of it is going to be controlled by external events. When are they opening up businesses, right? How's the market doing? Is Bitcoin at 60 or 6K today? You are driven by external events. And so this has been discussed a little bit by Josh Whiteskin, the great chess player, turned Tai Chi hands, turned standup paddle boarding guys. Like I don't know him, but one of these amazing people wrote the art of learning. He talks about this in non-neurobiological terms that the ability to stay in that plane of calm is key. Self-reward we sometimes think about is jumping up and down and be like, yes, I killed it, I did it and succeeded high fives all around. That's powerful, but equally perhaps more powerful is, I just did that. And the internal sense that you just hit a milestone and instead of wasting energy jumping all over the place to move to the next milestone. And high performers do this very well. And they're also very good at just showing up and taking care of business. And so whether it doesn't matter what domain you're in, this stuff of dopamine giving you more gas to push on further because it's the precursor to epinephrine. This is the stuff that once you start taking subtle control of it becomes easier to know if you're tapping into it. So people shouldn't obsess too much about whether or not they're doing it right. The results of the learning process will tell you if you're doing it right. But it takes time and it's a practice that you learn. Yeah, yeah, it's funny because I think back to, I used to sell cut-co back and they used to sell cut-co knives and we used to make hundreds. I remember a cut-co guy come to our house. I used to sell, I mean, we used to, I'd make- They were good knives. They're great knives, yeah. And so that's how I got into learning about this stuff was because then I started training people. I trained 2,000 people by the time I was 25. And when I would sit down to make phone calls, what I would do is I would take a bag of Skittles and I'd make me to make a hundred phone calls. And so instead of saying, all right, I'm gonna wait till I get to the very end and I get the entire bag. It'd be like, all right, when I get my first 10 done, I get three. And I didn't know that this was a thing. I just remember hearing somebody say, it's good to just reward yourself after each one, but I've learned over time, almost unconsciously, I think, my videographer comes over and we'll record like five episodes in a day. And that's to sit down and focus in five episodes in a day is hard, but she brought something up. She's like, do you realize that you celebrate yourself after every episode? Like, and it's to the point where I'll like, move the mic away and go, that was really fucking good. And that's all I'll say to her, but she's like, you notice that you celebrate yourself. And I heard you talk about how dopamine reward systems give you just that little bit more drive to do it. And I was like, oh, this makes so much sense. Why I get so excited to then go to the next one, even though mentally that could have been exhausting on the third episode in a row. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's a great example. I mean, dopamine is the molecule of craving of motivation and possibility. And it has a dark side too. I mean, drugs that throw dopamine through the roof, like cocaine and amphetamine, being the two most common ones that do that, they create a vicious loop where the drug seeking behavior itself and the drug become the only source of high amplitude dopamine release. And so nothing else compares. And I define addiction as a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure. We're not talking about that. We're talking about taking subjective control of dopamine. Dopamine and all the other feel good molecules, not the bad opioids that people get addicted to but the ones that you make yourself, endogenous opioids as they're called dopamine, serotonin, those are all taken care of just fine by all the evolutionary basics, right? Food, warmth when you're cold, cool when you're too warm, sex and mating, all the stuff that we're hardwired to feel pleasure with. But those systems are also available for subjective control. And that's how we've been able to emerge as the dominant species on the planet, right? I mean, there's some other really smart animals but we're the curators of the planet, right? We own the technology, we build the technology. And there's a reason which is that we can attach dopamine and the reward system to anything. And because of the way it segments time, you're able to say, okay, I did an interview, I finished it and I now have some reward or celebration and now it gives me the energy to go another one and another one and another one. If you just batched it by hours, well then you would start to feel exhausted. You would literally start to feel exhausted when you hit whatever mark that was. Really, I don't like to encourage gambling. I've said this several times, so people are gonna start to wonder, I don't have a gambling addiction. I find it fascinating to look at gambling because it's all about dopamine and schedules, but people are attaching their schedule to the external environment. Really good professional poker players play for time. Because if they play for how they're doing, then it's a disaster. So they know how to play well, they have skill but they play for time. So there are cases where you wanna, they actually reward themselves for being able to stop whether or not they're up or they're down at a given time unit because otherwise you're going to be controlled by some external thing like the person took your stack of chips five minutes ago and you're pissed and that can happen to anybody. So they know themselves better than to attach their dopamine to something that they can't control. So in certain cases you wanna attach it to time, in some cases, I mean, this is the way teams can fight their way back from devastating disparity in scores. You look at great comebacks or about attaching dopamine to just, football's a really good example because you get the next first down, the next first down. First downs are dopamine, right? That's what allows you to push down field. And then look at the team that wins and the team that loses. The team that wins, they fought hard. The team that lose in a really good game. The team that loses, they fought hard and look at how much energy the team that won has for sure. That's dopamine. And so you've, I've heard you say that, and this is super interesting when you talk about, especially at the end of the game, if we take that example where one team loses, one team wins, the team that wins, even though they probably put, as we take the Super Bowl, they put as much energy as they possibly could, both teams, which is a ton of adrenaline they're putting in going through their body. But when the dopamine comes in and actually buffers, what I've heard you say, the adrenaline, which then allows them to, it brings it down a little bit. So it allows them to have more energy to keep going, which at the end they could have worked their ass off and have nothing left in the tank. But when they win, it's just like, oh my gosh, I've got all of this energy again. Yep. And we hear a lot. I mean, sports nutrition is really important too. Nowadays, a lot of people are ketogenic, but you can work off glycogen from the liver and muscles. You can work off body fat stores. You can work off fuel. But neural fuel is what we see and what really makes us super impressed by, like the Steve Prompt pre-fontein videos if people don't watch those, they should, if you don't like running, watch a couple of those, like you will go running. It's just, they're amazing because he understood neural energy. And I'm sure he took care of his nutrition and everything else, but look at the examples, David Goggins, Steve Prompt, I mean, they're very rich role. Like there's so many examples in the endurance fields where people somehow intuitively understood that it's, when we hear it's 90% mental, I say, and I say from, because I'm a neuroscientist, I say it's 100% neurobiological, 100%. This is not muscle glycogen that suddenly you get that reserve. People talk about flipping the switch. Oh, they like somehow flip the switch. That's neural. That's not glycogen stores that wasn't your ketone suddenly got liberated into the bloodstream. All that stuff matters. But when you see truly impressive feats of athleticism or you see people who have fought incredibly long bouts with cancer or you see people who've come from absolute abject poverty and managed to get a university degree, that's dopamine, epinephrine and all the other stuff we're talking about. Sports examples just provide a more immediate and concrete example that I think most people can, if not relate to, they can look to and when they know what we're talking about. So that's why we're focusing on that. But it's just a core set of kind of macronutrients or ingredients in the nervous system that allow it to change. And everyone has them. Some people do have clinically low levels of these molecules and depression and things like that. But there's also this loop where behavior triggers the molecules. So this is why and the molecules trigger behavior. So people with very low levels of dopamine or serotonin will experience depression, which unfortunately makes them less likely to get into action to do the things that increase dopamine and serotonin. And so that's why I'm not of the stance that antidepressants and things like that are across the board bad. They can help people out of some very deep trenches. It's just that those aren't the only tools that people should rely on. And many people don't have clinically low levels of those molecules. They need to get into the specific types of action that will allow them to ramp up these levels. So these days you hear a lot about how antidepressants are so terrible, but antidepressants have saved a lot of lives. But ultimately these chemicals were, when I say designed, I mean, they evolved in the nervous system and body to reward certain behaviors and actions and punish others. And we can take control of that process. Yeah. Yeah, I've read an article not too long that said that they think like 61% of depression is misdiagnosed. But I think what's important, what you're saying is that when people actually understand what's happening in their brain and they can understand why they feel the way that they feel because there is this constant conversation between your head and your, between your brain and your body at all points in time. What you're saying is if somebody does happen to get onto depression medication, what I think is important for them to have knowledge like this, to know, all right, now that I'm on this medication, how do I get myself out of this whole versus doing the exact same actions I've been doing that maybe got myself into this whole? Absolutely, and for people that rely too much on supplementation or too much on nutrition, both of which I think are really important and I adopt for my own life, it can also be a problem. I have a friend who's an MD, a medical doctor. He has a great saying. He says, you know, better living through chemistry still requires better living. There's no pill, there's no device, there's nothing that's going to make you learn faster without a cost unless you're also doing the correct things. And I think that the nowadays, unlike 10 years ago, I think there's pretty good general agreement about what the foundations of good mental and physical health are. You know, get sunlight early in the day and then they have to avoid artificial light in the middle of the night. Whatever it is that whether or not you're intermittent fasting, you're vegan or you're carnivore, it doesn't matter to me. Get on a nutrition regimen that allows you to be focused when you need to be focused and sleep when you need to sleep. Good social connection, exercise. I mean, breathing and that we now, I think is pretty well generally accepted, especially after 2020, that having a healthy respiratory system is good and can afford you some resilience and other things. I mean, it now almost sounds redundant. You know, if someone's spending time on Instagram or they're paying attention to what people like you are doing or Jay Shetty is doing and some of the stuff we talk about on my podcast, you know, then this stuff sounds redundant. But for many people, I think they're kind of wondering where are the power tools? The real power is in establishing a really strong foundation. And the really strong foundation comes from practices that are geared toward making sure that the dopamine, epinephrine and serotonin systems and acetylcholine systems that they're there and ready and available for use because you only have to sleep deprive yourself for a few nights before all the stuff that we just talked about will not work. You only have to eat poorly for three or four days in a row and spend too many nights out drinking when you will forget everything you learned and you will have a panic attack three weeks later. So there's this relationship between the high performance stuff, the really leveling up stuff and the foundation. And I've been very fortunate to do some work with US and Canadian special operations. And one thing that's so impressive about people in special operations is that they, sure they spend a lot of time doing really high level super sophisticated, highly trained stuff. It's super impressive. But they spend a lot of time for their entire career on fundamentals and just making sure that their nervous system is ready to do all that other stuff. And I think today there's been a little bit, we hear so much about becoming super human or people of these superpowers that people are underestimating the value of having a really strong foundation on the house. And this is why the work that for instance guys like Matt Walker have done, talking about when, why we sleep. I've never met, we've met once actually, but I think so just to be clear, we don't have any professional relationship. But I think what he did was so powerful because he really just said, look the superpower lies in this thing that we should all be doing very regularly. And I think that you have to have the foundation set. And once the foundation is set, the rest becomes very straightforward. Now if people are very depressed, sleep becomes a problem. Eating becomes either overeating or under eating becomes a problem. So you can socializing becomes a problem. And so you can start to understand why some chemical support might help to get everything scooted back into place. But anyway, I'm kind of editorializing on this here, but I think that high performance is great when you've got all the basics, but the basics themselves, that foundation can take you to exceedingly high levels of performance in all areas of life. And that includes relationship and just living your life. I realize that not everyone's out there trying to hit that next super high rung. A lot of people are, but a lot of people are especially right now coming off 2020. A lot of people are like, look, I just want to go from back of my heels to flat-footed. For sure. The same principles apply. So they can just celebrate feeling flat-footed again. And so it's important because if you start thinking about this and people say, okay, well now this is, I feel like they have a foundation of a little bit of an idea of what we're talking about and how to get that working. But one of the things that's super important in this is to get the acetylcholine in the adrenaline and everything is that they have to have focus to be able to do that. That's right. So for someone that's out there and they want to figure out how to have more focus. One thing that I kind of accidentally just started doing this for a while was when I need to really get something done, like to sit down and script out episodes takes a lot of mental energy for me. Is I have a routine that I stick to and it's I put on my headphones, I play the exact same binarial beat song that's three hours long and I get coffee, which I've heard caffeine helps in that. And I'll chug an entire cup of coffee or tea. I'll have my headphones on, I'll have the song on and then since listening to you talk about it I will literally stare at my screen and try to make my eyes as big as I possibly can to and feel, which is really important now that I've realized feel how the actual room starts to disappear on the outside of my eyes, you know, the in literally just the computer is the thing that I see. And I can feel the actual chemical cocktail start to go. All right, now it's time to go. Yeah, that's great. So caffeine increases at levels of epinephrine and dopamine to some extent a little bit. It's inappropriate doses. It's great, you know, people are really caffeine sensitive. It can make them like, you know, feel like they can't sit down. Too much. And people vary a lot, you know, and or if you're like me, I'm probably pretty caffeine sensitive, but I've just blitzed my receptors for so many years. It's not a good thing to do, but these days I actually drink a lot less coffee. I drink mate or something that's a little bit more even. Yeah, I love your but mate. What's that? Actually, that's my, your but mate has become my focus thing now. It's, it's great. And I have Argentine lineage, so I'm biased there, but it's it's great because it has caffeine and it also has electrolytes and it has this thing called GLP-1, which can stave off hunger. And a little bit of hunger is actually good for focus because it ramps up adrenaline. And, you know, seeking food is one of the primordial ways in which our species learn to focus. Because if you have this idea, if I don't eat, I get lightheaded. That might be true if you have some blood sugar regulation issues, you'd need to eat eventually. But typically not eating is the way that our species went and found food was. So it actually enhances focus. You know, they didn't just walk through the woods like firing arrows off in random directions and hope you hit milk, right? So some level of underlying hunger actually can be good. Hydration's good too. I usually, I usually skip lunch and Dr. David Sinclair is on my podcast and he usually skips lunch as well as what he says. And I noticed if I have the Yorba Mate, the, the headphones, all of that stuff on and then I'll have dinner later on. It's like hyper focus for, and I've heard you talk about for like 90 minutes. It's, I can just go. Yeah. Yeah. David's great. I think the idea of skipping one meal a day really works. That's something I've done. I tend to skip the first meal of the day. It's a little easier for me. The visual focus part is really important. I'm glad you mentioned that because our cognitive focus, our ability to focus and pay attention to one specific thing or two specific things. We can move between two, but to not be scattered and looking at our phone all the time and to do what Cal Newport would call deep work. I'm such a huge fan of his over many years now. So if people haven't seen that, I think that's an amazing book. But that ability comes from an ability of course to limit distractions, but the visual system is the dominant driver on mental focus. And, you know, these two little bits in the front of our face, those are two little pieces of brain. They are the only two pieces of our central nervous system that are outside the cranial vault. The rest is spinal cord and brain, but our eyes, our neural retinas are part of the brain and they're out here in the front of our faces. So that we can know when it's daytime and when it's nighttime, when to be alert and when to be asleep. They're also out here as opposed to someplace else so that we know what to focus on. And so if you're gonna sit down and do work, there's great power in spending a few minutes at the beginning focusing visually on something, anything at the exact distance from that work that you're gonna perform. Now that doesn't mean YouTube or something, although, you know, I enjoy YouTube. I wanna be really clear. I'm not one of these anti-social media people. I'd be a hypocrite if I said that because I use it and I provide content there. But if you focus on like a little crosshatch or your blank screen or at a point on a wall at approximately the same distance, what you're doing is you're creating the tunnel. I actually have a little note. I've never said this to anybody. I hide it every time somebody comes over to my house, but I have a little sticky right above where I do my writing and my deep work to steal the Cal Newport phrase of deep work. And it just says like, find the tunnel, get in the tunnel, stay in the tunnel. And when I find my, I look back to that thing and it's just about, I mean, cause I like you, I've got email, people that need things from me. I've dropped the ball with people. You know, there's anxiety about what I'm not doing. All those things, just to find my way into that tunnel for 90 minutes or so. Cause these 90 minute learning cycles, these ultradian cycles are pretty optimal. And I might spend five to seven, just absolutely aggravating minutes trying to find my way in, but you can, like you said, you can feel it click over. And at that point, a nuclear bomb could go off and I'm not going to stop doing what I'm doing. And I actually learned this when I was in graduate school cause I used to cut brains on this thing called a micro-tome. It's like, it's like a deli slicer. You used to cut brains though you just said? Yeah, I used to cut brains. Yeah, I do, I do. Just casually. Yeah, I still do a lot of, I still do a lot. Yeah, we record from human brains. I mean, we cut brains after, you know, not from live people, the sectioning brain tissue. And there's this, there's a rule. It's like a, the micro-tome is like a deli slicer, but you're cutting brains and you take the little slice of brain, put it in a little dish and you stain it and you put it on your slide, take a picture, whatever it is you're interested in. It's actually very satisfying. And there's a rule. You realize to the average person how crazy this sounds, right? Well, these brains came our way through ethical means. The moment that blade hits the brain, if you stop or move too quickly, you completely damage the tissue and it's very valuable tissue. So you learn to just focus your eyes on this thing and just pull and then, and it's so satisfying to get into that zone. But when, before smartphones, you know, it was much easier to do, but it was still challenging. And so the first couple of slices on this thing were always subpar, but you come out of it and you feel amazing. And people should also take a, it's not just because you're cutting brains. This would also be, you know, typing or working of any kind. It also happens in conversation when you, you know, it takes time to break in. And then you get in the tunnel. And when you leave that, as you said, you want to, after about 90 minutes or so, you want to reward yourself for it, take a little break. People talk about the Pomodoro technique, which I think is like 20 minutes on. 25 on, five minutes off. So that could be great. I think it, you packed two or three of those into a 90 minute cycle. I find during the five minute thing, if I pick up social media, I'm gone. I'm in a different tunnel. And that tunnel, and you know, hats off to them. I have to say, they know what they're doing. They know what they're doing. They know a lot of neuroscience. In fact, there's some folks there. I have not been advising them, but they know their neuroscience because what you want in order to put yourself in the tunnel is a ton of novelty. And there's nothing as novel as a scroll, Australia, Europe, basketball, skateboarding, podcast. I mean, you know, like what's on the road? Like all these things are coming through. They're in a fight. Oh my goodness. Comments, it's, you're literally time traveling in this little tunnel. Of course it pulls you in. When you sit down to write your book or you sit down to do anything else, you're not gonna get the level of novelty because you're literally digging a hole into something conceptually. And social media is throwing at you millions of concepts, which itself is not bad. Like I said, I really enjoy it. But you have to understand what your attentional mechanisms are up against. And I will say this, it's great to be a consumer. I love consuming content. I find the internet to be just an, I'm so happy I'm alive at the time in life, you know, history when I am. There's so much great stuff out there that you can access now. But if you're going to be a consumer, terrific. But if you want to be a consumer and a creator, you're gonna have to get really comfortable with the agitation and boredom that comes from your own deprived little universe of not created yet. But the twist in that is everyone is following the creators. The consumers are following the creators. So there's no way around this puzzle. So getting good at focus using your visual system. And it sounds like you use auditory as well. There's some people, I should finish that statement, getting good at that, the visual system using that, using the auditory system, that's a power tool. So it's great you've done that. With auditory, if you're feeling really ramped up, sometimes too much sound around can be distracting. If you're feeling tired, then you can use the auditory system to wake up your nervous system because music or something, you can draw back focus. Because we wake up from sleep because we hear a loud noise. So auditory cues are very big wake up signals for the brain. Yeah, I've also heard that you can kind of, I've always just put on the same song because it was just easy to put on the same song. But I've also heard that you can almost like, what is it, Pavlov's Dogs, where you just, you're training your brain to know that we're about to go into this. Like I listened to the exact same five songs in a row when I'm stretching to work out. I listened to the exact same song when I'm about to go into different songs, but the exact same song when I'm about to go into work. So is there a sense of that? Is that true? Is what we can literally train your brain to know what it's supposed to do at the next moment? Yeah, I think it's that when you, right, this used to occur more when people listen to entire albums now because of playlists and the way that you can shuffle and the way that programs will self-select for you, or will select for you rather, it's not so common, but it used to be that if you listened to an album, you could anticipate the next song, right as the previous one ended. And if a different song came on, you'd be like, wait, so that's, and that's dopamine. That's time segmenting with dopamine. That's like you're anticipating. Remember, it's about motivation, anticipation and what's coming next. And so if you repeat the same song, that's good. What you're trying to do is get into a bit of a time warp. One thing that I think is really useful for people who are easily distracted is to really pinpoint what you're being distracted by. Is it the feeling that somebody needs you and you're not gonna be available? A lot of people who are like real caretaker types, they feel like, oh my goodness, if somewhere to reach out and I'm not available, whatever. Other people who they find they're cleaning the whole house when they have something important to do. Both those types of people, just by identifying that's what the issue is, then you can make it a bit of a game. I'll sometimes do this. I like a really clean workspace, but I don't always accomplish that. So I've actually recently, I wanna see how focused I can get amidst chaos. Now I don't destroy my house or anything like that, but I just notice how the challenge of not cleaning up the coffee stain on my desk or something is pulling me. But I know you're building a sort of resilience by pushing away from that and being able to refocus. And I learned this actually because several of my science colleagues are incredibly productive, incredibly smart and their offices are incredibly dirty. And it was like, not dirty, but just messy. I was like, how do you work in this place? And I realized they have incredible powers of focus. They don't care that they're in a mountain of books. It's just they don't see it. And they don't see it because they choose to pay attention to something else. So I've been playing this game with myself recently of not trying to have optimal conditions all the time. I think we overstate optimal. I think you talked to Rich Divini. He really just defined this principle really well as it relates to all sorts of domains of performance. When we seek optimal, then the moment we sense 5% off from optimal, we can dissolve into a puddle of tears. Sometimes it's good to train our mind in cognitive endeavors and sports endeavors, et cetera, emotional endeavors in suboptimal conditions, right? And you don't wanna defeat yourself. You don't wanna have the really hard, important conversation when you're two days sleep deprived, but you know what? Sometimes it's good to be able to have the hard conversation when you're exhausted because you get better at doing that sort of thing. For sure. So for people who are out there and you probably get messages all the time because you have a big social media following. I get messages all the time of like, I can't focus. I don't know how to focus. So what's an easy plan for someone listening to all that we just said to go, all right, I need to sit down and need to crank out emails or whatever it is they need to do. How do I go from doing something around the house to all right, I've gotta get down and be super focused right now. Yeah, so I can think of three ways. One is ritualize it, right? And you talked about that. So I'm a big believer in setting one 90 minute work block early in the day. That's when I do my best highly focused work. I try not schedule anything around that. I accept there will be agitation. I accept that there will be noise outside. I just, but I make that 90 minute segment wholly. I just, nothing's gonna get between me and that. And then I try and get another one in the afternoon where it's more creative type work, which tends to, creative work is favored by slightly sleepier states where your mind isn't quite so rigid. So I try and do that. So one way is to ritualize it and set it for 90 minutes. I use the program freedom, where it locks you out of everything on the internet. Oh, nice. On a computer or phone? I'm working mainly on the laptop. I think it also is for the phone. So freedom is great. You tell yourself, but I have to look something up. You write it down and you look it up later. It's fine. I look up a lot of stuff. So it's there. The other one, which I, so that's number one. Then that's what people really should establish on a regular basis, if they're interested in creating anything. The other is deadlines. Those are great. A lot of people like myself will wait till a deadline hits. Here comes the adrenaline. You're in the tunnel because now what you've done is you've created something that supersedes all other demands. And we have a social contract where we can say, either my kid needs something or I have a deadline, right? Obviously the kid thing is more important, but I don't have kids so that excuse doesn't work for me. And I've never pretended to have them just so I could, you know, get out of doing things. So having a deadline is great. That'll put you in the tunnel. Much more so actually than having a big incentive, right? You know, many people have shown that people are more willing to work for what they, to avoid loss than to gain. So, but the one that falls in between is really the one that I think is overlooked often, which is not just ritualizing these work schedules and optimizing them, not just having deadlines where it's external, but where you deliberately create a situation that is on the face of it, not consistent with optimal performance. So that means you're in the airport or you're ready to leave work and provided that there's no one waiting for you, you sit down and you punch out 45 minutes worth of really good text. Because you know you can, but the problem with the optimal zone of 90 minutes and you know what that's like, that's a lot like needing everything to be perfect in order to work out. Chances are over time, especially as you become more successful, you're not gonna be able to optimize as many things. People don't realize this, but this is actually a tool that I incorporate. I have a good friend who was also in the SEAL teams named Pat Dossett and he'll sometimes say like, can you run on Thursday at 4.30 a.m.? I'm like, oh my God, 4.30 a.m.? Like I can, but, and I'm thinking, that'll be a lot of fun. We've had some great swims and runs early in the morning. Those guys love early morning and cold water. So sure, I'm not gonna run as well as I would at 10 a.m. That's when I'm really warmed up, but doing that actually has its own virtue because you're training your body to be responsive to your demands, your mental demands at any time. So you can create a nervous system that is primed for success in optimal conditions and in suboptimal conditions. I actually have experienced this in workouts too. I love working out late mid morning. You know, it's clear I'm warmest about three hours after waking up after I have two cups of coffee and this and that. But then if you don't have that, then all other workouts feel like they're subpar. So what I've started playing with now is just I try and schedule for different times a day so my nervous system is always ready to work. And that way that works much better with the kind of schedule I have with a lab and a podcast and all these other things. So I think creating some variability in your schedule is also good. And I don't think we ever want to become so attached to a regimen that we can't perform outside of that regimen. And I think that's one that I'm glad that people are starting to talk about, but that certainly I could incorporate more of in my own life and I've seen how amazing it is when someone's like, hey, I got this thing to do before dinner, I just need like 35 minutes and they flip open the laptop, I have a friend, she's a designer and she can just like drop into the zone like how do you do that? She's like, oh, it's called having three children. She's just learned how to do it amidst chaos and she's extremely successful because she can enter the tunnel really quickly and exit it. One thing we should probably say is that exiting the tunnel is important too. If you're gonna sit down to dinner and your brain is still churning on the previous thing, you're not really available for social connection and that's not just bad for the people in your life, that's also bad for you because that's where you reset in theory. And I'm somebody that struggles with this a lot. I go deep into the trench and it might take me two hours to stop thinking about it. Yeah, me too. So these are things that obviously it's a process, you practice them, but learning how to pivot is really good. In certain communities, they use physiology to pivot. So nowadays it's kind of customary, not customary, but more and more I'm seeing meetings where they're like, okay, everybody, we're gonna do some breathing, we're all gonna drop in, but there's no offload. And so when I finish a 90 minute work block, I actually will do a big fan of these physiological size double inhale, exhale as a way to calm down. And I'll do that and then I'll go out onto my porch and I try and get a big vista, see a horizon and really expand my view and then think about what I wanna do next. Cause otherwise my brain is still subconsciously processing something. I'm on a call with somebody and they're saying something and then I'm asking, wait, sorry, I'm just not in the call. And it's not because I have poor powers of attention and I think a lot of people think they have ADHD, maybe they do, but I think a lot of people are thinking they're so distracted because they've never learned how to get in the tunnel and they've never learned how to stay there and they've never learned how to exit the tunnel. That's super interesting. And so I think we need to think more about practices about exiting the tunnel. There's not a lot of science on that, but there's a little bit. And that has a name, it's called task switching. And being really good at life means being really good at task switching. For sure. Yeah, I'm good friends with Aubrey Marcus and I know you guys were texting this morning and I know you were on his podcast and one of the things you were talking about is sitting down to write, which I started, I hate emails more than anything else in the world. Like I have an assistant that just does my emails for me. Like I'm like, this is the first thing I want you to have and then she does other things as well, but she's amazing at it, but there are certain emails that I have to respond to, right? And one of the things that I got from what you guys said is I'll sit down knowing that I gotta do emails and I feel this a massive amount of resistance to it and I'll sit down and I will just make myself type. Today is Thursday, I'm wearing a gray shirt and you talk about when you feel the resistance just kind of ease your way in where if someone's writing a book, like I'm in the middle of writing a book, sit down and just type. Random stuff doesn't have to be anything and that resistance tends to go away like you're saying that five to seven minutes and then you're kind of just in the flow at that point. Yeah, a lot of it is, that's a great practice. I'm gonna start to adopt some of your practices. There are, really, because a lot of it is motor, just shifting the brain over to a new sequence of motor commands, right? I mean, we all have this kind of Walden Pond fantasy, right? I'm gonna go to Walden and I'm gonna just spend time there. I'm gonna get this perfect little cabin in the woods and I'm gonna write, no, you're not. Your iPhone's gonna be there or your Android phone, excuse me. Whatever it is you use is gonna be there and you're gonna have the entire universe there with you. Forget it. That Freedom program really does help but getting into the motor action really helps and I think that you also point out something really important which is that, do not expect to, well, let me phrase this differently. You don't walk into the gym and expect to hit your PR on the first set. You just don't, you warm up. The brain needs warm ups, especially when you're pivoting between different activities because creative work is very different than strategy implementation. Strategy implementation is you know what you wanna do, you implement it. Creative work is, I need to come up with a strategy. I'm gonna start rearranging things in my mind. It takes time and we all have natural proclivities towards certain things and not others. I have a bulldog, he's great at chewing, he doesn't fetch, right? We are bulldogs, retrievers, whip-its, we do it all. That's what's so beautiful about the human nervous system. Some of us are more optimized for certain things, some for others. Developmental experience shapes us somewhat. Sure, we have different physical attributes but the fact of the matter is that we really can do creative work and focused work, business work, email. Those are all very different cognitive commands and here I'm really, and again I've never met him but I'm just a huge fan of what Cal Newport has done and he has this phrase that really rings in my mind and it comes to mind especially now which is that context switching is deadly for productivity. And when you move your eyes from the book that you're writing to your day planner, that's a context switch. And the most dramatic context switch is to social media because now you're actually saying, you know what? I'm gonna let somebody else's context drive my context which is fine, that's why we watch movies, that's why we listen to comedy or go to concerts, that's beautiful but when you're trying to be productive you have to control the context. And one way I do that, now I'm really revealing all my dorky little things is like I've been working on this book for far too long and there are a couple of people that I'm working with that I'm accountable to not because they're saying, hey, where's the book? They're saying that also but because I really like them and I care about those relationships. You know, I have a lot of relationships in my life I care about and oftentimes I'll sit down to write and I'm thinking, oh, my lab needs this from me or my dog needs that from me. So I actually will bring to mind the specific people that I'm working with while I'm in that breaking in phase. I'll bring up the document and I'll think about it is embarrassing to reveal but I think about, you know, I really enjoy working with Jim and Ariel and I'm so like, I really like and suddenly I've got the energy to work on this thing and not think about all the other stuff. And so the brain is very contextual. It tends to think, what are the people, places and things that hover around this particular endeavor? And if you're inviting everybody into that process you don't stand a chance. But we also have to remember that we can't be completely tunnel vision, right? Those people, we know them, I won't name names but there are some very famous people who are exceedingly tunnel vision. They are the ultra ultra high performers. And most of the time, not always, but most of the time people either don't like them or they don't like themselves or both, typically both. And so if you wanna have a balanced life and a super productive life you have to learn how to enter the tunnel, exit the tunnel and enter the tunnel is also I guess what I'm talking about is like you create the tunnel, then you enter the tunnel and then you have to stay there and then you have to exit. Like anything else, it's a process. And I think neuroscience has things within it that point to each one of these but they mainly are the elements of focus by definition is non-distraction. So we think too often about I'm so distractible. Think about focus, don't think about how distractible you are. Do take on practices like the ones you described to incorporate focus. And then we tend to think, oh, I obsess or something. Well, develop practices to expand your context. And the best way that I know to expand context is the same way I know is the same as the best way to get into focus, which is use your visual system. When you view a horizon or you expand your field of view, you literally start batching your assessment of time differently. And so the visual system can be a great ramp in and out of what we're calling focus or work. Love it. The only thing I would add is that the expanding your view can be practiced also, just like you can do it away from the actual work, which is you just try and see your physical body without moving your head or eyes while in the environment you're in. So you're trying to see the ceiling, the floor and the walls and yourself in the environment. And that's we call it panoramic vision, but as you dilate your vision, you pull off the accelerator of your stress system a little bit. When you focus, you're hitting the accelerator a little bit. And so your brain is amazing because it can contract and expand your view literally, but it also can contract and expand the way that you slice up time. And so I like the idea of your binaural beats practice because I don't know a lot of the science around binaural beats, but it's clear that metronomes or beats are the way that we batch time. And so if you go on vacation in a place where there's no internet connection, your day becomes the unit of time, right? So much can happen today, right? But if you're in a place where there's a lot of other elements like a typical day in civilization, electronic elements, then you're slicing time up differently. The best way to explain this perhaps is if you've ever been in line at the grocery store and you're very relaxed, a person in front of you could be returning an item, whatever, you're fine. Because when you're very relaxed, the external world seems to move either at the rate that you are or more quickly. If you're tired, everything seems like you wake up, oh my God, I've got so much going on, you open that email, I guess you don't know, someone else open your email. And there's a ton there, I'm jealous. And there's a ton there, you're like, oh my goodness. And that's because you're batching time in larger increments. But when you're stressed, like you have to get home or someone's waiting on you and the person in front of you is taking some time and checking out, they need to get a return on an item or a price on an item feels like forever because you're slicing up time very finely. So it seems like everything else is moving very slowly. Yeah, I had a friend who was in a car accident and he said it rolled over a few times and he can literally see the glass in slow motion. And so the way you're explaining it, it's almost like, I have a lot of cameras when I shoot all of my stuff. So it's like all of these cameras keep getting better and better. And it used to be like 30 frames per second and 60 frames and now they're up to like 180 frames per second. So what you're saying is when you're at that height and stated when you're super focused, it actually is like your brain going from 30 frames per second to now it's taking in 180 frames per second. It's more information's coming in in the exact amount of time. That's right. And in combat sports, there's this experience that people describe of it looks like things are coming in in slow motion but they're moving really fast. They're out timing people. And there is something kind of special about the ability to segment time really finely. But if you do that in a state of stress, then you don't actually have smooth muscle control because of the way that stress shuttles fuels to the center of the body. You kind of lose peripheral blood flow. And so people in a lot of high performing communities not just combat sports, but people who are involved in all sorts of, advanced warfare, these kinds of things, they learn how to be very alert in their mind but relaxed in the body. And we hear so much about unifying the brain and body like you wanna like link the brain and body. Well, that's great when you're feeling great. That's not great when you're stressed but the stress, the epinephrine, high levels of epinephrine in the brain and high levels of focus with a really supple responsive nervous system and body out here, that's the matrix, right? That's I see your punches coming in like arcs even though they're actually straight trajectories. That arching, that visualization, that's panoramic vision. So people are staying in panoramic vision. And maybe we could talk about this in the kind of a workflow mode or sport. When you blink, you reset time. There's a beautiful study published in current biology as a cell press journals, excellent journal. And they showed that when you blink, it's linked to the dopamine and other systems in the brain and you actually reset time perception. So one way actually you can get better at focusing is you don't want your eyes to dry out but you can practice not blinking while looking at the page. If you feel like, okay, this sentence, it's almost there. I'm almost there. Actually try not to blink. Now you don't want your eyes to cross, your eyes to dry out, the people do suffer from dry eye, et cetera. I've been teased various times about being a non-blinker and people like, that means you're a sociopath. Okay, for the record, there is no data, there are no data, excuse me, that blinking and non-blinking relates to stress or sociopathy, but guess what blinking does relate to? What fatigue? So I have a colleague at Stanford, David Spiegel, who's a clinical expert in hypnosis. He's our associate chair of psychiatry. And I said, what is this whole thing that you guys do when you hypnotize people for medical treatments and pain relief and where you have them look up and then close their eyes and their eyes roll back. And he said, well, simple, in that brainstem, the areas that control our levels of alertness or calmness, there are connections to the areas of the brain that control the eyes but also to control the eyelids. So we take it for granted that when we get sleepy our eyes start to flutter and we kind of do this, right? So when we're really alert, what happens? Our eyelids stay open. And so if you wanna focus, learning to keep your eyes open really helps. Now you don't wanna be like this, you wanna be relaxed. But there's so many basic things about the eyes, these little shutters that we call eyelids are linked to our levels of alertness and alertness and focus go hand in hand. And you have to be very, very stressed before you can't focus. People are like, well, I don't wanna be so agitated that I can't focus. That's called not wanting to be agitated. Being able to focus relates to your ability to keep those shutters open, your eyelids, and literally just focus on what you need to do and the rest of the brain will follow. Yeah, low level stress is actually, I've heard you say chronic stress is not good but low level stress can be good for these things. That's right. So low levels of stress defined as blips in your cortisol and epinephrine, that go up and go down, do many things. First of all, they liberate killer cells from the immune system. People always say, oh, stress destroys your immune system? No, when you stress, stress, stress, you ward off infection because stress is the way that your nervous system tells your spleen and your other organs to deploy killer cells. And then when you finally relax, you go on vacation or the final exam is over. The thing is, that's when you get sick because your immune system shut off. Now, you don't wanna be in chronic stress. I think the real power is to be able to get yourself into states of alertness and then toggle down, learn how to like hit the, there are two ways to slow down in a car, right? You come off the accelerator and you can hit the break. You wanna learn how to do both. But stress itself does all sorts of wonderful things to the nervous system and levels of focus, your ability to learn and remember. And that's the utility of stress. But we're talking about level two or level three stress, not panic where you can't tap the keys on the keyboard or where you're quaking while you're giving public presentation. But we've so overemphasized the need to be calm all the time. Cool, calm and collected comes from being well versed and practiced in what you're trying to do. It doesn't just come, you don't get that. There are no freebies and I wanna sound harsh, but it's like, these are biological rules that I think that once we're honest about and then we can confront them much more easily. And in addition, there are great tools to so-called hit the break or come off the accelerator. And we're talking about using vision, dilate your vision to come off the accelerator, focus your vision, blink a little bit less, although you have to blink sooner or later in order to focus more. And the hitting the break type stuff, the ultimate hitting the break is sleep. And then there are other ones like breathing practices and other things that allow you to truly calm down. Yeah, there's one, if people are in the brain hacking world or the neurotropic world, there's one that's the average person doesn't really hear much about, which is nicotine. And then I've, I've, I don't- For ramping up in focus. Right, so yeah, so there's, so what my best friend one time was like, hey, we gotta get a lot of stuff done when you're working on stuff. He's like, just take these one of these little nicotine tablets, like half of one. That'll do it. And you'll notice the focus and we're not, I'm not condoning people just go and start smoking cigarettes or that can, cause they can be very addicting from what I've heard. But what I've heard you say is that acetylcholine, the shape of it's very similar to nicotine it actually attaches to the same receptors, correct? Yeah, so acetylcholine binds two kinds of receptors. One are called muscarinic receptors. The other are nicotinic receptors. So nicotine, the substance, whether or not it comes from a cigarette or nicorette or nowadays people have these nicorette dip toothpicks and things like that, you can buy nicotine. It will increase acetylcholine. Now I'm, first of all, I'm not a physician. I always just say no one should adopt or remove any medical treatment, or pill or potion or anything unless they've consulted a board certified physician. And I don't just say that to protect me. I really say that to protect people because some people are very nicotine sensitive. It's like in, well, maybe or maybe not in high school someone brought out a can of dip and it got passed around, that's nicotine, right? Three of the five guys that were there turned Kermit the frog green, okay? Kermit the frog green, right? Some people respond to nicotine feeling pretty good. Other people literally feel sick. It's like a poison. And they vomited pretty soon after. So people vary and they vary in their dose response. For certain, you know, certainly not for kids but for certain like demanding high workflow type environments. Sure, some people benefit from it. Other people, it's too much agitation. I have friends who dip nicorette all day long. Won't name names. These are very, very successful people and they love it for its stimulatory effects but I also know people who drink six espresso a day. So the best thing is to be able to access these things without pharmacology but that's the reason that works. So that's gonna give you focus. And then of course there are a lot of people that are due a ton of things to get defocus. You know, alcohol, THC and those obviously, you know they're legal in certain contexts and not in others. The problem is they don't have really good on and off switches. You can't suddenly go from two glasses of wine in to being able to focus again. Some people are very sensitive to alcohol. Some people are very prone to addiction. Other people are not. I've never really liked alcohol. So if tomorrow or today all the alcohol in the universe were gone, I wouldn't even notice. But some people would be devastated. And so it really varies. But if all the caffeine in the world was gone. Yeah, let's not talk about that. Let's not talk about that. So the thing that I love that you say though is it kind of put in a context when I realized like a little bit of stress is actually not a bad thing, right? And one thing that you said is a lot of times when you're feeling a lot of frustration or agitation towards doing something, it actually means at that point in time, you're doing it right. That's right. Yeah, you're getting the chemical signals that your brain needs, that your nervous system needs to make the changes so that you can come back next time and do it reflexively. The brain and nervous system has essentially two modes. One is to do things reflexively. So that's anything that you were born into the world already knowing how to do like breathe or heartbeat or digestion. Babies don't have to learn that. So that's purely reflexive. But also once you learn how to walk, you don't think right foot, left foot. Yeah. Okay, unless you have an injury and you're relearning. When you learn, you have to think about three things. Duration, how long to do something. Path, what should I do? And in what sequence and then outcome. What are the results as I'm doing this? And that takes work. That's the agitation. Now the goal of course is once you have that agitation repeatedly, you get things right. You have some sleep in between your brain rewires. It becomes reflexive. You'll get the Pink Floyd song and you'll play it reflexively eventually. And you'll be able to look back and like, I can't believe that was so difficult. But when you're in the duration path outcome analysis mode, then it takes work and there's no way around that. There's no pill that will do that. I have a lot of friends that work. I have a few friends rather that work at Neural Link. And it's super exciting what they're doing. You put chips in the brain, you stimulate neurons. You're gonna get brain changes in some direction presumably to heal diseases hopefully first and then maybe learn languages and things of that sort. But we still don't know the neural code underlying language learning. What we understand are these very broad neuro-transmitter systems. So it is going to be many, many years. I'll bet all my limbs on this that it'll be more than 10 years before you can accelerate a process simply by dialing in the right activity of neurons. It's going to be first presumably by increasing the amounts of certain things like acetylcholine. That day will come when you could do that with a machine. How you can do it through the sorts of practices we're talking about. You can do it through pharmacology. I mean, a lot of the ADHD drugs, they are amphetamine. Let's just be honest. Adderall, those things. They increase dopamine and epinephrine. They teach the brain how to focus by increasing levels of alertness and agitation. Now, some people benefit from them greatly. Other people not. Unfortunately, there's a lot of recreational use of those. And if you rely on pharmacology too heavily, the problem is you will always need it. The systems don't care if you're getting it from a pill or the systems in the brain or from your own motivation and focus. So that's a problem, that's drug dependency. So I think that a lot can be done by setting the foundation of sleep, nutrition, light, et cetera and developing practices, none of which cost anything. They're all zero cost. They take a little bit of work. And sure, if you were to take an Adderall, chances are you're gonna be in the tunnel. Chances are you're also gonna have a much harder time getting in that tunnel the next day unless you take Adderall. And so that's a problem. And there are other issues with ramping up these things too high or too low. So anyway, that's a little bit of a mention about pharmacology. Because I think it's always in the back of people's mind, what should I take? The first question should always be, what should I do and what should I not do to optimize learning and performance? Then you can have the conversation, what should I take? What should I consider taking? Occasionally, or not at all. And then there's the people who probably, there's some real clinical need out there. Some people have real ADHD or real clinical depression or mania, so. Yeah, I would say it's probably once every two months where I'm like, all right, I'm gonna take a little bit of nicotine because it's four o'clock. I feel my mental energy is 100% gone but I just need to get something. And I'm like, I gotta crank out an hour of really good work, whatever it is. And it tends to help, but it's not like something that, and I do know people that take it way too often. And you can tell that there's a little bit of a reliance of it which actually brings me to a thought that I'm really curious of, that I don't think I've ever heard you talk about. Very rarely who people talk about is, is, you know, the importance of our thoughts but the chemicals that those release and what they create in the body. And has there been any studies done on, you know, people say misery loves company, right? So it's people that are just miserable and miserable and they've been miserable for years and they have this feeling and these chemicals that are inside the body. Is there any studies done on the body being addicted to certain chemicals? So even though somebody doesn't wanna be miserable anymore, the feeling is just so comfortable and so normal to them that they put themselves in that state because it's just what their body is chemically used to having at all points in time. Yeah, that's a really good question. So there's an interesting study done by a very controversial guy named Robert Heath. These were studies that were published mainly in the 1960s. You couldn't do them now. Where they took humans and planted them with electrodes in their brain so drill down below the skull. These weren't people that had epilepsy. These were just people that volunteered for these studies. So in my lab, we've recorded from human brains. We use patients of epilepsy that have consented to us exploring fear and other things. These are studies where Heath and colleagues went in and literally stuck electrodes in the brain and gave people buttons so they could, you know, press button A, B, C or D to stimulate different areas of the brain. And they simply asked, where do you like to stimulate? So they'd press one button and the person would go into a rage. This is actually how the brain works. It's crazy, like rage. And they'd, you know, they turn that one off and they'd say, well, that didn't feel good. They'd press another one, they'd feel drunk or happy or you'd think that the area that they would like to stimulate would be the one that causes happiness. But actually the number one area of the brain across all these subjects that people elected to self-stimulate given the option was an area called the central median nucleus of the ventral midline thalamus. And the subjective experience that they had was mild frustration and anger. Now, that's interesting and kind of says something about our species in general. Fast forward. So those days were done in the 60s. Fast forward to 2018, a graduate student of my lab named Lindsay Sillet published a paper in Nature showing that even small animals, that's in a fearful situation of like a predator looming in to grab to get it. We don't use real predators, we use virtual predators, but mice don't have great vision so we can trick them pretty easily. Mice will switch from a fear mode to a confrontational mode. They will literally stand in the face of fear if you stimulate the equivalent brain area in the mouse brain. And we've done some experiments on humans exploring sort of similar types of things about how fear and various processes of anxiety are housed in the brain. The net export from all of this, what to take away from all this is that we have areas of the brain that give us the sensation and the subjective experience of being frustrated and angry and they have connections to the dopamine system. So anger, frustration, and I would argue complaining too but I'm kind of inserting that too, are internally reinforced. And that's something that we should just be aware of. I don't think that means that we're wired to be miserable. I don't think that means that we like being miserable. I think that being miserable and complaining and feeling frustrated has a rewarding element to it. And so as a biologist or if anyone wants to think about this stuff scientifically, you don't wanna get too far outside the margins of what this means but what it probably means is because this circuitry exists in mice and exists in humans is that this frustration circuit probably served us well in some regard at some point. Now, there was probably a time, let's just say 2,000 years ago where we were short on food, weather was terrible and we needed to do some serious digging to find water. We need to do stuff. And if you kind of dug into the ground and you hit stone and you just were frustrated and you quit, well then we wouldn't be here today, right? They wouldn't have had children and they wouldn't have had children and we wouldn't be here today. If you can link frustration to a sense of reward, well then you go seeking errors. So this is kind of an error seeking mechanism. So I'm not just trying to put rose-colored glasses on this but I think that people that are complaining and they're frustrated and misery loves company, they're caught in a loop of they're getting just enough reward that they're continuing to turn around in a circle and it feels, it almost feels kind of good. We see a lot of this in the poor behavior out there, right? Especially on social media, see people getting into this, these battles on social media or the various elements of people like gotcha culture kind of stuff where one side says this, the other side says that and it feels like a victory but I think that outside the legal system and the proper channels for working through things in society, we are seeing a lot more of this and it's just something to be aware of. And I don't think it's terrible. I think that when we're feeling frustrated that's a sign to us that we need to adjust our behavior but we can't get caught in the tide pool of just going around and around and seeking frustration. I saw this a lot last year where there was a lot of anxiety in the world, understandably. But then the shedding of anxiety became its own kind of thing. It became its own long discussions about things for which there was really nothing to do at that moment. And so I think we all have to be careful not to get stuck in those little traps. Our nervous system has great accelerators and ability to push us out of ditches of different kinds, psychological ditches and physical ditches but it also has these little traps set in it because if they're not used properly they can lead to great dysfunction. And that's what I would say about dopamine and addiction, right? That the same dopamine circuit exists to allow us to learn and create great works of music and science and entertainment and information, et cetera, as lead to addiction. It's just a matter of degrees. How often you're spending time in that circuit? Yeah, yeah. So you're familiar with Dr. Joe Dispenza? I know of him. People have asked me about his work. I confess, so I'm really bad about this. I confess I spend so much time reading science and stuff and I know a little bit of who's out there and what's out there. So people have mentioned him to me but I'm not familiar with his work. Yeah, I'm curious. So I can't really comment on him or his work specifically. So I'll kind of give you an idea of what I'm curious about with what he says coming directly from you because he's deals in neuroscience but I don't think he says in depth anywhere near as in depth as you are. So he talks about thoughts and I talk about thoughts a lot. Thoughts are chemical or electrical signals that happen to your brain and I want you to either tell me if this is correct or if there's different pieces, not saying that he's right or wrong but just the actual mechanism of how all of this works. Thoughts happen and then there's a chemical messenger from your brain to your body which he says are neuropeptides which then make your body create hormones but I've heard you say that hormones actually take longer. Like sometimes hormones create, it takes longer for a hormone to be made. Yeah, and then the body is then communicating back with the brain saying, yeah, this is the way we're feeling. So like an example would be if we've ever had a sexual thought and then the thought turns our body, ramps our body up and then our body is like, yep, we're feeling this way and there's like a circle between it. Is that all chemically and correct or is, I'm just curious the way coming from your side of exactly how that whole system works between thought to chemical signal to body feeling a certain way to talking back to the brain again. Okay, yeah, this is an important theme because it comes up in reference to someone who's work I am familiar with which is the book, The Body Keeps the Score is like amazing name for a book, like took the best name for any book ever. Thank you very much. And he's on the best solo. Yeah, it's a great book. Every single week. I heard that book has like just such a long, long arc of success. 200 years from now, people will be like, have you read this book? Yeah. It's a great tell for a book. It's focused mainly on somatization of trauma and some healing that can take place. I believe he's a psychiatrist. Yes. Through focusing on the body. So there are a couple of elements here that I think we can accept as universal truths. One is that the brain and body are connected through this thing we call the nervous system. That the brain has the opportunity to impact the body. There's a simple way we could do that. If right now an alarm goes off in the building, we're gonna deploy adrenaline from our drenals. And that's because we heard the alarm with our ears and our auditory system, which is up here and our drenals are behind our kidneys in our lower back. As well, if you eat something, it makes you feel sick or you eat something and it's very sugary. There's a signal sent from your gut via the vagus nerve to the brain. Dopamine is released. And guess what? You're gonna want more of that sugary thing or you're gonna want less of that thing that made you feel nauseous. It's not dopamine if you feel nauseous. But anyway, so it's bi-directional, it's two-way street. So the link between brain and body is real. Now, I always say there are five, there are two things the nervous system does generally. Reflexive action and duration path outcome type of stuff we talked about before. There are really five things that it does, right? You have sensations, which is light and sound and stuff bombarding your nervous system and the conversion of those like photons of light and sound waves like real physical entities into neural signals and chemical signals. That's a category of nervous system job. The next one are perceptions, which are whichever one of those sensations you happen to be paying attention to. So I wasn't paying attention to a moment ago, but now I'm feeling my left elbow on the arm of this chair that happened to be sitting on and now I'm perceiving it. But it was happening all along, I was sensing all along. Okay, then there are emotions, we can talk about those. And then there are behaviors, right? So moving my arms up and down or moving my mouth, whatever it is. And then there are thoughts. And thoughts are complicated. We don't really know how to define thoughts in the nervous system yet. So I would say it's still early days to really define what a thought is. Thoughts have an element of perception. We have to be able to anchor our attention to something specific, but they tend to be perceptions on things that include the past, the present or future or some combination of those, right? So we don't really know what thoughts are. And unfortunately there are not good ways in the laboratory where I could, I mean, I could bring you into the laboratory, we could put electrodes in your brain or we could- Let's do it. If you let us, you know, or we could put you in a scanner and we could wire up your body too. And we could say, okay, think about a red apple or something like that. But I don't actually know that that's what you did because you might think red apple and then somebody that you're looking for to seeing this evening. So I don't know if that's a pure thought or not. We don't have a way to measure thoughts. So I think it's a bit of a stretch to say that thoughts control hormones, control the brain, but I like the idea that people are talking about a bi-directional relationship between brain and body that's powerful. And some of it is conscious and some of it is not conscious or subconscious. One of the best examples of not conscious ways in which our brain is being driven by our body is the sugar example. There are beautiful data showing that if you ingest sugar, even if you don't taste it, they've done this. You numb it or you put hidden sugars, which are in many foods. You have neurons in your gut that sense sugar as well as other things and send a signal through a nerve pathway to your dopamine system. And you will crave more sugar even though you can't taste it. So you are sugar seeking, not just because it tastes good, but because your gut is craving more of it. The same is true. You also amino acid seek and crave. So those are subconscious. You're not aware that that's happening. And even if I tell you, you're not aware when it's happening. Okay. So that's one. The other conscious ways where, yes, if you were to close your eyes and do a visualization of something or somebody that you really love, chances are you're gonna deploy some serotonin and some endogenous opioids and some dopamine in your brain and you're gonna have a feel good cocktail swimming around in your brain and your body will respond to that as well. You'll feel dilation of the periphery, of it giving more blood flow to the periphery, all those things. If it's a sexual thought, you'll have the whole response that associated with that. If you think about food, you'll have the responses associated with that. So we are very Pavlovian in that sense, right? That how we think really does shape our physiology. But it's not clear exactly how that process works yet. And I think that the reason why there's been more progress made on the trauma side of it is that it really has that community of people that treat trauma and particularly psychiatric community have embraced the fact that people do tend to hold their trauma both in the brain and body. Now, I'm not a big believer in the idea that you hold your trauma in your left knee, let's fix your left knee and then this horrible thing that happened to you three years prior is gonna disappear, forget it. No, I'll take a hard stance on that. Let's talk about that and show me the example. Show me even just the anecdotal data of somebody that got their knee fixed. Sure, you'll feel better if you're not in pain, but can you erase a sexual assault trauma by fixing somebody's knee because their knee hurts? No, that's disrespectful to people's experience. What you wanna understand is that the brain and nervous system are connected and sure an experience could be associated with a body part. But I get a little bit, as you can tell, I get a little bit like a little bit of epinephrine gets deployed in my system, not a lot, just a little. When I hear that like everything is somaticized, you can do a lot from the neck up and the best example I have, I'll back this with data, is that I happen to know people that have had their limbs blown off north of the knee. Do they not feel, of course, they have feelings about that experience, but they're every bit as cognitively connected as other people. People have all their limbs removed. So there is something special about the real estate in here. And I think it's wonderful that we're embracing the body as a powerful element within the nervous system and how to steer our nervous system. But the real estate, including the eyes, which is part of the brain from here up, is special. And we know that because if you have a lesion up here, oftentimes it can change your entire personality. Whereas if I cut off my right hand, I'll change, but my personality isn't gonna change. And I'll still feel the same about this point. I'm curious about you said visualization. I feel like people are starting to talk about visualization a lot. I know you said you have a colleague that deals with hypnosis and stuff. I've heard people can visualize playing the piano and the parts of their brain that play the piano will start to grow. Maybe not as much as someone actually sits down and plays the piano. I've heard of, I think it's like the back in the 30s that the Germans in the Olympics, they had all of their runners go and run and then they visualized it. And they said that when they were at night, their brain was still doing the exact same motions. Brain doesn't know the difference between, people are saying this like crazy now and I'm curious the actual truth or non-truth behind it, of when you visualize something, it is the same in your brain as when you're actually physically doing it. Yeah, so it comes close. So a couple of things. One is some people are very good at visualization. Some people are terrible at it. There's a guy that would, it sounds like I'm only mentioning Stanford studies but he was at Stanford, Roger Shepard, did beautiful studies on visualization, spatial manipulating objects in space. So you might imagine a three-dimensional triangle looks like a pyramid and flipping upside down. Some people can do that far better than others. Some people can do that. They're just more auditory focused. Other people have more of a kinesthetic sense which is a beautiful thing. I've had somebody tell me, a neuroscientist tell me, I think in feels, I'm like, what does that mean? And they told me that when they feel something, they feel at first in their gut, then in their head. Some people feel it first up here. I think we differ. That's probably another point I should have made before is I think that sometimes the seesaw is tilted a little bit more towards the body, sometimes a little bit more towards the brain. Some people are just literally more in their heads than in their bodies. And animals, I think dogs are really wonderful because they do seem to be more like holistically connected. It's probably the first and last time I'll ever use that phrase, but holistically connected because it doesn't really mean anything, but it does seem that they're very aware of how of their body in space because space is a big thing to dogs. Like who gets space is everything because they don't think in terms of bitcoins or US dollars or euros. So space is the unit of ownership, right? So they probably think more in space units. So there's a, I would say that there's a definite way in which certain people are gonna be more oriented towards body stuff and certain people are gonna be more oriented towards brain stuff. Some people are gonna be better at visualization than others. Now in terms of practicing something in mental rehearsal, there are some studies showing that mental rehearsal can improve actual physical performance. When you look at the brain in sleep, in particular in REM sleep, rapid eye movement sleep, and that's gonna be the sleep that predominates in the second half of night. It's gonna be associated with kind of emotionally rich dreams and this kind of thing. That sleep is when you replay events from the previous day and the previous day, especially if they have an emotional load to them. And there are beautiful studies that were done by Bat Wilson's lab at MIT showing that spatial navigation. So if you have to, this is the first time I've ever been in this building, I'll go to sleep tonight and in the second half of REM sleep, I'll bet you that the neurons in my brain that code like the relative position of this room, the restroom and the elevator and the parking lot, those are kind of the key elements I remember coming in. I know where they are relative to one another. Now tonight in sleep, my brain will decide whether or not it's important that I remember it or not. And that could be attached to whether or not something good or bad happened coming up from the parking lot or they're going back to our earlier example of suddenly there were an earthquake, we are in California after all. Knock on wood, I'm a little bit superstitious. If there were an earthquake. We're really high up. Yeah, we're really high up, we are way up here. You can bet I'm gonna remember that sequence forever. Because again, it's this highlighter on this whole experience. So visualization can be useful. Nothing is as good as actual practice. The thing is a visualization means you can get more practice. Now there's a tool that I think is perhaps more valuable that hasn't been discussed as much which is the use of non-sleep deep rest or 20 to 30 minute naps, shallow sleep after a learning episode. So this is a study that was published in Cell Reports. So the Cell Press Journal again, excellent journal. When I say that, I say that because they are great folks over at Cell Press Journal but these are like carefully peer reviewed studies. There's no company that has a vested interest. These are funded by your tax dollars. And what they did is they had people learn a spatial memory task. So lights lighting up on a board. It sounds pretty simple remembering the sequence of lights. You got up to 20, 30 different light sequences. It's really tough. You have to think, you're thinking really hard and they create incentives. Not electric shock incentives but usually reward incentives. Either one works though. Then you put people into these shallow sleep naps what also falls under the category of non-sleep deep rest and you look at performance on other days. People learn much faster if they're importing a nap into their day or shallow sleep or what I call NSDR, non-sleep deep rest. So basically turning off the brain just going into kind of a spacey mode. No, not scrolling on Instagram but just letting your mind wander and drift or enter sleep. You learn faster because as we talked about before that's when the synaptic rearrangements occur. So that's a powerful tool for accelerating learning. Visualization can help but for the 60% of people who have a hard time maintaining a visualization practice for more than a couple of minutes. Like some people can do it for a few minutes and then their mind drifts. Probably the non-sleep deep rest is going to be the better tool. But for the people that are very good at visualization they can see every motion that they need to take in the actual performance. There I think it's probably as good as physical exercise or close to it. At least in terms of stimulating plasticity. But let's be fair to the process of plasticity. I can't sit there and think about, 600 pound deadlift, 600 pound deadlift. And you're not gonna get hypertrophy that way. Although I'm sure people have tried. So I'm curious when you're talking about the spatial recognition. I remember seeing a TED talk about four or five years ago a guy talking about, first time I started really learning about neuroplasticity and he was talking about they would take rats and I think what he said is they hooked an electrode up to their hippocampus which whenever it was going through and trying to find this cheese that they had they would make like a ding, make an auditory sound. And so he's going through and it's the ding you can tell he's measuring it. And then he said, then he's working late in the lab and all of them are sleeping and he can hear dinging. He forgot to turn it off, but he could tell it. And is that right that the hippocampus is the part where it's actually, they're going through the entire maze again as they're sleeping over and over and over and over again. So, and especially if there's a reward involved and for a rat in the laboratory, that's probably like the biggest experience, excuse me, ever. Now that's a great day. There's an exciting day or at least it's different. You know, they're, and this calls to mind that in the 90s, there were all these experiments like if you give rats an enriched environment, there's all this brain plasticity like and so people started putting their playing motes art to their kids and doing all this stuff. So the stinger in this, it's kind of funny actually because it reveals how crazy we are as a species and how we're always trying to cheat the system the biological system is that what they realized was there's no enhanced plasticity through these enriched environments. Playing motes art to your kid is not going to enhance their brain learning at all. What they realized is that normally these rats are in a deprived environment. You just destroyed an entire company that just plays baby motes art for all the babies. Yeah, I mean, although I will say that baby shark thing that my friends play their kids, it must trigger a lot of epinephrine because I heard it once and that thing is, I mean, I can hear it now. That's in your head. Yeah, the earworm thing is a whole other business. But you know, if you deprive an animal or a child, I mean, obviously that's horrible, then you set the threshold for changing the brain really low because they're essentially in a black box, right? I mean, sadly, in the earlier part of the last century, there were people that did this, right? The Harlow Monkeys experiments, these frankly were barbaric experiments, hopefully never to be ever done again where you deprive animals of emotional contact or warmth, you give them a wire monkey mother, it's horrible, right? But that's a deprivation experiment. And so what we're talking about is normal experience and then moving up from normal experience. And there is such a thing as normal experience. Like sure, things vary, one parent, two parent, primary caretaker, et cetera, but most people aren't in this black box-deprived environment. So the point is that if you want to change the brain, you have to give it a really strong stimulus. For most people, you have to have a really strong stimulus. There's never been a case ever throughout human history, no reported case of somebody who had lifelong child-like neuroplasticity. But there have been elements of child-like behavior, I don't mean childish, I hope there's a real difference there, where adults have managed to tap into the plasticity process more readily. And those include things like an element of play, like the great physicist Richard Feynman was famous for bongo drumming on the roof. He did it naked, but nowadays that would get you fired. That's not good. These should be ethical, age-appropriate, context-appropriate, species-appropriate behaviors, of course. But he was bongo drumming naked on the roof of Caltech, or he became quite good at sketching and painting later in life. Mainly, he claims, we don't know exactly what his process was, by embracing an element of play and kind of lightheartedness about it, which presumably gave him the dopamine and the perspective on the agitation, or maybe he learned to bypass agitation. I should say, when you're very playful about something, that means that the contingency is usually pretty low. He already had a Nobel Prize, maybe he had two. But anyway, he at least had one, and he already had a full career. So drawing for him was about, oh wow, he's also a pretty good painter, but he wasn't a Rembrandt, right? So, and he didn't need it. So it's understandable, and I think people would be well to adopt the idea that the agitation is a prerequisite for learning and getting better. Now, if you're doing something for fun and recreation, then you can adopt an element of play. And as you get better at things, occasionally adopting an element of play can be really good. There's a reason why, I think in that documentary, The Last Dance, the Jordan documentary. I mean, he's a serious guy, right? He went at basketball with, if 110% is possible, he gave it 110%. Apparently, he went at everything that way. So for him, it wasn't a game. Nothing was a game, it was about winning. That's where his dopamine came from. You can do that, or you can be purely about process. But as we mentioned earlier, I think it's always gonna be best to be about both process and outcome. Because otherwise, you're divorcing yourself from the opportunity to really level up. And the more resources you gain, also the more that you can share. Those could be monetary resources, those could also be knowledge-based resources. So, in any event, learning for learning's sake is great, but learning for learning's sake and doing something with the information is also great. One thing that brings up, Rich Divini and I were talking about it was, and I feel like everybody in the world, every Shmo, including myself being one of those Shmo's, talks about the Reticular Activating System and the limited amount of information that comes in. But I feel like they're just people who are just regurgitating what they've heard before. So coming from your standpoint, knowing what you're talking about, can you explain the Reticular Activating System, exactly how that works with, and if we can wake up in the morning and set that Reticular Activating System to then look for specific outcomes? Yeah, so I love the Reticular Activating System. I used to teach this to medical students, so I'm very familiar with it. I think the simplest way to think about it is, it's a collection of brain areas, it's a system after all, that can queue up neuromodulators. Neuromodulators are what we've been talking about, acetylcholine, dopamine, serotonin, epinephrine. The reason the word modulator is important, not just neurotransmitter, not getting too down in the weeds here, but modulators, they're like playlists. They set the categories of things that your brain is able to do. So for instance, when serotonin levels are high, you generally are going to feel good about things in your immediate ownership or experience or environment. So it's kinda like gratitude? It's like gratitude. It's like, you see your kid, you see your spouse, you see your significant other, and you just feel good. It's appreciation, it's gratitude. There's no seeking involved. You have that. It's that there's a security there. Could be the food that you're about to eat that you have. The dopamine system is all about want, desire, craving, motivation, and getting more. It's ambition, right? It's about a focus on things that are outside your immediate experience, atmosphere, et cetera. And so it literally is in what we call the extra personal space. It's beyond the space that you have. It's, I don't know why I've been thinking about this because I haven't invested in it, but there's a lot of attention now about cryptocurrency, right? So every, the joke I like to tell myself is, and it could be very exciting. I don't know, I don't know anything about investing, but that people's, it's a purely dopaminergic system right now, right? People who have a lot of it don't know what it's gonna be worth. People who don't have it don't know what it's gonna be worth. But the actual value of it is not actually set by anything else except dopamine, right? So if people are excited about it, it will go up in value, right? So for those of you who are interested in cryptocurrency, understand the dopamine system. It's all dopamine as I've watched the excitement grow, et cetera, that's dopamine. Very different than serotonin. Cause if you have a Bitcoin or you have a hundred or a million Bitcoins right now, you actually don't know what you have. Is it in the serotonin system? Are you rich? I don't know. Now, maybe not. So it's really interesting. It's an externalization of something that's normally within our heads. The acetylcholine system is all about focus, as we said in epinephrine is all about alertness. There are other neuromodulators too. The reticular activating system combines a perception of something in your environment with one of these particular neuromodulators, right? Cause they're not just so diffused that you walk around excited about everything. There's a name for that, it's called mania. If people have too much dopamine, they're excited about everything. They buy things they can't afford, they start relationships, they can't continue, and they are truly manic, right? That's if people have very high levels of serotonin, unhealthy levels of serotonin, they're so blissed out they don't want to get out of their chair, they're fine right where they are. The opioid system will do the same if it's really ramped up. So the reticular activating system takes inputs from the ears, literally, and from the eyes, mainly, and combines it with specific combinations of neuromodulators and allows you to be either focused on and in pursuit of, or focused on and in gratitude, or appreciation of, or focused on and stressed about particular things. So the way this plays out in the real world is when people talk about whatever you, what is it, I hear this thing, energy flows, where attention goes, energy flows. Yeah, so I think that's a wellness perspective or a typical wording perspective on the fact that if, you know, the example that's almost always given about reticular activating system outside of neuroscience anyway, is if you're gonna buy a new car, thinking about, oh yeah, those new blazers, which are awesome, by the way, the ones I've seen anyway, those vintage ones that they put out, Broncos, blazers. Yeah, the Broncos. Broncos, Broncos, forgive me, those are great. I never really thought about them, I saw a picture of them, and then now if I see one, I'm like, that's really cool, they're rare, but your sensors for those are now, that's probably a combination of dopamine and a certain shape, a certain perception. And so yes, you can guide your nervous system in that direction, and as a consequence, your nervous system will start devoting resources to parsing, oh, well, that's definitely not a blazer, that one is, that's a knockoff one, oh, that one's really, really nice, these kind of thing. And so you can use perceptions as a way to drive neuromodulators. Typically neuromodulators also drive perception, so if the serotonin system is really high, you can be focused on things in your immediate sphere. If your dopamine system is really high, you're gonna be thinking about the next thing. So the reticular activating system is a way that you take those two things, perception and neuromodulators, and then there's a third element, you toggle it to levels of arousal, right? So what you do is you get excited when you see the combination of things that you're looking for in the environment, or something like it. So the way I would think about the reticular activating system is like a template. You've decided to create a template. So let's say you're writing a book, which is exciting, and you've got some idea in mind, and you could create a template that, okay, it's a bestseller, or you could create a template of all the great impact it's gonna have. Probably since you're in the creative stage, you're gonna create a template of, okay, this book is gonna have a certain feel, people are gonna derive certain benefits from it, and you start working from that template. And what will happen is you will start to queue up through your subconscious and your conscious mind. The things that you already possess in your mind and in your environment or in your notes if you have a co-writer, all the things that could go into that, and you'll also start seeking those things in the world. But there's nothing mystical about that, right? There's nothing secretive about it, right? No pun intended. What it is is that you are accessing memory stores and neuromodulators that are associated with a particular end goal. Now the same would be true if you decided, you know what, I'm really gonna work hard on my relationship to my significant other and my home life. You would immediately start looking for the things that gave you the serotonin release that you're seeking there. Cause typically when we are already in the company of things or we have a relationship with somebody or something, we aren't in that like heavy dopaminergic adventure type drive, drive, drive mode. So I just threw a lot of words at something, maybe over complicated a little bit, but you wanna think perception, what am I paying attention to? Neuromodulator, which of these four, cause there are many, but this is the main ones are acetylcholine, dopamine, epinephrine and serotonin. And then how is that driving my arousal or my excitement? How is that contracting or dilating my worldview? And I think if people just spend a little time, think about that, you realize, wow, there are these powerful systems in the brain that are drawing me towards certain things and away from others, but it's mainly by funneling us down particular paths. And so when I hear about the kind of actualization and manifestation and all that kind of stuff, I'm not dismissive of it because I'm a scientist. I'm not dismissive of it at all, but I look at things through the lens of neuroscience. That's just how my brain works. And that's what I do professionally. So I think that the reticular activating system is when you place an intention, like if you write down on a piece of paper before you go to sleep at night, with something about your book or you've, and you put that away. Yeah, you are definitely queuing up for your brain the things that it should pay attention to cause it can't pay attention to everything. Right. So essentially you just, the whole thing that we've been talking about is that your brain has, we've been starting to figure out what's going on in the brain. And when you listen to this and you can realize exactly how to focus more figure out how to use your reticular activating system to we're basically getting a manual of this is how it works. Cause we're not given, I would say like we're given the most complex piece of machinery in the world we're born, but we have no idea how the hell it works. 16, maybe you get your driver's license, but you're never actually told how to have like a, like a reasonable social interaction or how to deal with stress. 100%. And so this kind of lets people know, okay. And cause you see it, like I've seen it many times, especially myself, like I think when I was younger before I started reading books and getting into stuff, I was more pessimistic. I am, but that came from me thinking about negative things. And then I ended up finding more negative things throughout my, it's kind of like the phrase like, if you meet an asshole in the morning, you met an asshole, but if you meet an asshole's all day, you're the asshole. Like that's kind of like that. I've never heard that one, but I liked that one. It's like that. I've had both experiences, by the way. I would say it would have been more if I was the asshole back then, I was more pessimistic and could find and poke holes in everything. But then you start focusing on, you know, like you're saying the stuff that is more positive than the stuff that I am grateful for. And then you're like, oh my gosh, there are many things in my life that I can be grateful for. And it's essentially realizing that at any moment in time, our system can be hijacked, but this is kind of like the way of understanding to keep your hands on the wheel, to be able to drive your brain and your feelings a little bit more versus just letting things happen to you. Absolutely. I mean, I think that very well put. I mean, I think that outside of like real clinical depression, I do think the statement that, happiness is a decision holds some merit. Actually, when I was a postdoc, I remember my advisor saying, happiness is a decision. I was like, how can you possibly say that? But I actually think that happiness is not a decision. I think happiness is a series of action decisions. It's a series of things that you do. The nervous system is bidirectional and waiting around for good sensations, good feelings to emerge, rarely works. And so this is why rituals are really good. This is why getting into action, despite some friction about those actions can be really, really good. Because you start to discover the bidirectionality of behavior and these chemicals. Sure, the chemicals drive behavior, but behavior drives the chemicals too. And one thing, it's a little bit existential, but it's worth mentioning is that the nervous system, which is basically us, right? You can take away any other element of our body and we'll still persist. But our nervous system is, especially the part in our skulls is really who we are. It's our life experience. It's actually even shaped like us. If you were to melt away everything else, the nervous system is actually the one thing that actually looks like you. Everything else is just organs and stuff pieced together, tubes. The nervous system is absolutely who we are and can be shaped by the way that we think and approach things. But once you start to kind of ratchet into that a little bit, you start to realize, oh, it really is bidirectional. And you can start to experience that once or twice. Okay, I was feeling miserable. I think it's very healthy by the way for people to feel their feelings. I'm just not a big believer in extreme catharsis where you take out your feelings on people or yourself. That's not good, right? There are also feelings that can amplify themselves. We know this, right? If you really, really ramp up happiness, it can escalate to mania. You really, really drive down into the trench of sadness, you can hit depression. And there are points where we have options along the way and we can feel those points, right? So there is a real thing there. But it's absolutely true that if you can experience what it is to be in a place of like kind of down in the dumps and get into action, maybe it's exercise, maybe it's sunlight, maybe it's learning or something or feel agitated and push through that, you discover the bidirectionality. And if you can start to discover the accelerator on your focus and on your energy and that you can come off that and that can be good too. And there are ways to calm yourself down and you can work with that too. When you start to realize that there are these levers and buttons that you can press, but you press them through sensation, perception, feeling, thought and action, but mainly through action, you come to the conclusion that neuroscientists came to a long time ago, although they never actually stated it clearly. So it's kind of on them that we're only getting to this now in 2021, which is that there's no fossil record of you. There's no fossil record of the nervous system, except your behaviors. All of us will go into the ground. Everything except our skeleton will disintegrate. Whether or not you believe in one thing or the other is not the topic of discussion right now about what happens to you next. But the fossil record of you are your behaviors. It's the book you're gonna write. You'll be long gone. That book will still be here. It's the things you said and the ways that it impacted people. It's the tools you built. It's the ways you helped people. Hopefully you're helping and not destructing. You're clearly helping people being destructive, but there's no fossil record of emotion. Let's say you feel miserable. There goes nowhere. It circulates in you. It was designed, again, I say designed from the evolutionary perspective in this case or maybe who knows, I don't speculate about like higher order things because how could I? I always say I wasn't consulted the design phase. So I'm not in a position to speculate, but whatever people believe, if you feel something intense sadness and you do something useful with that, then there's a fossil record of that. It has the opportunity to be transmuted as the yogic and more certain cultures is transmuted into something. If you don't, it went nowhere. It just was recycled in your nervous system. The same thing with ambition, right? If you're just ambitious and you don't do anything with it that's focused, it goes nowhere. So the reason that thought appeals to me is that it means that when we are feeling miserable or when we're feeling fantastic, it's still about what we do with that. And that includes speech, but it also really focuses us toward the discoveries we make as scientists or the music we write as musicians or the things we write or the ways we raise kids because if we go back to the very beginning of this conversation, what kids are exposed to, that's a fossil record of our behavior. But again, it's about behavior. Sometimes people ask me about what do you think about the collective and transgenerational trauma and things? I don't know, I really don't know, but what I do know is that how we behave with one another shapes each other's nervous systems, especially with younger generations. And so what you do matters and what you don't do has an impact also. And so understanding that the nervous system is who we are and that the fossil record are behaviors, I think should feel empowering. I hope it doesn't feel overwhelming to people. It should feel empowering. That's great. You just ended it perfectly. That was amazing, man. Where can people find you? So a couple of places. I teach neuroscience, excuse me, on Instagram. So their little short clips, sometimes 60 seconds, sometimes some longer IGTV stuff on neuroscience, neuroscience facts and practical takeaways. I sometimes host other neuroscientists on and IG lives and things of that sort. So that's Huberman Lab, H-U-B-E-R-M-A-N-L-A-B on Instagram. I'm also on Twitter under the same handle. And then I have a podcast, the Huberman Lab podcast. And it's a little bit different than most podcasts in that every month we stay on one topic. So this last month was for instance hormones and there'll be four, sometimes five episodes all about that topic. We get pretty deep into the science. We also cover some practical tools. So even though we might not talk about sleep for a while, first two episodes, two, three and four, we're all about sleep. The idea is that the material is archival that one could go back to it kind of like a course. So that's on YouTube, Apple Spotify, all the kind of standard places that you can find audio podcasts. And I recommend following them. You have a bunch of really, it's good because for someone who's visual like me, you draw it out. Oh, that you actually see it. Yeah, I like to diagram like in the classroom. Most people I feel are visual. So it's very easy to look at it and go, oh, now I understand what you're talking about when you can see it. I recommend following them, listening to them as well. Andrew, thank you for being here, man. Thanks so much for the opportunity. I really enjoyed this. Thank you. Hey, thanks so much for watching this video. If you love this video, I've got another one you're gonna love. Just click right here and watch it.