Change Your Brain Neuroscientist Dr Andrew Huberman Rich Roll Podcast #viralvideo

Yeah, my pleasure.

Sure. So on the one hand, you know, maybe I was fated to become a scientist. I guess the two things that are relevant there are I always loved animals and I've always been obsessed with animal behavior. Like I just could watch nature shows growing up, you know, underwater life or animals hunting, animals doing anything is just so fascinating to me because I think even at a really young age, I've always just been intrigued in sort of what drives different animals to behave in the way they do and how body form matches to — I didn't know what it was, but brains and how that all works. So, I've always been obsessed with animals. And then my dad's a scientist, so he's a physicist. He was really early in chaos theory and so growing up in our home, you know, we had scientists over for dinner and graduate students would come over for barbecues and things like that.

He was at Stanford, he was mostly at Xerox PARC, which is kind of famous if you read the Steve Jobs book, for the development of the GUI, the graphical user interface, and sort of early days of the computer. So he had a lab there and he had a lab in applied physics at Stanford and something called symbolic systems, which is a Stanford degree in kind of ecology and computation, that kind of thing. So I grew up in this family where science was very prominent and we had lots of discussions in our home that I would overhear and I didn't understand about physics and we'd spend summers at the Aspen Center for Physics, which was like good times.

Yeah. So, you know, and we were — and to be clear, you know, you hear the word Aspen, you know, we were a middle-class family. But they have this Aspen Center for Physics. So, Feynman, you know, Richard Feynman was there, Murray Gell-Mann, like all these luminaries of physics, Peter Carruthers. And my dad was really good at telling me the stories about these guys. And then I'd always want to meet them. And it was mostly guys back then. There weren't many women in physics. So, you know, I was kind of immersed in science from a young age. But right about age 13, my parents split up and he moved overseas. He moved to Denmark and my mom was really struggling with the breakup and I wasn't in contact with him anymore. So I had this really unusual childhood where, you know, we didn't talk about sports, we talked about science and I had this close relationship with science and the people around science, but then all of a sudden the structure around family, like instead of dinners together every night, it was just like me and my mom.

And I was an adolescent. I was hitting puberty. So, you know, there was bound to be some shifts in my world landscape and internal landscape anyway. But basically what happened was I stopped really paying attention to school and I got really heavily into skateboarding and the kind of punk rock music and I found my pack or my community through like a pack and community of kids that also just were kind of parentless. So, this was like late 80s, early 90s.

And so at a pretty young age, I started taking the — I grew up in Palo Alto. I was actually born at Stanford Hospital and started taking the 7F bus up to San Francisco and hanging around in Embarcadero. For the skateboarders out there, the listeners, this is the now famous EM crowd. So this was the birth of a huge movement of skateboarders that became professionals like — so you'd see the young Danny Way would come through town and you had Rob Dyrdek, I remember when he came through. And so all these names that eventually became popular during the kind of X Games era. But at that time it was really underground and so it was this pack of maybe a hundred guys and it was run like a little city and it was chaos. It was like there was fights and there was drinking and there was lawlessness. There was also a lot of amazing skateboarding and there were a lot of amazing people and there were some older guys, like one in particular, a very famous skateboarder is this kid Mike Carroll. His older brother was kind of like the older brother to everybody, kind of kept us all in check. So it had its own unique organization and it's actually interesting because the same thing was happening at that time in Washington Square Park in New York and at Love Park in Philadelphia. There were all these like communities of kids that were basically parentless. And so in that time I saw some interesting things. First of all, I learned what it was to be parentless. Growing up in Palo Alto, it was like soccer games and AYSO and you know swim club. And all of a sudden I realized, you know, I don't have to be home at any particular time or, you know, none of these kids are going to school. And so we all — it was a kind of a big group of truants and it was interesting because it gave me a perspective that I had never had in Palo Alto and I was drifting further and further away from any kind of academic rigor.

I think I would go to school every once in a while.

So she was totally checked out. You know, I think she was just devastated by a bunch of things that were happening and she lapsed into a pretty serious depression. And then in that community, what was interesting is I started seeing that, you know, some guys were clearly fated to becoming professional skateboarders. They were really good at it. I just want to say for full disclosure, I was not particularly good. I kept getting injured. I just — I was not fated to be, you know, exceptional or very good at it. But I loved the camaraderie and I loved the community. But I also noticed that, you know, some people were drinking all day and other people got into hard drugs and people started to, you know, some of the dysfunction really started to show up.

Yeah. The fracture. Yeah. Exactly. And so, I started seeing that a lot more violence. You know, people started getting their girlfriends pregnant. They didn't have money to support those kids. You know, it started becoming apparent to me that there was a lot of dysfunction as well as a lot of incredible people in that community. And so about that time I got a girlfriend. And the other thing was I got removed from high school. So I went to kind of the famed slash infamous high school in Palo Alto, Gunn High School.

Went to Gunn, which is famous because it's one of the most academically rigorous schools in the, you know, country, maybe the planet. People move to the area just to send their kids there. But it also has this very complicated reputation as the highest suicide rate of any school in the country. The New York Times has written about this. So, you know, I would come to school every once in a while, but I could tell you far more about the curbs in the front of the Gunn High School parking lot than I could about anything that I learned at Gunn.

No. I basically — they just said you need to either start coming to school or, you know, or you're done. So, I got shifted to another high school and that was the same story. It just was — it was a mess. It just fell apart. And so at one point I was brought in — I have a kind of vague recollection of this — but I was brought in to have a discussion with a school counselor and I don't think I've ever told this story before, and there was someone sitting in the corner. This guy was sitting in the corner and he didn't introduce himself and pretty soon I realized I was like, I think they're going to take me away. Like I started to realize because they realized my mom wasn't really able to control me, wasn't really in a place to support me at that time. And so — and that's what they did. They took me away. They took me to a place up the peninsula which was not a jail and it wasn't a hospital. It was just sort of a place where they put kids that were —

Yeah. A lot of psychologists, a lot of locks on doors, a lot of kids that — there were 12 of us in there at any one time. It was locked down. And the first night there, I remember I had a roommate who was like really into cutting on himself, that kind of thing. And he told me, he was like, 'Look, if you just do what they say here, you'll be out of here in like a month.' And if you don't, you're going to be here a very long time. And I remember being pretty frightened for the first time. And at that point, I was like, 'Oh my goodness, like this is bad.' You know, like this is bad. I'm a long way from home.

I know. And, you know, and it was literally like the kind of one phone call a day kind of thing. So actually I called — I was skateboarding for a company in San Francisco. I think they put me on out of sympathy and I called this guy up and I said, 'Look, I, you know, they locked me up. I don't know what to do. Can you help me?' And he — and I'll never forget, I don't want to say his name. He goes, 'You're the most normal guy I know.' He's like the least likely of that crowd for that to happen. So, in any event, I was permitted to go back to school eventually, provided that I went to therapy. And so, I started going to weekly therapy, which in the early 90s was kind of a weird thing. You wouldn't admit it to your friends. But so we'd skateboard around Stanford campus. I was doing my thing. And then twice a week, I would go in and see this therapist.

He's a remarkable guy because, a, he had deep training in the mind, right? And we started talking about what was going on and he really picked up on the fact that there was essentially no structure, no home life for me, but that I had a strong drive and I was really interested in learning. I mean, I was enthusiastic and motivated enough to, you know, skateboard as hard as I could, even though I wasn't going to go anywhere with it. So at that point, and the fact that I had a girlfriend, I started looking for something that I could do. And I started — at one point I thought I'd join the fire service because it seemed like the camaraderie was good. At that point I started strengthening my body a bit because I didn't want to keep getting hurt. So I started running. I started lifting weights. A football coach at Gunn actually turned me on to fitness. It's actually an interesting guy. He wrote the script for that movie Mr. Mom. Do you remember that?

Yeah. Because his wife bet him that he couldn't do what she could do, which was stay home with the kids. And he was this big strong football coach. And so he made a bet and he lost. And so he wrote that script. Michael Keaton played the — you know. So he taught me. He was like, 'Look, you know, you can't even do a pull-up. You need to start doing your pull-ups. You need to start running.' You know, and he said, 'The fire service might be good for you.' So I was spinning out, but there were people that were willing to kind of, you know, point me in the right direction.

So what ended up happening was my high school girlfriend went off to college and I didn't, you know, I didn't know what I was going to do. So I actually went and I lived in the parking lot outside her dormitory. I just wanted to be near her. She was my family at that point.

She was at UC Santa Barbara.

I just drove down. I just camped out in the parking lot and I was starting to get into some martial arts and Muay Thai boxing then. So I think I was teaching some Muay Thai boxing self-defense stuff on campus and doing this kind of thing.

And by the end of that year, I realized that I should probably apply to college. I applied to UCSB and somehow I got in. Lord knows how I got in. I did because I did eventually graduate high school, barely. Got in and then after a year I just completely flailed it. You know, I wasn't going to class. I was getting into fights. A lot of that kind of mischief and kind of wildness was still in me. And what ended up happening was I got into a physical altercation on July 4th, 1994 with like a bunch of guys. And at the end of that, I walked back to the place I was staying. And of course, I wasn't paying rent because I had learned in those years like you can just squat in an empty house. So, you know, it's Vista, California, you know. So, I was really running wild. And went back and just — I realized I was like, this picture is really bad. You know, at some point this isn't going to be like a kid who had some problems. This is going to be truly —

Totally feral, actually. And I have some close friends that — that's how they refer to me. They're like, 'feral.' And it's funny, even to this day, I mean, I'll get to where this eventually took me, but even to this day, when I go into a home where it's clearly like a loving home where the kids are happy and there's good food and it's warm and cozy, I always feel this thing like, wow, like amazing. Like I sort of want to be adopted by them immediately. But, you know, I'm 45 years old, so that's not appropriate at this age.

Yeah, it really did. You know, I think that I'm so grateful for those years. I wouldn't wish them on any kid because I think having a secure, loving environment at home is so key. And, you know, I should say about a third of the kids that I grew up with in that environment, that whole skateboarding punk rock culture, about a third have gone on to found companies or professional skateboarders. About a third just kind of drifted off and about a third are dead or incarcerated. You know, a huge number. And so there's real value in having a support system. That's clear. But it exposed me to all these things like addictions, schizophrenia, rage, like all these incredible elements. Like I was never really into drinking and drugs. I could drink or not drink. It just wasn't — I wasn't drawn to it. But other people, they took one sip and it was like that was their thing. It was like the magic elixir for them.

And so I, you know, I was observing what was happening and then after that, you know, that July 4th '94 incident, I realized this is it. You know, it's now or never. It really was one of those moments. You know, you hear about those moments but it was me realizing I'm living in this squat. I've got a pet ferret. My girlfriend's gone. She broke up with me. She was smart enough to break up with me. You know, I'm getting in fights. I'm working at a bagel shop. I'm barely making ends meet. And at that point, I just made the decision. I just said, 'Okay, look, I'm not going to be a professional athlete. I think I'm pretty good at memorizing things. I think I have an interest in people. I'm going to just decide — I just decided to do school. I decided that was the track.' So like some people pick the military because it's like if you know what to expect at least in terms of the passages that you're going to go through and for me that was school. And so I decided to get back in school. I moved into a studio apartment by myself. I quit partying completely. I didn't go to parties. I got really serious about fitness. So I just started running and lifting weights and I studied.

I did. Yeah. I did. It's a lot of self-awareness, you know. I mean, people go into the military because on some level — I mean, some people do because there's some yearning for having that structure imposed upon their lives, but you constructed that kind of structure for yourself.

Yeah. I think I was really afraid. I think I was like, you know, and these days, you know, because my lab studies fear and I get into this whole thing around mindsets. People always ask me like, is it better to do something from a place of love or fear? Like, it depends. And at that point, fear was the best motivator for me. And I just basically worked like crazy. And it's interesting because I didn't have a mentor or someone to bring me to that. But once I started doing that, you know, there was one professor in particular who kind of took note. He was like, 'Oh, you know, you seemed really interested in this stuff.' And I was like, 'Yeah.' Because he was teaching me about depression, schizophrenia, neurochemicals. I thought I was totally turned on by the world of neuroscience. It wasn't even called neuroscience back then, but this one guy, Harry Carlisle, he was teaching me about thermal regulation and how the brain works and how receptors in the skin relate to perceptions in the mind. And he also had a deep sensitivity to mental disease. And I'd seen a lot of that, you know, I'd seen a lot of depression and anxiety in my own family. I'd had a friend commit suicide, another friend become schizophrenic. I think he still walks in the Mission District of San Francisco now. Seen some friends become addicts. And so here was someone explaining that there's actually an underlying basis for this and I just poured myself into it.

Yeah, he was amazing. So he was a favorite teacher of many students, but if you could get into his lab, then you were kind of one of the chosen ones, I guess. And like the perfect mentor at the perfect time for you. Yeah. So he used to drink coffee in lab, which you're not supposed to do. He used to smoke cigarettes in lab and in the fume hood and they used to come and yell at him and he would do it anyway. And I thought, you know, this guy's — he doesn't even know what it is, but you know, he's a punk rocker. He doesn't even know. And so, you know, he gave me an opportunity to work in his lab. And then at some point, he told me, 'If you go to graduate school, they'll actually pay you to do science.' And what ended up happening at that point was I hit a brick wall because I had a lot of resentment toward my dad. I felt, you know, here's my dad. He was a scientist. He had, you know, left us, all this kind of thing. And I realized if I didn't do this, if I didn't take this opportunity, it was going to be the most foolish thing ever. You know, what am I going to do? Despite my — you know, my parents — you know, I was 20 years old at that point. So I just made the decision I'm going to get a PhD, I'm going to become a professor, I'm going to get tenure, I'm going to be like this guy, you know, this guy who looked like he had a pretty good life to me. And so that's pretty much how I spent the last 25 years of my life is doing experiments.

It worked out. I mean, it was a lot of work. I mean, I didn't have the power of concentration. I hadn't read all the good books that Gunn High School students read growing up. I had to learn how to speak properly. I learned how to learn, how to think properly and really learn how to commit to something that was very linear and at times was very painful. And I went to some pretty extreme things. I, you know, I actually used to set a timer and I wouldn't allow myself to get out of the chair until the timer went off. So, and I would experience extreme agitation, but over time I got pretty good and now I can do long stints of work without any breaks. And yeah, it worked out.

I loved books. So, I would, you know, I would hide in the Tower Books section in the evenings and I would read everything about fitness, psychology, anything I could. I've always devoured information. My favorite book when I was a kid was the Encyclopedia or the Guinness Book of World Records. So I would like — when I was a little kid, I'd walk around the Aspen Center for Physics and I would tell anyone — I didn't even ask them if they wanted to hear about like what's the world's smallest mammal, you know? I could tell you all these facts that were kind of meaningless at the time, but I've always been fascinated by the inventory of different animals on the planet and their different behaviors. And so, yeah, voracious reader and still now I love information.

He absolutely saved my life. He gave me the book 'Wherever You Go, There You Are,' the Jon Kabat-Zinn book, and he said, no pressure, but if you can develop a mindfulness practice where you can sit still for like 10 minutes a day, it'll serve you very well. So I started doing that. Like he could have told me — he could have told me to hang out of a window by my ankles. I would have done it. I think there was a self-preservation thing kicking in for me. So I got very interested in mindfulness meditation. He also was, I think, quite smart in saying, 'Look, there's a whole world of psychedelic drugs that are powerful in influencing the mind.' He said, 'If you're going to explore those, wait until your brain has already developed,' which I think is a controversial statement in and of itself. So he actively discouraged me to go down that path, which I think was the right thing given I was a minor, you know, and nowadays there's all this discussion now about psychedelics and their power and I think they are very interesting compounds, but he really steered me towards behavioral practices like what could I do each day from waking up to going to sleep that would serve my mental health and my productivity well. Yeah, I owe him a tremendous amount and especially because he wasn't just in the psychoanalytic theory, he also was like cognitive behavioral. He understood the power of practices, not just discussing issues.

Yeah. I felt it was funny because I thought if I didn't sit in the lotus position, like I wasn't doing it properly. You know, back then there was all this stuff around. I was very mystical and in my family, because my dad's very conservative and my mom is a little bit more of a free spirit, I was taught that anything that related to hippie culture was doomed to fail and cause problems and that anything that was related to like conservative culture was fated to advance the progress of humanity. It turned out neither one was true, of course. So I — but I needed people to push me in those directions. Lift weights, run, meditate, do your schoolwork, do your homework. And so I think I, you know, now I have a good relationship with my parents, but I think I had to go out into the world and find those, you know, sort of paternal and maternal figures because they weren't in my home. I needed to find those.

Yeah, I'm immensely grateful for it because, you know, where I'm at today is, you know, my lab works on a number of issues related, you know, sort of hardcore neurobiology of regenerating the brain, you know, trying to basically cure blindness and repair visual systems, but also things related to, you know, fear, courage, mindset, stress, anxiety, trauma, etc. And the early seed of seeing how science is done definitely gave me an advantage. I won't lie. You know, seeing how scientists interact and behave and understanding that they are just people, because a lot of what was discussed in my home was about the people, not just the science they do, that really gave me an advantage. And then seeing all that dysfunction and realizing that the human animal is amazing at making plans, at modifying its brain if it wants to. But the human brain and the human animal are also dreadfully bad at doing what's best for us, right? Because of this, what I think it comes down to is the fact that our reward systems are not designed for things that are just good for us. They're designed for things that optimize the progression of our species, but they will grab on to and ratchet into any behavior that makes us feel good. And so the human brain is really not optimized for making best choices, right? And so those years of seeing all that dysfunction — yeah, it's — and it's a — I wouldn't trade those years for anything. And I still have great friends in that community. I mean, I think, you know, had I joined a different community I would have found the right people as well, but to be with a huge pack of feral kids at that age and to see the function and dysfunction and also it was wild, it was a lot of fun.

It was a lot of fun. That's a whole set of stories.

Mid90s and the movie Kids, the Larry Clark movie. When I saw that movie, first of all, I had a lot of friends that were in that movie because he used actual skateboarder kids. Yeah, I actually knew a couple of those kids. And, you know, it's a movie, but there were a lot of things about that movie that were very accurate. And when I saw that movie, I was like, 'Yeah, that's like pretty much a day in the life in Washington Square Park.' And, you know, I mean, it was a little extreme on some end, but you didn't know where you were going to end up each night. That was a unique experience, you know. So, yeah. And Mid90s was really good. I think it captured the essence of what it is to be a kid that's just looking for some group of people to join. And skateboarding is a unique sport because you get young kids and grown men and now women and girls do it as well. It didn't happen so much then, but now there are a lot of great awesome skateboarders that are female, but they're all hanging out together. You wouldn't find that in soccer. You're not going to get little kids playing with grown men. So, you get exposed to a lot because everyone's at different developmental stages. But yeah, it was an amazing thing. I wouldn't change it for anything.

Yeah. So the brain and nervous system — so it's like brain, spinal cord, connections with the body and back. And I don't distinguish between brain and mind. I think that's like an '80s discussion or earlier and I think it would take us down the wrong track. So brain or mind to me is interchangeable. Mind-body is kind of interchangeable because the brain is connected to the body and the body's connected to the brain. Right? If I, you know, pinprick my hand and it hurts, my brain registers it where it happens. It's kind of an irrelevant discussion now. I think we really need to just appreciate that the nervous system is designed to orchestrate all the processes in the body, not just thinking and not just behavior, and really can be divided into five things. So there's sensation and sensation is really bound or restricted by the receptors in the body. So receptors in the eye that perceive photons, light energy, receptors in the skin that perceive pressure, you know, touch receptors, smell, taste, hearing, etc. And the interesting thing about sensation and the fact that the nervous system needs to pay attention to sensation is it's non-negotiable. The nervous system of humans is designed to extract physical phenomena from the universe that are non-negotiable. Photons of light. I can't see in the infrared with my eyes and I can't see ultraviolet light with my eyes and I can't perceive that because I don't have the receptors for it. So, you know, other animals can perceive some of those things. But that leads us to the next thing which is perception, which is which sensations are you paying attention to. So, all the time you're sensing things like right now your feet are sensing the contact with your shoes, but you're not thinking about it until I say that. And then you shift your perception. So, perception is like the spotlight. So the brain wants to constantly bring in sensation. It's non-negotiable what's coming in. It's just dependent on your environment. Perception is negotiable. You can control that because I just said shoes and you thought about your feet and there you are.

Then there are feelings which can be a little bit nebulous but feelings are a link between our emotion and it generally invokes the body, sensations in the body and concepts in the mind of what those sensations are about. That's really what emotions are. Animals definitely experience them. I'm kind of appalled to think that 10 years ago people were like, 'Do animals have emotions?' Of course they have emotions, right? Because those are bodily sensations merged with some perception. So, of course, they do. And then there's thoughts. And thoughts are interesting because thoughts happen spontaneously. Think about like a web browser that's constantly giving you pop-ups. But thoughts can also be deliberate. So, you and I can decide right now that we're going to think about a plan for something or we're going to think about what's going on in the world. So thoughts happen spontaneously and they can be deliberate. And then the final thing is behaviors and actions. So the nervous system is responsible for sensation, perception, feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. And what's interesting, you start to think about that is you're like, 'Okay, that's a lot.' But what is the nervous system really trying to accomplish? Like on any given day or at any moment, what's it trying to accomplish? And it's really trying to accomplish one thing which is to take perceptions of the outside world and merge those with perceptions of the inside world, what we call interoception, and to link those in a way that's operating on our environment in the appropriate way. So what do I mean by that? So if I'm feeling anxious and I'm in a very calm environment, I'm going to perceive that rapid heart rate and kind of feeling of agitation in my body as inappropriate for the moment. Right? And my goal then as an organism is to adjust my level of what they call autonomic arousal or alertness down. If I'm at a great party or I'm at a wedding or it's a celebration or I'm at a protest, you know, then I might feel that my level of alertness is appropriate for my environment. So the nervous system is in this constant dynamic interaction with the outside world and trying to figure that out. One way that this can be kind of conceptualized is there's an emerging idea that's kind of interesting about impatience. So, we've all had the feeling of being impatient. Some people are far more patient than others. But if you've ever been in line at the store and you feel like something's going very slowly, you know, the person in front of you is taking a long time, they're doing some returns and you're getting kind of impatient. Maybe you're breathing in a mask and you're like — the idea is that if you're getting a certain frequency of pulses from your body and if those pulses are coming in quickly, like you're perceiving your interoception quickly, it's like pulse, pulse, pulse, pulse, you're going to be more geared towards your internal representation and then you're seeing what's going on in the outside world and —

It seems like it's going very slowly. But there are other times when you're in line at the store, someone's getting some returns and you're texting on your phone, or you've had a great day, you've had a great run, your family's in great shape and you're fine. Why? Well, the frequency of those pulses, that interception, is matched pretty well to your outside environment.

And so impatience is really when your internal sort of metronome, tick tick tick tick, is not matched well to the external environment. There are other times when you're feeling like your internal metronome is tick tick tick and you've got a million things coming at you through email or text and you've got a bunch of things and you're feeling overwhelmed and tired. Well, in either case, there's nothing right or wrong. It's just your body and your brain are trying to say what's going on in the outside world and how well matched am I to it?

Right? So if you think about some of the sort of core practices of mindfulness and self-regulation, of like focusing on breathing or focusing on, you know, state of mind, a lot of that is trying to bring more awareness to your internal state. But what our brain is normally doing when our eyes are open and we're interacting in the world is we're constantly trying to update our internal state to match external demands of the world.

And this hearkens back to a, you know, like a really early design of all nervous systems, which is how do you take an organism that needs certain things, food, water, mates, reproduction, shelter, how do you move that organism? How do you create a system that will do that in best relation to the environment? And so what mother nature has done is designed a series of systems. Let's just take agitation and stress for one.

If an animal or a human is very thirsty, you feel kind of agitated. You might get up and get a drink of water. If you're very thirsty, it can put you into a state of panic. If you're extremely thirsty and water is a limited resource, you might even resort to violence to get it or negotiation of some sort that you wouldn't if you were calmer. So that stress and agitation were designed to actually mobilize the body to take us in the direction of something that's adaptive.

So you can start to see these kind of core elements of what the brain and nervous system do: sensation, perception, feeling, thought, and action. And this constant challenge of trying to match our internal state to the external real estate, the outside world. And you start to see that the sensations that we call stress or impatience or calm are really the result of those attempts that the nervous system is trying to perform.

Mhm. Well, I think that, you know, in terms of value of understanding the nervous system and where it can be steered, it's absolutely clear that the nervous system can change in response to experience. So this thing we call neuroplasticity is really that, it's the brain's ability to modify itself in response to experience. And I think it's important to understand that from birth till about age 25, the brain is extremely malleable in a kind of almost passive way where kids are exposed to things and the brain is just wiring up.

I mean the brain is really designed to adjust itself in order to be in concert with its surroundings and to optimize that just the way we described a minute ago, like the way that a child can learn a language very quickly or play the guitar or something like that.

Yeah. Without an accent, you know, three languages without an accent. It's remarkable. You try and do that after age 25, it's very challenging. And so the brain is basically designed to be customized in the early part of life and then to implement those algorithms and that circuitry for the rest of its life.

And so the brain can change in adulthood and it can change provided that there's an emphasis on some perceptual event. So in other words, if you want to change your brain as an adult, let's say you want to be less anxious, you want to learn a new language, you want to be more functional in some way, presumably the key thing is to bring focus to some particular perception of something that's happening during the learning process.

And the reason for that is that there's a neurochemical system involving acetylcholine. And it comes from these two little nuclei down in the base of the brain called nucleus basalis. All day long you're doing things in a reflexive way. But when you do something and you think about it very intensely, acetylcholine is released from basalis at the precise neurons that were involved in that behavior and it marks those for change during sleep or during deep rest later.

So for people that want to change their brain, the power of focus is really the entry point and the ability to access deep rest and sleep, because most people don't realize this, but neuroplasticity is triggered by intense focus, but neuroplasticity occurs during deep sleep and rest. And we can talk about how to optimize those different brain functions.

One of the things that's really important also to think about how the brain works in terms of plasticity and all this stuff is what the brain really wants to do is also pass as much of what it does off to reflexive behavior as possible.

So, so when we're talking about focus, I think it can get a little bit vague, but it might be useful to think about like what exactly is focus and what triggers plasticity. So the brain loves to be able to just do things, pick up coffee cups and drink and walk and talk and do things and not put much energy into it.

When we decide to focus, what the brain really does is it switches on a set of circuits that involve the frontal cortex and nucleus basalis and some others. And it's trying to understand duration, how long something's going to last, path, what's going to happen, and outcome, what ultimately is going to happen. So duration, path, and outcome.

You know, the events of early 2020 are a good example of this. One of the reasons why it's so exhausting to be alive in 2020 is because we are now having to pay attention to duration, path, and outcome. How long is this thing going to last? When are, you know, when are they going to open up all businesses? Did I touch that door handle? Does it matter? You know, who are the experts? Are there any experts? You know, there are a lot of questions. Whereas normally we can just move through life without having to do all that analysis.

So if it's a simple example like trying to learn a new language or a new motor skill or a new way of conceptualizing something, maybe somebody's in a therapeutic process and they're trying to work through a trauma or something like that. Duration, path, and outcome is built into the networks of the brain. We can do that very easily, but it takes work and it almost has a feeling of underlying agitation and frustration.

And that's because the circuits that turn on before acetylcholine are of the stress system. So when you or I decide we're going to learn something and really dig in, norepinephrine, which is adrenaline, is secreted in the brain stem and in the body and it brings about a state of alertness. Then our attention, which is mostly a diffuse light, is brought to a particular duration, path, and outcome analysis.

This would be thinking about what somebody is saying. What are they really trying to say? A hard passage of reading, a hard, you know, set of math problems, you know, a challenging physical workout. When you do that, these two systems have to work very hard and the adult brain doesn't really want to change the algorithms it learned in childhood.

But if you do those two things, you have alertness and focus. The acetylcholine and the norepinephrine converge to mark those synapses for change. And so the way to think about neuroplasticity if one wants to change their brain is bring about the most intense concentration you can to something and then later bring about the least amount of concentration of that thing.

So I'll talk about that in a second, but there were some studies that were done at Stanford by a guy named Eric Kandel that showed that plasticity in the adult brain, any age, can be as robust as it is in childhood, as fast and as dramatic.

Provided the focus is there and it's all contingent on this acetylcholine molecule coming from nucleus basalis. So you say, well, how do you do that? How do you get it? You know, well, I've got friends that chew Nicorette thinking that's going to get them there because Nicorette is a nicotinic acetylcholine agonist, but that's going to globally increase acetylcholine. So I always tell them that's not the right approach.

The right approach is to bring as much focus to a behavior or to a thought or to an action pattern. And there has to be a sense of urgency. So what Kandel's lab showed and another lab at UCSF, Mike Merzenich's lab showed, is that if there's a serious contingency, like in order to get your ration of food each day, you have to learn this thing, the degree of plasticity is remarkable, right?

But if there isn't an incentive, it just isn't going to happen. So these circuits in the brain that mother nature set up are designed to be anchored to a real need. And people always say to me, well, should I do something out of love and a real desire to learn or should it be out of fear? Either one works. The sense of urgency is just acetylcholine. It's norepinephrine. That's all it is.

The brain doesn't have a recognition of whether or not something is pleasurable or not until later. Once you start accomplishing your goal, the reward systems like dopamine start kicking in. But I think if people are interested in modifying their brain for the better, at least some top contour understanding of how urgency and focus must converge for that to happen can be useful.

Because I think there's a lot of attention paid to whether or not something feels like flow or whether or not it's what I call highly desirable states or whether or not you can eat a plant out of the ground that will magically put your brain into a state of plasticity. And the answer is yes, such plants exist. But what's missing is the focus component.

If that work is not done with a particular end goal in mind, you'll get plasticity, but you'll get plasticity in a kind of across the board. It's like learning a little bit of nine languages all at once is not going to make you speak coherently in any one of them. So focus is the key.

Well, I can offer some potential explanations. I can relate.

It's all hard.

And you know, I'm friends with Steven Kotler. I think flow and I think the Csikszentmihalyi who originated the state thing of flow is really interesting. I say right now the most we can say about flow mechanistically is backwards it spells wolf.

We don't really understand flow. People have come up with these theories. It's like, you know, hypofrontality. I haven't seen the data and I'm not picking on anybody. I'm putting that out there as a prompt for people to discover this. I think that and to work on it. I think it's a really interesting, highly desirable state.

But I think we need to get comfortable as a culture in trying to understand our species and how we work that the early stages of hard work and focus are going to feel like agitation, stress, and confusion because that's the norepinephrine and adrenaline system kicking in. None of us would expect to walk into the gym and do our PR lift or, you know, a performer go do something without warming up.

The brain also needs to warm up and start to hone in which circuits are going to be active. And it's unreasonable for us to think, oh, I've got an hour. I'm gonna plop down and write beautifully for an hour or my best work. We need to accept that there's a period of agitation and stress that accompanies the dropping into these highly concentrated states.

Now, in terms of the reward that accompanies the feeling that we're funneling into that groove of being productive in one regime, like for you writing this book, the dopamine system is really important to understand. So, we've talked about norepinephrine kind of gets you going. Acetylcholine is the spotlight of attention. The dopamine system is mother nature's hardwired ancient system in all animals, including humans, to put us on the right path.

Now, a lot of people talk about dopamine as this thing that you get when you publish the book or when you get the book deal or when something wonderful happens like your child's born. And that's true. But dopamine's main role is to be released anytime you achieve a milestone or you think you're on the right path.

And when the dopamine system is tethered to a particular pattern of focus, remember duration, path, and outcome. So, it's like, okay, you sit down, maybe you don't get much text out, but then the next day you get 800 words of really solid text and you feel good. Like, I'm into this. What does that dopamine system do?

The dopamine system takes the norepinephrine, which is normally rate limiting. Like, at some point, there's so much norepinephrine that you quit. And we can talk about that. It's actually the substrate for quitting. Dopamine can push that noradrenaline back down, that adrenaline back down, and give you more room, more space to do duration, path, and outcome work, highly focused work. And I'm making duration, path, outcome synonymous with highly focused work.

Why would this happen? So, let's think about an animal. Let's think about a deer that wakes up and is thirsty and it's wandering out looking for water. That animal needs water. It doesn't know that it needs water. It experiences agitation the same way that a baby feels agitation when it wants food, but it doesn't know it needs food. It just feels agitation and cries and a caretaker comes.

Hopefully, that deer is now foraging for something that it needs. And let's say it smells water because deer can actually do that and arrives at a stream and takes a sip of water. There's dopamine release then that puts it on a path to maybe a larger lake or something of that sort or to be able to go achieve food.

So when we are on the right path and we hit a milestone, dopamine is released and it tends to tighten our focus more for that activity. So the dopamine, this is why drugs of abuse and why alcoholism and some, you know, process addictions which are behavioral addictions are so dangerous because a lot of those drugs of abuse are dopamine.

So it becomes this cyclical loop where there's no other behavior that can evoke the same level of release. In fact, I sort of define addiction as a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure. And I say that because it really is the way that the dopamine system works.

Normally, the dopamine system is designed to be generic. It's designed to get me to do lots of things. Social, quality social interactions, you know, work, exercise, all those things. Just like the stress system is designed to get me out of bed in the morning, a cortisol pulse is what gets me out of bed in the morning. It's also what led me to pursue a career in science out of fear initially and eventually pleasure.

So the dopamine system is tethered to those states of focus and it's what mother nature designed so that the neuroplasticity would occur and you would want to continue those behaviors again in the future. That deer needs to know and remember and create a memory not just of where that stream is, but the process of, oh, when I feel that agitation, I'm going to get up and go down this particular path.

And so people think of the dopamine system as this kind of like catch-all for reward. Oh, you get likes on Instagram and it makes you feel good. That's not really how it works. And the important thing to understand is when you start getting a convergence of norepinephrine, so that level of agitation, duration, path, outcome, acetylcholine, and dopamine, now you're starting to wire in the behaviors that make people really good at certain things.

Now, in a functional view of this, so not addiction, what this means is that for any of us, success in any endeavor is very closely related to how much focus we can bring to that endeavor. And the reward system, you start to realize, is entirely internal. No one's coming along and cramming dopamine in your ear or dripping it in your brain. It's all internal.

And this starts to bring us into the kind of discussion around mindsets because my colleague Carol Dweck, who, you know, popularized this theme, growth mindset, it's again a very misunderstood concept. It's the idea that we can change. So that's built into that.

But the discovery of growth mindset was of these kids that actually really enjoyed doing problem sets that they knew they couldn't get right. But for them, they would get this like dopamine release from just focusing on the problem. They liked doing puzzles they couldn't get right. It sounds crazy, but inevitably those kids are very good at puzzles and very good at math and these kinds of things.

So growth mindset is, I believe, sort of a neuroscience lens on growth mindset would be that the agitation and stress that you feel at the beginning of something and when you're trying to lean into it and you can't focus is just a recognized gate. You have to pass through that gate to get to the focus component.

And then if you can reward the effort process, you really start to feel joy and low levels of excitement in the effort process. That's that buffering of adrenaline. That's that feeling like, yes, I've got a lot of adrenaline in my system, but I'm on the right path. It feels good to walk up this hill, so to speak.

And when you start to bring those neural circuits together, you really start to create a whole set of circuits that are designed to be exported to any behavior you want. So, if it's writing a book, great. If it's podcasting, great. If it's building a business, great. If it's building a terrific relationship, great.

The circuits that mother nature has designed are incredibly generic so that we could adapt to whatever it is that we need to do. And I think the misunderstanding around how these circuits work has led to this idea that there's some secret entry point maybe marked flow on the door and there's a trampoline up to that door and you just open that door and you're going to be in it, right?

And nothing could be further from the truth. And anyone who's done well in any career or athletic pursuit knows this. But unfortunately, there's a kind of obsession with the idea that it's all supposed to feel good. And it does feel good, but there's a whole staircase in which it feels kind of lousy.

Yeah, absolutely. And what's incredible is the extent to which the mind and thoughts, remember earlier we were talking about how thoughts are spontaneous. You can't control them. Negative thoughts, traumatic thoughts, bad thoughts, trying to suppress those is futile. If there's one message I can send people, it's just don't even work at that.

But work at the process of introducing thoughts as almost like you would introduce actions because we can introduce thoughts. And, you know, Carol Dweck has talked about this that positive self-talk is not the same thing as growth mindset because positive self-talk is almost always linked to the ultimate outcome. If I'm losing badly in something and I tell myself I'm doing great, I know that I'm lying. There's no dopamine release from that.

And, you know, a lot of the self-help wellness culture of the 80s and 90s was like, it's impossible to be in a bad mood if you're smiling. We wouldn't have any depression on the planet if that's true. There's probably some feedback from the face to the brain, but it's not that simple.

But the idea that you can self-reward the effort process is extremely powerful because what it means is that if you can recognize agitation, stress, and confusion as an entry point to where you eventually want to go, I do think that even just mental recognition can allow people to pass through it more easily. They think they're doing something wrong.

And then rewarding yourself when you achieve any milestone, like, you know, running to a particular location if you're trying to run a long distance and then registering that as a partial win. What we know is that the dopamine that's released in response to that suppresses the total amount of adrenaline and gives you more room, more time, more energy to run in the running example.

And this is anchored in a real scientific result. So last year there was a paper published that essentially was asking why any human or animal quits at any behavior. Now certain behaviors like I can't lift a car unless it's a very small car. I can't lift a car. But if we're talking about running or we're talking about long bouts of work, the question is why do we quit? Like what is that?

And it turns out that every time we exert effort, a certain amount of noradrenaline in the brain is released and there's a sort of a counter in the brain stem and at some point enough noradrenaline is released and it shuts down cognitive control, deliberate control over the motor circuitry and we quit. That's it.

But the thing that can restore those levels or can sort of reset those levels lower and give us more gas, more mileage is dopamine. And it makes perfect sense because our species had to move against very challenging things in nature and in terms of in culture at every stage of our evolution, including now. 2020 is a good example of this.

And a good example would be if you're really slogging it out and things are miserable, just think like the worst family vacation, everything is a disaster or a very hard physical event and someone cracks a joke. You almost immediately feel a sense of relief.

You see this in the team that wins the Super Bowl. Both teams slogged it out. You have to believe they were both at max effort the entire game. Look at the team that wins. They have extra energy. They're jumping all over the place. So, it can't be physical energy. It can't be glycogen related. It's not ketone related. It's nothing in the body in that sense. It's dopamine's ability to take that level of norepinephrine and smack it back down.

And so, we can learn this, right? I mean, I think this is where there's real power like in your story or the story that I'm familiar with from your book, like the ability to push through those pain points is something that we really can export to other aspects of life because it's the same neurochemicals that are involved.

So when you get to a particular location or maybe you're, I recall, you know, a portion where you're just, you're feeling lousy, you know, you're injured or you feel like you're hurt and you can reframe it mentally and think, I'm actually still on the ladder. I'm still holding on to a rung. I know at least that much. I'm still breathing. I know that much.

And the lift that we get is not some psychological pump-up. It's a neurochemical thing. It's dopamine suppressing norepinephrine and saying you're on the right path. You can keep going. It's a permission to keep going and we grant that permission to ourselves. No one grants that permission to us.

I think one of the other kind of misconceptions that we want to dissolve is this idea that external rewards can actually propel us down long paths of success and high performance. They can't.

Yeah. Yeah.

I have a friend from the SEAL teams and somebody asked us recently, we were giving a talk and somebody said, how can I make sure that I continue to self-reward and I'm not driven by these external rewards? How can I continue to have that drive? And his answer was very good. He said, give away all the external rewards. You know, now not everyone can afford to do that.

It's just you and you. And the more attached, there's a famous Stanford study done at Bing Nursery School, probably not far from where you were in the dormitory. There's a little nursery school in Escondido Village. And they did this study where they looked at kids that liked playing during their recess. It's all recess in nursery school, but they're drawing.

And they took the kids that really liked to draw and they started giving them little gold stars on their drawings and then they liked the gold stars. For a kid that's an extrinsic reward. And then they stopped doing that and the kids stopped drawing. They just, they associated the good feeling of doing it with the external rewards.

We have to be very cautious about how much of our internal dopamine we attach to external rewards. If we want to continue to grow and pursue and focus and work hard, if you just want to get to some place and cash in, then fine. But most people find themselves in a pretty miserable place because their dopamine was so attached to external rewards, they need more and more of that.

Absolutely. There's an interesting process that occurs when people start to realize that rewards are all internal and what they start to do is they start linking this duration, path, outcome thing to their internal rewards. And so to put this simply, one of the most powerful things that any person can do is to learn to control this idea of duration, path, and outcome and attach an internal sense of reward.

Just that you're doing well, to reward yourself mentally. Just say, I'm doing well. I'm actually on the right path to do that inside of the demands that come from the external world. The more often that we can self-reward some aspect of the process, provided it's in the right direction of what we're trying to achieve, the more energy we're going to have for that, the more focus we're going to have for that.

And remember, the reason I say energy, I don't throw that around loosely, is that limiting amount of noradrenaline is constantly being kept at bay. You're literally buffering the quit response. And so when people start realizing that if they set the goals inside of the larger goal and self-reward each one of those, they essentially have an infinite amount of energy to pursue those goals. They have an infinite amount of focus to pursue those goals.

You see this most in the special operations community and people that are selected essentially for this process. So, one of the things that's been intriguing to me, I have some friends from the SEAL teams and I don't begin to, you know, really understand the real work that they do deployed because I've never done that kind of work, but I've always been intrigued by the selection process, the so-called BUD/S process, right?

Because carrying logs and getting in cold water and all that, that's not really how the work is. That's really not what the work is about. So, the selection process is interesting because everyone shows up fit, motivated, and convinced that they're not going to quit. I think like there might be a couple people that just show up to show up, but everybody is absolutely convinced and then a very small subset of them make it through.

And I'd be willing to bet that the ones that make it through, of course they're gritty and resilient, but they all are essentially, right? So that's necessary but not sufficient obviously otherwise everyone would make it through. The people that make it through somehow are able to tap into a process. Maybe it's a reward process. Maybe it's through self-punishment. Maybe it's through self-reward in the positive sense.

But they're able to control something inside an environment that is not controlled by them. It's controlled by the instructors. And I've always been struck by the fact that in order to get through, you just have to not quit. Remember, people aren't being deselected. They're not saying, get out of here. You're not good enough. People are deciding that for themselves.

And so it's interesting because it brings about a real world experiment of people who are quitting and I believe they're quitting because they can't manage these neurotransmitters. And when I say manage, I think that the people that get through, knowing some of these people quite well, had an internal process by which they could reward themselves for doing something that might have just looked trivial to everybody else, but it gave them more gas, more energy.

Right. And what's interesting is the process, the kind of unconscious genius of the BUD/S process is that they've picked two sensory events that are across the board challenging for everybody. One is cold water, which is great because most of the time it can't kill you, right? It's not like heat, which can kill you. It's cold water and sleep deprivation.

And so the ability to do these, like what I'm calling DPOs, this duration, path, and outcome steps and procedures, is great when you're rested. You know, when you're well-fed, well-slept, you can do anything. You can be in any hard conversation, you can work through anything.

So what they do is they start taking the autonomic nervous system, which is these deep reserves of the nervous system, that when our autonomic nervous system is off, it starts making us pay more attention to how we feel than the demands of the world around us. Remember that basic challenge in the nervous system. And so sleep deprivation is the best way that you can pull somebody down from their ability to analyze duration, path, and outcome and reward themselves.

Sleep deprivation is the way in which you essentially pull apart the nervous system and the way that it wants to function because it's very easy, again, rested, to do all this. But so what they do is they sleep-deprive people, they put them in cold water. They're trying to get them more in touch with the way that they feel inside than what they need to do in response to the external demands.

And everyone I know that's made it through that process did it slightly differently. But I'll tell you how they didn't do it. They didn't do it through sheer grit and determination. They did it through attaching a sense of meaning. They did it by micro-slicing the day or slicing the day into a series of meals that they just needed to get to and then rewarding themselves for getting to that next milestone. So, they don't know. I mean, most of them, you know, probably had

Very low concept of dopamine and norepinephrine, but that's the process. That's also the process, I think, that allows someone to finish an ultra. I've never run an ultra, but I think that process of self-reward is grit and resilience in a kind of neurochemical definition.

Yeah, so I had the good fortune of meeting David at a consulting event a few years ago, and I should just say, David is, you probably know this already, but he is every bit as intense as he comes across.

Exactly, yeah, exactly. What you see is what you get. Really wonderful and obviously extremely impressive human being.

So he, a little David anecdote. So the night before we had this event, he came out to the lab. My lab, we study fear, we study courage, we study resilience, and we study the underlying neurochemical substrates for those. So we had a bunch of guys there, a couple team guys, some other folks, and we bring them in this little room and we do virtual reality there. And one of the things that we use to scare people or to generate a sense of autonomic arousal is this experience of diving with great white sharks, which of course you're not in water in the laboratory, but it's very immersive. And for people that are afraid of sharks, it can be quite scary. Not always, but we also have heights. We have claustrophobia. But we got something where you can feel spiders crawling all over your body if you're an arachnophobe. We, you know, if you have a pain point, we find it.

We do. And we do it through some very covert methodology that involves AI and some fun tools.