The following is a conversation with Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist at Stanford,
working to understand how the brain works, how it can change their experience,
and how to repair brain circuits damaged by injury or disease.
He has a great Instagram account at Huberman Lab, where he teaches the world about the brain
and the human mind. Also, he's a friend and an inspiration in that he shows that you can be
humble, giving, and still succeed in the science world. Quick mention of each sponsor,
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Friedman. And now here's my conversation with Andrew Huberman. You've mentioned that in your lab
at Stanford, you do stress by putting people into virtual reality and having them go through
one of a set of experiences. I think you mentioned this on Rogan or with Whitney,
that scare them. So just on a practical, psychological level and maybe on a philosophical
level, what are people afraid of? What are the fears? What are these fear experiences that
you find to be effective? Yeah, so it depends on the person, obviously. And we should probably
define fear, right? Because you can, without going too far down the rabbit hole of defining
these things, you can't really have fear without stress, but you could have stress without fear.
And you can't really have trauma without fear and stress, but you could have fear and stress
without trauma. So we can start playing the word game, and that actually is one of the
motivations for even having a laboratory that studies these things is that we really need better
physiological, neuroscientific, and operational definitions of what these things are. I mean,
the field of understanding emotions and states, which is mainly what I'm interested in,
is very complicated. But we can do away with a lot of complicated debate and say,
in our laboratory, what we're looking for to assign it a value of fear is a big inflection
in autonomic arousal. So increases in heart rate, increases in breathing,
perspiration, pupil dilation, all the hallmark signature features of the stress response.
And in some cases, we have the benefit of getting neurosurgery patients where we've
got electrodes in their amygdala and their insula and the orbital frontal cortex
down beneath the skull. So these are chronically implanted electrodes, we're getting multi-unit
signals. And we can start seeing some central features of meaning within the brain. And
what's interesting is that, as trivial as it might seem in listening to it,
almost everybody responds to heights and falling from a high virtual place with a very strong stress,
if not fear response. And that's because the visual vestibular apparatus, the optic flow and
how it links to the balanced semi-circular canals in the inner ears, all this technical stuff.
But really, all of that pulls all your physiology, the feeling that your stomach is dropping,
the feeling that suddenly you're sweating even though you're not afraid of falling off this
virtual platform, but you feel as if you're falling because of the optic flow. That one is
universal. So we've got a dive with Great White Sharks experience where you actually exit the
cage. We went out into this in the real world and brought back 360 video that's built out.
Oh, so this is actually 360 video. That's awesome. And this was important to us, right? So when we
decided to set up this platform, a lot of the motivation was that a lot of the studies of
these things in laboratories, I don't want to call them lame because I want to be respectful of the
people that did this stuff before, but they'd study fear by showing subjects a picture of a
bloody arm or a snake or something like that. And unless you have a snake phobia, it just wasn't
creating a real enough experience. So we need to do something where people aren't going to get
injured, but where we can tap into the physiology and that thing of presence of people momentarily,
not the whole time, but momentarily forgetting they're in a laboratory. And so heights will
always do it. And if people want to challenge me on this, I like to point to that movie Free Solo,
which was wild because it's incredible movie, but I think a lot of its popularity can be explained
by a puzzle, which is you knew he was going to live when you walked in the theater or you watched
it at home. You knew before that he survived. And yet it was still scary that people somehow were
able to put themselves into that experience or into Alex's experience enough that they were
concerned or worried or afraid at some level. So heights always does it. If we get people who
have generalized anxiety, these are people who wake up and move through life at a generally
higher state of autonomic or alzol and anxiety, then we can tip them a little bit more easily
with things that don't necessarily get everyone afraid, things like claustrophobia, public speaking.
That's going to vary from person to person. And then if you're afraid of sharks, like my sister,
for instance, afraid of sharks, she won't even come to my laboratory because there's a thing
about sharks in it. That's how terrified some people are of these specific stimuli. But heights
get some every time. And I'm terrified of heights. It's when we have you step off a platform,
virtual platform, and it's a flat floor in my lab, but you're up there. Well, you actually
allow them the possibility in the virtual world to actually take the leap of faith. Yeah, maybe
I should describe a little bit of the experiment. So without giving away too much in case someone
wants to be a subject in one of these experiments, we have them playing a cognitive game. It's a
simple lights out kind of game where you're pointing a cursor and turning out lights on a
grid. But it gets increasingly complex and it speeds up on them. And there's a failure point
for everybody where they just can't make the motor commands fast enough. And then we surprise
people essentially by placing them virtually all of a sudden, they're on a narrow platform between
two buildings. And then we encourage them or we cue them by talking to them through microphone to
continue across that platform to continue the game. And some people, they actually will get
down on the ground and hold on to a virtual beam that doesn't even exist on a flat floor.
And so what this really tells us is the power of the brain to enter these virtual states as if
they were real. And we really think that anchoring the visual and the vestibular, the balance
components of the nervous system are what bring people into that presence so quickly.
There's also the potential and we haven't done this yet to bring in 360 sound. So the reason we
did 360 video is when we started all this back in 2016, a lot of the VR was pretty lame, frankly.
It was CGI. It just wasn't real enough. But with 360 video, we knew that we could get people into
this presence where they think they're in a real experience more quickly. And our friend Michael
Muller, who I was introduced to because of the project, I reached out to some friends. Michael
Muller is a very famous portrait photographer in Hollywood, but he dives with great white sharks
and he leaves the cage. And so we worked with him to build a 360 video apparatus that we could
swim underwater with, went out to Guadalupe Island, Mexico, and actually got the experience. It was
a lot of fun. There were some interesting moments out there of danger, but it came back with that
video and built that for the sharks. And then we realized we need to do this for everything. We need
to do it for heights. We need to do it for public speaking, for claustrophobia. And what's missing
still is 360 sound where 360 sound would be, for instance, if I were to turn around and there was
like a giant attack dog there, the moment I would turn around and see it, the dog would growl. But
if I turned back toward you, then it would be silent. And that brings a very real element to
one's own behavior where you don't know what's going to happen if you turn a corner. Whereas if
there's a dog growling behind me and I turn around and then I turn back to you and it's still growling,
that might seem like more of an impending threat and sustained threat. But actually,
it's when you start linking your own body movements to the experience. So when it's closed loop,
where my movements and choices are starting to influence things and they're getting scarier
and scarier, that's when you can really drive people's nervous system down these paths of high
states of stress and fear. Now, we don't want to traumatize people, obviously, but we also study
a number of tools that allow them to calm themselves in these environments. So the short answer is
heights. Well, from a psychology and from a neuroscience perspective, this whole construction
that you've developed is fascinating. We did this a little bit with autonomous vehicles,
so to try to understand the decision making process of a pedestrian when they cross the road
and try to create an experience of a car that can run you over. So there's the danger there.
I was so surprised how real that whole world was. And the graphics that we built wasn't
ultra realistic or anything, but I was still afraid of being hit by a car. Everybody we tested
were really afraid of being hit by that car. Even though it was all a simulation.
It was all a simulation. It was kind of a boxy, actually. I mean, it wasn't like
ultra realistic simulation. And it's fascinating. Looms and heights. So any kind of depth, we're
just programmed to not necessarily recoil but to be cautious about that edge and that depth.
And then looms, things coming at us that are getting larger. There are looming sensing neurons
even in the retina at a very, very early stage of visual processing. And incidentally,
the way Mueller and folks learn how to not get eaten by great white sharks when you're swimming
outside the cage is as they start lumbering in, you swim toward them. And they get very confused
when you loom on them because clearly you're smaller, clearly they could eat you if they
wanted to. But there's something about forward movement toward any creature that that creature
questions whether or not it would be a good idea to generate forward movement toward you.
And so that's actually the survival tool of these cage exit white shark divers.
Are you playing around with like one of the critical things for the autonomous vehicle
research is you couldn't do 360 video because there's a game theoretic. There's an interactive
element that's really necessary. So maybe people realize this, maybe they don't, but 360 video,
you obviously, what's actually not that obvious to people, but you can't change
the reality that you're watching. That's right. So, but you find that that's
like, is there something fundamental about fear and stress that the interactive element is essential
for? Or do you find you can you can arouse people with just the video? Great question.
It works best to use mixed reality. So we have a snake stimulus. I personally don't like snakes
at all. I don't mind spiders. We also have a spider stimulus, but like snakes, I just don't
like them. There's something about the the slithering and the it just it creates a visceral
response for me. Some people not so much. And they have lower levels of stress and fear in there.
But one way that we can get them to feel more of that is to use mixed reality where we have
an actual physical bat, and they have to stomp out the snake as opposed to just
walk to a little safe corner, which then makes the snake disappear. That tends to be not as
stressful as if they have a physical weapon. And so you've got people in there, you know,
banging on the floor against this thing. And there's something about engaging that makes it more
of a more of a threat. Now, I should also mention we we always get the subjective report from the
subject of what they experience, because I we never want to project our own ideas about what
they were feeling. But that's the beauty of working with humans is you can ask them how they feel.
Exactly. And humans aren't great at explaining how they feel. But it's a lot easier to understand
what they're saying than a mouse or a macaque monkey is saying. So it's the best we can do
is language plus these physiological and neurophysiological signals.
Is there something you've learned about yourself about your deepest fears?
Like you said, snakes, is there something that like if I were to torture you, I'm
so I'm Russian. So, you know, I always kind of think, how could I murder this people that this
person entered the room? But also how how could I torture you to get some information out of you?
What, what, what would I go with? It's interesting. You should say that I never
considered myself claustrophobic. But because I don't mind small environments provided they're
well ventilated. But before COVID, I started going to this Russian Banya, you know, and then
which I'm curious. And I had never been to a Banya. So, you know, the whole experience of
really, really hot sauna. And what are they called the plots? They're hitting you with the leaves.
And it gets really hot and humid in there. And there were a couple of times where I thought,
okay, this thing is below ground. It's in a city where there are a lot of earthquakes,
like if this place crumbled and we were stuck in here and I'd start getting a little panicky.
And I realized I'm like, I don't like small confined spaces with poor ventilation. So,
I realized I think I have some claustrophobia. And I wasn't aware of that before. So I put
myself into our own claustrophobia stimulus, which involves getting into an elevator.
And with a bunch of people, virtual people, and the elevator gets stalled. And at first,
you're fine. You feel fine. But then as we start modulating the environment and we actually can
control levels of oxygen in the environment if we want to, it is really uncomfortable for me.
And I never would have thought, you know, I fly, I'm comfortable in planes, but it is really
uncomfortable. And so I think I've unhatched a bit of a claustrophobia.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, for me as well, probably. That one, that one is pretty bad. The heights,
I tried to overcome. So I went to skydiving to try to overcome the fear of heights,
but that didn't help. Did you jump out? Yeah, yeah, jumped out. But it was, it was a,
it was fundamentally different experience than I guess there could be a lot of different flavors
of fear of heights, maybe. But the one I have didn't seem to be connected to jumping out of a
plane because it's a very different, because like once you accept it, you're going to jump.
Then it's, it's a different thing. I think what I'm afraid of is the moments before it
is the scariest part. Absolutely. And I don't think that's emphasized in the skydiving experience
as much. And also just the acceptance of the fact that it's going to happen. So once you accept it
is going to happen, it's not as scary. It's the fact that it's not supposed to happen. And it might,
that's the scary part. I guess I'm not being eloquent in this description, but there's something
about skydiving that was actually philosophically liberating. I was, I was like, wow, it, it was
the possibility that you can walk on a surface. And then at a certain point, there's no surface
anymore to walk on. And it's all of a sudden the world becomes three-dimensional. And there's this
freedom of floating that the concept of like, of earth disappears for a brief few seconds. I don't
know. That was, that was wild. That was wild, but I'm still terrified of heights. So I mean, one,
one thing I want to ask just on fear, because it's so fascinating is, have you learned anything about
what it takes to overcome fears? Yes. And that comes from two, from a, you know, research study
standpoint, two parallel tracks of research. One was done actually in mice, because we have a mouse
lab also where we can probe around in different brain areas and try and figure out what interesting
brain areas we might want to probe around in humans. And a graduate student in my lab, she's now at
Caltech, Lindsay Sallay, published a paper back in 2018 showing that what at first might seem a
little bit obvious, but the mechanisms are not, which is that there are really three responses
to fear. You can pause, you can freeze essentially. You can retreat, you can back up, or you can go
forward. And there's a single hub of neurons in the midbrain, in the, it's actually not the
midbrain, but it's in the middle of the thalamus, which is a forebrain structure. And depending
on which neurons are active there, there's a much higher probability that a mouse or it turns out
or a human will advance in the face of fear or will pause or will retreat. Now, that just assigns
a neural structure to a behavioral phenomenon. But what's interesting is that it turns out
that the lowest level of stress or autonomic arousal is actually associated with the pausing
and freezing response. Then as the threat becomes more impending and we used visual looms, in this
case, the retreat response has a slightly higher level of autonomic arousal and stress. So think
about playing hide-and-go-seeking or trying to stay quiet in a closet that you're hiding. If
you're very calm, it's easy to stay quiet and still. As your level of stress goes up, it's harder
to maintain that level of quiet and stillness. You see this also in animals that are stalking a
cat will chatter its teeth. That's actually sort of top-down inhibition and trying to restrain
behavior. So the freeze response is actually an active response, but it's fairly low stress.
And what was interesting to us is that the highest level of autonomic arousal
was associated with the forward movement toward the threat. So in your case, jumping out of the
plane. However, the forward movement in the face of threat was linked to the activation of what we
call collateral, which means just a side connection, literally a wire in the brain that connects to the
dopamine circuits for reward. And so when one safely and adaptively, meaning you survive,
moves through a threat or toward a threat, it's rewarded as a positive experience. And so the
key, it actually maps very well the cognitive behavioral therapy and a lot of the existing
treatments for trauma is that you have to confront the thing that makes you afraid.
So otherwise, you exist in this very low level of reverberatory circuit activity where the circuits
for autonomic arousal are humming and they're humming more and more and more. And we have to
remember that stress and fear and threat were designed to agitate us so that we actually move.
So the reason I mention this is I think a lot of times people think that the maximum
stress response or fear response is to freeze and to lock up. But that's actually not the
maximum stress response. The maximum stress response is to advance, but it's associated
with reward. It has positive valence. So there's this kind of, everyone always thinks about the
bell shape curve for at low levels of arousal performance is low and as increases performance
goes higher and then it drops off as you get really stressed. But there's another bump
further out the distribution where you perform very well under very high levels of stress.
And so we've been spending a lot of time in humans and in animals exploring what it takes to get
people comfortable to go to that place and also to let them experience how there are heightened
states of cognition there. There's changes in time perception that allow you to evaluate your
environment at a faster frame rate, essentially. This is the matrix that a lot of people think of
it. But we tend to think about fear as all the low level stuff where things aren't worked out.
But there are many, there are a lot of different features to the fear response. And so we think
about it quantitatively and we think about it from a circuit perspective in terms of outcomes.
And we try and weigh that against the threat. So we never want people to put themselves in
unnecessary risk, but that's where the VR is fun because you can push people hard without
risk of physically injuring them. And that's, like you said, the little bump. That seems to be a
very small fraction of the human experience. So it's kind of fascinating to study it because
most of us move through life without ever experiencing that kind of focus.
Well, everything's in a peak state there. I really think that's where optimal performance lies.
There's so many interesting words here, but what's performance and what's optimal performance?
We're talking about mental ability to perceive the environment quickly,
to make actions quickly. What's optimal performance?
Yeah, well, it's very subjective and it varies depending on task and environment. So one way
we can make it a little bit more operational and concrete is to say there is a sweet spot,
if you will, where the level of internal autonomic arousal, aka stress or alertness,
whatever you want to call it, is ideally matched to the speed of whatever challenge you have to be
facing in the outside world. So we all have perception of the outside world as exteroception
and the perception of our internal real estate interoception. And when interoception and
exteroception are matched along a couple dimensions, performance tends to increase,
or tends to be in an optimal range. So for instance, if you're, I don't play guitar,
but I know you play guitar. So let's say you're trying to learn something new on the guitar.
I'm not saying that being in these super high states of activation are the best place for
you to be in order to learn. It may be that your internal arousal needs to be at a level where
your analysis of space and time has to be well matched to the information coming in
and what you're trying to do in terms of performance, in terms of playing chords
and notes and so forth. Now, in these cases of high threat where things are coming in quickly
and animals and humans need to react very quickly, the higher your state of autonomic
arousal, the better because you're slicing time more finely just because of the way the autonomic
system works. The pupil dilation, for instance, and movement of the lens essentially changes your
optics. That's obvious. But with the change in optics is a change in how you bend time and
slice time, which allows you to get more frames per second readout. With the guitar learning,
for instance, it might actually be that you want to be almost sleepy, almost in a kind of drowsy
state to be able to, and I don't play music, so I'm guessing here, but sense some of the nuance
in the chords or the ways that you're to be relaxed enough that your fingers can follow an
external cue. So matching the movement of your fingers to something that's pure external reception.
And so there is no perfect autonomic state for performance. This is why I don't favor terms
like flow because they're not well operationally defined enough. But I do believe that optimal
or peak performance is going to arise when internal state is ideally matched to the
space time features of the external demands. So there's some slicing of time that happens,
and then you're able to adjust, so slice time more finely or more or less finely in order to
adjust to the stimulus, the dynamics of the stimulus. What about the the realm of ideas?
So like, you know, I'm a big believer, this guy named Cal Newport wrote a book about deep work.
Oh yeah, I love that book. Yeah, he's great. I mean, one of the nice things, I've always
practiced deep work, but it's always nice to have words put to the concepts that you've
practiced. It somehow makes them more concrete and allows you to get better. It turns it into a
skill that you can get better at. But, you know, I also value deep thinking where you think it's
almost meditative, you think about a particular concept for long periods of time, the programming
you have to do that kind of thing for, you just have to hold this concept, like, like you hold
it, and then you take steps with it, you take further steps, and you're holding relatively
complicated things in your mind as you're thinking about them. And there's a lot of,
I mean, the hardest part is there's frustrating things like you take a step and it turns out
to be the wrong direction. So you have to calmly turn around and take a step back. And then it's
you kind of like exploring through the space of ideas. Is there something about your study of
optimal performance that could be applied to the act of thinking as opposed to action?
Well, we haven't done too much work there, but what, but I think I can comment on it
from a neuroscience perspective, which is really all I do is, well, we do experiments in the lab,
but looking at things through the lens of neuroscience. So what you're describing can
be mapped fairly well to working memory, just keeping things online and updating them as
they change and information is coming back into your brain. Jack Feldman, who I'm a huge fan of
and fortunate to be friends with, is a professor at UCLA, works on respiration and breathing,
but he has a physics background. And so he thinks about respiration and breathing in terms of
ground states and how they modulate other states, very, very interesting and I think important
and important work. Jack has an answer to your question. So I'm not going to get this exactly
right because this is lifted from a coffee conversation that we had about a month ago.
So apologies in advance for that, but I think I can get mostly right. So we were talking about
this about how the brain updates cognitive states depending on demands and thinking in particular.
And he used an interesting example, I'd be curious to know if you agree or disagree.
He said, you know, most great mathematics is done by people in their late teens and 20s,
and even you could say early 20s, sometimes into the late 20s, but not much further on.
Yeah. Maybe I just insulted some mathematicians. No, that's true.
And I think that it demands, his argument was there's a tremendous demand on working memory
to work out theorems in math and to keep a number of plates spinning, so to speak,
mentally, and run back and forth between them, updating them. In physics,
Jack said, and I think this makes sense to me too, that there's a reliance on working memory,
but an increased reliance on some sort of deep memory and deep memory stores, probably stuff
that's moved out of the hippocampus and forebrain and into the cortex and is more
or some episodic and declarative stuff. But really, so you're pulling from your library,
basically, it's not all RAM, it's not all working memory. And then in biology,
and physicists tend to have very active careers into their 30s and 40s and 50s and so forth,
sometimes later. And then in biology, you see careers that have a much longer arc,
kind of these protracted careers often, people still in their 60s and 70s doing really terrific
work, not always doing it with their own hands because people in the labs are doing them, of
course. And that work does tend to rely on insights gained from having a very deep knowledge base,
where you can remember a paper or maybe a figure in a paper, you could go look it up if you wanted
to, but it's very different than the working memory of the mathematician. And so when you're
talking about coding or being in that tunnel of thought and trying to iterate and keeping
a lot of plates spinning, it speaks directly to working memory. My lab hasn't done too much of
that. Working memory. But we are pushing working memory when we have people do things like these
simple lights out tasks. While they're under, we can increase the cognitive load by increasing
the level of autonomic arousal to the point where they start doing less well. And everyone has a
cliff. This is what's kind of fun. We've had SEAL team operators come to the lab, we have people
from other units in the military. We've had range of intellects and backgrounds and all sorts of
things. And everyone has a cliff. And those cliffs sometimes show up as a function of the demands of
speed of processing or how many things you need to keep online. I mean, we're all limited at some
point in the number of things we can keep online. So what you're describing is very interesting
because I think it has to do with how narrow or broad the information set is. And I'm not a
active programmer, so this is a regime I don't really fully know. So I don't want to comment about it
in any way that doesn't suggest that. But I think that what you're talking about is top-down control.
So this is prefrontal cortex keeping every bit of reflexive circuitry at bay, the one that makes
you want to get up and use the restroom, the one that makes you want to check your phone, all of
that, but also running these anterior thalamus to prefrontal cortex loops, which we know are very
important for working memory. Yeah, let me try to think through this a little bit. So
reducing the process of thinking to working memory access is tricky. It's probably ultimately correct.
But if I were to say some of the most challenging things that an engineer has to do,
and a scientific thinker, I would say it's kind of depressing to think that we do that best in
our 20s, but is this kind of first principles thinking step of saying you're accessing the things
that you know, and then saying, well, how do I do this differently than I've done it before?
This weird stepping back, is this right? Let's try it this other way. That's the most mentally
taxing step. You've gotten quite good at this particular pattern of how you solve this particular
problem. So there's a pattern recognition first. You're like, okay, I know how to build a thing
that solves this particular problem in programming, say, and then the question is, but can I do it
much better? And I don't know if that's, I don't know what the hell that is. I don't know if that's
accessing working memory. That's almost access, maybe it is accessing memory in a sense it's trying
to find similar patterns in a totally different place that it could be projected onto this.
But you're not querying facts, you're querying functional things.
Yes, patterns. I mean, you're running out, you're testing algorithms, right? You're testing
algorithms. So I want to just, because I know some of the people listening to this and you
have a basis in scientific training and have scientific training. So I want to be clear.
I think we can be correct about some things like the role of working memory in these kinds of
processes without being exhaustive. We're not saying they're the only thing. We can be correct,
but not assume that that's the only thing involved, right? And I mean, neuroscience,
let's face it, is still in its infancy. I mean, we probably know 1% of what there is to know
about the brain. We've learned so much. And yet, there may be global states that underlie
this, that make prefrontal circuitry work differently than it would in a different regime.
Or even time of day. I mean, there's a lot of mysteries about this. So I just want to make
sure that we're aiming for precision inaccuracy, but we're not going to be exhaustive. So there's
a difference there. And I think sometimes in the vastness of the internet, that gets forgotten.
So the other is that, we think about these operations at really focused, keeping a lot of
things online. But what you were describing is actually, it speaks to the very real possibility,
with certainty, there's another element to all this, which is when you're trying out lots of
different algorithms, you don't want to be in a state of very high autonomic arousal. That's
not what you want. Because the higher level of autonomic arousal and stress in the system,
the more rigidly you're going to analyze space and time. And what you're talking about is playing
with space-time dimensionality. And I want to be very clear, I mean, I'm the son of a physicist,
I am not a physicist. When I talk about space and time, I'm literally talking about
about visual space and how long it takes for my finger to move from this point to this point.
You are facing a tiger and trying to figure out how to avoid being eaten by the tiger.
And that's primarily going to be determined by the visual system in humans. We don't walk through
space, for instance, like a scent hound would, and look at three-dimensional scent plumes. You
know, when a scent hound goes out in the environment, they have depth to the odor trails
they're following. And they don't think about them. If we don't think about odor trails,
you might say, oh, well, the smell's getting more intense. But they actually have three-dimensional
odor trails. So they see a cone of odor, seed, of course, with their nose, with their olfactory
cortex. We do that with our visual system. And we parse time often subconsciously,
mainly with our visual system, also with our auditory system. And this shows up for the
musicians out there. Metronomes are a great way to play with this. You know, bass drumming,
when the frequency of bass drumming changes, your perception of time changes quite a lot.
So in any event, space and time are linked in that through the sensory apparatus,
through the eyes and ears and nose, and probably through taste, too, and through touch for us,
but mainly through vision. So when you drop into some coding or iterating through a creative
process or trying to solve something hard, you can't really do that well if you're in a rigid,
high level of autonomic arousal, because you're plugging in algorithms that are
in this space regime, this time regime matches. It's space time matched. Whereas creativity,
I always think the lava lamp is actually a pretty good example, even though it has these
counterculture new agey connotations, because you actually don't know which direction things
are going to change. And so in drowsy states, sleeping and drowsy states, space and time become
dislodged from one another somewhat, and they're very fluid. And I think that's why a lot of
solutions come to people after sleep and naps. And this could even take us into a discussion,
if you like, about psychedelics. And what we now know, for instance,
that people thought that psychedelics work by just creating a spontaneous bursting of neurons
and hallucinations, but that the 5H2CA and 2C and 2A receptors, which are the main sites for
things like LSD and psilocybin and some of the other, the ones that create hallucinations,
the drugs that create hallucinations, the most of those receptors are actually in the
collection of neurons that encase the thalamus, which is where all the sensory information goes
into a structure called the thalamic reticular nucleus. And it's an inhibitory structure that
makes sure that when we're sitting here talking, that I'm mainly focused on whatever I'm seeing
visually that I'm essentially eliminating a lot of sensory information under conditions where
people take psychedelics and these particular serotonin receptors are activated, that inhibitory
shell, it's literally shaped like a shell, starts losing its ability to inhibit the passage of
sensory information, but mostly the effects of psychedelics are because the lateral connectivity
in layer 5 of cortex across cortical areas is increased. And what that does is that means
that the space-time relationship for vision, like moving my finger from here to here,
a very rigid space-time relationship, if I slow it down, it's slower obviously,
but there's a prediction that can be made based on the neurons in the retina and the cortex.
On psychedelics, this could be very strange experience, but the auditory system has one
that's slightly different space-time and they're matched to one another in deeper circuits in the
brain. The olfactory system has a different space-time relationship to it. So under conditions of
these increased activation of these serotonin receptors, space and time across sensory areas
starts being fluid. So I'm no longer running the algorithm from moving my finger from here to here
and making a prediction based on vision alone. I'm now, this is where people talk about hearing
sites, right? You start linking, this might actually make a sound in a psychedelic state.
Now, I'm not suggesting people run out and do psychedelics because it's very disorganized,
but essentially what you're doing is you're mixing the algorithms. And so when you talk about being
able to access new solutions, you don't need to rely on psychedelics. If people choose to do that,
that's their business. But in drowsy states, this lateral connectivity is increased as well.
The shell of the thalamus shuts down. And these are through these so-called pawns,
cheniculate occipital waves. And what's happening is you're getting whole brain activation at a
level that you start mixing algorithms. And so sometimes I think solutions come not from being
in that narrow tunnel of space-time and strong activation of working memory and trying to,
well, iterate if this, then this very strong deductive and inductive thinking and working
from first principles, but also from states where something that was an algorithm that you never
had in existence before suddenly gets lumped with another algorithm. And all of a sudden,
a new possibility comes to mind. And so space and time need to be fluid and space and time need to
be rigid in order to come up with something meaningful. And I realize I'm riffing long on
this. But this is why I think there was so much interest a few years ago with Michael Pollan's
book and other things happening about psychedelics as a pathway to exploration and all this kind of
thing. But the real question is what you export back from those experiences because dreams are
amazing. But if you can't bring anything back from them, they're just amazing.
I wonder how to experiment with a mind without any medical assistance first. I pushed my mind
in all kinds of directions. I did shrooms a couple of times. I definitely want to
figure out how I can experiment with psychedelics. I'm talking to Rick Dobin, I think, Doblin.
Soon, I went back and forth. So he does all these studies on psychedelics. And he keeps ignoring
the parts of my email that asks, like, how do I participate in these studies?
Yeah, well, there are some legality issues. I mean, conversation, I want to be very clear.
I'm not saying that anyone should run out and do psychedelics. I think that drowsy states and
sleep states are super interesting for accessing some of these more creative states of mind.
Hypnosis is something that my colleague David Spiegel, Associate Chair of Psychiatry at Stanford,
works on, where also, again, it's a unique state because you have narrow context. So this is very
kind of tunnel vision and yet deeply relaxed where new algorithms, if you will, can start to surface.
Strong state for inducing neuroplasticity. And I think, so if I had a, I'm part of a group
that it's called the liminal collective as a group of people that get together and talk about
just wild ideas, but they try and implement. And it's a really interesting group, some people from
military, from Logitech and some other backgrounds, academic backgrounds. And I was asked, what would
be, if you could create a tool, you just had a tool like your magic wand wish for the day,
what would it be? I thought it'd be really interesting if someone could develop psychedelics
that have on-off switches. So you could go into a psychedelic state very deeply for 10 minutes,
but you could launch yourself out of that state and place yourself into a linear real-world state
very quickly so that you could extract whatever it was that happened in that experience and then go
back in if you wanted. Because the problem with psychedelic states and dream states is that,
first of all, a lot of the reason people do them is they're lying. They say they want plasticity
and they want all this stuff. They want a peak experience inside of an amplified experience.
So they're kind of seeking something unusual. I think we should just be honest about that
because a lot of times they're not trying to make their brain better. They're just trying to
experience something really amazing. But the problem is space and time are so unlocked
in these states, just like they are in dreams, that you can really end up with a whole lot of
nothing. You can have an amazing amplified experience housed in an amplified experience
and come out of that thinking you had a meaningful experience when you didn't bring anything back.
You didn't bring anything back. All you have is a fuzzy memory of having a transformational
experience. But you don't actually have tools to bring back or actually concrete ideas to bring
back. Yeah, it's interesting. I wonder if it's possible to do that with the mind to be able to
hop back and forth. I think that's where the real power of adjusting states is going to be.
It probably will be with devices. Maybe it'll be done through pharmacology. It's just that
it's hard to do on-off switches in human pharmacology, that we have them for animals.
I mean, we have Cree-Flip recombinases and we have channelopsins and haloridopsins and
all these kinds of things. But to do that work in humans is tricky. But I think you could do it
with virtual reality, augmented reality, and other devices that bring more of the somatic
experience into it. You're, of course, a scientist who's studying humans as a collective. I tend to
be just a one-person scientist of just looking at myself. When these deep thinking, deep work
sessions, I'm very cognizant in the morning that there's times when my mind is so
eloquent at being able to jump around for ideas and hold them all together.
I'm almost like I step back from a third person perspective and enjoy that whatever that mind
is doing. I do not waste those moments. I'm very conscious of this little creature that woke up
that's only awake for, if we're being honest, maybe a couple hours a day, an early part of the
day for you. An early part of the day. Not always. An early part of the day for me is a very fluid
concept. You're one of those. Yeah, you're one of those. Being single, one of the problems.
Single and no meetings. I don't schedule any meetings. I've been living on a 28-hour day,
so it drifts. It's all over the place. But after a traditionally defined full night sleep,
whatever the heck that means, I find that in those moments, there's a clarity of mind that's just
everything is effortless. It's the deepest dives intellectually that I make. I'm cognizant of it,
and I try to bring that to the other parts of the day that don't have it,
and treasure them even more in those moments because they only last five or 10 minutes.
Because, of course, in those moments, you want to do all kinds of stupid stuff that are completely
is worthless, like Czech social media or something like that. But those are the most
precious things in intellectual life is those mental moments of clarity. And I wonder,
I'm learning how to control them. I think caffeine is somehow involved. I'm not sure exactly.
Sure. Well, because if you learn how to titrate caffeine, everyone's slightly different with
this, what they need. But if you learn to titrate caffeine with time of day and the kind of work
that you're trying to do, you can bring that autonomic arousal state into close to perfect
place. And then you can tune it in with sometimes people want a little bit of background music,
sometimes they want less, these kinds of things. The early part of the day is interesting because
one thing that's not often discussed is the transition out of sleep. So there's a book,
I think it's called Winston Churchill's Nap, and it's about naps and the transition between
wake and sleep as a valuable period. A long time ago, someone who I respect a lot was
mentoring me said, be very careful about bringing in someone else's sensory experience early in
the day. So when I wake up, I'm very drowsy. I sleep well, but I don't emerge from that very
quickly. I need a lot of caffeine to wake up and whatnot. But there's this concept
of getting the download from sleep, which is in sleep, you were essentially expunging the
things that you don't need, the stuff that was meaningless from the previous day.
But you were also running variations on these algorithms of whatever it is you're trying to
work out in life on short timescales like the previous day and long timescales like your whole
life. And those lateral connections in layer five of the neocortex are very robustly
active and cross-sensory areas. And you're running an algorithm, it's a brain state that
would be useless in waking. You wouldn't get anything done. You'd be the person talking to
yourself in the hallway or something about something that no one else can see. But in those
states, the theory is that you arrive at certain solutions, and those solutions will reveal themselves
in the early part of the day unless you interfere with them by bringing in social media as a good
example of you immediately enter somebody else's space-time sensory relationship. Someone is the
conductor of your thoughts in that case. And so many people have written about this, what I'm
saying isn't entirely new, but allowing the download to occur in the early part of the day.
And asking the question, am I more in my head or am I in more of an interoceptive or extroceptive
mode? And depending on the kind of work you need to do, if it sounds like for you, it's very
interoceptive and you've got a lot of thinking going on and a lot of computing going on,
allowing yourself to transition out of that sleep state and arrive with those solutions from sleep
and plug into the work really deeply. And only then allowing things like music, news, social
media, doesn't mean you shouldn't talk to loved ones and see faces and things like that. But some
people have taken this to the extreme. When I was a graduate student at Berkeley, there was a guy,
there was a professor, brilliant, odd but brilliant, who was so fixated on this concept that he
wouldn't look at faces in the early part of the day because he just didn't want anything else to
impact him. Now, he didn't have the most rounded life, I suppose. But if you're talking about
cognitive performance, this could actually be very beneficial.
You said so many brilliant things. So one, if you read books that describe the habits of
brilliant people, like writers, they do control that sensory experience in the hours after wake.
Like many writers, they have a particular habit of several hours early in the morning of actual
writing. They don't do anything else for the rest of the day, but they control, they're very
sensitive to noises and so on. I think they make it very difficult to live with them. I try to,
I'm definitely like that. I love to control the sensory, how much information is coming in.
There's something about the peaceful, just everything being peaceful. At the same time,
and we're talking to a mutual friend of Whitney Cummings who has a mansion, a castle on top of
a cliff in the middle of nowhere. She actually purchased her own island. She wants silence.
She wants to control how much sound is coming in. She's very sensitive to sound and environment.
Beautiful home and environment, but clearly puts a lot of attention into details and very creative.
That allows for creativity to flourish. I don't like, that feels like a slippery slope,
so I enjoy introducing noises and signals and training my mind to be able to tune them out,
because I feel like you can't always control the environment so perfectly, because your
mind gets comfortable with that. I think it's a skill that you want to learn to be able to
shut it off. I often go back before COVID to a coffee shop. It really annoys me when there's
sounds and voices and so on, but I feel like I can train my mind to block them out. So it's a
balance, I think. Yeah, and I think two things come to mind as you're saying this. First of all,
what's best for work is not always what's best for completeness of life. Autism is probably
many things. Autism, they're probably 50 ways to get a fever. They're probably 50 ways that the brain
can create what looks like autism or what people call autism. There's an interesting
set of studies that have come out of David Ginty's lab at Harvard Med looking at, these are mouse
mutants where these are models for autism where nothing is disrupted in the brain proper and
in the central nervous system, but the sensory neurons, the ones that innervate the skin and
the ears and everything are hypersensitive, and this maps to a mutation in certain forms of human
autism. So this means that the overload of sensory information and sensory experience
that a lot of autistics feel, that they can't tolerate things and then they get the stereotype
behaviors, the rocking and the shouting, we always thought of that as a brain problem.
In some cases, it might be, but in many cases, it's because it's like turning the volume up on
every sense and so they're overwhelmed and none of us want to become like that. I think it's very
hard for them and it's hard for their parents and so forth. So I like the coffee shop example
because the way I think about trying to build up resilience physically or mentally or otherwise
is one of, I guess we could call it limb, I like to call it limbic friction. That's not a real
scientific term and I acknowledge that I'm making it up now because I think it captures the concept
which is that we always hear about resilience. It makes it sound like, oh, under stress,
where everything's coming at you, you're going to stay calm. The limbic system wants to pull
you in some direction, typically in the direction of reflexive behavior and the prefrontal cortex
through top-down mechanisms has to suppress that and say, no, we're not going to respond to the
banging of the coffee cups behind me or I'm going to keep focusing. That's pure top-down control.
So limbic friction is high in that environment. You've put yourself into a high limbic friction
environment. I mean that the prefrontal cortex has to work really hard. But there's another side to
limbic friction too, which is when you're very sleepy, there's nothing incoming. It can be completely
silent and it's hard to engage and focus because you're drifting off and you're getting sleepy.
So their limbic friction is high but for the opposite reason, autonomic arousal is too low.
So they're turning on Netflix in the background or looping a song might boost your level of
alertness that will allow top-down control to be in the play exactly the sweet spot you want it.
So this is why earlier I was saying it's all about how we feel inside relative to what's going on
on the outside. We're constantly in this, I guess one way you could envision it spatially, especially
if people are listening to this just on audio, is I like to think about it kind of like a glass
barbell where one sphere of perception and attention can be on what's going on with me.
And one sphere of attention can be on what's going on with you or something else in the room
or in my environment. But this barbell isn't rigid. It's not really glass. Would plasma work here?
I don't know anything about plasma. Sorry, I don't know. So imagine that this thing can contort
the size of the globes at the end of this barbell can get bigger or smaller. So let's say I close
my eyes and I bring all my experience into what's going on through interoception internally.
Now it's as if I've got two orbs of perception just on my internal state, but I can also do the
opposite and bring to both orbs of perception outside me. I'm not thinking about my heart rate
or my breathing. I'm just thinking about something I see. And what you'll start to realize as you
kind of use this spatial model is that two things. One is that it's very dynamic and that the more
relaxed we are, the more these two orbs of attention, the two ends of the barbell can move
around freely. The more alert we are, the more rigid they're going to be tethered in place.
And that was designed so that if I have a threat in my environment,
it's tethered to that threat. If something's coming to attack me, I'm not going to be like,
oh, my breathing cadence is a little bit quick. That's not how it works. Why? Because both orbs
are linked to that threat. And so my behavior is now actually being driven by something external,
even though I think it's internal. And so I don't want to get too abstract here because I'm a
neuroscientist. I'm not a theorist. But when you start thinking about models of how the brain
work, I mean, brain works, excuse me, they're only really three things that neurons do. They're
either sensory neurons, they're motor neurons, or they're modulating things. And the models of
attention and perception that we have now, 2020, tell us that we've got interoception and extra
reception. They're strongly modulated by levels of autonomic arousal. And that if we want to form
the optimal relationship to some task or some pressure or something, whether or not it's sleep
and impending threat or coding, we need to adjust our internal space time relationship with the
external space time relationship. And I realize I'm repeating what I said earlier. But we can
actually assign circuitry to this stuff. It mostly has to do with how much limbic friction there is,
how much you're being pulled to some source. That source could be internal. If I have pain,
physical pain in my body, I'm going to be much more interoceptive than I am exteroceptive.
You could be talking to me and I'm just going to be thinking about that pain. It's very hard.
And the other thing that we can link it to is top down control, meaning anything in our environment
that has a lot of salience will tend to bring us into more extra reception than interoception.
And again, I don't want to litter the conversation with just a bunch of terms. But
what I think it can be useful for people is to do what essentially you've done, Lex, is to start
developing an awareness. When I wake up, am I mostly in a mode of interoception or extra
reception? When I work well, what does working well look like from the perspective of autonomic
arousal? How alert or calm am I? What kind of balance between internal focus and external
focus is there? And to sort of watch this process throughout the day.
Can you just briefly use this term a lot and be nice to try to get a little more color to it,
which is interoception and extra reception? What are we exactly talking about? What's included
in each category and how much overlap is there? Interoception would be an awareness of anything
that's within the confines or on the surface of my skin that I'm sensing.
So literally physiological. Physiologically, like within the boundaries of my skin
and probably touch to the skin as well. Extra reception would be perception of anything that's
beyond the reach of my skin. So that bottle of water, a scent, a sound, although, and this
can change dramatically, actually, if you have headphones in, you tend to hear things in your
head as opposed to a speaker in the room. This is actually the basis of ventriloquism.
So there are beautiful experiments done by Greg Reckonzone up at UC Davis looking at how auditory
and visual cues are matched in an array of speakers. And this will become obvious as I say it,
but obviously the ventriloquist doesn't throw their voice. What they do is they direct your
vision to a particular location and you think the sound is coming from that location. And there
are beautiful experiments that Greg and his colleagues have done where they suddenly introduce
an auditory visual mismatch and it freaks people out because you can actually make it seem from
a perception standpoint as if the sound arrived from the corner of the room and hit you like
physically and people will recoil. And so sounds aren't getting thrown across the room. They're
still coming from this defined location and array of speakers. But this is the way the brain
creates these internal representations. And again, not to I don't want to go down a rabbit hole, but
I think as much as you know, I'm sure the listeners appreciate this, but you know,
everything in the brain is an abstraction, right? I mean, the sensory apparatus that are the eyes
and ears and nose and skin and taste and all that are taking information and with interoception,
taking information from sensors inside the body, the enteric nervous system for the gut.
I've got sensory neurons that iterate my liver, etc. Taking all that. And the brain is abstracting
that in the same way that if I took a picture of your face and I handed it to you and I'd say,
that's you, you'd say, yeah, that's me. But if I were an abstract artist, I'd be doing a little
bit more of what the brain does, where if I took a pen and pad and paper, maybe I could do this
because I'm a terrible artist, and I could just mix it up. And let's say I would make your eyes
like water bottles, but I'd flip them upside down and I'd start assigning fruits and objects to
the different features of your face. And I showed you, I say, Lex, that's you. Say, well,
that's not me. And I'd say, no, but that's my abstraction of you. But that's what the brain
does. The space-time relationship of the neurons that fire that encode your face has
have no resemblance to your face. Right. And I think people don't really, I don't know if people
have fully internalized that. But the day that I, and I'm not sure I fully internalized that,
because it's weird to think about, but all neurons can do is fire in space and in time,
different neurons in different sequences, perhaps with different intensities. It's not clear the
action potential is all or none. Although neuroscientists don't like to talk about that,
even though it's been published in Nature a couple of times, the action potential for a given neuron
doesn't always have the exact same waveform. People, it's in all the textbooks, but you can
modify that waveform. Well, I mean, there's a lot of fascinating stuff with neuroscience about the
fuzziness of all the, of the transfer of information from neuron to neuron. I mean, that we certainly
touch upon it every time we at all try to think about the difference between artificial neuron
networks and biological neural networks. But can we maybe linger a little bit on this,
on the circuitry that you're getting at? So the brain is just a bunch of stuff firing,
and it forms abstractions that are fascinating and beautiful, like layers upon layers upon layers
of abstraction. And I think it, just like when you're programming, you know, on programming in
Python, it's awe-inspiring to think that underneath it all, it ends up being zeros and ones. And the
computer doesn't know about no stupid Python or Windows or Linux. It only knows about the zeros
and ones in the same way with the brain. Is there something interesting to you or fundamental to
you about the circuitry of the brain that allows for the magic that's in our mind to emerge?
How much do we understand? I mean, maybe even focusing on the vision system. Is there something
specific about the structure of the vision system, the circuitry of it, that allows for the complexity
of the vision system to emerge? Or is it all just a complete chaotic mess that we don't understand?
It's definitely not all a chaotic mess that we don't understand if we're talking about vision.
And that's not just because I'm a vision scientist.
Let's stick to vision.
Let's stick to vision.
Well, because in the beauty of the visual system, the reason David Hubel and Torrance and Weasel
won the Nobel Prize was because they were brilliant and forward-thinking and adventurous
and all that good stuff. But the reason that the visual system is such a great model for
addressing these kinds of questions and other systems are hard is we can control the stimuli.
We can adjust spatial frequency, how finer the gradings are, thick gradings, thin gradings.
We can adjust temporal frequency, how fast things are moving. We can use cone-isolating
stimuli. There's so many things that you can do in a controlled way. Whereas if we're talking
about cognitive encoding, encoding the space of concepts or something, I like you, if I may,
I am drawn to the big questions in neuroscience. But I confess, in part because of some good
advice I got early in my career, and in part because I'm not perhaps smart enough to go after
the really high-level stuff, I also like to address things that are tractable. And we need
to address what we can stand to make some ground on at a given time.
That you can construct brilliant controlled experiments to study, to really literally
answer questions about it. Yeah. I mean, I'm happy to have a talk about consciousness,
but it's a scary talk. And I think most people don't want to hear what I have to say,
we can save that for later, perhaps. I mean, it's an interesting question of
we talk about psychedelics, we can talk about consciousness, we can talk about cognition.
Can experiments in neuroscience be constructed to shed any kind of light on these questions?
So I mean, it's cool that vision, I mean, to me, vision is probably one of the most beautiful
things about human beings. Also, from the AI side, computer vision has some of the most exciting
applications of neural networks is in computer vision. But it feels like that's a neighbor
of cognition and consciousness. It's just that we maybe haven't come up with experiments to study
those yet. Yeah, the visual system is amazing. We're mostly visual animals to navigate,
survive humans mainly rely on vision, not smell or something else. But
it's a filter for cognition. And it's a strong driver of cognition,
maybe just because it came up and then we're moving to higher level concepts.
The way the visual system works can be summarized in a few
relatively succinct statements, unlike most of what I said, which has not been succinct at all.
Let's go there. What's involved? Yeah, so the retina is this three layers
of neuron structure at the back of your eyes, but I think it's a credit card.
It is a piece of your brain. And sometimes people think I'm kind of wriggling out of
reality by saying that it is it's absolutely a piece of the brain. It's a four brain structure
that in the first trimester, there's a genetic program that made sure that that neural retina,
which is part of your central nervous system, was squeezed out into what's called the embryonic
eye cups and that the bone formed with a little hole where the optic nerve is going to connect
it to the rest of the brain. And that window into the world is the only window into the
world for a mammal, which has a thick skull. Birds have a thin skull, so their pineal gland
sits and lizards to and snakes actually have a hole so that light can make it down into the
pineal directly and entrained melatonin rhythms for time of day and time of year.
Humans have to do all that through the eyes. So three layers of neurons that are a piece of
your brain, their central nervous system, and the optic nerve connects to the rest of the brain.
The neurons in the eye somewhat just care about luminance, just how bright or dim it is,
and they inform the brain about time of day. And then the central circadian clock informs
every cell in your body about time of day and makes sure that all sorts of good stuff happens if
you're getting light in your eyes at the right times and all sorts of bad things happen if you
are getting light randomly throughout the 24-hour cycle. We could talk about all that,
but this is a good incentive for keeping a relatively normal schedule, a consistent schedule
of light exposure, consistent schedule. Try and keep a consistent schedule. When you're young,
it's easy to go off schedule and recover. As you get older, it gets harder. But you see everything
from outcomes in cancer patients to diabetes improves when people are getting light at a
particular time of day and getting darkness at a particular phase of the 24-hour cycle.
We were designed to get light and dark at different times of the circadian cycle.
That's all that information is coming in through specialized type of neuron in the retina
called the melanopsin intrinsically photosensitive ganglion cell discovered by
David Berson at Brown University. That's not spatial information. It's subconscious. You
don't think, oh, it's daytime. Even if you're looking at the sun, it doesn't matter. It's a
photon counter. It's literally counting photons. It's saying, oh, even though it's a cloudy day,
lots of photons coming in at winter in Boston. It must be winter and your system is a little
depressed. It's spring. You feel alert. That's not a coincidence. That's these melanopsin cells
signaling the circadian clock. There are a bunch of other neurons in the eye that signal to the
brain. They mainly signal the presence of things that are lighter than background or darker than
background. Darker than background, a light object, lighter than background. It's looking
at pixels. Mainly, they look at circles. Those neurons have receptive fields, which not everyone
will understand, but those neurons respond best to little circles of dark light or little circles
of bright light. Little circles of red light versus little circles of green light or blue light.
It sounds very basic. It's like red, green, blue, and circles brighter or dimmer than what's next
to it. That's basically the only information that's sent down the optic nerve. When we say
information, we can be very precise. I don't mean little bits of red traveling down the optic nerve.
I mean spikes, neural action potentials in space and time, which for you makes total sense. But
I think for a lot of people, it's actually beautiful to think about. All that information in the
outside world is converted into a language that's very simple. It's just like a few syllables,
if you will. Those syllables are being shouted down the optic nerve, converted into a totally
different language like Morse code. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. It goes into the brain and then
the thalamus essentially responds in the same way that the retina does. Except the thalamus is also
waiting things. It's saying, you know what? That thing was moving faster than everything else,
or it's brighter than everything else. So that signal I'm going to get up, I'm going to allow
up to cortex. Or that signal is much redder than it is green. So I'm going to let that signal go
through that signal as much. It's kind of more like the red next to it. Throw that out. The
information just doesn't get up into your cortex. And then in cortex, of course, is where perceptions
happen. And in V1, if you will, visual area one, but also some neighboring areas, you start getting
representations of things like oriented lines. So there's a neuron that responds to this
angle of my hand versus vertical. This is the defining work of Hubel and Wiesel's Nobel.
And it's a very systematic map of orientation, line orientation, direction of movement,
and so forth. And that's pretty much end color. And that's how the visual system is organized
all the way up to the cortex. So it's hierarchical. I want to be clear, it's hierarchical because you
don't build up that line by suddenly having a neuron that responds to lines in some random way.
It responds to lines by taking all the dots that are aligned in a vertical stack,
and they all converge on one neuron. And then that neuron responds to vertical lines. So it's
not random. There's no abstraction at that point, in fact. In fact, if I showed you a black line,
I could be sure that if I were imaging V1, that I would see a representation of that black line
as a vertical line somewhere in your cortex. So at that point, it's absolutely concrete,
it's not abstract. But then things get really mysterious. Some of that information travels
further up into the cortex and goes from one visual area to the next, to the next, to the next,
so that by time you get into an area that Nancy Kenwisher at MIT has studied much of her career,
the fusiform face area, you start finding single neurons that respond only to your father's face
or to Joe Rogan's face, regardless of the orientation of his face. I'm sure if you saw Joe,
because you know him well, from across the room and you just saw his profile, you'd be like,
oh, that's Joe. Walk over and say hello. The orientation of his face isn't there. You wouldn't
even see his eyes necessarily. But he's represented in some abstract way by a neuron
that actually would be called the Joe Rogan neuron or collection neurons.
It might have limits. I might not recognize him if he was upside down or something like that.
It'd be fascinating to see what the limits of that Joe Rogan concept is.
So Nancy's lab has done that because early on she was challenged by people that said,
there aren't face neurons. There are neurons that they only respond to space and time,
shapes and things like that moving in particular directions and orientations. And it turns out
Nancy was right. They used these stimuli called greeble stimuli, which any computer programmer
would appreciate, which kind of morphs a face into something gradually that eventually just looks
like this alien thing they call the greeble. And the neurons don't respond to greebles.
In most cases, they only respond to faces and familiar faces. Anyway, I'm summarizing a lot
of literature and forgive me, Nancy, and for those of the greeble people, if there are,
is there anything like, don't come after me with pitchforks. Actually, you know what,
come after me with pitchforks. I think you know what I'm trying to do here. So the point is that
in the visual system, it's very concrete up until about visual area four, which has color pinwheels
and seems to respond to pinwheels of colors. And so the stimuli become more and more elaborate.
But at some point, you depart that concrete representation and you start getting abstract
representations that can't be explained by simple point to point wiring. And to take a leap out of
the visual system to the higher level concepts, what we talked about in the visual system, maps
to the auditory system where you're encoding what? Frequency of tone sweeps. So this is gonna sound
weird to do, but you know, like a Doppler, like hearing something car passing by, for instance.
But at some point, you get into motifs of music that can't be mapped to just a,
what they call a tonotopic map of frequency, you start abstracting. And if you start thinking
about concepts of creativity and love and memory, like what is the map of memory space?
Well, your memories are very different than mine, but presumably there's enough structure at the
early stages of memory processing or at the early stages of emotional processing or at the earlier
stages of creative processing that you have the building blocks, your zeros and ones, if you will.
But you depart from that eventually. Now, the exception to this, and I want to be really clear
because I was just mainly talking about neocortex, the six layered structure on the outside of the
brain that explains a lot of human abilities, other animals have them too, is that subcortical
structures are a lot more like machines. It's more plung and chug. And what I'm talking about
is the machinery that controls heart rate and breathing and receptive fields, neurons that
respond to things like temperature on the top of my left hand. And one of the, I came into
neuroscience from the more of a perspective initially of psychology, but one of the reasons I
forced upon myself to learn some electrophysiology, not a ton but enough. And some molecular biology
and about circuitry is that one of the most beautiful experiences you can have in life.
I'm convinced, is to lower an electrode into the cortex and to show a person or an animal,
you do this ethically, of course, stimulus, like an oriented line or a face. And you can convert
the recordings coming off of that electrode into an audio signal or an audio monitor, and you can
hear what they call hash. It's not the hash you smoke, it's the hash you hear. And it's,
it sounds like, it just sounds like noise. And in the cortex, eventually, you find a stimulus
that gets the neuron to spike in fire action potentials that convert it into an auditory
stimulus that are very concrete crack, crack, crack sounds like a bat cracking, you know,
like home runs, you know, or outfield balls. When you drop electrodes deeper into the thalamus
or into the hypothalamus or into the brainstem areas that control breathing,
it's like a machine. You never hear hash. You drop the electrode down. This could be like a
grungy old Tuggestin electrode, not high fidelity electrode. As long as it's got a little bit of
insulation on it, you plug it into an audio monitor, it's picking up electricity. And
if it's a visual neuron and it's in the thalamus or the retina and you walk in front of that animal
or person, that neuron goes, and then you walk away and it stops. And you put your hand in front
of the eye again, and it goes, and you could do that for two days. And that neuron will just,
every time there's a stimulus, it fires. So whereas before it's a question of how much
information is getting up to cortex, and then these abstractions happening where you're creating
these ideas, when you go subcortical, everything is... There's no abstractions.
It's two plus two equals four. There's no abstractions. And this is why I know we have
some common friends at Neural Link. And I love the demonstration they did recently. I'm a huge
fan of what they're doing and where they're headed. And no, I don't get paid to say that.
And I have no business relationship to them. I'm just a huge fan of the people in the mission.
But my question was to some of them, when are you going to go subcortical? Because if you want
to control an animal, you don't do it in the cortex. The cortex is like the abstract painting I
made of your face. Removing one piece or changing something may or may not matter for the abstraction.
But when you are in the subcortical areas of the brain, a stimulating electro can evoke an
entire behavior or an entire state. And so the brain, if we're going to have a discussion about
the brain and how the brain works, we need to really be clear which brain. Because everyone
loves neocortex. It's like, oh, canonical circuits in cortex, we're going to get the
cortical connectome. And sure, necessary, but not sufficient. Not to be able to plug in
patterns of electrical stimulation and get behavior. Eventually we'll get there. But if
you're talking subcortical circuits, that's where the action is. That's where you could potentially
cure Parkinson's by stimulating the subthalamic nucleus. Because we know that it gates motor
activation patterns in very predictable ways. So I think for those that are interested in
neuroscience, it pays to pay attention to, is this a circuit that abstracts the sensory information?
Or is it just one that builds up hierarchical models in a very predictable way? And there's
a huge chasm in neuroscience right now because there's no conceptual leadership. No one knows
which way to go. And this is why I think Neuralink has captured an amazing opportunity, which was,
okay, well, while all you academic research labs are figuring all this stuff out,
we're going to pick a very specific goal and make the goal the endpoint. And some academic
laboratories do that. But I think that's a beautiful way to attack this whole thing about
the brain because it's very concrete. Let's restore motion to the Parkinsonian patient.
Academic labs want to do that too, of course. Let's restore speech to the stroke patient.
But there's nothing abstract about that. That's about figuring out the solution to a particular
problem. So anyway, those are my, and I admit I've mixed in a lot of opinion there. But having
spent some time, like 25 years digging around in the brain and listening to neurons firing and
looking at them anatomically, I think given it's 2020, we need to ask the right, you know,
the way to get better answers to ask better questions. And the really high level stuff
is fun. It makes for good conversation. And it has brought enormous interest. But I think the
question's about consciousness and dreaming and stuff. They're fascinating. But I don't know
that we're there yet. So you're saying there might be a chasm in the two views of the power of the
brain arising from the circuitry that forms abstractions or the power of the brain arising from
the majority of the circuitry that's just doing very brute force dumb things that are like,
that don't have any fancy kind of stuff going on. That's really interesting to think about.
And which one to go after first? And here I'm poaching badly from someone I've never met,
but whose work I follow, which is, and it was actually on your podcast, I think Elon Musk said,
you know, basically the brain is a monkey brain with a supercomputer on top. And I thought that's
actually probably the best description of the brain I've ever heard because it captures a lot of
important features like limbic friction, right? But we think of like, oh, when we're making plans,
we're using the prefrontal cortex and we're executive function and all this kind of stuff.
But think about the drug addict who's driven to go pursue heroin or cocaine. They make plans.
So clearly they use their frontal cortex. It's just that it's been hijacked by the limbic system
and all the monkey brain as you refer to. It's really not fair to monkeys though, Elon,
because actually monkeys can make plans. They just don't make plans as sophisticated as us.
I've spent a lot of time with monkeys, but I've also spent a lot of time with humans.
Anyway, you're saying like, there's a lot of value to focusing on the monkey brain or whatever
the heck you call it. I do because let's say I had an ability to place a chip anywhere I wanted
in the brain today and activate it or inhibit that area. I'm not sure I would put that chip in
neocortex, except maybe to just kind of have some fun and see what happens. The reason is it's an
abstraction machine. And especially if I wanted to make a mass production tool, a tool in mass
production that I could give to a lot of people because it's quite possible that your abstractions
are different enough than mine that I wouldn't know what patterns of firing to induce. But if I
want, let's say I want to increase my level of focus and creativity, well, then I would love to
be able to, for instance, control my level of limbic friction. I would love to be able to wake up
and go, oh, you know, I have an eight o'clock appointment. I wake up slowly. So between seven
and eight, but I want to do a lot of linear thinking. So you know what? I'm going to just,
I'm going to turn down the limbic friction and or ramp up prefrontal cortex is activation. So
there's a lot of stuff that can happen in the thalamus with sensory gating. For instance,
you could shut down that shell around the thalamus and allow more creative thinking by allowing more
lateral connections. These would be some of the, those would be the experiments I'd want to do.
So they're in the subcortical, quote unquote, monkey brain. But you could then look at what
sorts of abstract thoughts and behaviors would arise from that rather than, and here I'm not
pointing my finger at neural link at all. But there's this obsession with neocortex. But I'm
going to, well, I might lose a few friends, but I'll hopefully gain a few. And also, one of the
reasons people spend so much time in neocortex, I have a fact and an opinion. One fact is that you
can image there and you can record there. Right now, the two photon and one photon microscopy
methods that allow you to image deep into the brain still don't allow you to image down really
deep unless you're jamming prisms in there and endoscopes. And then the endoscopes are very
narrow. So you're getting very, you know, it's like looking at the bottom of the ocean through a,
through a spotlight. And so you much easier look at the waves up on top, right? So let's face it,
folks. A lot of the reasons why there's so many recordings in layer two, three of cortex with
all this advanced microscopy is because it's very hard to image deeper. Now, the microscopes are
getting better. And thanks to the amazing work mainly of engineers and chemists and physicists,
let's face it, they're the ones who brought this revolution to neuroscience in the last 10 years
or so. You can image deeper. But we don't really, that's why you see so many reports on layer two,
three. The other thing, which is purely opinion, and I'm not going after anybody here, but is that
as long as there's no clear right answer, it becomes a little easier to do creative work in
a structure where no one really knows how it works. So it's fun to probe around because anything you
see is novel. If you're going to work in the thalamus or the pulvenar or the hypothalamus or
these structures that have been known about since the 60s and 70s and really since the centuries
ago, you are dealing with exist, you have to combat existing models. And whereas in cortex,
no one knows how the thing works. Neocortex, six layer cortex. And so there's a lot more room for
discovery. There's a lot more room for discovery. And I'm not calling anyone out. I love cortex.
We've published some papers on cortex. It's super interesting. But I think with the tools that are
available nowadays and where people are trying to head of not just reading from the brain,
monitoring activity, but writing to the brain, I think we really have to be careful and we need
to be thoughtful about what are we trying to write? What script are we trying to write? Because
there are many brain structures for which we already know what scripts they write. And I
think there's tremendous value there. I don't think it's boring. The fact that they act like
machines makes them predictable. Those are your zeros and ones. Let's start there. But what's
sort of happening in this field of writing to the brain is there's this idea. And again,
I want to be clear, I'm not pointing at neural link. I'm mainly pointing at the neocortical
jockeys out there that you go in, you observe patterns, and then you think replaying those
patterns is going to give rise to something interesting. I should call out one experiment
or two experiments which were done by Sasumoto Nagawa, Nobel Prize winner from MIT, done important
work in memory and immunology, of course, as well as Mark Mayford's lab at UC San Diego.
They did an experiment where they monitored a bunch of neurons while an animal learned something.
Then they captured those neurons through some molecular tricks so they could replay the neurons.
So now there's like perfect case scenario. It's like, okay, you monitor the neurons in your brain,
then I say, okay, neurons one through 100 were played in the particular sequence. So you know
the space time, you know the keys on the piano that were played that gave rise to the song,
which was the behavior. And then you go back and you reactivate those neurons, except you
reactivate them all at once, like slamming on all the keys once on the piano. And you get the
exact same behavior. So the space time code may be meaningless for some structures. Now that's
freaky. That's a scary thing because what that means is that all the space time firing in cortex,
the space part may matter more than the time part. So rate codes and space time codes,
we don't know. And I'd rather have more, I'd rather deliver more answers in this discussion
questions, but I think it's an important consideration. You're saying some of the
magic is in the early stages of what the closest of the raw information that the brain is receiving.
I believe so. You know the stimulus. You know the neuron then codes that stimulus. So you know
the transformation. When I say this for those that don't think about sensory transformations,
it's like I can show you a red circle. And then I look at how many times the neuron fires in
response to that red circle. And then I could show the red circle a bunch of times, green circle,
see if it changes. And then essentially the number of times that is the transformation.
You've converted red circle into like three action potentials, or whatever you want to call it,
for those that think in sound space. So that's what you've created. You know the transformation
and you march up the, it's called the nerve axis as you go from the periphery up into the cortex.
And we know that, and I know Lisa Feldman-Berrider, is it Barrett Feldman?
Barrett Feldman, excuse me, Lisa, that talked a lot about this, that you know, birds can do
sophisticated things and whatnot as well. But humans, there's a strong what we call
cephalization. A lot of the processing is moved up into the cortex and out of these
subcortical areas. But it happens nonetheless. And so as long as you know the transformations,
you are in a perfect place to build machines or add machines to the brain that exactly mimic
what the brain wants to do, which is take events in the environment and turn them into internal
firing of neurons. So the mastery of the brain can happen at the early
low. You know, another perspective of it is you saying this means that humans aren't that special
if we look at the evolutionary time scale, the leap to intelligence is not that special. So like
the extra layers of abstraction isn't where most of the magic happens of intelligence,
which gives me hope that maybe if that's true, that means the evolution of intelligence is
not that rare of an event. I certainly hope not. Obviously, you hope there's,
I hope there are other forms of intelligence. I mean, I think what humans are really good at and
here, I want to be clear that this is not a formal model, but what humans are really good at is
taking that plasma barbell that we were talking about earlier and not just using it for analysis
of space, like the your media environment, but also using historical information. Like I can
read a book today about the history of medicine, I happen to be doing that lately for some stuff
I'm researching. And I can take that information and if I want, I can inject it into my plans
for the future. Other animals don't seem to do that over the same time scales that we do.
Now, it may be that the chipmunks are all hiding little notebooks everywhere in the form of little
dirt castles or something that we don't understand. I mean, the waggle dance of the bee is in the most
famous example. Bees come back to the hive, they orient relative to the honeycomb and they waggle.
There's a guy down in Australia named Serena Visan who studied this. It's really interesting,
no one really understands it except he understands it best. The bee waggles in a couple of ways
relative to the orientation of the honeycomb and then all the other bees see that it's visual
and they go out and they know the exact coordinate system to get to the source of whatever was the
food and bring it back. And he's done it where they isolate the bees, he's changed the visual
flight environment, all this stuff. They are communicating and they're communicating something
about something they saw recently but it doesn't extend over very long periods of time. The same
way that you and I can both read a book or you can recommend something to me and then we could
converge on a set of ideas later. And in fairness, because she was the one that said it and I didn't
and I hadn't even thought of it, when you talked to Lisa on your podcast, she brought up something
beautiful which is that had never really occurred to me and I was sort of embarrassed that it hadn't
but it's really beautiful and brilliant which is that we don't just encode
senses in the form of color and light and sound waves and taste but ideas become a form of sensory
mapping. And that's where the really, really cool and exciting stuff is but we just don't
understand what the receptive fields are for ideas. What's an idea of receptive field?
And how they're communicated between humans because we seem to be able to encode those
ideas in some kind of way. Yes, it's taking all the raw information and the internal physical
states, that sensory information put into this concept blob that we store and then we're able
to communicate that. Your abstractions are different than mine. I actually think the
comment section on social media is a beautiful example of where the abstractions
are different for different people. So much of the misunderstanding of the world
is because of these idea receptive fields. They're not the same whereas I can look at
a photoreceptor neuron or olfactory neuron or a V1 neuron and I am certain I would bet my life
that yours look and respond exactly the same way that Lisa's do and mine do but once you get
beyond there it gets tricky and so when you say something or I say something and somebody gets
upset about it or even happy about it, their concept of that might be quite a bit different.
They don't really know what you mean. They only know what it means to them.
Yeah, so from a neural link perspective, it makes sense to optimize the control and the
augmentation of the more primitive circuitry. So the stuff that is closer to the raw sensory
information. Go deeper into the brain. And to be fair, so Matt McDougal who's a neurosurgeon
at Neuralink and also a clinical neurosurgeon, great guy, brilliant. They have amazing people.
I have to give it to them. They have been very cryptic in recent years. Their website was just
like nothing there. They really know how to do things with style and they've upset a lot of
people but that's good too. But Matt is there. I know Matt, he actually came up through my lab
at Stanford although he was a neurosurgery resident. He spent time in our lab. He actually came out
on the shark dive and did great white shark diving with my lab to collect the VR that we use in our
fear stuff. I've talked to Matt and I think he and other folks that are hungry for the deeper
brain structures, the problem is that damn vasculature, all that blood supply. It's not
trivial to get through and down into the brain without damaging the vasculature in the neocortex
which is on the outer crust. But once you start getting into the thalamus and closer to some of
the main arterial sources, you really risk getting massive bleeds. It's an issue that can
be worked out. It just is hard. Maybe it'd be nice to educate. I'm sure my ignorance. The smart
stuff is on the surface. I didn't quite realize because you keep saying deep. The early stages
are deep in actually physically in the brain. Of course, you've got your deep brain structures
that are involved in breathing and heart rate and kind of lizard brain stuff. And then on top of
that, this is the model of the brain that no one really subscribes to anymore. But anatomically,
it works. And then on top in mammals. And then on top of that, you have the limbic structures which
gate sensory information and decide whether or not you're going to listen to something more
than you're going to look at it or you're going to split your attention to both sensory allocation
stuff. And then the neocortex is on the outside. And that is where you get a lot of this abstraction
stuff. And now not all cortical areas are doing abstraction. Some are like visual area one,
auditory area one. They're just doing concrete representations. But as you get into the higher
order stuff, when you start hearing names like infro, parietal cortex, and when you start hearing
multiple names in the same, then you're talking about higher order areas. But actually, there's an
important experiment that drives a lot of what people want to do with brain machine interface.
And that's the work of Bill Newsom, who is at Stanford, and Tony Moveshin, who runs the Center
for Neuroscience at NYU. This is a wild experiment. And I think it might freak a few people out if
they really think about it too deeply. But anyway, here he goes. There's an area called MT in the
cortex. And if I showed you a bunch of dots all moving up, and this is what Tony and Bill and
some of the other people in that lab did way back when, is they show a bunch of dots moving up.
Somewhere in MT, there are some neurons that respond, they fire when the neurons move up.
And then what they did is they started varying the coherence of that motion. So they made it so
only 50% of the dots moved up and the rest move randomly. And that neuron fires a little less.
And eventually, it's random and that neuron stops firing because it's just kind of dots moving
everywhere. It's awesome. And there's a systematic map so that other neurons are responding to
things moving down and other things are responding left and other things are moving right. Okay.
So there's a map of direction space. Okay, well, that's great. You could lesion MT,
animals lose the ability to do these kind of coherence discrimination or direction discrimination.
But the amazing experiment, the one that just is kind of eerie, is that they lowered a stimulating
electrode into MT, found a neuron that responds to when dots go up. But then they silenced that neuron.
And sure enough, the animal doesn't recognize the neurons are going up. And then they move the
dots down. They stimulate the neuron that responds to things moving up. And the animal responds,
because it can't speak, it responds by doing a lever press, which says the dots are moving up.
So in other words, the sensory, the dots are moving down in reality on the computer screen.
They're stimulating the neuron that responds to dots moving up. And the perception of the animal
is that dots are moving up, which tells you that your perception of external reality
absolutely has to be a neuronal abstraction. It is not tacked to the movement of the dots in any
absolute way. Your perception of the outside world depends entirely on the activation patterns of
neurons in the brain. And you can hear that and say, well, duh, because if I stimulate the stretch
reflex and you kick or something or whatever, the knee reflex and you kick, of course, there's
a neuron that triggers that. But it didn't have to be that way. Because A, the animal had prior
experience, B, you're way up in this higher order cortical areas. And I generally try and
avoid conversations about this kind of thing. But what this means is that we are constructing our
reality with this space time firing the zeros and ones. And it doesn't have to have anything to do
with the actual reality. And the animal or person can be absolutely convinced that that's what's
happening. Are you familiar with the work of Donald Hoffman? So he's, so he makes an evolution
argument. That's not important. That we, our brains are completely detached from reality,
in the sense that he makes a radical case, that we have no idea what physical reality is. And in
fact, is drastically different than what we think it is. So he goes, that's scary. So he doesn't
say like there's just because you're kind of implying there's a, there's a gap. There might,
there might be a gap. We're constructing an illusion. And then maybe using communication to
maybe create a consistency that's sufficient for human collaboration, whatever, or mammal could,
you know, just maybe even just life forms are constructing a consistent reality that's maybe
detached. I mean, that's really cool that neurons are constructing that like that you can prove
this is when you were science at his best vision science. But he says that like, our brain is actually
just lost its shit on the path of evolution to where we're normal. We're just playing games
with each other in constructing realities that allow our survival. But it's completely detached
from physical reality. We're missing a lot. We're missing like most of it, if not all of it.
Well, this was, it's fascinating because I just saw the Oliver Sacks documentary,
there's a new documentary out about his life. And there's this one part where he's like,
I've spent part of my life trying to imagine what it would like to be to be a bat or something to
see the world through the sensory apparatus of a bat. And he did this with his patients that
were locked into these horrible syndromes that to pull out some of the beauty of their experience
as well, not just communicate the suffering, although the suffering too. And as I was listening
to him talk about this, I started to realize, it's like, what, you know, like they're these
mantis shrimps that can see 60 shades of pink or something. And they see this stuff all the time
and animals, they can see UV light. Every time I learn about an animal that can sense other things
in the environment that I can't like heat sensing, why not? I don't crave that experience the same
way Sacks talked about craving that experience. But it does throw another penny in the jar for
what you're saying, which is that it could be that most, if not all of what I perceive and believe
is just a neural fabrication. And that for better or for worse, we all agree on enough
of the same neural fabrications in the same time and place that we're able to function.
Not only that, but we agree with the things that are trying to eat us enough to where we don't,
they don't eat us, meaning like that it's not just us humans, you know, I see, because it's
because it's interactive, it's interactive. So like, so like, now, I think it's a really
nice thought experiment. I think because Donald really frames it in a scientific,
like he makes a hard, like as hard as our discussion has been now, he makes a hard scientific case
that we don't know shit about reality. I think that's a little bit hardcore. But I think it's
I think it's hardcore. But I think it's a good thought experiment that kind of cleanses the
palette of the confidence we might have about about because we are operating in this abstraction
space. And, you know, and, you know, the sensory spaces might be something very different. And
it's kind of interesting to think about if you start to go into a realm of neural link or start to
talk about just everything that you've been talking about with dream states and psychedelics
and stuff like that, which part of the which layer can we control and play around with,
to maybe look into a different slice of reality. It, you know, you just got to do the experiment.
The key is to just do the experiment in the most ethical way possible. You just,
I mean, that's the beauty of experiments. This is why, you know, there's, there's wonderful
theoretical neuroscience happening now make to make predictions. But that's why experimental
science is so wonderful. You can go into the laboratory and poke around in there and be
a brain explorer and listen to and write to neurons. And when you do that, you get answers.
You don't always get the answers you want. But that's, you know, that's the beauty of it.
When you were saying this thing about reality and the Donald Hoffman model, I was thinking about
children, you know, like when I have an older sister, she's very sane. But when she was a
kid, she had an imaginary friend. And she played with this imaginary friend. And it had, there
was this whole, there was a consistency. This friend was like, it was Larry lived in a purple
house. Larry was a girl. It was like all this stuff that a child, a young child wouldn't have any
issue with. And then one day she announced that Larry had died, right? And it wasn't traumatic
or traumatic. And that was it. And she just stopped. And I always wonder what that neurodevelopmental
event was that a kept her out of a psychiatric ward. Had she got, you know, kept that imaginary
friend. But it's also, there was something kind of sad to it. I think the way it was told to me
because I'm the younger brother, I wasn't around for that. But my dad told me that, you know,
there was a kind of a sadness because it was this beautiful reality that had been constructed. And
so we kind of wonder, I wonder as you're telling me this, whether or not, you know, as adults,
we try and create as much reality for children as we can so that they can make predictions and feel
safe because the ability to make predictions is a lot of what keeps our autonomic arousal in check.
I mean, we go to sleep every night and we give up total control. And that should frighten us
deeply. But, you know, unfortunately, autonomic arousal be yanks us down under and we don't
negotiate too much. So you sleep sooner or later. I don't know. I was a little worried we get into
discussions about the nature of reality because it's interesting in the laboratory, I'm very much
like, what's the experiment? What would the, you know, what's the analysis going to look like?
What mutant mouse are we going to use? What experience are we going to put someone through?
But I think it's wonderful that in 2020, we can finally have discussions about this stuff
and look, kind of peek around the corner and say, well, neural link and people, others who are
doing similar things are going to figure it out. They're going to, the answers will show up and
we just have to be open to interpretation. Do you think there could be an experiment
centered around consciousness? I mean, you're plugged into the neuroscience community. I think
for the longest time, the quote unquote, C word was totally not, was almost anti-scientific.
But now more and more people are talking about consciousness. Elon is talking about
consciousness. AI folks are talking about consciousness. It's still nobody knows anything,
but it feels like a legitimate domain of inquiry that's hungry for a real experiment.
So I have fortunately three short answers to this. The first one is a, I'm not,
I'm not particularly sustained. I agree. The joke I always tell is there are two things you
never want to say to a scientist. One is what do you do? And the second one is take as much time
as you need. And you definitely don't want to say them in the same sentence. I have three
short answers to it. So there's a cynical answer and it's not one I enjoy giving, which is that
if you look into the 70s and back at the 1970s and 1980s and even into the early 2000s,
there were some very dynamic, very impressive speakers who were very smart in the field of
neuroscience and related fields who thought hard about the consciousness problem and fell in love
with the problem, but overlooked the fact that the technology wasn't there. So I admire them
for falling in love with the problem, but they gleaned tremendous taxpayer resources,
essentially for nothing. And these people know who they are. Some of them are alive,
some of them aren't. I'm not referring to Francis Crick who was brilliant, by the way,
and thought the classroom was involved in consciousness, which I think is a great idea.
It's this obscure structure that no one's really studied. People are now starting to study it.
So I think Francis was brilliant and wonderful. But there were books written about it. It makes for
great television stuff and thought around the table or after a couple glasses of wine or whatever.
It's an important problem nonetheless. And so I do think the consciousness,
the issue is it's not operationally defined, right? That psychologists are much smarter than
a lot of hard scientists in that for the following reason, they put operational definitions. They
know that psychology, if we're talking about motivation, for instance, they know they need
to put operational definitions on that so that two laboratories can know they're studying the same
thing. The problem with consciousness is no one can agree on what that is. And this was a problem
for attention when I was coming up. So in the early 2000s, people would argue, what is attention?
Is it spatial attention, auditory attention? And finally, people are like, you know what,
we agree. Have they agreed on that one? I remember hearing people scream a lot of attention.
Right. They couldn't even agree on attention. So I was coming up as a young graduate student,
I'm thinking like, I'm definitely not going to work on attention. And I'm definitely not going
to work on consciousness. And I wanted something that I could solve or figure out. I want to be
able to see the circuit or the neurons. I want to be able to hear it on the audio. I want to record
from it. And then I want to do gain a function and loss a function, take it away, see something
change, put it back, see something change a systematic way. And that takes you down into the
depths of some stuff that's pretty plug and chug. But I'll borrow from something in the
military because I'm fortunate to do some work with units from special operations. And they have
beautiful language around things because their world is not abstract. And they talk about three
meter targets, 10 meter targets and 100 meter targets. And it's not an issue of picking the
100 meter target because it's more beautiful or because it's more interesting. If you don't take
down the three meter targets and the 10 meter targets first, you're dead. So I think scientists
could pay to adopt a more kind of military thinking in that sense. The other thing that
is really important is that just because somebody conceived of something and can talk about it
beautifully and can glean a lot of resources for it, doesn't mean that it's led anywhere. So
this isn't just true of the consciousness issue. And I don't want to sound cynical, but I could
pull up some names of molecules that occupied hundreds of articles in the very premier journals
that then were later discovered to be totally moot for that process. And biotech companies
folded everyone and the lab pivots and starts doing something different with that molecule.
And nobody talks about it because as long as you're in the game, we have this thing called
anonymous peer review. You can't afford to piss off anybody too much unless you have some other
funding stream. And I've avoided battles most of my career, but I pay attention to all of it.
And I've watched this and I don't think it's ego driven. I think it's that people fall in love
with an idea. There's not enough money and science for people to sit back there rubbing
their hands together. The beauty of what Neuralink and Elon and team, because obviously he's
very impressive, but the team as a whole is really what gives me great confidence in their mission,
is that he's already got enough money, so it can't be about that. He doesn't seem to need it at a
level of, I don't know him, but he doesn't seem to need it at an ego level or something. I think
it's driven by genuine curiosity. And the team that he's assembled include people that are very
kind of abstract, neuro, neocortex, space-time coding people. They're people like Matt, who is
a neurosurgeon. You can't BS neurosurgery. Failures in neurosurgery are not tolerated,
so you have to be very good to be exceptional to even get through the gate. And he's exceptional.
And then they've got people like Dan Adams, who was at UCSF for a long time,
who's a good friend and a known name for years, who is very concrete, studied the
vasculature in the eye and how it maps to the vasculature in cortex. When you get a team like
that together, you're going to have dissenters. You're going to have people that are high-level
thinkers, people that are coders. When you get a team like that, it no longer looks like an
academic laboratory or even a field in science. And so I think they're going to solve some really
hard problems. And again, I'm not here. I have nothing at stake with them. But I think that's
the solution. You need a bunch of people who don't need first-author papers, who don't need to complete
their PhD, who aren't relying on outside funding, who have a clear mission, and you have a bunch of
people who are basically will adapt to solve the problem. I like the analogy of the three-meter
target and the 100-meter target. So the folks at Neuralink are basically, many of them are some
of the best people in the world at the three-meter target. Like you mentioned Matt, Neurosurgery,
like they're solving real problems. There's no BS, philosophical smokes and weed and look back
and look at the stars. But so both on Elon and because I think like this, I think it's really
important to think about the 100 meter and the 100 meter is not even 100 meter, but like
like the stuff behind the hill that's too far away, which is where I put consciousness.
Maybe I tend to believe that consciousness can be engineered. I mean, part of the reason,
part of the business I want to build leverages that idea. That consciousness is a lot simpler
than we've been talking about. Well, if someone can simplify the problem,
right, that will be wonderful. I mean, the reason we can talk about something as abstract as
face representations, infusive form, face area is because Nancy Kenwisher had the brilliance
to tie it to the kind of lower level statistics of visual scenes. It wasn't because she was like,
oh, I bet it's there. That wouldn't have been interesting. So people like her understand
how to bridge that gap and they put a tractable definition. So I just, that's what I'm begging
for in science is a tractable definition. This is what, but I want people to sit in the,
I want people who are really uncomfortable with Woo Woo, like consciousness, like high level
stuff to sit in that topic and sit uncomfortably because it forces them to then try to ground
and simplify it into something that's concrete. Because too many people are just uncomfortable
to sit in the consciousness room because there's no definitions. It's like attention or intelligence
in the artificial intelligence community. But the reality is it's easy to avoid that room altogether,
which is what, I mean, there's analogies to everything you've said with the artificial
intelligence community with Minsky and even Alan Turing that talked about intelligence a lot,
and then they drew a lot of funding and then it crashed because they really didn't do anything
with it. And it was a lot of force of personality and so on. But that doesn't mean the topic of
the Turing test and intelligence isn't something we should sit on and think like, think like what
is, well, first of all, Turing actually attempted this with a Turing test. He tried to make concrete
this very question of intelligence. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't linger on it and
we shouldn't forget that ultimately that is what our efforts are all about in the artificial
intelligence community. And in the people, whether it's neuroscience or whatever bigger
umbrella you want to use for understanding the mind, the goal is not just about understanding
layer two or three of the vision. It's to understand consciousness and intelligence and
maybe create it or just all the possible biggest questions of our universe. That's
ultimately the dream. Absolutely. And I think what I really appreciate about what you're saying is
that everybody whether or not they're working on a kind of low level synapse that's like a reflex
in the musculature or something very high level abstract can benefit from looking at those who
prefer three, you know, everyone's going after three meter, 10 meter and 100 meter targets in some
sense. But to be able to tolerate the discomfort of being in a conversation where there are real
answers where the zeros and ones are known zeros and ones and those the equivalent of that in the
nervous system. And also, as you said, for the people that are very much like, oh, I can only
trust what I can see and touch, those people need to put themselves into the discomfort of the high
level conversation because what's missing is conversation and conceptualization of things
at multiple levels. I think one of the, this is, I don't gripe about my life's been fortunate,
we've been funded from the start and we've been happy in that regard and lucky and we're grateful
for that. But I think one of the challenges of research being so expensive is that there isn't
a lot of time, especially nowadays, for people to just convene around a topic because there's so
much emphasis on productivity. And so there are actually, believe it or not, there aren't that
many concepts, formal concepts in neuroscience right now. The last 10 years has been this huge
influx of tools. And so people in neural circuits and probing around and connectomes,
it's been wonderful. But 10, 20 years ago, when the consciousness stuff was more prominent,
the C word, as you said, what was good about that time is that people would go to meetings and
actually discuss ideas and models. Now it's sort of like demonstration day at the School of Science
Fair where everyone's got their thing and some stuff is cooler than others. But I think we're
going to see a shift. I'm grateful that we have so many computer scientists and theoreticians and
or theorists, I think they call themselves. Somebody tell me what the difference is someday.
And psychology and even dare I say philosophy, these things are starting to converge. Neuroscience,
the name neuroscience, there wasn't even such a thing when I started graduate school or as a
postdoc. It was neurophysiology or you were a neuroanatomist. Now, it's sort of everybody's
invited and that's beautiful. That means that something useful is going to come up all this.
And there's also tremendous work, of course, happening for the treatment of disease. And
we shouldn't overlook that. That's where eliminating, reducing suffering is also a huge
initiative in neuroscience. So there's a lot of beauty in the field. But the consciousness
thing continues to be a, it's like an exotic bird. It's like no one really quite knows how to handle
it and it dies very easily. Well, yeah. I think also from the AI perspective,
I view the brain as less sacred. I think from a neuroscience perspective,
you're a little bit more sensitive to BS, like BS narratives about the brain or whatever.
I'm a little bit more comfortable with just poetic BS about the brain as long as it helps
engineer intelligence systems. Well, and I confess ignorance when it comes to
most things about coding and I have some quantitative ability, but I don't have strong
quantitative leanings. And so I know my limitations too. And so I think the next generation coming
up, a lot of the students at Stanford are really interested in quantitative models and theory and
AI. And I remember when I was coming up, a lot of the people who were doing work ahead of me,
I kind of rolled my eyes at some of the stuff they were doing, including some of their personalities,
although I have many great senior colleagues everywhere in the world. So it's the way of the
world. So nobody knows what it's like to be a young graduate student in 2020 except the
young graduate students. So I know what I do. I know there are a lot of things I don't know.
And in addition to why I do a lot of public education, increased scientific literacy and
neuroscientific thinking, et cetera, a big goal of mine is to try and at least pave the way so that
these really brilliant and forward thinking younger scientists can make the biggest possible
dent and make what will eventually be all us old guys and gals look stupid. I mean,
that's what we were all trying to do. That's what we were trying to do. So yeah.
So from the highest possible topic of consciousness to the lowest level
topic of David Goggins, let's go. I don't know if it's low level. He's high performance.
High performance, but I don't think David has any time for philosophy. Let's just put it this way.
Well, I mean, I think we can tack it to what we were just saying in a meaningful way, which is
whatever goes on in that abstraction part of the brain, he's figured out how to dig down in
whatever the limbic friction. He's figured out how to grab ahold of that, scruff it,
and send it in the direction that he's decided it needs to go. And what's wild is that what we're
talking about is him doing that to himself. It's like he's scruffing himself and directing
himself in a particular direction and sending himself down that trajectory. And what's beautiful
is that he acknowledges that that process is not pretty. It doesn't feel good. It's kind of horrible
at every level, but he's created this rewarding element to it. And I think that's what's so
admirable, and it's what so many people crave, which is regulation of the self at that level.
And he practices it. I mean, there's a ritual to it. There's every single day, like no exceptions.
There's a practice aspect to the suffering that he goes through.
It's principle suffering.
Yeah, principle suffering.
It is.
I mean, I admire all aspects of it, including him and his girlfriend slash wife. I'm not sure.
She'll probably know this. I don't know.
If you want to say.
Wonderful person.
I'm not asking him.
No, no, we've only communicated. I've only communicated with her via text about some stuff
I was asking David. But yeah, they clearly have formed a powerful team.
And it's a beautiful thing to see people working in that kind of synergy.
It's inspiring to me, same as with Elon, that a guy like David Goggins can find love.
That you find a thing that works, which gives me hope that whatever flavor of crazy I am,
you can always find another thing that works with that.
But I've had the, so maybe let's trade Goggins stories. You're from a neuroscience
perspective, me from a self-inflicted pain perspective. I somehow found myself
in communication with David about some challenges that I was undergoing.
One of which is we were communicating every single day, email phone about the particular
30 day challenges I did that stretched for longer of pushups and pull ups.
You made a call out on social media.
Actually, I think that was the point. I knew of you before, but that's where I started tracking
some of what you were doing with these physical challenges.
The hell's wrong with that guy?
Well, no, I think I actually, I don't often comment on people's stuff, but I think I commented
something like neural plasticity loves a non-negotiable rule. No, I said a non-negotiable
contract because at the point where neural plasticity really loves a non-negotiable contract,
because I've said this before, so forgive me, but the brain is doing analysis of duration path
and outcome, and that's a lot of work for the brain. And the more that it can pass off duration
path and outcome to just reflex, the more energy it can allocate to other things.
So if you decide there's no negotiation about how many pushups, how far I'm going to run,
how many days, how many pullups, et cetera, you actually have more energy for pushups
running and pullups. And when you say neural plasticity, you mean like the brain,
once the decision is made, it'll start rewiring stuff to make sure that this can actually
make this happen. That's right. I mean, so much of what we do is reflexive at the level of just
core circuitry, breathing, heart rate, all that boring stuff, digestion, but then there's a lot
of reflexive stuff like how you drink out of a mug of coffee that's reflexive too, but that you
had to learn at some point in your life earlier when you were very little, analyzing duration
path and outcome. And that involves a lot of top-down processing with the prefrontal cortex.
But through plasticity mechanisms, you now do it. So when you take on a challenge,
provided that you understand the core mechanics of how to run pushups and pullups and whatever
else you decided to do, once you set the number and the duration and all that, then all you have
to do is just go. But people get caught in that tide pool of just, well, do I really have to do
it? How do I not do that? What if I get injured? Can I sneak at this? And that's work. And to some
extent, look, I'd not David Goggins, obviously, nor do I claim to understand his process partially,
but maybe a little bit, which is that it's clear that by making the decision,
there's more resources to devote to the effort of the actual execution.
Well, that's a really, like what you're saying was not a lesson that was obvious to me. And it's
still not obvious. It's something I really work at, which is there is always an option to quit.
And I mean, that's something I really struggle with. I mean, I've quit some things in my life.
It's like stupid stuff. And one lesson I've learned is if you quit once, it opens the door
that, like, it's really valuable to trick your brain into thinking that you're going to have
to die before you quit. Like, it's actually really convenient. So actually, what you're saying is very
profound, but you shouldn't intellectualize it. Like, it took me time to develop out psychologically
in ways that I think would be another conversation, because I'm not sure how to put it into words,
but it's really tough on me to do certain parts of that challenge, which is a huge output.
I thought it would be the number would be hard, but it's not. It's the entirety of it,
especially in the early days, was just spending a kind of embarrassed to say how many hours this
took. So I didn't say publicly how many hours because people, I knew people would be like,
don't you aren't you supposed to do other stuff? Well, it's how are you doing? Again,
I don't want to speculate too much about, but occasionally, David has said this publicly
where people will be like, don't you sleep or something? Yeah. And his process used to just
be that he would just block, delete, you know, like gone. But it's actually, it's a super
interesting topic. And because self control and directing our actions and the role of emotion
and quitting, these are vital to the human experience. And they're vital to performing
well at anything. And obviously, at a super high level, being able to understand this about the
self is crucial. So I have a friend who was also in the teams, his name is Pat Dossett,
he did nine years in the SEAL teams. And in a similar way, there's there's a lore about him
among team guys, because of a kind of funny challenge he gave himself, which was so he and I
swim together, although he swims further up front than I do. And he's very patient. But,
you know, he was on a he was assigned when he was in the teams to a position that gave him a
little more time behind a desk than he wanted. And there's not as much time out and deployments,
although he did deployments. So he didn't know what to do at that time. But he thought about
and he asked himself, what, what does he hate the most? And it turns out the thing that he hated
doing the most was bear crawls, you know, walking your hands and knees. So he decided to bear crawl
for a mile for time. So he was bear crawling a mile a day, right? And I thought that was an
interesting example that he gave because, you know, like, why pick the thing you hate the most?
And I think it maps right back to limbic friction. It's the thing that creates the most limbic
friction. And so if you can overcome that, then there's carryover. And I think the notion of
carryover has been talked about psychologically and kind of in the self help space, like, oh,
if you run a marathon, it's going to help you in other areas of life. But will it really? Will it?
Well, I think it depends on whether or not there's a lot of limbic friction. Because if there is,
what you're exercising is not a circuit for bear crawls or a circuit for pull ups. What you're
doing is you're exercising a circuit for top down control. And that circuit was not designed to be
for bear crawls or pull ups or coding or waking up in the middle of the night to do something hard.
That circuit was designed to override limbic friction. And so neural circuits were designed
to generalize, right? The stress response to an incoming threat that's a physical threat was
designed to feel the same way and be the same response internally as the threat to an impending
exam or divorce or marriage or whatever it is that's stressing somebody out. And so neural circuits
are not designed to be for one particular action or purpose. So if you can, as you did, if you can
train up top down control under conditions of the highest limbic friction that when the desired
equit is at its utmost, either because of fatigue or hyperarousal, being too stressed or too tired,
you're learning how to engage a circuit. And that circuit is forever with you.
And if you don't engage it, it sits there, but it's atrophied. It's like a plant that doesn't get
any water. And a lot of this has been discussed in self-help and growth mindset and all these kinds
of ideas that circle the internet and social media. But when you start to think about how
they map to neural circuits, I think there's some utility because what it means is that
the limbic friction that you'll experience in, I don't know, maybe some future
relationship to something or someone, it's a category of neural processing that should
immediately click into place. It's just like the limbic friction you experienced trying to engage
in the God knows how many push-ups, pull-ups, and running runs you were doing. 25,000,
25,000, 25,000. So folks, if Lex does this again, more comments, more likes.
This is the problem with you getting more followers as you're gonna get more.
Actually, I should say that's the benefit. I don't know. Maybe it's not politically
correct for me to ask, but there is this stereotype about Russians being like-
Politically correct. No, like being really durable. And I started going to that Russian
Banya way back before COVID, and they could tolerate a lot of heat. And they would sit
very stoic, and no one was going, oh, it's hot in here. They were just kind of like easing
into it. So maybe there's something there who knows.
Might be something there, but it could be also just personal. I just have some,
I found myself, everyone's different, but I've found myself to be able to do
something unpleasant for very long periods of time. Like, I'm able to shut off the mind.
And I don't think that's been fully tested. Monkey mind or the supercomputer?
Well, it's interesting. I mean, which mind tells you to quit exactly?
Limbic friction tells you- Limbic friction is the source of that,
but who are you talking with exactly?
So there's a, we can put something very concrete to that. So there's a
paper published in Cell, super top tier journal, two years ago, looking at effort.
And this was in a visual environment of trying to swim forward toward a target and a reward.
And it was a really cool experiment because they manipulated virtually the visual environment. So
the same amount of effort was being expended every time, but sometimes the perception was
you're making forward progress. And sometimes the perception was you're making no progress
because stuff wasn't drifting by meant no progress. So you can be swimming and swimming and not
making progress. And it turns out that with each bout of effort, there's a epinephrine and
norepinephrine is being released in the brainstem. And glia, what traditionally were thought of as
support cells for the neurons, but they do a lot of things actively too, are measuring the amount
of epinephrine and norepinephrine in that circuit. And when it exceeds a certain threshold,
the glia send inhibitory signals that shut down, top down control, they literally,
it's the quit, you stop, there's no more, it's you quit enduring.
It can be rescued. Endurance can be rescued with dopamine. So that's where the subjective part
really comes into play. So you quit because you've learned how to turn that off, or you've
learned how to wrote some people will reward the pain process so much that friction becomes the
reward. And I, you know, when you talk about people like Goggins and other people I know from
special operations and people have gone through cancer treatments three times, you hear about,
you know, just when you hear about people, the Victor Frankel stories, I mean, you hear about
Nelson Mandela, you hear about these stories. I'm sure the same process is involved. Again,
this speaks to the generalizability of these processes as opposed to a neural circuit for
particular action or cognitive function. So I think you have to learn to subjectively self reward
in a way that replenishes you. Goggins talks about eating souls. It's a very dramatic example.
In his mind, apparently, that's a form of reward. But it's not just a form of reward where
you're, it's like you're picking up a trophy or something. It's, it's actually, it gives the
energy. It's a reward that gives more neural energy. And I'm defining that as more dopamine
to suppress the noradrenaline and adrenaline circuits in the brainstem.
So ultimately maps of that. Yeah, he creates enemies. He's always fighting enemies. I never,
I think I have enemies, but they're usually just versions of me inside my head. So I thought about
through that 30 day challenge, I tried to come up with like, fake enemies. It wasn't working.
The only enemy I came up with is David. Well, now you have a, you certainly have a
formidable adversary in this one. I don't care. I'm, David, I'm willing to die on this one. So
let's go there. Well, let's hope you, you both, uh, uh, both survived this, um, this one. But
my problem is the physical, there's a, so everything we've been talking about been the mind.
There's a physical aspect that's just practically difficult, which is like,
I can't like, you know, when you injure yourself at a certain point, like you just can't function.
Or you're doing more damage. Yeah. Talking about it, taking yourself out of running for,
yeah. Um, for the rest of your life potentially, or like, you know, or for years. So, you know,
I'd love to avoid that, right? There's just like stupid physical stuff that you just want to avoid.
You want to keep it purely in the mental. And if it's purely in the mental, that's when the race
is interesting. But yeah, the, the, the problem with these physical challenges as, as David has
experienced, I mean, it has a toll on your body. I tend to think of the mind as limitless and the
body is kind of unfortunately quite limited. Well, I think the key is to dynamically control
your output. And that can be done by reducing effort, which doesn't work for throughout,
but also by restoring through these subjective reward processes. And we don't want to go down
the rabbit hole of why this all works. But these are ancient pathways that were designed to
bring resources to an animal or to a person through foraging for hunting or mates or water or all
these things. And they work so well because they're down in those circuits where we know the zeros
and ones. And that's great because it can be subjective at the level of, oh, I reached this one
milestone, this one horizon, this one three meter target. But if you don't reward it, you, it's just
effort. If you do self reward it, it's effort minus one in terms of the adrenaline output.
But I have to ask you about this. You're one of the great communicators in science. I'm
a really big fan of yours enjoying in terms of like the educational stuff you're putting
in terms on neuroscience. Thank you. What's the, do you have a philosophy behind it? Or is it just
an instinct? Oh my unstoppable force. Do you have like, what's your thinking? Because it's rare
and it's exciting. I'm excited that somebody from Stanford, so I, okay, I'm in multiple places
in the sense of like where my interests lie and politically speaking, academic institutions are
under fire for many reasons. We don't need to get into, I get into it in a lot of other places.
But I believe in, in places like Stanford and places like MIT as one of the most magical
institutions for inspiring people to dream, people to build the future. I mean, it's, I, I believe
that it is a really special, these universities are really special places. And so it's always
exciting to me when somebody as inspiring as you represents those places. So it makes me
proud that somebody from Stanford is like something like you is representing Stanford.
So maybe you could speak to what's, how did you come to be who you are in being a communicator?
Well, first of all, thanks for the kind words, especially coming from you. I, I think Stanford
is an amazing place as is MIT and it's such a- MIT is better by the way. I'll let it out anything
you say at this point. I've got many friends at MIT. Yeah. You know, I had smarter friends. Yeah.
Ed Boyden is, is, is best in class, you know, among the best in class. There's some people-
Number one. Not me that can hold, hold a candle to him, but not many, maybe one or two. But I
think the great benefit of being in a place like MIT or Stanford is that when you look around, you
know, that the average is very high, right? You have many best in class among the, you know,
one or two or three best in the world at what they do. And it's a wonderful privilege to be there.
And one thing that I think also makes them and other universities like them very special is
that there's an emphasis on what gets exported out of the university, what, you know, not keeping
it ivory tower and really trying to keep an eye on what's needed in the world and trying to do
something useful. And I think the proximity to industry in Silicon Valley and in the Boston
area in Cambridge also lends itself well to that. And there are other institutions of two, of course.
So the reason I got involved in educating on social media was actually because of a Pat Dossett,
the bear mile bear call guy. I was at the turn of 2018 to 2019. We had formed a good friendship.
And we were, he talked to me into doing these early morning cold water swims. I was learning a lot
about pain and suffering, but also the beauty of cold water swims. And we were talking one morning,
he said, so what are you going to do to serve the world in 2019? It's like, that's the way that,
like a Texan former SEAL talks, we're just literally, what are you going to do to serve the
world in 2019? Like, well, I run my lab is like, no, no, what are you going to do that's new?
And he wasn't forceful in it. But I was like, that's interesting question. I said, well,
if I had my way, I would just teach people, everyone about the brain, because I think it's
amazing. He goes, we'll do it. All right. He goes, shake on it. So we did it. And so I started
putting out these posts and it's grown into to include a variety of things. But you asked about
a governing philosophy. So I want to increase interest in the brain and in the nervous system
and in biology, generally, that's one major goal. I'd like to increase scientific literacy, which
can't be rammed down people's throats of talking about how to look at a graph and statistics and,
you know, z scores and p values and genetics, it has to be done gradually, in my opinion.
I want to put valuable tools into the world, mainly tools that map to things that we're doing
in our lab. So these will be tools centered around how to understand and direct one's states of mind
and body. So reduce stress, raise one's stress threshold. So it's not always just about being
calm. Sometimes it's about learning how to tolerate not being not calm, raise awareness for mental
health. There's a ton of micro missions in this. But it all really maps back to, you know, like the
eight and 10 year old version of me, which is I used to spend my weekends when I was a kid reading
about weird animals. And I had this obsession with like medieval weapons and stuff, like catapults.
And then I used to come into school on Monday, and I would ask if I could talk about it to the
class and teach. And I just, it's really, I promise, and some people might not believe me,
but it's really, I don't really like being the point of focus. I just get so excited about these
gems that I find in the world in books and in experiments and in discussions with colleagues
and discussions with people like you and around the universe. And I can't just compulsively,
I got to tell people about it. So I try and package it into a form that people can access.
You know, I think the reception has been really wonderful. Stanford has been very supportive,
thankfully. I've done some podcasts even with them, and they've reposted some stuff on social
media. It's a precarious place to put yourself out there as a research academic. I think some
of my colleagues, both locally and elsewhere, probably wonder if I'm still serious about
research, which I absolutely am. And I also acknowledge that, you know, their research
and the research coming out of the field needs to be talked about. And not all scientists are
good at translating that into a language that people can access. And I don't like the phrase,
dumb it down. What I like to do is take a concept that I think people will find interesting and
useful and offer it sort of like a you would offer food to somebody visiting your home,
you're not going to cram Fragras in their face, you're going to say, like, do you want a cracker?
Like, and they say, yeah, like, do you want something on that cracker? Like, do you like cheese?
Like, yeah, like, do you want Swiss cheese? Or you want that really like stinky like French?
I don't like cheese much. But what do you want for a grout? Like, what's that? Like, so you're
trying the best information prompts more questions of interest, not questions of confusion,
but questions of interest. And so I feel like one door opens, then another door opens, then
another door opens. And pretty soon, the image in my mind is you create a bunch of neuroscientists
who are thinking about themselves neuroscientifically. And I don't begin to think that I have all the
answers at all. I cast a neuroscience, sometimes a little bit of a psychology lens onto what I
think are interesting topics. And, you know, I, you know, someday I'm going to go into the ground
or the ocean or wherever it is I end up. And I'm very comfortable with the fact that not everyone's
going to be happy with how I deliver the information. But I would hope that people would feel like some
of it was useful and meaningful and got them to think a little bit harder.
Since you mentioned going into the ground, and Victor Franco man search for meaning,
I read that, I reread that book quite often. What, let me ask the, the big ridiculous question
about life. What do you think is the meaning of it all? Like, maybe why do you, do you mention
that book from a psychologist perspective, which Victor Franco was, or do you, do you ever think
about the, the bigger philosophical questions that raises about meaning? What's, and the meaning of it
all? One of the great challenges in assigning a good, you know, giving a good answer to the
question of like, what's the meaning of life is, I think illustrated best by the Victor
Franco example, although there are other examples too, which is that our sense of meaning is very
elastic in time and space. And I'm, we talked a little bit about this earlier, but it's amazing
to me that somebody locked in a cell or a concentration camp can bring the horizon in
close enough that they can then micro slice their environment so that they can find rewards and
meaning and power and beauty, even in a little square box or, or a horrible situation. And I
think this is really speaks to one of the most important features of the human mind, which is
we could do, let's take two opposite extremes. One would be, let's say the alarm went off right
now in this building and the building started shaking. Our vision, our hearing, everything
would be tuned to this space time bubble for those moments. And everything that we were
processed, all that would matter, the only meaning would be get out of here safe, figure out what's
going on, contact loved ones, et cetera. If we were to sit back totally relaxed, we could do the,
you know, as I think it's called pale blue dot thing or whatever, where we could imagine ourselves
in this room and then they were in the United States and this continent and the earth and then
it's peering down us. And all of a sudden you get back, it can seem so big that all of a sudden it's
meaningless, right? If you see yourself as just one brief glimmer in all of time and all of space,
you go to, I don't matter. And if you go to, oh, every little thing that happens in this text
thread or this, you know, comment section on YouTube or Instagram, your space time bubble is
tiny, then everything seems inflated and the brain will contract and dilate its space time
vision and time, but also sense of meaning. And that's beautiful. And it's what allows us
to be so dynamic in different environments and we can pull from the past and the present and future.
It's why examples like Nelson Mandela and Victor Frankel had to include. It makes sense that it
wasn't just about grinding it out. They had to find those dopamine rewards, even in those little
boxes they were forced into. So I'm not trying to dodge an answer, but for me personally, and I
think about this a lot because I have this complicated history in science where my undergraduate,
graduate advisor and postdoctoral advisor all died young. So, you know, and they were wonderful
people and had immense importance in my life. But what I realized is that we can get so fixated
on the thing that we're experiencing holding tremendous meaning, but it only holds that
meaning for as long as we're in that space time regime. And this is important because what really
gives meaning is the understanding that you can move between these different space time
dimensionalities. And I'm not trying to sound like a theoretical physicist or anyone that
thinks about the cosmos in saying that. It's really the fact that sometimes we say and do and
think things and it feels so important. And then two days later, we're like, what happened? Well,
you had a different brain processing algorithm entirely. You were in a completely different
state. And so what I want to do in this lifetime is I want to engage in as many different
levels of contraction and dilation of meaning as possible. I want to go to the micro. I sometimes
think about this. I'm like, if I just pulled over the side of the road, I bet you there's an
ant hill there and their whole world is fascinating. You can't stay there. And you also can't stay
staring up at the clouds and just think about how we're just these little beings and it doesn't
matter. The key is the journey back and forth up and down that staircase back and forth and
back and forth. And my goal is to get as many trips up and down that staircase as I can before
the Reaper comes for me. Oh, beautiful. So the dance of dilation and contraction between the
different spaces, zoom in, zoom out and get as many steps in on that staircase.
That's my goal anyway. And I've watched people die. I watched my postdoc advisor die wither away
my graduate. It was tragic, but they found beauty in these closing moments because their bubble was
their kids in one case or like one of them was a Giants fan and got to see a Giants game
in her last moments. And you just realize it's a Giants game, but not in that moment because
time is closing. And so those time bins feel huge because she's slicing things so differently.
So I think learning how to do that better and more fluidly, recognizing where one is
and not getting too tacked to the idea that there's one correct answer,
like that's what brings meaning. That's my goal anyway.
I don't think there's a better way to end it. Andrew, I really appreciate that you would come
down and contract your space time and focus on this conversation for a few hours. It is
a huge honor. I'm a huge fan of yours as I told you. I hope you keep growing and educating the
world about the human mind. Thanks for talking today. Thank you. I really appreciate the invitation
to be here. And people might think that I'm saying it just because I'm here, but I'm a huge fan of
yours. I send your podcasts to my colleagues and other people. And I think what you're doing
is isn't just amazing. It's important. And so thank you.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Andrew Huberman and thank you to our sponsors.
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