Huberman Lab discusses neuroscience — how our brain and its connections with the organs of our body control our perceptions, our behaviors, and our health. We also discuss existing and emerging tools for measuring and changing how our nervous system works.
Andrew Huberman, Ph.D., is a neuroscientist and tenured professor in the department of neurobiology, and by courtesy, psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford School of Medicine. He has made numerous significant contributions to the fields of brain development, brain function and neural plasticity, which is the ability of our nervous system to rewire and learn new behaviors, skills and cognitive functioning.
Huberman is a McKnight Foundation and Pew Foundation Fellow and was awarded the Cogan Award, given to the scientist making the most significant discoveries in the study of vision, in 2017. His lab’s most recent work focuses on the influence of vision and respiration on human performance and brain states such as fear and courage. He also works on neural regeneration and directs a clinical trial to promote visual restoration in diseases that cause blindness. Huberman is also actively involved in developing tools now in use by the elite military in the U.S. and Canada, athletes, and technology industries to optimize performance in high stress environments, enhance neural plasticity, mitigate stress and optimize sleep.
Work from the Huberman Laboratory at Stanford School of Medicine has been published in top journals including Nature, Science and Cell and has been featured in TIME, BBC, Scientific American, Discover and other top media outlets.
In 2021, Dr. Huberman launched the Huberman Lab podcast. The podcast is frequently ranked in the top 5 of all podcasts globally and is often ranked #1 in the categories of Science, Education, and Health & Fitness.
Peer pressures. So why misnomer's parents think that they don't matter during adolescence? They still really matter. But peers also come in and matter quite a bit. And then teens are really trying to figure out who they are. You get a lot of questions. Who am I? Where am I going in life? What do I wanna do when I grow up? What's important to me? How do other people feel about me? And then how do I feel about other people? So a lot of the social and psychosocial development is happening as well. And you get asynchronous development too if a young person, for example, starts puberty at a younger age, say 10, where they're physically looking older, more mature, but emotionally and psychosocially, they still might be young versus the late matures, physical matures who may be not having and looking like an older teen or an adult till 16, 17, 18, but they're more mature emotionally than others, then you might have some confusion to that young person. I look older, but I don't feel older and stuff like that. But it's really this wonderful time of exploration for an adolescent and a time of really wanting autonomy and wanting to make a lot of decisions that we should let them make, but there's some risks that we have to be careful about at the same time. I often heard this word autonomy as it relates to this, stage of, you know, puberty in the teen years. You mentioned that kids of that age still really need their parents. You know, in the last, gosh, 20, 30 years in this country, there's been a market increase in the frequency of divorce. Is there any direct evidence that single parent homes or homes where, I don't know, people are remarried or just basically divorced homes are somehow creating more challenges in terms of risk taking behavior in adolescents and teens or, or not? Because I know plenty of people who had, you know, grew up in single parent
Into his shorts and his shirt. He's like, I'm going running. I gotta go to the airport. I'm thinking I'm gonna go running, then I'm gonna go to He was running to the airport. Seriously, only like fourteen miles from the airport, which I realized fourteen miles a marathon or no big deal, but he's got his bags. And I'm thinking to myself, this guy, he's nuts, and I love him. I mean, he's really he's really that guy. It's it's it's actually very refreshing. You know, the the Rick, you know, I think one reason we love the Rick Rubens and the the David Goggins is they truly are different, but from one basic standpoint is they just don't kill a shit. They just do what they're gonna do. And they trust that they're doing right for them and for the people around them. And it's awesome. It's really awesome. I think that it it, again, brings about that, you know, that word that, you know, doesn't come about very often for me, but you just kinda stuns you into, like, behold. David Goggins, Rick Rubin, the cuttlefish, whatever. You know? So but I talked about this with David. There's this structure in our brain, and these are recent discoveries not by my lab. I wish I'd discover these, but actually a colleague of mine at Stanford Joe Parvizy, who's in the Department of Neurosurgery has made these beautiful discoveries about the anterior mid singlet cortex, the anterior mid singlet cortex. It's a structure in the brain. That has a lot of subdivisions, but when Joe put a little stimulating electrode into this area because he had patients that needed neurosurgery and, you know, they probe around asking questions. What do you feel? How do you feel? What are you gonna do? And sometimes they hit an area. I've seen these experiments. They're unbelievable. Stimulate an area and the person says, you know, I feel like I'm about to go into a rage. You're like, okay. Let's back off. Let's move over here. Enter a mid singulate cortex to stimulate and the patient, the person says, I feel like I'm heading into a storm. You go, oh, that doesn't sound good.
Welcome to the Huberman Lab guest series where I and an expert guest discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today marks the 3rd episode in our six episode series all about sleep with expert guest, Doctor Matthew Walker. During today's episode, we discuss how to structure your sleep for optimal mental health, physical health, and performance. We discuss monophasic sleep schedules, which are the more typical sleep schedule where you go to sleep at night, and then wake up in the morning. So sleeping in one bout as opposed to polyphasic sleep schedules, which are when you sleep in 2 or more bouts. Either at night or perhaps a shorter bout of sleep at night and another bout of sleep during the day. We also discuss naps including how to nap how long your nap should be, whether or not naps are good or bad. In particular, whether or not they're good or bad for you, it turns out this varies according to individual We also discuss how your needs for sleep and naps vary across the lifespan, and we discuss body position during sleep which might seem excessively detailed, but it turns out that body position during sleep is critical for ensuring that the sleep you get is optimally restorative. As with the first two episodes of the 6 episode series, today's 3rd episode is filled with both science that is the biology of sleep and napping and body position and how those relate to one another, as well as practical tools that you can use to vastly improve your sleep. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Better Help. Better Help offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out online. Now I've been doing therapy for well over 30 years. Initially, I had to do therapy against my will, but of course, I continued to do it voluntarily over time.
The other day, I spent 25 minutes telling my son all the things he has to change, and like, how he's doing everything wrong. And he didn't remember it 5 minutes later. How could someone remember your thing 4 years later? And I was, like, did you hear yourself talking? Like, I'm sure the way you talk to yourself was, like, totally condescending and bad. So the the first step is, in that 25 minutes, how are you communicating in a way where someone's ears are open, where they're not feeling talked down to, ashamed, humiliated, etcetera? But then the second step is saying that to you at a time when it's possible for there to be a what we call a recursive process or a snowball effect that's gonna happen over time. Mhmm. So that's the stage setting. Okay. So now let's take the first part. 25 minutes, what am I gonna say to you? Right? There are 3 big things that are in every intervention. And the term that Greg Walton, the Stanford professor, colleague, collaborator, uses is wise interventions. That's the umbrella term of which growth mindset is 1. And a good one, but it's just one of many. For wise interventions, we often do the following three things. 1st is we present some new scientific information, some idea that almost in like a Gladwell way is not is not obvious and intuitive to the reader, but feels like new information and useful information. So the first is a scientific. The second is we present participants with stories from people like them who've used those ideas in their lives and found them useful. So in the concrete case of 9th graders getting growth mindset, it's like 10th, 11th, 12th graders who previously felt dumb, learned a growth mindset, then felt better. That's it's more complicated than that. That's the basic idea. And last, we don't just tell them the stories we ask, 3rd, for participants to author.
Natural bedtime is versus the one that you may be taking right now. It's very interesting. Cortisol will almost hit its lowest point, something that we call it's nadir, it's the lowest point in that trough of its decline right around the time when you should be sleeping. However, there's a great study that looked at people with insomnia. And in, subsequent episodes, we'll discuss this too. But one of the ways that we think about or conceptualize insomnia is in 2 different flavors, sleep onset insomnia, I can't fall asleep, and sleep maintenance insomnia, I wake up, I can't get back to sleep. And what they looked at was essentially cortisol levels. They had a catheter in the arm, and they were sampling it from the bloodstream. And they were able to do that every 30 minutes. So it's a little bit like time lapse photography. And you're getting a data point every 30 minutes across the 24 hour period looking at cortisol across now a full 24 hour period. And sure enough, when you look at healthy controls who can sleep well and insomnia patients, they look almost identical across the day. But then when it comes to falling asleep right around that bedtime period, the healthy controls are going all the way down. The insomnia patients go down and down and down, and then they have a rise back up right around that sleep onset period. And then they start to drop back down again just as the control group. But then they also often will have a spike in the middle of the night, which then comes down. And then both of them are staying low throughout the early morning period, and then it starts to rise back up. So it's not as though net net overall there is a high level of cortisol in people with insomnia. It seems to be right at those trigger zones that map very nicely to sleep onset problems and sleep maintenance problems. Very interesting.
