back to indexThe Science of Emotions & Relationships | Huberman Lab Podcast #13
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Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,
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where we discuss science and science-based tools
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for everyday life.
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My name is Andrew Huberman,
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and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology
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at Stanford School of Medicine.
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This podcast is separate from my teaching
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and research roles at Stanford.
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It is, however, part of my desire and effort
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to bring zero cost to consumer information
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about science and science-related tools
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to the general public.
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In keeping with that theme,
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I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.
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Our first sponsor is Inside Tracker.
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Inside Tracker is a personalized nutrition platform
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that analyzes data from your blood and DNA
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to help you better understand your body
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and inform your health goals.
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I'm a big believer in getting blood tests taken
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because it's simply the only way to get in-depth data
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about your metabolic factors, hormones,
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all the things that inform your immediate
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and long-term health.
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Nowadays, there are also excellent DNA tests
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that can further inform you
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about your immediate and long-term health.
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Now, the problem with most blood tests out there
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is that you get information back,
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you get a lot of numbers,
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and they'll tell you whether or not
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your numbers are in normal range or high or low,
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but they don't inform you what steps to take
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In addition, they can often be very confusing
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what all the factors are and what they really mean.
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Inside Tracker has a dashboard and a platform
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that makes interpreting all that information really easy.
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It also points you in the direction
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of certain lifestyle factors,
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exercise, nutrition, et cetera,
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that you might want to change
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in order to bring the numbers
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into the ranges that you want.
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So Inside Tracker is something
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that I've been doing for some time now,
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and it's really helped me inform the choices.
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For instance, I've swapped out some of the foods
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that I was eating regularly.
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I found out I was actually too high
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in certain vitamins and minerals.
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I was too low in others.
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It's really helped me adjust my diet
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and my exercise regimes,
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and it really gives me the confidence
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that I'm on the path to long-term health.
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So if you want to try Inside Tracker,
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you can go to insidetracker.com slash Huberman
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to get 25% off any of Inside Tracker's plans.
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Use the code Huberman at checkout.
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That's insidetracker.com slash Huberman
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to get 25% off any of Inside Tracker's plans
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and use the code Huberman at checkout.
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Our next sponsor is ExpressVPN.
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ExpressVPN is a virtual private network
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that keeps your data safe and secure and private.
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It does that by routing your internet activity
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through their servers and encrypting it
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so that no one can see or sell your data.
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I started using ExpressVPN
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because my bank account got hacked.
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I still don't know exactly how it happened,
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but it was an absolute mess.
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I lost a lot of time.
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I wouldn't want to have it happen to anybody.
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When that happened,
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I talked to my friends in the tech community
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and they told me that even though
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you think your internet connection is secure,
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oftentimes it's not.
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So I tend to use internet connections on planes,
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in hotels, in cafes, but also at home.
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And I was told that even at home,
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your data may not be as secure as you think.
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And so with ExpressVPN, your data is absolutely secure.
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So are your online activities.
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The great thing is you don't even notice
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that it's operating.
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It's running in the background.
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You just turn it on and it goes without you realizing
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that your data is being protected.
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It doesn't interfere with any of your online activities.
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So I use ExpressVPN when I travel,
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anytime I'm outside the house, when I'm at work,
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and when I'm at home.
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If you want to try ExpressVPN,
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you can go to expressvpn.com slash Huberman.
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And if you do that, you'll get an extra three months free
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on one of their one-year packages.
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That's expressvpn.com slash Huberman
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to get three months free on a one-year package.
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The final sponsor of today's podcast is Magic Spoon.
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Magic Spoon is a zero-sugar,
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grain-free, keto-friendly cereal.
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As I've mentioned before on the podcast,
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I'm neither ketogenic nor am I all meat, nor am I vegan.
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The way I eat is that early in the day I fast.
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And then sometime around noon, I eat my first meal.
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And that meal is always low carbohydrate.
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And then throughout the day,
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I maintain a low carbohydrate diet.
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The fasting and low carbohydrate diet during the daytime
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optimizes alertness and wakefulness.
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I want to be awake and be able to work.
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And then at night is when I eat my carbohydrates
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because it facilitates the transition to sleep.
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So for me, Magic Spoon is a terrific snack
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I'll sometimes even have it with lunch.
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And the reason I like it
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is because it tastes really delicious
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and it's compatible with the keto-friendly
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or keto-like meals that I eat throughout the day.
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They come in a variety of flavors,
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cocoa, fruity, peanut butter, frosted.
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I particularly like the frosted
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because it tastes like donuts in my opinion.
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And I love donuts.
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As a consequence, I love Magic Spoon cereal.
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It tastes like a pastry.
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And it has zero grams of sugar
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and it's compatible with this nutritional regimen
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I mentioned earlier.
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If you want to try Magic Spoon,
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you can go to magicspoon.com slash Huberman
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to grab a variety pack.
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Use the code Huberman at checkout
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and get $5 off your order.
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That's magicspoon.com slash Huberman
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and use the code Huberman to get $5 off.
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This month, we're talking all about the science of emotions
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and tools related to the science of emotions.
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We've talked about the science of stress and resiliency,
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tools to access more calm,
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tools to raise your stress threshold
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to become more resilient.
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We've talked about motivation
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and the role of the dopamine system.
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I'd like to make a couple of announcements
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about some new resources.
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The first one is that we have now captioned
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all the Huberman Lab episodes in English and in Spanish.
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We were able to do that thanks to your support
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of our sponsors and on Patreon.
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So now all of the podcasts have a captioning feature
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on YouTube and those were done by experts.
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So while there might be the occasional error
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for the most part, they're very precise.
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We've done that so that people that prefer
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to consume the content in Spanish
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or that like to read the content
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from the English subtitles can do so.
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And we're going to continue to expand the number
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of languages that are captioned for the Huberman Lab podcast.
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So we want to thank you for that resource.
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It's now available for all episodes.
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In addition, in previous episodes,
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I've talked about NSDR or non-sleep deep rest.
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NSDRs come in a variety of different forms.
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There's self-hypnosis.
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I've pointed you to some resources for that previously.
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There's yoga nidra.
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NSDR is really about achieving calm quickly
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and doing that in a self-directed way for many reasons.
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In order to access sleep more readily,
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in order to de-stress very deeply,
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in order to replace sleep that you've lost.
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It also seems to aid neuroplasticity.
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It can enhance the rearrangements of connections
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in the brain that occur during learning.
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There's scientific support for that.
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There's a link in today's episode caption to a new site.
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This is a YouTube video that was brought free of cost
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by the folks over at Made For,
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a company that's been a sponsor of the podcast previously.
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So this is an NSDR script that doesn't contain
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any of the intentions
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or some of the more typical language of yoga nidra.
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Instead, it's focused purely on the breathing protocols
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as well as includes a sort of body scan
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where you direct your attention
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to different locations around your body.
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It has all the core elements of non-sleep deep rest,
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but is distinct from yoga nidra.
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I just offer this to you as a resource
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if you'd like to use it.
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It's about 30 minutes long and should be very effective
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in bringing you into deep states of relaxation
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for all the reasons I mentioned before.
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So let's talk about emotions.
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Emotions are a fascinating and vital aspect
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of our life experience.
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It's fair to say that emotions make up most
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of what we think of as our experience of life.
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Even the things we do, our behaviors and the places we go
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and the people we end up encountering in our life,
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all of that really funnels into our emotional perception
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of what those things mean,
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whether or not they made us happy or sad or depressed
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or lonely or we're all inspiring.
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Now, one thing that is absolutely true
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is that everyone's perception of emotion
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is slightly different.
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Meaning your idea of happy is very likely different
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than my idea of what a state of happiness is.
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And we know this also for color vision, for instance,
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even though the cells in your eye and my eye
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that perceive the color red are identical
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right down to the genes that they express,
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we can be certain based on experimental evidence
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and what are called psychophysical studies
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that your idea of the most intense red
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is going to be very different than my idea
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of the most intense red
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if we were given a selection of 10 different reds
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and asked which one is most intense,
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which one looks most red.
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And that seems crazy.
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You would think that something as simple as color
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would be universal and yet it's not.
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And so we need to agree at the outset
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that emotions are complicated
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and yet they are tractable, they can be understood.
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And today we're going to talk about a lot of tools
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to understand what emotions are
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for you to understand what your emotional states mean
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and what they don't mean.
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And in doing that, that will allow you to place a value
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on whether or not you should hold an emotional state
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as true or not true,
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whether or not it has meaning or it doesn't,
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as well as whether or not the emotions of others
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are important to you in a given context.
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We're going to talk a lot about development.
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In fact, we're going to center a lot of our discussion today
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around infancy and puberty.
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We're also going to talk about tools
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for enhancing one's emotional range
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and for navigating difficult emotional situations.
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I am not a clinical psychologist, I'm not a therapist,
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but I do have some background in psychology.
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And today I'm going to be drawing from the psychology greats
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not me, but from the greats of psychology
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who studied emotion, who studied emotional development
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and linking that to the neuroscience of emotion.
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Because nowadays we understand a lot about the chemicals
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and the hormones and the neural circuits in the brain
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and body that underlie emotion.
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So while there's no one single universally true theory
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of emotion at the intersection
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of many of the existing theories,
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there are really some ground truth.
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So today we're going to visit those ground truths.
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We're going to talk about the tools that emerge from them.
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And we're going to talk about some absolutely wild
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and wacky experiments that people are doing
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out there right now
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that I don't necessarily recommend you do
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of inhaling different types of hormones
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and trying to get attached more quickly.
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You're actually going to do some experiential stuff today
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There's some things that you can do in real time
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while listening to the podcast
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in order to tap into some of the mechanisms
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that I'll be referring to.
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So today's going to be very interactive
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in a way that previous podcasts episodes have not.
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If we want to understand emotions,
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we have to look at where emotions first develop.
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In fact, this is a critical central theme
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if you want to understand brain science and psychology.
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There's a rule in neuroanatomy
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because if you look at 50 different brains of humans
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or you compare the brains of dogs and humans,
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there are a lot of differences.
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Certain things are the same,
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but certain things are different.
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And the rule that every good neuroanatomist knows
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is that if you want to understand
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what a part of the brain does,
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you have to address two questions.
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First, you have to know
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what connections does that brain area make?
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What is it connected to?
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Where does it get inputs from?
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And where does it send inputs?
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So for instance, if there's an area of the brain
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that gets direct input from the neurons in the nose,
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you can be pretty certain that it has some role
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in analyzing smell, in measuring something about odors
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or analyzing something about odors.
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Now, if it also gets input from the eye,
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you can also conclude that it gets input
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from the visual system,
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that it cares about light and photons.
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This is sort of obvious.
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And yet you need to know that connectivity
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and you need to know what's called
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the developmental origin of that structure.
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You need to know where it was early in development
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because things move around a lot as the brain develops.
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The brain of course, is this more or less squishy thing
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floating around in some liquid
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that's stuffed inside your skull.
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And as a consequence, things move around a lot.
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They are not always in the same place
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in two different species
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or two individuals of the same species.
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So you have to know where they started out
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because where they started out
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informs what they do as well.
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And when we're talking about emotions,
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we cannot point to one area of the brain.
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We can't say that's the area of the brain
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that's responsible for emotions.
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There is this so-called limbic system
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that has been linked to emotions in various ways.
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We're going to talk about that today.
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But the limbic system is just one component
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of the inputs to create emotions.
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It's not the place for emotions.
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You can't go in and lesion one location in the brain
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and eliminate emotions entirely.
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It just doesn't work that way.
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So first of all, we have to ask,
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what are the circuits for emotion?
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What are the brain areas for emotion?
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And nowadays there's a lot of debate about this.
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For years, it was thought that there might be circuits,
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meaning connections in the brain
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that generate the feeling of being happy
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or circuits that generate the feeling of being sad, et cetera.
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That's been challenged.
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In fact, Lisa Feldman Barrett has been the person
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who's really challenged this head on
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and has very good evidence for the fact
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that such circuits probably don't exist.
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And yet I think there's good evidence
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for circuits in the brain,
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such as limbic circuits and other circuits
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that shift our overall states
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or our overall level of alertness or calmness
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or whether or not they bias us
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toward viewing the outside world
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or paying more attention to what's going on
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inside our bodies.
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If none of this makes sense right now,
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I promise it will make sense soon.
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But the important thing to understand
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is that emotions do arise in the brain and body.
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They arise because there are specific connections
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between specific areas in the brain and body.
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And if we want to understand how emotions work,
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we have to look how emotions are built.
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And they are built during infancy, adolescence and puberty.
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And then it continues into adulthood,
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but the groundwork is laid down early in development
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when we are small children.
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So let's think about what happens
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to a baby that comes into the world.
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A baby comes into the world,
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you were born into this world
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without really any understanding of the things around you.
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Now, there are two ways that you can interact
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with the world and you're always doing them more or less
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to some degree at the same time.
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Those are interoception,
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paying attention to what's going on inside you,
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what you feel internally and exteroception,
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paying attention to what's going on outside you.
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Hold that in mind, please,
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because the fact that you're both interocepting
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and exterocepting is true for your entire life
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and it sets the foundation for understanding emotions.
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It's absolutely critical.
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As an infant, you didn't have any knowledge
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of what you needed.
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You didn't understand hunger,
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you didn't understand toys
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when you first came into the world,
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you didn't understand cold or heat or any of that.
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When you needed something,
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you experienced that as anxiety.
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You would feel an increase in alertness
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if you had to use the bathroom,
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you would feel an increase in alertness if you were hungry
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and you would vocalize, you would cry out,
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you would act agitated, you might coo,
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you might do a number of different things,
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but all you knew was what you were feeling internally
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and then your caregiver, whoever that might've been,
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would respond to that.
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So you would feel some agitation,
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a caregiver would come and make a decision.
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Oh, you need food and give you milk or change your diaper
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or wrap you in a blanket if you were cold,
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but they didn't know if you were cold,
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they could just assume that you were cold.
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So this is actually really important to understand
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that a baby, when you were a baby and when I was a baby,
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we didn't have any sense of the outside world
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except that it responded to our acts of anxiety essentially.
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Now, this isn't Freudian theory, right?
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There are components of it
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that are embedded in Freudian theory,
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but all developmental psychologists agree
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that babies lack the ability
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to make cognitive sense of the outside world.
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But in this feeling of anxiety
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and registering one's own internal state
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and then crying out to the outside world,
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either through crying or subtle vocalizations
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or even just cooing, making some noise,
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we start to develop a relationship with the outside world
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in which our internal states, our shifts in anxiety,
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start to drive requests and people come and respond
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to those requests, hopefully.
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And the reason I say hopefully is that we've all heard
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presumably about these cases of neglect.
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There are a lot of cases where if you neglect a baby,
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you neglect an adolescent or a teenager,
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development doesn't go well.
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And we'll touch on some of those,
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but those are really extreme cases.
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They're sort of like the parallel to experiments
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that are often done in the laboratory with animals
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where you've probably heard of these enriched environments
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where they'll give mice a bunch of toys
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and they'll give them some different foods
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every once in a while
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and they'll house them together with other mice.
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And then what you find is that the animals,
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they will say, oh, their brain is thicker
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and their neurons have more branches to them and all that.
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But that's really comparing deprivation with normalcy.
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What we want to center on today instead
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is what happens when things go well
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and why things might not go well in certain circumstances
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is interesting, but to me, not as interesting
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as what healthy emotional development looks like.
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And if you haven't achieved healthy emotional development,
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what can be done as an intervention at later times
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in order to rescue that?
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So the baby, you as a baby,
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you're flopping around there in your crib,
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you're getting care where you need it
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and when you need it, presumably.
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And this gets to the basis of what emotions are about,
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which are emotions are really about forming bonds
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and being able to predict things in the world.
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That's really what emotions are about.
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Whether or not the baby feels angry or happy or sad,
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We can guess, but we don't know.
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In fact, most of the time we don't even know how we feel,
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let alone how other people feel.
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And that's true for adults.
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So if I ask you how you feel right now,
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I don't know that you could tell me
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in any kind of rich language that I would say,
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oh, I really understand.
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If you said you were very, very depressed
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or very, very happy,
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I'd have some sense because of how extreme that is,
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but I don't know that I would really know.
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And I don't think you know how I feel right now either.
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I could be furious right now or I could be very happy.
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You don't have any idea.
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Now, of course, we have these things called expressions.
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Our pupils dilate.
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There are various cues of how people feel.
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We're going to talk about those cues,
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but you really don't know.
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And at this point, I actually just want to pause
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and mention a really interesting tool
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that is trying to address this question
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of what are emotions and what do they consist of
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that you can use if you like.
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I didn't develop it.
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I don't have any relationship to them,
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but the app was developed by people at Yale,
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by groups at Yale who do research,
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and it's called Mood Meter.
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And it's actually quite interesting.
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I think it's either free or it's 99 cents.
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Again, no business relationship to them,
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but what they're trying to do is put more nuance,
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more subtlety on our words and our language for emotions
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and be able to allow you to predict
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how you're going to feel in the future.
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And it's actually quite interesting.
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I'm on the app right now, and I know you can't see this,
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but it's called Mood Meter,
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and you can find it on Apple or Android.
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And you go into it and it asks you,
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it says to me, hi, Andrew, how are you right now?
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And I click the little tab that says I feel,
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and I can either pick high energy and unpleasant,
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high energy and pleasant,
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low energy, unpleasant, or low energy, pleasant.
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And I would say right now, I feel high energy pleasant.
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So I just revealed to you how I feel.
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So I click on that,
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and then it gives you a gallery of colors,
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and you just move your finger to the location
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where you think it matches most.
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And as you do that, little words pop up.
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I know some people are looking at this on,
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or listening to this on audio only.
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So say motivated, cheerful, inspired.
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I would say I'm feeling right now, cheerful.
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So you click that, and then you just go to the next window
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and it just says, what are you doing?
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And this feels like play to me,
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but I'm going to call it work.
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And then that's it.
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And then what it does is it basically starts
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to collect data on you.
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You're giving it information,
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and it starts to link that to other features
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that you allow it access to if you like.
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And it starts helping you be able to predict
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how you're going to feel at different times of day.
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It's actually quite accurate in certain ways,
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quite interesting.
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And it points to a couple of really interesting features,
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which is that we don't really have enough language
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to describe all the emotional states.
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And yet there's some core truths
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to what makes up an emotion.
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And I want to review that twice during today's podcast,
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because this can really help people, kids and adults,
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understand better what they're feeling and why,
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and when best to engage in certain activities,
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and thankfully when best to avoid certain activities too.
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So the way this works is the following.
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You need to ask yourself at any point,
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you could do this right now if you like,
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what's your level of autonomic arousal?
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Autonomic arousal is just the continuum,
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the range of alert to calm.
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So if you're in a panic right now,
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you are like 10 out of 10 on the arousal scale.
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you're probably not comprehending what I'm saying,
link |
although maybe a little bit,
link |
but let's say you're very drowsy,
link |
you might be at a one or a two.
link |
So you always have to ask,
link |
where are you on the arousal scale?
link |
And then there's this other axis, this other question,
link |
which is what we call valence.
link |
Now, valence is a value.
link |
Do you feel good or bad?
link |
I would say I feel pretty good right now
link |
on a scale of one to 10,
link |
I'm like, I don't know, I feel like a seven.
link |
Got a good night's sleep last night,
link |
had a good walk with Costello this morning,
link |
I'm fed, I'm hydrated, I feel good.
link |
So I'm like a seven.
link |
So I'm alert and I feel pretty good.
link |
And then there's a third thing,
link |
which is how much we are interocepting
link |
and how much we are exterocepting, all right?
link |
So how much our attention is focused internally
link |
on what we're feeling and how much it's focused externally.
link |
And this is always going to be in a dynamic balance.
link |
So for instance, if you're really, really stressed,
link |
oftentimes that puts you in a position
link |
to be really in touch with what's going on in your body.
link |
If you start having a lot of somatic,
link |
a lot of bodily sensations,
link |
like your heart is beating so fast that you can't ignore it,
link |
then you're really strongly interoceptive.
link |
But also sometimes you're really stressed
link |
because someone's stressing you out
link |
or somebody sends you a text message
link |
or makes a comment about a YouTube thing you posted
link |
or something and you're really triggered by it.
link |
That never happens to me, but if it does happen to you,
link |
then you're exterocepting.
link |
So there are these three things,
link |
how alert or sleepy you are, that's one.
link |
How good or bad you feel, that's two.
link |
And then whether or not most of your attention
link |
is directed outward or whether or not it's directed inward.
link |
And much of what we call emotions
link |
are made up by those three things.
link |
And so let's return now to development,
link |
but tuck that away and just kind of think about it,
link |
alert versus asleep, good versus bad,
link |
and focused internally or focused externally.
link |
Because when I looked at all the theories of emotion
link |
that were out there,
link |
there were a lot of different components to them,
link |
but they all seem to center back
link |
to these same three features in some way
link |
or to some degree or another.
link |
And it can be very powerful to understand
link |
and look at your emotions through that lens.
link |
So let's return to the infant.
link |
There's the baby in the crib.
link |
It's mostly interocepting.
link |
As caregivers bring it what it needs, you hope,
link |
milk, diaper changes, et cetera,
link |
a warm blanket if it's cold,
link |
pull off the blanket when the baby's fussing
link |
and it's too warm because babies get too warm also.
link |
It starts to exterocept, excuse me, I misspoke.
link |
I want to be very clear.
link |
It starts to exterocept.
link |
The baby starts to look into the outside world
link |
and start making predictions.
link |
It starts wondering how much it needs to cry
link |
or predicting, well, if I cry like a little bit,
link |
then mom comes over and I get my milk.
link |
Or if I cry a lot, mom doesn't come over and give me milk.
link |
So I need to really scream at the top of my head.
link |
So babies are starting to evaluate and do all this,
link |
but they're not doing it consciously.
link |
They're doing this strategically
link |
in order to relieve anxiety.
link |
And I won't propose that that's what we do into adulthood.
link |
But a lot of what we do in adulthood
link |
is when we feel something, we start exterocepting.
link |
Some people are much better at just sitting as a container
link |
and just interocepting and paying attention
link |
to what they're feeling internally.
link |
But most people do a little bit of a balance of both.
link |
We don't feel good, so we look for an item of food
link |
that might make us feel better.
link |
We're feeling anxious heading into the dentist
link |
or something like that, so we text somebody.
link |
We do this almost reflexively.
link |
It's not always conscious.
link |
So infants do this and we continue to do this.
link |
We start to now balance our interoceptive
link |
and exteroceptive focus,
link |
our looking inward and looking outward.
link |
And as we do that, we're starting to figure out
link |
what gets our needs met.
link |
Remember, emotions are really there to form bonds
link |
and to make predictions.
link |
And so our needs are going to be met to some degree or not.
link |
Sometimes, sadly, there is neglect.
link |
Sometimes people don't show up for us
link |
the way that we would like.
link |
And in general, our responses to that
link |
have to do with whether or not we predict
link |
whether or not they would or not.
link |
When we expect something and it doesn't happen,
link |
it's a big letdown.
link |
That was the discussion about dopamine last episode.
link |
So the many theories of emotion,
link |
the triune brain theory
link |
that you have a primitive and evolved brain,
link |
something that's a little bit on shaky ground these days,
link |
the idea that Darwin proposed
link |
that there are these universal expressions of emotions,
link |
the work of Helen Fisher on love,
link |
that you have circuits in the brain for lust,
link |
circuits in the brain for love,
link |
and circuits in the brain for long-term bonds,
link |
as well as the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett
link |
saying that emotions are contextual,
link |
that they have a social component.
link |
And I'll be talking more about this,
link |
but the work of Alan Shore,
link |
a clinical psychologist and researcher at UCLA
link |
about right brain, left brain,
link |
and its role in emotional development,
link |
all of them have strong elements of this idea
link |
of paying attention to what's going on inward and outward.
link |
As a young creature, an infant and young toddler,
link |
you were mainly focused inward
link |
and you started to understand what was going on outward
link |
as a way of predicting what would bring you relief,
link |
what would remove your anxiety.
link |
And that's where the fundamental rules of your experience,
link |
your emotional experience, were laid down.
link |
Now, I realize that's a lot of information
link |
and it's somewhat of an academic talk,
link |
but there were two tools in there
link |
that I just want to highlight.
link |
One is the Mood Meter app.
link |
If you're interested in it, it can give you some insight
link |
into the different kinds of nuance within emotions
link |
and allow you to actually predict emotional states.
link |
If you want to try that,
link |
then you might find that interesting.
link |
The other one is this idea
link |
that there are three axes to emotion,
link |
three continuum that interact,
link |
the level of alertness and calmness,
link |
how good or bad you feel,
link |
and whether or not you're mainly focused inward or outward,
link |
because those are going to form a useful toolkit
link |
for the information going forward.
link |
So now let's talk about what kind of baby you were,
link |
because that actually informs your emotionality now.
link |
These are classic, they're actually famous experiments
link |
done by Bowlby and Ainsworth.
link |
Anyone that studied psychology
link |
or has taken a psychology class
link |
might have learned about this.
link |
This is this classic experiment
link |
of what was called the strange situation task,
link |
in which, and I'm describing it very coarsely here,
link |
I realize, but a mother and child come into the laboratory.
link |
Yes, this has now also been done with fathers.
link |
The baby and the mother or father play together for a bit,
link |
and then the mother leaves.
link |
The mother leaves for some period of time
link |
and then comes back.
link |
And the research is devoted to understanding
link |
the response of the child when the caretaker,
link |
the mother or the father returns.
link |
Most all children, not every child,
link |
but most children will cry
link |
when their primary caretaker leaves.
link |
They don't like that.
link |
And there are good reasons for that.
link |
They formed a bond and an attachment.
link |
And we will talk about some of the deeper chemical reasons
link |
However, the experiment is focused
link |
on the return of the caregiver
link |
because Bowlby and Ainsworth
link |
and many of their scientific offspring and colleagues
link |
identified at least four patterns that babies display
link |
when their caretaker returns.
link |
And they grouped these into group A, B, C, D,
link |
so much so that the kids were referred to as A babies,
link |
B babies, C babies, or D babies.
link |
You may know which one you were,
link |
but the categories are really interesting.
link |
The first babies are the A babies.
link |
So these were kids that would get upset
link |
when their caretaker would leave,
link |
but when their caretaker would return,
link |
the infant would respond with happiness,
link |
with what looked like delight.
link |
They would go to the caretaker.
link |
They seemed happy.
link |
If they had been fussy before or sad,
link |
they felt relieved.
link |
These are referred to as secure attached kids.
link |
So they have a healthy response to separation
link |
and they have a healthy response
link |
to re-engaging with the caretaker.
link |
The B babies, as they're called,
link |
were less likely to seek comfort from their caregiver
link |
when the caregiver would return.
link |
So they would sometimes continue to play with their toys
link |
or they would be with the,
link |
they had an adult in the room while the parent was gone.
link |
They would stay with them.
link |
It was sometimes complicated and nuanced,
link |
but these were referred to as avoidant babies.
link |
Don't run away with any conclusions
link |
about the language here just yet.
link |
It's not clear that avoidant babies become avoidant adults,
link |
The C babies would respond to the return of the caregiver
link |
with acts of annoyance.
link |
They seemed kind of angry, right?
link |
So it wasn't that they ignored them.
link |
They seemed kind of angry.
link |
And those were referred to as ambivalent babies.
link |
Not to be confused with A babies,
link |
these are the C babies were the ambivalent babies.
link |
So the infant's reaction to the returning caregiver
link |
were inconsistent.
link |
They, it seemed like they wanted to bond with them again,
link |
but that they seem kind of annoyed.
link |
I think we've all felt this way before
link |
with people that we care very much about,
link |
especially people we care very much about.
link |
And then the third category, the D babies,
link |
were the disorganized babies.
link |
That's what they called them.
link |
They weren't disorganized in that they were messy.
link |
The child avoided interactions with everyone
link |
and acted fearful when the caregiver returned.
link |
And their behavior didn't really change
link |
whether or not the caregiver was there or not.
link |
And that fourth category was actually added rather late
link |
in the course of this research.
link |
I should mention these experiments have been repeated
link |
with a huge variety of different contexts.
link |
There was work done by Mary Main at UC Berkeley
link |
looking at all sorts of variations on this theme.
link |
But over time, it made it clear
link |
that certain babies are able to feel secure
link |
upon re-engaging with their caregiver
link |
and others don't, or they're confused about it.
link |
So we probably don't know whether or not
link |
you were an A, a B, or a C, D baby,
link |
unless you were in these experiments
link |
and somehow you had that knowledge.
link |
But this work, this classic work,
link |
opened up a huge set of important questions
link |
that relate to what is the re-establishment
link |
of the bond really about?
link |
I mean, what's actually being figured out here
link |
is not whether or not there are four categories of babies,
link |
that's interesting,
link |
but it presumably is more interesting to focus on
link |
what is it that defines a really good bond,
link |
a secure attachment or an insecure attachment
link |
or an avoidant attachment.
link |
And the four things are gaze,
link |
literally eye contact,
link |
and doesn't have to be direct beaming eye contact
link |
with no blinks like people accused me of before.
link |
It can just be gaze that people look at each other,
link |
you see couples, they look at each other,
link |
they don't always stare at each other long periods of time,
link |
sometimes they do.
link |
Vocalizations, so what we say and how we say it.
link |
Affect or emotion, so the way that we express,
link |
crying, smiling, et cetera.
link |
And touch, those four things.
link |
And you probably could add a fifth dimension
link |
once language and written language develops,
link |
which is written word.
link |
Exchange of letters, exchange of texts,
link |
exchange of things of that sort, emails,
link |
are another way in which people can bond.
link |
But gaze, vocalization, affect and touch
link |
are really the core of this thing
link |
that we call social bonds and emotionality.
link |
Now that's important.
link |
We know for instance, that there are brain areas
link |
like the fusiform face area, which is deep in the brain
link |
that is responsible for the processing of faces.
link |
Children's recognition of their parents faces and voices
link |
is extremely accurate and strong.
link |
Likewise, parents recognition of their child's vocalizations
link |
not just voices, but cries are remarkable.
link |
If you've ever had the experience of being at a party
link |
with somebody who has small children
link |
and you're talking to them and all of a sudden
link |
they hear something but you don't,
link |
it's as if they've got wolf hearing
link |
and all of a sudden they go running into the other room
link |
and indeed, the kid is like, I don't know,
link |
some kid is beating up their kid
link |
or their kid's beating up some other kid
link |
or the kid has done injured themselves
link |
or feels emotionally injured.
link |
This perception of voices,
link |
there's very good evidence to support the fact
link |
that we are tuned to the frequencies of voices
link |
and vocalizations of people that we care about.
link |
It's not just true in rodents and in birds
link |
and other mammals, it's definitely true in humans as well.
link |
And babies are very tuned in
link |
to the sound of their mother's voice.
link |
Even yes, while they're in the womb,
link |
there's this whole world of what's called mother ease,
link |
which is the particular style of speech
link |
that mothers and other caretakers now we know
link |
use with children.
link |
So those are the core elements, right?
link |
How you look at somebody and how they look at you,
link |
what you say, what they say,
link |
what they seem to be feeling
link |
and how that makes you feel, smiles, frowns.
link |
If you know someone really well,
link |
you can read inflections in like even little subtle things
link |
like, they don't really believe me
link |
or oh, they're really excited by this
link |
or oh, you know, now I know what they're thinking.
link |
That kind of processing,
link |
some people are better at it than others,
link |
but everyone's better at doing that with people
link |
that we recognize and know.
link |
In fact, couples come to know each other exceedingly well,
link |
so much so that it can both benefit
link |
and injure their relationship
link |
to constantly be making these perceptions.
link |
But there's a range,
link |
some people are more tuned into this than others.
link |
And that probably has roots in the sorts of attachments
link |
that you form early on.
link |
So Boulby and colleagues developed these ABCD thing
link |
and it has a lot to do with face processing
link |
and gaze and vocalizations and touch.
link |
All of those happened on return with the mother,
link |
but they weren't parsing those,
link |
they weren't looking at them individually.
link |
So this raises a really interesting question,
link |
which is what is it when we feel something?
link |
Is it because of something that happens spontaneously in us,
link |
it's a memory, or it's something that we realize,
link |
we saw on the internet, or we got news about somebody.
link |
Nowadays, people get so much information
link |
about the people they know,
link |
both the people they like and dislike
link |
by way of viewing online activities, right?
link |
So they're exterocepting
link |
and then it's impacting your internal state.
link |
And it's clear from most all of the theories
link |
of emotional health that an ability to recognize
link |
when your own internal state is being driven
link |
primarily by external events,
link |
as important for being able to emotionally regulate, right?
link |
People who are constantly being yanked around
link |
by the external happenings in the world,
link |
you would say are emotionally labile.
link |
They are not in control of their emotions.
link |
Even if they're calm all the time,
link |
if that calmness only arrives
link |
because they're in a placid environment
link |
and then you put a cracker in that environment
link |
and they freak out, well, then they're not really calm.
link |
They're calm in so far
link |
as there isn't something disturbing in the environment.
link |
So how much the outside environment
link |
disrupts your internal environment
link |
has everything to do with this balance
link |
of interoception and exteroception.
link |
And it very likely has roots in whether or not
link |
you were secure attached or insecure attached,
link |
disorganized or ambivalent as a baby.
link |
Of course, you can't travel back in time and know,
link |
but there are some hints
link |
as to what kind of emotionality each of us has
link |
by examining two periods of development.
link |
One is adolescence and puberty, and the other is adulthood.
link |
So while we can't travel back in time,
link |
there is an exercise that you can do
link |
to address at least in this moment,
link |
whether or not you have a bias for exteroception
link |
or a bias for interoception.
link |
Whether or not you are better, at least in this moment,
link |
at paying attention to what's going on
link |
internally or externally.
link |
And of course, this will vary with circumstance.
link |
I think we all know people that maybe it's you,
link |
you go to a party and you get there
link |
and everyone seems to be talking
link |
and having a really good time.
link |
And you're wondering whether or not
link |
you have any food in your teeth
link |
or whether or not there's something on your face
link |
or whether or not your hair is right,
link |
or whether or not you said something the wrong way,
link |
whether or not you're turning red.
link |
People also experienced this a lot with public speaking.
link |
It's not just about learning to clamp your level of stress.
link |
It's also about how much you're exterocepting,
link |
how much you're out of your head, they call it,
link |
but how much you're focused on the events around you
link |
versus the events inside you.
link |
Actually, it's interesting when you talk to people
link |
who are very effective athletes
link |
or they have very high stress, high consequence jobs,
link |
they talk about this notion of getting out of your head.
link |
You only have so much attentional resource
link |
and it can be split between two things.
link |
You'll see that in a moment.
link |
They can be anchored to one thing.
link |
It can be fully focused on what's going on internally,
link |
or it can be fully focused on what's going on externally.
link |
And if you want to be effective in the world,
link |
effective being in quotes,
link |
it is useful when in very dynamic environments,
link |
especially social environments,
link |
to have a lot of your attention focused outward
link |
as opposed to trying to pay attention
link |
to whether or not you're saying things correctly
link |
or the timbre of your own voice.
link |
That is more or less destructive
link |
for the ability to engage socially.
link |
So here's the exercise.
link |
You can do this, please don't do this if you're driving,
link |
but let's just try and illustrate
link |
or allow you to experience
link |
this interoceptive, exteroceptive balance
link |
and the extent to which you can move interoception
link |
and exteroception deliberately.
link |
If you close your eyes right now
link |
and concentrate on the contact of any portion of your body
link |
with say the chair or your car seat,
link |
although please again, don't do this while you're driving,
link |
anywhere that you are,
link |
even if you're just standing up or you're in the kitchen,
link |
you're lying on the couch
link |
and trying to bring as much of your attention
link |
to that point of contact as possible.
link |
And then from there,
link |
you're going to move your attention even more deeply
link |
into say the sensation of what's going on in your gut.
link |
Is your heart beating?
link |
What's the cadence of your breathing?
link |
Basically bringing your focus and attention
link |
to everything at the surface of your skin and inward.
link |
So I'm going to do a rare thing
link |
on the Huberman Lab Podcast.
link |
I'm going to introduce about five to eight seconds
link |
of silence in order to allow you to do that a little bit.
link |
Okay, now this is an exercise
link |
that you can continue afterward
link |
if you want to extend how long you do this.
link |
But now try and do something that for most people
link |
actually is a little bit harder,
link |
which is to purely extero set.
link |
Put your eyes or your ears or both
link |
on anything in your immediate space, one thing.
link |
And I would restrict that thing to something small enough
link |
that at least in your field of view,
link |
it would occupy 20% of your field of view.
link |
So it doesn't have to be a pinpoint
link |
unless the pin is right in front of you
link |
and you're holding it real close.
link |
I would say, look across the room,
link |
pick a panel on the wall or a leg of a table or something
link |
and try and bring as much of your attention
link |
to that as possible.
link |
And again, I'll take about five seconds of silence
link |
to allow you to extero sept.
link |
Okay, so what you probably found
link |
is that you were able to do that,
link |
but that some degree of interoception is maintained.
link |
It's hard to place 100% of your attention
link |
on something externally,
link |
unless it's really exciting, really novel.
link |
If you've ever watched a really great movie,
link |
presumably you're extero septing
link |
more than you're intero septing
link |
until something exciting happens
link |
and then you feel something.
link |
You're actually tethering your emotional experience
link |
to something external.
link |
And now you can also do this dynamically.
link |
You can decide to focus internally and then externally.
link |
You can decide to split it 50%, 50% or 70, 30.
link |
One can develop, you can develop
link |
a heightened ability to do this.
link |
And the power of doing that
link |
is actually that when you are in environments
link |
where you feel like you're focused too much internally
link |
and you'd like to be focused more externally,
link |
you can actually do that deliberately.
link |
But as you notice, it takes work.
link |
It involves taking your attentional spotlight
link |
and what we call the aperture of your attention
link |
and narrowing that aperture to either the self
link |
or something externally or splitting the two.
link |
And yet there are practices that have been developed
link |
that center on moving interoception and exteroception
link |
from one being more heavily weighted than the other,
link |
more focused outward or more focused inward.
link |
And the circuits in the brain
link |
that underlie intero and exteroception
link |
aren't exactly known,
link |
but they are anchored in the areas of the brain
link |
they're involved in attention,
link |
like the frontal eye fields
link |
and areas that when you third person yourself,
link |
when you can see yourself doing something,
link |
like if you put your hand out in your environment
link |
and you focus on your hand,
link |
you know that that's your hand
link |
as opposed to some random object.
link |
There are areas of the brain they're involved in that
link |
in recognizing the location of self
link |
relative to the rest of your body.
link |
These exercises are really what are at the core
link |
of these development of emotional bonds,
link |
because as we mentioned before,
link |
these four things, the gaze, vocalization,
link |
those are happening very dynamically.
link |
So if somebody winks at you,
link |
you're paying attention to their wink,
link |
but then you also notice how you feel,
link |
then they might say something,
link |
then you might say something.
link |
This is very dynamic.
link |
So if it seems overwhelming to try and interocept
link |
and exterocept and then shift the balance,
link |
you do that all the time.
link |
Your brain and nervous system are fantastic at doing this.
link |
Now, some people have a very hard time
link |
breaking out of a very strongly interoceptive mode.
link |
Some people have a harder time
link |
breaking out of their exteroceptive mode.
link |
It's very interesting to note
link |
the extent to which we have biases
link |
in how interoceptive or exteroceptive we are.
link |
Remember those three axes that we talked about earlier.
link |
You have valence, good or bad,
link |
you have alertness, alert or calm,
link |
and you have interoceptive or exteroceptive bias, right?
link |
And it's going to differ across the day,
link |
it's going to differ across the lifetime,
link |
it's certainly going to differ
link |
according to whatever it is that you're engaged in.
link |
But early in development,
link |
you start off with this interoceptive bias,
link |
you are starting to develop expectations,
link |
predictions about how the outside world is going to work,
link |
and you are trying to figure out
link |
the reliability of outside events in people
link |
and where things are reliable.
link |
When people are reliable,
link |
we are able to give up more of our interoception.
link |
There's literally trust that our interoceptive needs,
link |
our internal needs will be met
link |
through bonds and actions of others.
link |
This starts to veer toward
link |
the discussion about neglect and trauma.
link |
We are going to devote entire episodes,
link |
probably an entire month, to trauma and PTSD,
link |
but those have roots in what we're talking about now,
link |
and it's important to internalize and understand
link |
what we're talking about now
link |
in order to get the most out of those future conversations.
link |
So if all of this seems like a lot of information
link |
and very complicated,
link |
I just invite you to pay attention from time to time
link |
how much you happen to be interocepting or exterocepting,
link |
because emotions and the intensity of those emotions
link |
will grow or shrink
link |
depending on how much we're interocepting.
link |
If we are feeling extremely sad
link |
and there is an outside event that made us sad,
link |
chances are there's going to be a balance,
link |
but that the extreme grief, the extreme sadness
link |
is going to lead us to mostly interocept.
link |
Whereas when we're feeling extremely happy,
link |
Something great happens in the world
link |
and we're just going to feel it.
link |
Most of our perception,
link |
most of our awareness is going to be on an internal state.
link |
So we are always tethered to the outside world
link |
to some degree or another.
link |
That was true when you were an infant
link |
and it was true when you were an adolescent
link |
and it's true as an adult.
link |
So now I want to just pause,
link |
just shelve the discussion about interoception,
link |
exteroception for a moment.
link |
And I want to talk about what is arguably the second most,
link |
if not equally important aspect of your development
link |
as it relates to emotionality.
link |
And as it relates to this, what I call trust,
link |
but this ability to predict
link |
whether or not things in the outside world are reliable
link |
or not reliable in terms of their ability
link |
to help you meet your interoceptive needs.
link |
And that period is puberty.
link |
So up until now, we've been talking mainly about psychology,
link |
not a lot of biology, not a lot of mechanism.
link |
And now we're going to transition
link |
into talking about mechanism,
link |
hormones, receptors, et cetera.
link |
Puberty is a absolute biological event.
link |
It has a beginning and it has a specific definition,
link |
which is the transition into reproductive maturity.
link |
So there are a lot of hormonal changes.
link |
Yes, there are also a lot of brain changes
link |
and most people don't realize it,
link |
but the brain changes occur first.
link |
The brain turns on the hormone systems
link |
that allow puberty to occur.
link |
Puberty is occurring earlier nowadays
link |
than it did in the past.
link |
The current numbers that I was able to find
link |
is that in females and girls,
link |
the transition is starting around age 10,
link |
whereas in boys, it's about age 12.
link |
That's going to differ by way
link |
of a number of different factors, those are averages.
link |
So it depends on where you are in the world,
link |
depends on all sorts of things.
link |
One of the primary triggers for puberty
link |
is actually body fat.
link |
This is interesting.
link |
The peptide hormone leptin,
link |
some people call it a peptide,
link |
some people call it a hormone,
link |
but it meets both definitions
link |
depending on how you look at it, is made by fat.
link |
So leptin had a lot of popularity in the 90s
link |
because it was discovered as being produced by fat
link |
and it was seen in animal studies
link |
that it could promote leanness.
link |
It actually communicates to the brain
link |
that there's enough body fat
link |
in order to allow the metabolic factors
link |
and processes to occur to liberate more fat.
link |
This is why people have trouble losing that last five pounds
link |
is because leptin levels are very low.
link |
This was actually the basis
link |
for the whole cheat day refeed thing,
link |
that the idea was if you eat a lot for one day a week
link |
while dieting hard, that you can signal to the brain
link |
that there's enough leptin.
link |
I don't know if that's the reason
link |
or whether or not the cheat days
link |
just provided some psychological relief, probably both.
link |
But in any case, leptin is made by body fat
link |
and when there's enough leptin,
link |
it signals the brain to trigger puberty.
link |
There was a paper published in the mid 90s
link |
in the journal Science, excellent journal,
link |
showing that leptin could be injected into younger females
link |
that would not have yet gone into puberty
link |
and you could accelerate the onset of puberty with leptin.
link |
So the more body fat, the earlier puberty, that's true.
link |
Leptin is also involved in various growth effects
link |
in the body generally.
link |
And it's interesting, very obese children
link |
don't necessarily undergo puberty earlier,
link |
sometimes they do, but they do tend to be larger boned.
link |
Their bones actually grow more quickly
link |
and they tend to have higher bone density
link |
because leptin is also involved in bone density.
link |
The whole issue of onset of puberty
link |
also has some really interesting social effects.
link |
And I want to really highlight that most of these effects
link |
are so-called pheromone effects.
link |
Remember, a hormone is a substance
link |
secreted from one area of the body,
link |
travels and impacts tissues and cells elsewhere in the body.
link |
A pheromone is a chemical that's released
link |
by one member of a species that goes and acts on
link |
and impacts other members of that species
link |
or even other species.
link |
So for instance, rodents are very good at detecting
link |
the urine and the scent markings of large carnivores
link |
that want to eat them.
link |
So that's a pheromonal interaction.
link |
Whether or not there are pheromonal effects in humans
link |
I did a post on this on Instagram a little while ago
link |
about some pheromone effects that were reported in humans.
link |
And I had a couple of people come at me saying,
link |
look, it's never really been shown in humans
link |
that there's a pheromonal,
link |
what's called the vomeronasal organ.
link |
There's something called Jacobson's organ.
link |
Some people have it, some people don't.
link |
Very controversial.
link |
So I want to point out that human pheromone effects
link |
are controversial.
link |
Although I think there's, in my opinion,
link |
there's ample evidence for them.
link |
Synchronization of menstrual cycles.
link |
For many people report, then people say,
link |
there's some studies that show that it's not true.
link |
Then there've been some data showing very impressive
link |
pheromonal effects of female partners
link |
being able to detect the odor of their significant others
link |
on t-shirts that were washed several times.
link |
So they can't consciously perceive it,
link |
but they say, this one smells like them.
link |
This one smells like my partner.
link |
And indeed, the match was way above chance.
link |
So there does seem to be weak pheromonal effects,
link |
at least in my opinion, when I look at the data,
link |
but much more needs to be done.
link |
So one of the more interesting pheromone effects
link |
that impacts puberty, at least in animal models,
link |
is the so-called Vandenberg effect,
link |
which is if you take a pre-pubertal female,
link |
so a female that has not undergone sexual maturation,
link |
and you introduce a novel male that is not the father
link |
or a brother, not a sibling,
link |
she will undergo puberty almost immediately.
link |
So this is really striking.
link |
For years, this was thought not to occur in primate species,
link |
but there was a paper published last year
link |
in Current Biology Cell Press Journal, excellent journal,
link |
showing that mandrills, a particular type of primate,
link |
they exhibit this Vandenberg effect.
link |
There are also all sorts of other pheromone effects.
link |
There's the most infamous one is called the Bruce effect,
link |
where the introduction of a novel male
link |
to a pregnant female animal causes spontaneous miscarriage.
link |
And that effect seems to be protected against
link |
by the presence of the father.
link |
So another, you know, these interpretation of this,
link |
and I want to really highlight that these are animal studies,
link |
but the way this works is that if a pregnant female
link |
is in the company of the male that impregnated her,
link |
then her young are protected by his scent presence
link |
or his pheromone presence.
link |
But if he's gone and a novel male shows up,
link |
there's a tendency for her to spontaneously miscarry
link |
and essentially for the fetus to be lost.
link |
Now, whether or not this occurs in humans
link |
is still very controversial,
link |
but nonetheless, these pheromone effects exist.
link |
And that one is called the Bruce effect,
link |
named after Hilda Bruce,
link |
who is the scientist that discovered it.
link |
The one that's relevant to the puberty discussion
link |
is the Vandenberg effect,
link |
which I mentioned a few minutes ago,
link |
which is a novel male showing up,
link |
has to be a sexually competent male,
link |
so he has to have already passed through puberty,
link |
and his presence triggers activation of puberty
link |
in a female that otherwise would have remained
link |
pre-pubertal for longer.
link |
Again, whether or not this happens in humans, unclear.
link |
Well, what can we be sure about when we think about puberty?
link |
Puberty is triggered by a number of different factors.
link |
There are changes in GABA expression in the brain
link |
and inhibitory transmitter.
link |
One of the more interesting molecules that triggers puberty
link |
in all individuals is something called kispeptin,
link |
K-I-S-S-P-E-P-T-I-N, kispeptin.
link |
Kispeptin is made by the brain,
link |
and it stimulates large amounts of a different hormone
link |
called GnRH, gonadotropin-releasing hormone, to be released.
link |
Gonadotropin-releasing hormone
link |
then causes the release of another hormone,
link |
comes something like called luteinizing hormone or LH,
link |
which travels in the bloodstream
link |
and stimulates the ovaries of females to produce estrogen
link |
and the testes of males to produce testosterone.
link |
Kispeptin has other effects as well,
link |
but those are some of the main ones
link |
as they relate to puberty.
link |
This is interesting because at this point,
link |
the testes in males start churning out tons of testosterone
link |
in order to trigger the development of secondary
link |
sexual characteristics, body hair and all the others,
link |
deepening of voice, et cetera.
link |
And in females, estrogen is doing various other things,
link |
breast development, et cetera.
link |
Normally in an adult, somebody who has passed puberty,
link |
a big increase in gonadotropin-releasing hormone
link |
and luteinizing hormone would eventually be shut down
link |
because the way that the brain works,
link |
the hypothalamus and the pituitary
link |
are actually measuring how much hormone is in the blood.
link |
And if testosterone or estrogen
link |
or any other hormone goes too high,
link |
they shut down the release of things like luteinizing hormone
link |
it's a way called a negative feedback loop.
link |
It basically is like a thermostat in the house.
link |
It's more complicated than that,
link |
but once levels get too high in the bloodstream,
link |
it shuts down, but Kispeptin is able to drive
link |
very high levels of these hormones in an ongoing way
link |
so that puberty can commence and can continue.
link |
And incidentally, Kispeptin has now become
link |
yet another of the panoply of hormones and peptides
link |
and cocktails that athletes take
link |
in order to try and stimulate natural hormone production,
link |
essentially to create their own
link |
performance-enhancing drugs endogenously.
link |
No judgment there, but that's a fact.
link |
There's a lot of Kispeptin use.
link |
I'm truly not suggesting anyone do this,
link |
but people are buying and injecting Kispeptin
link |
for the specific reason that even past puberty
link |
can stimulate the large increases in things like estrogen,
link |
large increases in testosterone and things of that sort.
link |
Has a number of psychological effects too,
link |
seems to have big effects on libido, et cetera.
link |
All these things of course are subject to feedback loops
link |
so they don't work indefinitely.
link |
And I'm going to highlight again,
link |
I'm not suggesting anyone do it,
link |
but I do like to pay attention to what's out there
link |
and Kispeptin because it wasn't discovered that long ago
link |
is one of the things that you don't often hear about
link |
when people talk about performance-enhancing drugs
link |
or therapeutic endocrinology.
link |
These things also have therapeutic uses
link |
in the endocrine setting.
link |
So for instance, kids that don't undergo puberty
link |
or kids that are hypogonadal
link |
or adults that are hypogonadal,
link |
they're not making enough hormone,
link |
will take things like Kispeptin among other things.
link |
So that's how puberty happens at the biological level,
link |
gets triggered by leptin and Kispeptin.
link |
And then this young child is now a different creature
link |
not just because they're reproductively competent of course,
link |
but because there's a shift in a number of the things
link |
that underlie these social bonds.
link |
There's a market shift in a number of the things
link |
that allow children and adults
link |
to engage in predictive behavior about each other.
link |
And the whole nature of adolescence and puberty
link |
is to take a child that was a generalist
link |
and to make them a specialist.
link |
And this is very important
link |
as it relates to the conversation about emotionality,
link |
but it's important in terms of all aspects of brain function
link |
and in terms of learning
link |
and in terms of who each and every one of us
link |
will and has become.
link |
In adolescence and in childhood,
link |
sure, there are some genetic biases,
link |
hair color, eye color, height, and things like that.
link |
A lot of that's programmed into the genome.
link |
There are other genetic biases too, of course,
link |
but it's in adolescence and puberty
link |
that we go from essentially
link |
being somewhat good at a bunch of things
link |
or somewhat poor at a bunch of things
link |
to becoming very good at a few things
link |
and very poor at a lot of other things.
link |
And that's because of the relationship
link |
to puberty and neuroplasticity.
link |
This ability to change the brain
link |
in response to experience is starting to taper off
link |
such that by our early 20s, it's harder to achieve.
link |
Now, the transition from generalist to specialist
link |
is one aspect of adolescence and puberty,
link |
but the other is the formation
link |
of social and emotional bonds.
link |
And most of what consumes the minds
link |
and waking hours of adolescents
link |
and children who have gone through puberty
link |
and going through puberty
link |
is questions about how they relate to social structures,
link |
who they can rely on,
link |
and how they can make reliable predictions in the world
link |
now that they have more agency,
link |
that they are physically changed.
link |
In fact, you could argue that puberty
link |
is the fastest rate of maturation
link |
that you'll go through at any point in your life.
link |
It's the largest change that you'll go through
link |
at any point in your life in terms of who you are
link |
because your biology is fundamentally changed
link |
at the level of your brain and your bodily organs,
link |
all your organs from the skin inward.
link |
So I want to visit a little bit of the research
link |
about some of the core needs
link |
that occur during puberty and adolescence,
link |
not just for parents or for the people
link |
that might be in puberty and adolescence,
link |
but also so that people can reflect
link |
on which of these sort of boxes were checked off for them
link |
as they approached emotional maturity.
link |
So there's a terrific review article
link |
that was published in the journal Nature,
link |
which is, if not the premier,
link |
then certainly among the top three premier journals
link |
in the field of science
link |
about the biology of adolescence and puberty,
link |
as well as some of the core needs and demands
link |
that have to be met for successful emotional maturation
link |
We will provide a link to that,
link |
but I just want to highlight a few of the things
link |
that they place in the final table.
link |
I don't want to go through all the results right now
link |
because you could do that on your own if you like.
link |
They mainly highlight a lot of the changes in neurons
link |
and neural circuits.
link |
For instance, I'll just highlight one.
link |
There's a connection between the dopamine centers
link |
in the brain and an area of the brain
link |
that's involved in emotion and dispersal.
link |
Dispersal is very interesting.
link |
What you observe in animals and humans
link |
is that around the end of adolescence
link |
and during the transition to puberty,
link |
both because of changes in the brain
link |
and changes in hormones,
link |
there's an intense desire on the part of the child
link |
to get further and further away from primary caregivers.
link |
Not permanently, they always return,
link |
similar to a child that walks off and then looks back
link |
and sees if everything's safe and then continues on.
link |
During adolescence and puberty,
link |
both in animals and in kids,
link |
it almost seems like there's a bias for action
link |
and the action is always in the direction away
link |
from the primary caregiver.
link |
Now, as soon as I say that,
link |
I can just imagine in my mind
link |
that somebody out there saying,
link |
well, no, my kid, as soon as they hit puberty,
link |
they just want to stay home with us all the time.
link |
That's not typical.
link |
It happens, but it's not typical.
link |
Mostly there's a desire to start spending
link |
more time with friends, more time with peers,
link |
and less time with adults.
link |
And I find it extremely interesting to note
link |
that that's not just true in humans.
link |
That's true in other primates species.
link |
That's true in rodents.
link |
That's true in almost every other mammalian species.
link |
So there's something about these hormones
link |
that don't just allow sexual reproduction.
link |
They don't just change the brain and bodily organs
link |
and the shape of us.
link |
They also bias us towards dispersal,
link |
getting further and further away
link |
from primary caregivers in particular.
link |
So parents of teenagers or future teenagers,
link |
it is not just normal.
link |
It is baked in to the biology of humans
link |
to disperse around adolescents and in the teen years.
link |
So again, I just want to highlight a few of these,
link |
what were listed as intervention strategies
link |
to promote healthy adolescence and puberty.
link |
And it's very interesting because the entire article,
link |
I should mention who wrote this article, apologies,
link |
one of them is a friend of mine.
link |
So the first author is Ronald Dahl,
link |
not the children's book author, I'm assuming.
link |
No, from the School of Public Health
link |
at a University of California, Berkeley.
link |
And Nicholas Allen, Linda Wilbrecht,
link |
and Anna Ballenhof, Suleiman,
link |
forgive me for the pronunciation of the last one.
link |
I know Dr. Wilbrecht quite well.
link |
She's done the work on dispersal,
link |
is quite well known for that work.
link |
And it's a very extensive review,
link |
but I think you'll find it accessible.
link |
Lot of changes in thickness of the brain
link |
at different stages, et cetera.
link |
But I think most people will be interested
link |
in what that translates to in the real world.
link |
And what's interesting is during puberty,
link |
there's increased connection, connectivity as we call it,
link |
between the prefrontal cortex,
link |
which is involved in motivation and decision-making,
link |
being able to suppress action for making long-term goals
link |
possible, as well as dopamine centers and the amygdala.
link |
So there's this really broad integration and testing.
link |
I think this is the key element here,
link |
testing of circuits for emotions and reward
link |
as they relate to decisions.
link |
And I think that's useful because when you look
link |
at the behavior of adolescents and teens,
link |
they are testing social interactions.
link |
They are testing physical interactions with the world.
link |
Oftentimes they're engaging in unsafe behavior.
link |
And you can't just, I would never try and justify that
link |
with the underlying neurology.
link |
But the neuroscience points to increased connectivity
link |
between areas of the brain that are related to emotionality
link |
and to threat detection, like the amygdala,
link |
So it's a time of testing behaviorally
link |
how different behaviors lead to success or not.
link |
It's how different behaviors lead to fear states or not.
link |
Now, of course, you could say that of any stage
link |
of development, but it seems like puberty
link |
is a very, very heightened stage in which testing
link |
of contingencies, good or bad, is taking place.
link |
And of course, this is happening,
link |
it's operating in a body that's now more capable
link |
So an infant can damage themselves through error,
link |
but it's harder for them to damage themselves
link |
through deliberate planning.
link |
That's why it's important, of course,
link |
to lock up all the medications in the house,
link |
make sure infants can't get to them.
link |
But it's not likely that the infant
link |
is going to devise an extremely diabolical plan
link |
to get into the cabinet to get a certain substance,
link |
whereas a teenager might, right?
link |
So you can start to map the neurology
link |
onto some of this emotional exploration.
link |
I do realize that this episode is about emotions.
link |
Puberty is a time in which the internal state
link |
of the person or the animal is being sampled
link |
and tested against different extra receptive events,
link |
only now they are able to guide those events
link |
with more agency, right?
link |
It's no longer just about whether or not the caregiver
link |
is bringing you milk or bringing you food.
link |
Now, of course, the parents will all say,
link |
yeah, but I'm paying for everything that they're doing,
link |
I'm paying for the car and I'm paying for the food.
link |
Ah, true, but the biology doesn't care about the source,
link |
the child or the adolescent is now able,
link |
the teen really is able to now sample many,
link |
many more extra receptive events through behavior.
link |
So some of these recommendations are interesting.
link |
The theory is that one of the motivations
link |
is to learn to mitigate the risk of famine and malnutrition.
link |
As teenagers get older, they start questioning
link |
whether or not their parents
link |
are everything they thought they were,
link |
whether or not they're the greatest thing that ever was
link |
or the worst thing that ever was perhaps,
link |
including whether or not they will be able
link |
to provide them resources.
link |
So they test whether or not
link |
they can actually feed themselves,
link |
whether or not they can support themselves,
link |
although rarely not, certainly it happens,
link |
but rarely are they really taking care of themselves.
link |
Although some teens are forced
link |
to take care of themselves, of course,
link |
because parents and other caretakers aren't available.
link |
The recommendations that map to the biology include later,
link |
there's been a big push for later start times in schools
link |
to match their shifts in circadian rhythms
link |
and the need for extended sleep,
link |
something we talked about during the sleep episodes,
link |
to insist on sleep interventions for youth
link |
who are at increased risk for mental health problems.
link |
Almost every mental health issue is supported
link |
by getting regular quality sleep of sufficient duration.
link |
Sufficient duration is going to vary from person to person.
link |
Leveraging different kinds of social relationships
link |
that reinforce positive behavior.
link |
This is starting to sound like kind of a boilerplate stuff.
link |
And yet really the goal is during puberty
link |
to encourage as many safe forms of interaction
link |
that allow children, teens really, and adolescents,
link |
I keep calling them children,
link |
but what I mean are children going through puberty,
link |
that allow them to test this thing of autonomy
link |
so that they can start to make good assessments
link |
about their extra receptive events
link |
that they are selecting
link |
and how those make them feel internally.
link |
So they're essentially doing a buffet.
link |
The buffet has now broadened
link |
to not just include the events and experiences
link |
that their parents and other caretakers bring them,
link |
but they can now expand the buffet
link |
into things that they can provide themselves.
link |
And so adolescence and puberty
link |
is really seen as the period of development
link |
in which one self samples for these two elements
link |
that we talked about at the beginning,
link |
which are how do I form bonds
link |
and how do I make predictions
link |
about what will make me feel good
link |
at a level of interoception.
link |
Some of that might sound a little transactional,
link |
that all we're trying to do
link |
is figure out how we can bond with people
link |
so we can get what we need so we can feel how we need.
link |
I think that's true to some extent.
link |
Of course, there's a richer,
link |
more abstract aspect to relationships too,
link |
which are in relationships
link |
you can access things you couldn't do before,
link |
you can cooperate, there's things like teamwork,
link |
you can do all sorts of things.
link |
But in terms of the biology,
link |
it's clear that there's this stage of development
link |
where more autonomy, more physical capability
link |
is triggered by these hormone changes in the brain
link |
and these peptide changes in the brain and body.
link |
And that nonetheless brings us back
link |
to the exact same model that we started with in infancy
link |
of alert or calm, feel good or feel bad,
link |
primarily exterocepting, primarily interocepting.
link |
So I keep going back to this,
link |
I'm sort of like a repeating record on that
link |
because the same core algorithm,
link |
the same core function is at play throughout the lifespan.
link |
And that's a useful framework in my opinion,
link |
because it allows you to sort through
link |
all the data and information that's out there about,
link |
well, this area, the stria terminalis is active
link |
or the basolateral amygdala is active
link |
or gray matter thickening or this hormone or that hormone
link |
and return to a kind of kernel
link |
of certainly not exhaustive truth,
link |
it doesn't cover all aspects of emotionality,
link |
but at least establishes some groundwork
link |
from which you can start to evaluate
link |
how different behaviors might or might not make sense,
link |
how certain emotional responses
link |
might or might not make sense,
link |
regardless of the age of the person or the organism.
link |
A discussion about emotions would not be complete
link |
without talking about the right brain, left brain stuff.
link |
And this is a very interesting aspect
link |
of sociology, psychology, and neuroscience.
link |
There's a theory of emotional development
link |
that I find particularly interesting,
link |
which is from Alan Shore at UCLA,
link |
that talks about how most of our testing of bonds
link |
and relationships is the seesawing back and forth
link |
between very dopaminergic, so driven by dopamine
link |
or serotonergic, driven by serotonin states.
link |
And this starts with infant and mother
link |
or infant and father.
link |
I talked a little bit about this in the previous episode,
link |
but just to remind you,
link |
or for anyone that didn't hear about it,
link |
that during development, healthy emotional development
link |
clearly begins with an ability for the caretaker and child
link |
to be in calm, peaceful, soothing, touch-oriented,
link |
eye-gazing type of behaviors.
link |
Those really drive serotonin,
link |
the endogenous opioid system, oxytocin,
link |
things that are very calming
link |
and are centered around pleasure with the here and now,
link |
as well as excited states of what we're going to do next.
link |
There's actually a kind of characteristic sign
link |
of the dopaminergic interaction
link |
where both caretaker and child are wide-eyed,
link |
the pupils dilate, that's a signature of arousal.
link |
They get really excited.
link |
Oftentimes the baby will look away
link |
if it gets really excited.
link |
Those are signatures of dopamine release in the body.
link |
And in adolescence, these same things carry forward
link |
where their good bonds are achieved
link |
through hanging around, watching TV,
link |
just kind of being there, playing video games
link |
or texting together or talking,
link |
whatever it is that the soothing local activity
link |
happens to be, as well as adventure
link |
and things that are exciting.
link |
So it could be sports, it could be shopping,
link |
it could be a summer adventure,
link |
it could be the next big thing.
link |
And so this kind of seesawing back and forth
link |
between the different reward systems
link |
seems to be the basis
link |
from which healthy emotional bonds are created.
link |
And I invite anyone who's interested in this
link |
to look up some of Dr. Schor's work.
link |
I think I misspoke on the last episode.
link |
He's not a psychiatrist,
link |
he's a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst,
link |
but has deep rootings in neuroscience.
link |
So it's, I think, a fascinating aspect.
link |
But the way it's framed in that book and in his book
link |
and in some of the language around that
link |
is around right brain, left brain.
link |
And we've all heard this stuff before
link |
that the right brain is thought to be the emotional side.
link |
This is the characteristic thing that you hear out there,
link |
that the right brain is holistic, that it's emotive,
link |
and that the left brain is logical,
link |
sequential, and analytic.
link |
And that's not what Schor was proposing.
link |
There are some right brain, left brain differences,
link |
but the idea that the right brain is synthetic,
link |
holistic, and emotive,
link |
and that the left brain is logical, sequential,
link |
and analytic is false.
link |
There is zero neuroscience evidence for that whatsoever.
link |
We're going to address this in more detail
link |
during a month talking about learning
link |
and memory and dementia,
link |
but let's talk about some truths,
link |
some differences between the left brain and right brain,
link |
because we can't have a discussion about emotion
link |
without doing that.
link |
The left brain, at least for people who are right-handed,
link |
is linguistically dominant,
link |
meaning most of language is centered
link |
in the left side of the brain for right-handed people.
link |
If you were a left-hander
link |
and you were forced to become right-handed,
link |
chances are this is still true
link |
because of when language gets laid down in the brain.
link |
For left-handers, people that naturally write
link |
with their left hand and always did,
link |
language is still mostly in the left side of the brain,
link |
but it's also found more often
link |
in the right side of the brain,
link |
so it's not as lateralized as we say,
link |
it's kind of distributed between both.
link |
Okay, so right-handers,
link |
most of your language is coming
link |
from the left side of your brain.
link |
Left-handers, it's probably
link |
a little bit more evenly distributed.
link |
And there are some variations,
link |
whether or not you're a hook righty or a hook lefty,
link |
there's all sorts of nuance to this,
link |
but that's the general aspect.
link |
So language tends to be centered
link |
in the left side of the brain,
link |
and that includes lexicon, grammar, syntax, all of it,
link |
and we'll talk about one aspect of language
link |
that seems to be more right brain,
link |
that's very interesting.
link |
There does seem to be some arithmetic advantage,
link |
so ability in math, in the left side of the brain.
link |
And I'm going to talk about
link |
how all this was discovered in a minute.
link |
The right brain, however, is linguistically primitive.
link |
Most people don't realize this
link |
because the right brain is always described
link |
as the emotive side, it's super emotional and holistic,
link |
but it's actually linguistically primitive.
link |
And there's a way that that's been teased out
link |
through experiment.
link |
It's very good at manipulating spatial things
link |
and visual spatial tasks.
link |
It's primarily handling that stuff,
link |
but it's sort of non-language, except one aspect.
link |
And there isn't a ton of evidence for this,
link |
but the evidence is strong, which is prosody.
link |
Prosody is the lilting and falling of language.
link |
So a good example would be Italian.
link |
I don't speak Italian.
link |
I only know a little bit of Italian,
link |
but most of the Italian I know
link |
is when my Italian colleagues have said to me,
link |
ma cosarici, which means like,
link |
what are you trying to say, or what are you saying?
link |
I think I'm getting that right.
link |
Basically, they're saying I don't speak Italian,
link |
Or because one of them knows and loves Costello very much,
link |
they always say, umpigrone, which means big lazy guy,
link |
which accurately captures Costello.
link |
So even those few examples, right?
link |
Ma cosarici, umpigrone.
link |
There's a lot of lilt and fall in Italian.
link |
Other languages, not so much, and it varies by language.
link |
One of the reasons I find Italian so beautiful,
link |
not the Italian I speak,
link |
but the Italian that other people speak,
link |
so beautiful to listen to is that prosody
link |
and the shifts in intonation are really quite remarkable.
link |
It's almost like a singing song, listening to them speak.
link |
And I used to like to go to scientific meetings
link |
and I always hang out with the Italians
link |
because I have some good friends in Italian labs,
link |
but also because they always knew where the best food was.
link |
Their standards for food are incredible.
link |
They would rather starve than eat terrible pasta.
link |
And the pasta they do find
link |
and that they're willing to eat is always fantastic.
link |
But in addition to that, they always brought a guitar.
link |
They were a lot more fun than a lot of my other colleagues
link |
to hang out with at meetings.
link |
So in any event, the right brain is doing things
link |
that are more about manipulating spatial information.
link |
And I'll talk about this more in a future episode,
link |
but this was discovered in split brain patients,
link |
so people that lack connection
link |
between the two sides of the brain.
link |
And this had to be teased out
link |
through very complicated experiments.
link |
People like Roger Sperry, who won a Nobel Prize for this,
link |
who was at Caltech, Mike Gazzaniga and others,
link |
figured out these lateralized differences.
link |
But let's just try and demolish the myth
link |
that the right side is synthetic and holistic and emotive
link |
and that the left side is logical, sequential and analytic,
link |
that you're a left brain person or a right brain person.
link |
Nothing could be further from the truth.
link |
There's no scientific evidence to support that.
link |
And there's a few lesion studies that can tease out effects
link |
that make you think that's what's happening,
link |
but the really careful work
link |
points in a totally different direction.
link |
We can't have a complete conversation
link |
about emotions and bonds and social connection
link |
without talking about oxytocin.
link |
Oxytocin has come to such prominence
link |
in the last decade or so, and seems to be everywhere.
link |
Anytime you hear a discussion about neuroscience
link |
in the brain or hormones in the brain,
link |
oxytocin is released in response to lactation in females.
link |
It is released in response to sexual interactions.
link |
It is released in response to non-sexual touch.
link |
It's released in males and females.
link |
And indeed it's involved in pair bonding
link |
and the establishment of social bonds in general.
link |
How it does that seems to be by matching internal state.
link |
It seems to both increase
link |
synchrony of internal state somehow,
link |
maybe it sets a level of calmness or alertness,
link |
that seems like a reasonable hypothesis,
link |
as well as raising people's awareness
link |
for the emotional state of their partner.
link |
And again, this brings us back to this alertness
link |
calmness axis and this interoceptive, exteroceptive axis.
link |
In order to form good bonds,
link |
we can't just be thinking about how we feel,
link |
we also need to be paying attention to how others feel,
link |
and we're evaluating a match.
link |
We're trying to see whether or not
link |
there seems to be some sort of synchrony between states.
link |
And oxytocin both seems to increase that synchrony
link |
and increase the awareness for the emotional state of others.
link |
Now, I know many of you are probably screaming
link |
mirror neurons, mirror neurons.
link |
Mirror neurons, as some of you may know,
link |
and some of you perhaps may not,
link |
are neurons that were discovered in animals and humans
link |
for their ability to respond
link |
when people engaged in certain physical actions
link |
like lifting of a pen,
link |
but the same neurons would respond
link |
when somebody watched someone else lift a pen.
link |
So they were really mirrors of,
link |
or representing mirrors of behavior,
link |
both in self and in others.
link |
Mirror neurons are very controversial.
link |
There are many neuroscientists who I respect a lot
link |
who don't think they exist
link |
because they look at the data
link |
and the data, at least in their mind,
link |
were over-interpreted in the realm of empathy
link |
and in assigning value to the emotional states of others.
link |
And when I look at the literature,
link |
my opinion is that indeed there are neurons in the brain
link |
that clearly represent the actions of others,
link |
but it's not clear that they're wired
link |
into the emotion and empathy system in any direct way.
link |
And I think the growing consensus is that mirror neurons,
link |
while the name is terrific, is so catchy
link |
and encompasses so much
link |
of what you would love for it to encompass,
link |
but that the data don't really support that.
link |
But this is controversial,
link |
and I'm perfectly happy to get experts on here
link |
that could debate it better than I could.
link |
There are, however, neurons in the brain
link |
that were discovered by my colleague Karen Harush
link |
at Stanford when she was working in Noam Ziv's lab
link |
that clearly point to the fact that primate species
link |
are making assumptions and are trying to predict
link |
the behavior of other members of their species.
link |
It's an experiment I don't have time to go into
link |
in real detail, which probably just get Karen on here.
link |
For those of you that are familiar
link |
with the prisoner's dilemma,
link |
which is really a model of cooperation,
link |
you can either cooperate or one member
link |
of a given interaction can cooperate
link |
and the other one won't, or you can both not cooperate.
link |
There are ways in which you can solve
link |
this so-called prisoner's dilemma
link |
by looking at previous behavior and making predictions
link |
about the likely next behavior
link |
that the other individual will engage in.
link |
And there do seem to be neurons
link |
that are doing these sorts of predictions or computations.
link |
And again, I'll go into this in more detail in the future.
link |
So rather than think about mirror neurons,
link |
like neurons for empathy, I think it's more correct
link |
to think about neurons that are trying
link |
to predict the behavior of others.
link |
And that's, as we said, one of the core features
link |
of emotions, which are to establish bonds
link |
and through those bonds to be able to predict behavior.
link |
So oxytocin is one component of this ability
link |
to predict other's behavior and to guide our own behavior.
link |
So here's some experiments that involve the administration
link |
of intranasal oxytocin.
link |
This is actually, people now I think you need a prescription
link |
although in some places you don't.
link |
There are people who are taking intranasal oxytocin
link |
in order to try and increase the depth of bonding.
link |
And I don't recommend you do that.
link |
I've never tried that.
link |
Whatever oxytocin I've released,
link |
I've made without an intranasal exogenous application.
link |
But what's been reported is
link |
increased positive communication among couples.
link |
So people have taken intranasal oxytocin in studies.
link |
So that study, just for those of you who like,
link |
was published in biological psychiatry,
link |
which my psychiatry colleagues tell me is a fine journal.
link |
And the title is intranasal oxytocin
link |
increases positive communication
link |
and reduces the stress hormone cortisol levels
link |
during couple conflict.
link |
They have them fight
link |
or they have them fight with and without oxytocin.
link |
Very much in line with the idea that oxytocin
link |
is the quote unquote trust hormone.
link |
That's in keeping with that.
link |
That was a 2009 paper.
link |
There's other evidence, for instance,
link |
that men report a greater sense of connection
link |
and intimacy with their partners during sex
link |
after taking intranasal oxytocin.
link |
There are studies in autistic children,
link |
giving them intranasal oxytocin
link |
as a way to try and help them
link |
establish better social connection
link |
and quote unquote empathy or theory of mind.
link |
I've talked about theory of mind before
link |
or understanding of what other children
link |
and adults are experiencing.
link |
So oxytocin does seem to create these general effects
link |
and how nuanced they are in one situation or another,
link |
I'm aware and I was told
link |
and I'm definitely not recommending this
link |
that there's a marketed oxytocin ketamine nasal spray.
link |
Now I have no idea, maybe someone can put in the comments
link |
why you'd want to combine oxytocin and ketamine.
link |
I can't imagine why.
link |
Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic
link |
that's used for the treatment of PTSD.
link |
It used to be used as a recreational drug.
link |
It's very similar to PCP, seems quite dangerous in fact.
link |
I don't know why those two things would be combined,
link |
why one would want to combine them,
link |
but there are products out there
link |
that seem to combine those two things.
link |
And I'm not certain why one would do that,
link |
but it's interesting to note that it's happening.
link |
A particularly interesting study about oxytocin
link |
is that that was published in the Journal of Neuroscience,
link |
which is a good journal,
link |
that oxytocin modulates social distance
link |
between males and females.
link |
So this is interesting.
link |
What they did is they gave oxytocin
link |
to people that were in monogamous relationships
link |
and then they evaluated the extent to which the,
link |
in this case, the males in those relationships
link |
would pay attention to,
link |
visual attention to attractive other potential partners.
link |
And it seemed like that the general takeaway
link |
from the study is that oxytocin administration
link |
seemed to promote monogamous behavior.
link |
So behavior that was in line with monogamy
link |
of the relationship that they were in,
link |
as opposed to foraging for potentially new mates.
link |
Now, of course, these are somewhat artificial experiments
link |
or very artificial experiments,
link |
depending on how you interpret them.
link |
But the general theme is that oxytocin
link |
is promoting monogamy, it's promoting pair bonding,
link |
it's promoting a understanding
link |
of the internal state of others,
link |
which requires enhanced exteroception
link |
for those particular others.
link |
So not just generally having them look everywhere
link |
and see what's going on in the world,
link |
but particularly paying attention
link |
to the emotional states of others.
link |
I'm sure several of you will be asking,
link |
well, what can I do to increase oxytocin
link |
if that's your goal?
link |
There's some evidence, and I invite you again
link |
to go to examine.com or another such site like PubMed,
link |
if you want to forage PubMed,
link |
that vitamin D is required for proper production,
link |
and in some cases can increase levels of oxytocin
link |
when supplemented, which is interesting.
link |
And that, believe it or not, melatonin,
link |
our old friend melatonin,
link |
which I have pushed back against as a supplement for sleep
link |
because of some of what I view
link |
as untoward side effects of melatonin in most cases.
link |
But it seems like melatonin in some cases
link |
can prime the system
link |
for slightly increased oxytocin release.
link |
There's even one report,
link |
although it didn't look that strong to me,
link |
that low doses of caffeine could increase oxytocin release.
link |
But that to me falls under the category
link |
of what was once described as a drug
link |
when injected into a person or animal
link |
is always effective at producing a scientific paper,
link |
meaning that you can get a result,
link |
but the result isn't always so robust.
link |
So you always want to read past the titles and the abstracts
link |
and get into the meat of the paper.
link |
And when I did that,
link |
the effects were pretty negligible with caffeine on oxytocin.
link |
But it's interesting that vitamin D and melatonin
link |
may have some positive effects on oxytocin release.
link |
But like I said, many people are just taking oxytocin
link |
directly through these intranasal sprays.
link |
I'm pretty sure it's prescription in most places, but check.
link |
And again, I'm not recommending anybody do that.
link |
I've never tried it.
link |
I don't know that I will.
link |
I think I'm going to stick with the oxytocin
link |
The other molecule that we make
link |
that's extremely important for social bonds and emotionality
link |
is one that we're going to talk about more
link |
in the month on hormones, and that's vasopressin.
link |
Vasopressin suppresses urination.
link |
It was actually developed, it's made by the body,
link |
but it was developed as a treatment
link |
for something called diabetes insipidus,
link |
where people urinate excessively
link |
and they actually risk dehydration
link |
and they can lose a lot of electrolytes, et cetera.
link |
So it causes water retention.
link |
Alcohol consumption inhibits vasopressin.
link |
So large amounts of alcohol,
link |
made people excrete a lot of fluid and so forth.
link |
Vasopressin has effects on the brain directly.
link |
It actually creates feelings of giddy love.
link |
It also increases memory in very potent ways.
link |
There's a whole biohacking community
link |
that has been dabbling with vasopressin for some time.
link |
I have never tried it.
link |
I certainly don't recommend it.
link |
It is prescription, and it is a pretty serious compound
link |
to start messing with
link |
because it has so many different effects in the body.
link |
It's interesting because it creates the sense of giddy love.
link |
It's also used somewhat as an aphrodisiac.
link |
So it's similar to oxytocin.
link |
It also has very interesting effects
link |
on monogamous or non-monogamous behavior.
link |
This, again, we will revisit in the future,
link |
but there's a beautiful set of experiments
link |
that have been done in a little rodent species
link |
called a prairie vole.
link |
It turns out there are two different populations
link |
Some are monogamous.
link |
They always mate with the same other prairie vole.
link |
And some are very robustly non-monogamous.
link |
They mate with as many other prairie voles as they can.
link |
And it turns out that levels of vasopressin
link |
and or vasopressin receptor
link |
dictate whether or not they're monogamous or not.
link |
And there's actually some interesting evidence in humans
link |
when people report their behavior,
link |
assuming they're reporting it accurately,
link |
that vasopressin and vasopressin levels
link |
can relate to monogamy or non-monogamy in humans as well.
link |
We're going to talk about this in the month on hormones.
link |
If we're talking about the neuroscience of emotions,
link |
we have to talk about the vagus nerve.
link |
I described what the vagus nerve is in a previous episode.
link |
That's these connections between the body and the viscera,
link |
including the gut, the heart, the lungs,
link |
and the immune system, and the brain.
link |
And that the brain is also controlling these organs
link |
so it's a two-way street.
link |
There's this big myth out there that I mentioned before
link |
that stimulating the vagus in various ways
link |
leads to calmness, that it's always going to calm you down.
link |
And that is false.
link |
I just want to repeat, that is completely false.
link |
In fact, there was just a paper,
link |
yet another paper published the other day,
link |
which is fantastic,
link |
which is from David McCormick's lab
link |
up at the University of Oregon.
link |
It's published in Current Biology, excellent journal,
link |
showing, I'm just reading the title,
link |
Vegas nerve stimulation induces widespread cortical,
link |
the neocortex, and behavioral activation.
link |
I've read the paper, it's fantastic.
link |
It illustrates yet again,
link |
stimulation of the vagus increases dopamine release,
link |
increases activation of the brain alertness.
link |
It is a stimulant of alertness.
link |
It is not calming people down.
link |
Now, this is interesting in light of emotionality
link |
because of work that's been done
link |
by many groups, but in particular,
link |
I'm going to focus on the work of a colleague of mine,
link |
Carl Deisseroth at Stanford, who's a psychiatrist,
link |
but has also developed a lot of tools
link |
to adjust the activity of neurons in real time
link |
using light and electrical stimulation and so forth.
link |
I'll refer you to an article in the New Yorker
link |
that was published about this a few years ago.
link |
I'm going to read a brief excerpt,
link |
I'll put the link in the caption as well.
link |
He's talking to an extremely depressed,
link |
suicidally depressed patient who has a small device implanted
link |
that allows her to adjust her vagus nerve activity.
link |
Now, vagus stimulation was originally developed
link |
for the treatment of epilepsy.
link |
It's now being used for various other purposes.
link |
Vagus stimulation can even increase plasticity, it seems.
link |
So again, increasing activity of the vagus
link |
increases alertness, and it's just incredible
link |
to see what happens in real time to emotionality
link |
when the vagus is stimulated.
link |
Again, not calming, but activating alertness.
link |
They're in his office and they're talking
link |
and he asks her how she's doing.
link |
And she describes how she's been doing
link |
as previously as quote unquote, going pancake,
link |
which for her just means totally laid out flat,
link |
not much going on.
link |
She talks about how she doesn't want to pursue a job,
link |
she's really depressed.
link |
And he says in typical good psychiatrist fashion,
link |
well, that's a lot to think about.
link |
That's actually the quote.
link |
And they talk about her blood pressure, et cetera.
link |
And then she says, moods been down, just spiraling down,
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talks about insomnia, bad dreams, low appetite.
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So this is severe depression.
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This is what we call major depression.
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And then she requests, can we please go up
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to 1.5 on vagus stimulation?
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She'd been receiving 1.2 milliamps of stimulation
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every five minutes to 30 seconds,
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but was no longer able to feel the effects.
link |
So he says, okay, I think we can go up a little,
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you're tolerating things well.
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They start the stimulation and quote,
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in the course of the next few minutes,
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her name was Sally, underwent a remarkable change.
link |
Her frown disappeared, she became cheerful,
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describing the pleasure she'd had
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during the Christmas holiday
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and recounting how she'd recently watched
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some YouTube videos of Diceroth.
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She was still smiling and talking when the session ended
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and they walked out to the reception area.
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So this is just by stimulating and activating the vagus.
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Now, why am I bringing this up?
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Well, for several reasons.
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One is the vagus is fascinating
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in terms of the brain-body connection.
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Two, I'd like to keep trying to dispel the myth
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that vagus stimulation is all about being calm.
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It's really about being alert.
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I don't know how that originally got going backwards,
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but it's about being alert.
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And once again, level of alertness
link |
or level of calmness is impacting emotion.
link |
That this access of alertness and calmness
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is one primary access in emotion.
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It's not the only one because there's also
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this valence component of good or bad.
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And those two aren't the only ones
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because there's also this component
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of interoceptive, exteroceptive
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that we talked about earlier.
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And there will be others too.
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Again, it's not exhaustive.
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But I find it fascinating
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and it really brings us back to where we started,
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which is what are the core elements of emotion
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and what can you do about them?
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And before we close up today,
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I just want to make sure that
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even though I've mentioned some tools,
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I talked about the Mood Meter app,
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I talked about oxytocin
link |
and some of the things that impact oxytocin.
link |
I talked about some of the ways
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that you can conceptualize emotions.
link |
This business of how you conceptualize emotions
link |
is really the most powerful tool you can ever have
link |
in terms of understanding and regulating your emotional state
link |
if you're willing to try and wrap your head around it.
link |
I realize it's not the simplest thing to do,
link |
but rather than think of emotions
link |
as just these labels, happy, sad, awe, depressed,
link |
thinking about emotions, excuse me,
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as elements of the brain and body
link |
that encompass levels of alertness
link |
that include a dynamic with the outside world
link |
and your perception of your internal state.
link |
And starting to really think about emotions
link |
in a structured way can not only allow you
link |
to understand some of the pathology
link |
of when you might feel depressed or anxious
link |
or others are depressed and anxious,
link |
but also to develop a richer emotional experience
link |
Now, of course, I don't expect that
link |
as you're out there interacting with friends
link |
and you're watching TV and experiencing life
link |
that you should be parsing every bit of your experience
link |
in some sort of reductionist and mechanistic way.
link |
That's not the goal here.
link |
But for those of you that are practitioners,
link |
teachers of any kind, for those of you that are kids,
link |
for those of you that are trying to understand
link |
what your emotional life and your consciousness,
link |
dare I say the word, really consists of,
link |
I do believe that these are fundamental elements
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that are well supported by the science
link |
across a variety of researchers doing things
link |
from a variety of different perspectives
link |
and some of whom agree with one another
link |
and some of whom don't.
link |
So I offer it to you as a source of knowledge
link |
from which you can start to think about
link |
your emotional life differently, I hope,
link |
as well as others in a way that builds more richness
link |
into that experience, not that detracts from it.
link |
One last point as it relates to that.
link |
Many of you have asked me about psychedelic therapies
link |
that are now emerging, things like psilocybin and MDMA.
link |
We are, of course, going to dive into that topic deeply.
link |
We have an expert guest coming on to discuss that topic.
link |
Those compounds clearly affect the aspects of emotionality
link |
that we were talking about today.
link |
Calmness, alertness, valence, good or bad,
link |
interoceptive, extra receptive positioning.
link |
And so rather than just do a kind of cursory exploration
link |
of those compounds and what the therapeutic
link |
and scientific community is thinking about them
link |
and how they function, I think it's more important
link |
to embed that framework in our thinking
link |
so that when we address psychedelics
link |
and we address other sorts of therapies,
link |
cognitive behavioral therapy,
link |
different types of emotive therapies
link |
that relate to individuals and couples, et cetera,
link |
that we are able to think about them
link |
with some sort of structure and rigor
link |
rather than just talk about them as a bunch of chemicals
link |
that produce these amazing experiences
link |
that people need to tell you about.
link |
Because if there's one truth,
link |
it seems that psychedelics seem to promote activity
link |
of storytelling about psychedelic experience.
link |
But that itself is not really what the therapeutic community
link |
and the academic communities are interested in.
link |
They're interested in trying to understand
link |
the universal truths, the universal biological shifts
link |
and psychological shifts that occur
link |
in the clinical use of those compounds.
link |
And so we're going to hold off for now,
link |
but we will get to them.
link |
Once again, we've covered an enormous amount
link |
of material today.
link |
It's really the equivalent of two, if not three,
link |
university lectures in one podcast episode.
link |
I want to thank those of you that have supported the podcast
link |
and point to ways in which all of you
link |
can support the podcast.
link |
Many of these are cost-free.
link |
The first is to please subscribe on YouTube
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and as well to hit the notifications button
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so that when we release new videos,
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which typically is every Monday for the full length episodes
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but we also know how short clips that you'll be notified.
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As well, if you could subscribe on Apple and Spotify
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and leave us a review on Apple,
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Please tell your friends and family and coworkers
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And if you want to send them links, that's terrific too.
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We also have a Patreon account.
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It's patreon.com slash Andrew Huberman
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and there you can support us at any level that you like.
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In addition, if you could check out our sponsors,
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we always provide links to those sponsors in the captions.
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That's the best way to support the podcast.
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And several of you have asked about supplements.
link |
I talk about supplements in various episodes.
link |
We've partnered with Thorne
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because we think Thorne has the very highest levels
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of stringency in terms of the purity of the contents
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and the amounts of the contents.
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They really put in the bottle what's listed on the bottle
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which is not true for a lot of supplement companies.
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If you want to see the supplements that I take,
link |
as well as get a discount on those
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or any of the other supplements that Thorne makes,
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you can go to thorne.com slash U slash Huberman
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and you can get 20% off any of those supplements
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or any of the other supplements that Thorne makes.
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So that's Thorne, T-H-O-R-N-E dot com
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slash the letter U slash Huberman
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to get 20% off any supplements that Thorne makes.
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And last, but certainly not least,
link |
I want to thank you for your time and attention
link |
and thank you for your interest in science.
link |
I'll see you next time.