Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist at Stanford,
00:00:05 working to understand how the brain works, how it can change through experience,
00:00:09 and how to repair brain circuits damaged by injury or disease. He has a great Instagram account
00:00:17 at Huberman Lab where he teaches the world about the brain and the human mind. Also, he’s a friend
00:00:24 and an inspiration in that he shows that you can be humble, giving, and still succeed in the
00:00:31 science world. Quick mention of each sponsor, followed by some thoughts related to the episode.
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00:00:56 this podcast. As a side note, let me say that I heard from a lot of people about the previous
00:01:01 conversation I had with Yaron Brook about objectivism. Some people loved it, some people
00:01:08 hated it. I misspoke in some parts, was more critical on occasion than I’m meant to be,
00:01:14 didn’t push on certain points that I should’ve, was undereducated or completely unaware about
00:01:20 some major things that happened in the past or major ideas out there. I bring all that up to say
00:01:27 that if we are to have difficult conversations, we have to give each other space to make mistakes,
00:01:32 to learn, to grow. Taking one or two statements from a three hour podcast and suggesting that
00:01:39 they encapsulate who I am, I was, or ever will be is a standard that we can’t hold each other to.
00:01:48 I don’t think anyone could live up to that kind of standard, at least I know I can’t.
00:01:53 The conversation with Yaron is mild relative to some conversations that I will likely have in
00:01:59 the coming year. Please continue to challenge me, but please try to do so with love and with
00:02:04 patience. I promise to work my ass off to improve. Whether I’m successful at that or not, we shall
00:02:13 see. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcast, follow
00:02:18 on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman. And now here’s my
00:02:26 conversation with Andrew Huberman. You’ve mentioned that in your lab at Stanford, you induce stress by
00:02:34 putting people into a virtual reality and having them go through one of a set of experiences. I
00:02:40 think you mentioned this on Rogan or with Whitney that scare them. So just on a practical, psychological
00:02:48 level, and maybe on a philosophical level, what are people afraid of? What are the fears? What
00:02:55 are these fear experiences that you find to be effective? Yeah, so it depends on the person,
00:03:00 obviously. And we should probably define fear, right? Because you can, without going too far
00:03:06 down the rabbit hole of defining these things, you can’t really have fear without stress,
00:03:12 but you could have stress without fear. And you can’t really have trauma without fear and stress,
00:03:18 but you could have fear and stress without trauma. So we can start playing the word game.
00:03:22 And that actually is one of the motivations for even having a laboratory that studies these things
00:03:26 is that we really need better physiological, neuroscientific, and operational definitions
00:03:32 of what these things are. I mean, the field of understanding emotions and states, which is mainly
00:03:39 what I’m interested in, is very complicated. But we can do away with a lot of complicated debate
00:03:46 and say in our laboratory, what we’re looking for to assign it a value of fear is a big inflection
00:03:54 in autonomic arousal. So increases in heart rate, increases in breathing, perspiration,
00:04:00 pupil dilation, all the hallmark signature features of the stress response. And in some cases,
00:04:07 we have the benefit of getting neurosurgery patients where we’ve got electrodes in their
00:04:11 amygdala and their insula and the orbitofrontal cortex down beneath the skull. So these are
00:04:17 chronically implanted electrodes. We’re getting multiunit signals and we can start seeing some
00:04:22 central features of meaning within the brain. And what’s interesting is that as trivial as it might
00:04:31 seem in listening to it, almost everybody responds to heights and falling from a high virtual place
00:04:42 with a very strong stress, if not fear response. And that’s because the visual vestibular apparatus,
00:04:49 right? The optic flow and how it links to the balanced semicircular canals of the inner ears,
00:04:53 all this technical stuff. But really, all of that pulls all your physiology, the feeling that your
00:05:01 stomach is dropping, the feeling that suddenly you’re sweating, even though you’re not afraid
00:05:04 of falling off this virtual platform, but you feel as if you’re falling because of the optic flow.
00:05:10 That one is universal. So we’ve got a dive with great white sharks experience where you actually
00:05:16 exit the cage. We went out and did this in the real world and brought back 360 video that’s
00:05:21 built out pretty. Oh, so this is actually 360 video.
00:05:24 360 video. And this was important to us, right? So when we decided to set up this platform,
00:05:29 a lot of the motivation was that a lot of the studies of these things in laboratories,
00:05:35 I don’t want to call them lame because I want to be respectful of the people that did this stuff
00:05:39 before, but they study fear by showing subjects a picture of a bloody arm or a snake or something
00:05:45 like that. And it just, unless you have a snake phobia, it just wasn’t creating a real enough
00:05:50 experience. So we need to do something where people aren’t going to get injured, but where
00:05:54 we can tap into the physiology and that thing of presence of people momentarily, not the whole time,
00:05:59 but momentarily forgetting they’re in a laboratory. And so heights will always do it. And if people
00:06:06 want to challenge me on this, I like to point to that movie, Free Solo, which was wild because
00:06:10 it’s an incredible movie, but I think a lot of its popularity can be explained by a puzzle,
00:06:16 which is you knew he was going to live when you walked in the theater or you watched it at home.
00:06:22 You knew before that he survived. And yet it was still scary that people somehow were able to put
00:06:28 themselves into that experience or into Alex’s experience enough that they were concerned or
00:06:35 worried or afraid at some level. So heights always does it. If we get people who have generalized
00:06:41 anxiety, these are people who wake up and move through life at a generally higher state of
00:06:46 autonomic arousal and anxiety, then we can tip them a little bit more easily with things that
00:06:51 don’t necessarily get everyone afraid. Things like claustrophobia, public speaking, that’s
00:06:58 going to vary from person to person. And then if you’re afraid of sharks, like my sister for instance
00:07:04 is afraid of sharks, she won’t even come to my laboratory because there’s a thing about sharks
00:07:08 in it. That’s how terrified some people are of these specific stimuli, but heights gets them
00:07:14 every time. Yeah. And I’m terrified of heights. We have you step off a platform, virtual platform,
00:07:22 and it’s a flat floor in my lab, but you’re up there. Well, you actually allow them the
00:07:28 possibility in the virtual world to actually take the leap of faith. Yeah. Maybe I should
00:07:32 describe a little bit of the experiment. So without giving away too much, in case someone
00:07:36 wants to be a subject in one of these experiments, we have them playing a cognitive game. It’s a
00:07:41 simple lights out kind of game where you’re pointing a cursor and turning out lights on a
00:07:45 grid, but it gets increasingly complex and it speeds up on them. And there’s a failure point
00:07:50 for everybody where they just can’t make the motor commands fast enough. And then we surprise
00:07:56 people essentially by placing them virtually, all of a sudden they’re on a narrow platform between
00:08:03 two buildings. And then we encourage them or we cue them by talking to them through a microphone
00:08:10 to continue across that platform to continue the game. And some people, they actually will
00:08:18 get down on the ground and hold onto a virtual beam that doesn’t even exist on a flat floor.
00:08:24 And so what this really tells us is the power of the brain to enter these virtual states as if
00:08:29 they were real. And we really think that anchoring the visual and the vestibular, the balance
00:08:35 components of the nervous system are what bring people into that presence so quickly.
00:08:40 There’s also the potential, and we haven’t done this yet to bring in 360 sound.
00:08:44 So the reason we did 360 video is when we started all this back in 2016,
00:08:49 a lot of the VR was pretty lame, frankly, it was CGI, it just wasn’t real enough. But with 360
00:08:55 video, we knew that we could get people into this presence where they think they’re in a real
00:08:59 experience more quickly. And our friend Michael Muller, who I was introduced to because of the
00:09:04 project, I reached out to some friends. Michael Muller is a very famous portrait
00:09:08 photographer in Hollywood, but he dives with great white sharks and he leaves the cage.
00:09:12 And so we worked with him to build a 360 video apparatus that we could swim underwater with,
00:09:19 went out to Guadalupe Island, Mexico, and actually got the experience. It was a lot of fun. There’s
00:09:25 some interesting moments out there of danger, but it came back with that video and built that for
00:09:30 the sharks. And then we realized we need to do this for everything. We need to do it for heights. We
00:09:33 need to do it for public speaking, for claustrophobia. And what’s missing still is 360 sound where 360
00:09:40 sound would be, for instance, if I were to turn around and there was a giant attack dog there,
00:09:47 the moment I would turn around and see it, the dog would growl. But if I turn back toward you,
00:09:52 then it would be silent. And that brings a very real element to one’s own behavior where you
00:09:58 don’t know what’s going to happen if you turn a corner. Whereas if there’s a dog growling behind
00:10:03 me and I turn around and then I turn back to you and it’s still growling, that might seem like more
00:10:08 of an impending threat and sustained threat, but actually it’s when you start linking your own body
00:10:15 movements to the experience. So when it’s closed loop where my movements and choices are starting
00:10:20 to influence things and they’re getting scarier and scarier, that’s when you can really drive
00:10:25 people’s nervous system down these paths of high states of stress and fear. Now we don’t want to
00:10:30 traumatize people obviously, but we also study a number of tools that allow them to calm themselves
00:10:36 in these environments. So the short answer is height. Well, from a psychology and from a neuroscience
00:10:43 perspective, this whole construction that you’ve developed is fascinating. We did this a little
00:10:49 bit with autonomous vehicles. So to try to understand the decision making process of a
00:10:56 pedestrian when they cross the road and trying to create an experience of a car, you know, that
00:11:02 could run you over. So there’s the danger there. I was so surprised how real that whole world was.
00:11:11 And the graphics that we built wasn’t ultra realistic or anything, but I was still afraid
00:11:17 of being hit by a car. Everybody we tested were really afraid of being hit by that car.
00:11:21 Even though it was all a simulation.
00:11:23 It was all a simulation. It was kind of boxy actually. I mean, it wasn’t like ultra realistic
00:11:29 simulation. It was fascinating. Looms and heights. So any kind of depth,
00:11:35 we’re just programmed to not necessarily recoil, but to be cautious about that edge and that depth.
00:11:43 And then looms, things coming at us that are getting larger. There are looming sensing neurons
00:11:47 even in the retina at a very, very early stage of visual processing. And incidentally, the way
00:11:54 Muller and folks learn how to not get eaten by great white sharks when you’re swimming outside
00:12:00 the cage is as they start lumbering in, you swim toward them. And they get very confused when you
00:12:06 loom on them because clearly you’re smaller. Clearly they could eat you if they wanted to,
00:12:11 but there’s something about forward movement toward any creature that that creature questions
00:12:16 whether or not it would be a good idea to generate forward movement toward you. And so that’s
00:12:22 actually the survival tool of these cage exit white shark divers. Are you playing around with,
00:12:27 like one of the critical things for the autonomous vehicle research is you couldn’t do 360 video
00:12:32 because there’s a game theoretic. There’s an interactive element that’s really necessary.
00:12:37 So maybe people realize this, maybe they don’t, but 360 video, you obviously,
00:12:44 well, it’s actually not that obvious to people, but you can’t change the reality that you’re
00:12:48 watching. That’s right. So, but you find that that’s like, is there something fundamental
00:12:55 about fear and stress that the interactive element is essential for, or do you find you can,
00:13:02 you can arouse people with just the video? Great question. It works best to use mixed
00:13:08 reality. So we have a snake stimulus that I personally don’t like snakes at all. I don’t
00:13:13 mind spiders. We also have a spider stimulus, but like snakes, I just don’t like them. There’s
00:13:17 something about the, the slithering and the, it just creates a visceral response for me.
00:13:23 Some people not so much, and they have lower levels of stress and fear in there. But one way
00:13:29 that we can get them to feel more of that is to use mixed reality where we have an actual physical
00:13:36 bat and they have to stomp out the snake as opposed to just walk to a little safe corner,
00:13:42 which then makes the snake disappear. That tends to be not as stressful as if they have
00:13:46 a physical weapon. And so you’ve got people in there, you know, banging on the floor against
00:13:50 this thing. And there’s something about engaging that makes it more of a, more of a threat. Now,
00:13:56 I should also mention that we, we always get the subjective report from the subject of what they
00:14:01 experienced because we never want to project our own ideas about what they were feeling,
00:14:06 but that’s the beauty of working with humans is you can ask them how they feel and humans aren’t
00:14:11 great at explaining how they feel. But it’s a lot easier to understand what they’re saying than a
00:14:16 mouse or a macaque monkey is saying. So it’s the best we can do is language plus these physiological
00:14:23 and neurophysiological signals. Is there something you’ve learned about yourself about your deepest
00:14:28 fears? Like you said, snakes, is there something that, like if I were to torture you, I’m, so I’m
00:14:34 Russian. So, you know, I always kind of think, how can I murder this people that this person
00:14:40 entered the room, but also how, how can I torture you to get some information out of you? What would
00:14:46 I go with? Hmm. It’s interesting. You should say that I never considered myself claustrophobic,
00:14:51 but because I don’t mind small environments provided they’re well ventilated. But I,
00:14:58 before COVID, I started going to this Russian banya, you know, and then, and I had never been
00:15:04 to a banya. So, you know, the whole experience of really, really hot sauna and what are they
00:15:09 called? The plots. They’re hitting you with the leaves and it gets really hot and humid in there.
00:15:14 And there were a couple of times where I thought, okay, this thing is below ground.
00:15:20 It’s in a city where there are a lot of earthquakes. Like if this place crumbled and
00:15:26 we were stuck in here and I’d start getting a little panicky and I realized, I’m like, I don’t
00:15:29 like small confined spaces with poor ventilation. So I realized I think I have some claustrophobia
00:15:35 and I wasn’t aware of that before. So I’ve put myself into our own claustrophobia stimulus,
00:15:41 which involves getting into an elevator and with a bunch of people, virtual people,
00:15:46 and the elevator gets stalled. And at first you’re fine. You feel fine. But then as we start
00:15:53 modulating the environment and we actually can control levels of oxygen in the environment,
00:15:57 if we want to, it is really uncomfortable for me. And I never would have thought, you know, I fly,
00:16:03 I’m comfortable in planes, but it is really uncomfortable. And so I think I’ve unhatched
00:16:09 a bit of a claustrophobia. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For me as well, probably that one, that one is pretty
00:16:15 bad. The heights I tried to overcome. So I went to skydiving to try to overcome the fear of heights,
00:16:21 but that didn’t help. Did you jump out? Yeah. Yeah. I jumped out, but it was, it was a,
00:16:26 it was fundamentally different experience. And I guess there could be a lot of different flavors
00:16:32 of fear of heights maybe, but the one I have didn’t seem to be connected to jumping out of a
00:16:39 plane is a very different, cause like once you accept that you’re going to jump, then it’s,
00:16:45 it’s a different thing. I think what I’m afraid of is the moments before it is the scariest part.
00:16:54 Absolutely. And I don’t think that’s emphasized in the skydiving experience as much,
00:16:59 and also just the acceptance of the fact that it’s going to happen. So once you accept that
00:17:05 it’s going to happen, it’s not as scary. It’s the fact that it’s not supposed to happen.
00:17:10 And it might, that’s the scary part that I guess I’m not being eloquent in this description,
00:17:15 but there’s something about skydiving that was actually philosophically liberating. I was,
00:17:21 I was like, wow, it, it was the possibility that you can walk on a surface. And then at a certain
00:17:28 point there’s no surface anymore to walk on. And it’s all of a sudden the world becomes
00:17:33 three dimensional and there’s this freedom of floating that the concept of like of earth
00:17:40 disappears for a brief few seconds. I don’t know. That was, that was wild. That was wild,
00:17:46 but I’m still terrified of heights. So, I mean, one, one thing I want to ask just on fear,
00:17:52 cause it’s so fascinating is have you learned anything about what it takes to overcome fears?
00:18:00 Yes. And that comes from two, from a, you know, research study standpoint,
00:18:05 two parallel tracks of research. One was done actually in mice, because we have a mouse lab
00:18:10 also where we can probe around in different brain areas and try and figure out what interesting
00:18:14 brain areas we might want to probe around in humans. And a graduate student in my lab,
00:18:19 she’s now at Caltech, Lindsay Saleh, published a paper back in 2018, showing that what at first
00:18:27 might seem a little bit obvious, but the mechanisms are not, which is that there are really three
00:18:32 responses to fear. You can pause, you can freeze essentially. You can retreat, you can back up,
00:18:39 or you can go forward. And there’s a single hub of neurons in the midbrain, it’s actually not
00:18:46 the midbrain, but it’s in the middle of the thalamus, which is a forebrain structure.
00:18:51 And depending on which neurons are active there, there’s a much higher probability that a mouse,
00:18:56 or it turns out, or a human will advance in the face of fear or will pause or will retreat.
00:19:02 Now that just assigns a neural structure to a behavioral phenomenon. But what’s interesting
00:19:08 is that it turns out that the lowest level of stress or autonomic arousal is actually associated
00:19:14 with the pausing and freezing response. Then as the threat becomes more impending, and we used
00:19:21 visual looms in this case, the retreat response has a slightly higher level of autonomic arousal
00:19:28 and stress. So think about playing hide and go seeking, you’re trying to stay quiet in a closet
00:19:33 that you’re hiding. If you’re very calm, it’s easy to stay quiet and still. As your level of stress
00:19:38 goes up, it’s harder to maintain that level of quiet and stillness. You see this also in animals
00:19:45 that are stalking, a cat will chatter its teeth. That’s actually sort of top down inhibition and
00:19:49 trying to restrain behavior. So the freeze response is actually an active response,
00:19:54 but it’s fairly low stress. And what was interesting to us is that the highest level
00:19:59 of autonomic arousal was associated with the forward movement toward the threat. So in your case,
00:20:05 jumping out of the plane. However, the forward movement in the face of threat was linked to the
00:20:13 activation of what we call collateral, which means just a side connection, literally a wire in the
00:20:18 brain that connects to the dopamine circuits for reward. And so when one safely and adaptively,
00:20:25 meaning you survive, moves through a threat or toward a threat, it’s rewarded as a positive
00:20:31 experience. And so the key, it actually maps very well to cognitive behavioral therapy and
00:20:36 a lot of the existing treatments for trauma is that you have to confront the thing that
00:20:42 makes you afraid. So otherwise you exist in this very low level of reverberatory circuit activity
00:20:48 where the circuits for autonomic arousal are humming and they’re humming more and more and
00:20:53 more. And we have to remember that stress and fear and threat were designed to agitate us so
00:20:58 that we actually move. So the reason I mentioned this is I think a lot of times people think that
00:21:04 the maximum stress response or fear response is to freeze and to lock up. But that’s actually not
00:21:10 the maximum stress response. The maximum stress response is to advance, but it’s associated with
00:21:16 reward. It has positive valence. So there’s this kind of, everyone always thinks about the bell
00:21:22 shape, you know, the sort of hump shape curve for, you know, at low levels arousal performance is low
00:21:28 and as the increases performance goes higher and then it drops off as you get really stressed.
00:21:31 But there’s another bump further out that distribution where you perform very well under
00:21:36 very high levels of stress. And so we’ve been spending a lot of time in humans and in animals
00:21:41 exploring what it takes to get people comfortable to go to that place and also to let them experience
00:21:48 how there are heightened states of cognition there. There’s changes in time perception that
00:21:54 allow you to evaluate your environment at a faster frame rate, essentially. This is the matrix as a
00:22:01 lot of people think of it. But we tend to think about fear as all the low level stuff where
00:22:06 things aren’t worked out, but there are a lot of different features to the fear response.
00:22:13 And so we think about it quantitatively and we think about it from a circuit perspective
00:22:18 in terms of outcomes. And we try and weigh that against the threat. So we never want people to
00:22:22 put themselves in unnecessary risk, but that’s where the VR is fun because you can push people
00:22:27 hard without risk of physically injuring them. And that’s like you said, the little bump that
00:22:33 seems to be a very small fraction of the human experience, right? So it’s kind of fascinating
00:22:38 to study it because most of us move through life without ever experiencing that kind of focus.
00:22:48 Well, everything’s in a peak state there. I really think that’s where optimal performance lies.
00:22:53 There’s so many interesting words here, but what’s performance? And what’s optimal performance?
00:22:59 We’re talking about mental ability to what to perceive the environment quickly to make actions
00:23:07 quickly. What’s optimal performance? Yeah. Well, it’s very subjective and it
00:23:11 varies depending on task and environment. So one way we can make it a little bit more
00:23:17 operational and concrete is to say there is a sweet spot, if you will, where the level of internal
00:23:25 autonomic arousal, AKA stress or alertness, whatever you want to call it, is ideally matched to the
00:23:34 speed of whatever challenge you have to be facing in the outside world. So we all have
00:23:40 perception of the outside world as exteroception and the perception of our internal real estate
00:23:44 interoception. And when those two things, when interoception and exteroception are matched along
00:23:49 a couple of dimensions, performance tends to increase or tends to be in an optimal range.
00:23:58 So for instance, if you’re, I don’t play guitar, but I know you play guitar. So let’s say you’re
00:24:01 trying to learn something new on the guitar. I’m not saying that being in these super high
00:24:06 states of activation are the best place for you to be in order to learn. It may be that your
00:24:13 internal arousal needs to be at a level where your analysis of space and time has to be well matched
00:24:20 to the information coming in and what you’re trying to do in terms of performance, in terms of
00:24:25 playing chords and notes and so forth. Now, in these cases of high threat where things are coming
00:24:31 in quickly and animals and humans need to react very quickly, the higher your state of autonomic
00:24:36 arousal, the better because you’re slicing time more finely just because of the way the autonomic
00:24:42 system works. The pupil dilation, for instance, and movement of the lens essentially changes your
00:24:49 optics and that’s obvious. But with the change in optics is a change in how you bin time and
00:24:55 slice time, which allows you to get more frames per second readout. With the guitar learning, for
00:25:00 instance, it might actually be that you want to be almost sleepy, almost in a drowsy state to be able
00:25:09 to, and I don’t play music, so I’m guessing here, but sense some of the nuance in the chords or the
00:25:14 ways to be relaxed enough that your fingers can follow an external cue. So matching the movement
00:25:19 of your fingers to something that’s pure exteroception. And so there is no perfect
00:25:25 autonomic state for performance. This is why I don’t favor terms like flow because they’re not
00:25:34 well operationally defined enough. But I do believe that optimal or peak performance is
00:25:41 going to arise when internal state is ideally matched to the space time features of the external
00:25:48 demands. So there’s some slicing of time that happens and then you’re able to adjust, slice
00:25:54 time more finely or more, less finely in order to adjust to the stimulus, the dynamics of the
00:26:01 stimulus. What about the realm of ideas? So like, you know, I’m a big believer, this guy named
00:26:10 Cal Newport who wrote a book about deep work. Yeah, I love that book. Yeah, he’s great. I mean,
00:26:18 one of the nice things, I’ve always practiced deep work, but it’s always nice to have words
00:26:25 put to the concepts that you’ve practiced. It somehow makes them more concrete and allows you
00:26:32 to get better. It turns it into a skill that you can get better at. But, you know, I also value
00:26:38 deep thinking where you think it’s almost meditative. You think about a particular
00:26:45 concept for long periods of time. The programming you have to do that kind of thing for. You just
00:26:50 have to hold this concept, like you hold it and then you take steps with it. You take further
00:26:56 steps and you’re holding relatively complicated things in your mind as you’re thinking about them.
00:27:03 And there’s a lot of, I mean, the hardest part is there’s frustrating things like you take a step
00:27:10 and it turns out to be the wrong direction. So you have to calmly turn around and take a step back.
00:27:14 And then it’s, you kind of like exploring through the space of ideas. Is there something about
00:27:20 your study of optimal performance that can be applied to the act of thinking as opposed to
00:27:26 action? Well, we haven’t done too much work there, but I think I can comment on it from a neuroscience
00:27:33 perspective, which is really all I do is, well, I mean, we do experiments in the lab, but I’m
00:27:38 looking at things through the lens of neuroscience. So what you’re describing can be mapped fairly
00:27:44 well to working memory, just keeping things online and updating them as they change in information
00:27:51 is coming back into your brain. Jack Feldman, who I’m a huge fan of and fortunate to be friends
00:27:58 with is a professor at UCLA, works on respiration and breathing, but he has a physics background.
00:28:05 And so he thinks about respiration and breathing in terms of ground states and how they modulate
00:28:10 other states. Very, very interesting and I think important work. Jack has an answer to your
00:28:17 question. So I’m not going to get this exactly right because this is lifted from a coffee
00:28:21 conversation that we had about a month ago. So apologies in advance, but I think I can get mostly
00:28:28 right. So we were talking about this, about how the brain updates cognitive states depending on
00:28:34 demands and thinking in particular. And he used an interesting example. I’d be curious to know if you
00:28:40 agree or disagree. He said, most great mathematics is done by people in their late teens and 20s,
00:28:49 and even you could say early 20s, sometimes into the late 20s, but not much further on. Maybe I
00:28:54 just insulted some mathematicians. No, that’s true. And I think that it demands, his argument
00:29:00 was there’s a tremendous demand on working memory to work out theorems in math and to keep a number
00:29:07 of plates spinning, so to speak mentally and run back and forth between them, updating them.
00:29:12 In physics, Jack said, and I think this makes sense to me too, that there’s a reliance on
00:29:20 working memory, but an increased reliance on some deep memory and deep memory stores,
00:29:27 probably stuff that’s moved out of the hippocampus and forebrain and into the cortex and is some
00:29:34 episodic and declarative stuff, but really, so you’re pulling from your library, basically. It’s
00:29:39 not all RAM, it’s not all working memory. And then in biology, and physicists tend to have
00:29:44 very active careers into their 30s and 40s and 50s and so forth, sometimes later. And then in
00:29:50 biology, you see careers that have a much longer arc, these protracted careers often, people still
00:29:57 in their 60s and 70s doing really terrific work, not always doing it with their own hands because
00:30:03 people in the labs are doing them, of course. And that work does tend to rely on insights
00:30:10 gained from having a very deep knowledge base where you can remember a paper or maybe a figure
00:30:16 in a paper, you could go look it up if you wanted to, but it’s very different than the working
00:30:20 memory of the mathematician. And so when you’re talking about coding or being in that tunnel of
00:30:27 thought and trying to iterate and keeping a lot of plates spinning, it speaks directly to working
00:30:34 memory. My lab hasn’t done too much of that. But we are pushing working memory when we have people
00:30:40 do things like these simple lights out tasks. We can increase the cognitive load by increasing the
00:30:47 level of autonomic arousal to the point where they start doing less well. And everyone has a cliff.
00:30:54 This is what’s kind of fun. We’ve had SEAL team operators come to the lab. We’ve had people from
00:30:58 other units in the military. We’ve had a range of intellects and backgrounds and all sorts of things
00:31:05 and everyone has a cliff. And those cliffs sometimes show up as a function of the demands of
00:31:12 speed of processing or how many things you need to keep online. I mean, we’re all limited at some
00:31:18 point in the number of things we can keep online. So what you’re describing is very interesting
00:31:21 because I think it has to do with how narrow or broad the information set is. And I’m not an
00:31:29 active programmer, so this is a regime I don’t really fully know. So I don’t want to comment
00:31:34 about it in any way that doesn’t suggest that. But I think that what you’re talking about is
00:31:41 top down control. So this is prefrontal cortex keeping every bit of reflexive circuitry at bay,
00:31:48 the one that makes you want to get up and use the restroom, the one that makes you want to check
00:31:51 your phone, all of that, but also running these anterior thalamus to prefrontal cortex loops,
00:31:59 which we know are very important for working memory. Let me try to think through this a little
00:32:04 bit. So reducing the process of thinking to working memory access is tricky. It’s probably
00:32:14 ultimately correct. But if I were to say some of the most challenging things that an engineer has
00:32:23 to do, and a scientific thinker, I would say it’s kind of depressing to think that we do that best
00:32:29 in our 20s, but is this kind of first principles thinking step of saying you’re accessing the
00:32:39 things that you know, and then saying, well, let me, how do I do this differently than I’ve done
00:32:47 it before? This weird like stepping back, like, is this right? Let’s try it this other way. That’s
00:32:57 the most mentally taxing step is like, you’ve gotten quite good at this particular pattern of
00:33:05 how you solve this particular problem. So there’s a pattern recognition first. You’re like, okay,
00:33:11 I know how to build a thing that solves this particular problem in programming, say. And then
00:33:18 the question is, but can I do it much better? And I don’t know if that’s, I don’t know what
00:33:25 the hell that is. I don’t know if that’s accessing working memory. That’s almost access. Maybe it is
00:33:32 accessing memory in a sense. It’s trying to find similar patterns in a totally different place that
00:33:37 it could be projected onto this. But you’re not querying facts. You’re querying like functional
00:33:47 things like. Yeah, it’s patterns. I mean, you’re running out, you’re testing algorithms. Yeah.
00:33:52 Right. You’re testing algorithms. So I want to just, because I know some of the people listening
00:33:59 to this and you have a basis in scientific training and have scientific training. So I
00:34:04 want to be clear. I think we can be correct about some things like the role of working memory in
00:34:09 these kinds of processes without being exhaustive. We’re not saying they’re the only thing. We can be
00:34:14 correct, but not assume that that’s the only thing involved. And neuroscience, let’s face it,
00:34:20 is still in its infancy. I mean, we probably know 1% of what there is to know about the brain.
00:34:24 I mean, we’ve learned so much and yet there may be global states that underlie this that
00:34:30 make prefrontal circuitry work differently than it would in a different regime or even time of day.
00:34:37 I mean, there’s a lot of mysteries about this. So I just want to make sure that we’re aiming for
00:34:44 precision and accuracy, but we’re not going to be exhausted. So there’s a difference there. And I
00:34:49 think sometimes in the vastness of the internet, that gets forgotten. So the other is that
00:35:02 we think about these operations at really focused, keeping a lot of things online.
00:35:09 But what you were describing is actually, it speaks to the very real possibility probably
00:35:16 that with certainty, there’s another element to all this, which is when you’re trying out lots
00:35:22 of things, in particular, lots of different algorithms, you don’t want to be in a state of
00:35:27 very high autonomic arousal. That’s not what you want, because the higher level of autonomic
00:35:32 arousal and stress in the system, the more rigidly you’re going to analyze space and time. And what
00:35:38 you’re talking about is playing with space time dimensionality. And I want to be very clear. I’m
00:35:43 the son of a physicist. I am not a physicist. When I talk about space and time, I’m literally
00:35:47 talking about visual space and how long it takes for my finger to move from this point to this
00:35:53 point. You are facing a tiger and trying to figure out how to avoid being eaten by the tiger.
00:35:58 And that’s primarily going to be determined by the visual system in humans. We don’t walk through
00:36:02 space, for instance, like a cent hound would and look at three dimensional scent plumes. When a
00:36:09 scent hound goes out in the environment, they have depth to the odor trails they’re following.
00:36:15 And they don’t think about them. We don’t think about odor trails. You might say,
00:36:19 oh, well, the smell’s getting more intense. Aha. But they actually have three dimensional odor
00:36:24 trails. So they see a cone of odor, see, of course, with their nose, with their olfactory cortex.
00:36:29 We do that with our visual system. And we parse time, often subconsciously, mainly with our visual
00:36:35 system, also with our auditory system. And this shows up for the musicians out there. Metronomes
00:36:40 are a great way to play with this. Bass drumming, when the frequency of bass drumming changes,
00:36:44 your perception of time changes quite a lot. So in any event, space and time are linked
00:36:50 through the sensory apparatus, through the eyes and ears and nose, and probably through taste too,
00:36:55 and through touch for us, but mainly through vision. So when you drop into some coding or
00:37:02 iterating through a creative process or trying to solve something hard,
00:37:08 you can’t really do that well if you’re in a rigid, high level of autonomic arousal because
00:37:15 you’re plugging in algorithms that are in this space regime, this time regime matches. It’s
00:37:20 space time matched. Whereas creativity, I always think the lava lamp is actually a pretty good
00:37:25 example, even though it has these counterculture, new agey connotations, because you actually don’t
00:37:29 know which direction things are going to change. And so in drowsy states, sleeping and drowsy
00:37:36 states, space and time become dislodged from one another somewhat, and they’re very fluid.
00:37:41 And I think that’s why a lot of solutions come to people after sleep and naps. And this could
00:37:47 even take us into a discussion, if you like, about psychedelics and what we now know, for instance,
00:37:53 that people thought that psychedelics work by just creating spontaneous bursting of neurons
00:37:58 and hallucinations. But the 5H2C and 2A receptors, which are the main sites for things like LSD and
00:38:06 psilocybin and some of the other ones that create hallucinations, the drugs that create hallucinations,
00:38:13 most of those receptors are actually in the collection of neurons that encase the thalamus,
00:38:20 which is where all the sensory information goes into, a structure called the thalamic
00:38:24 reticular nucleus. And it’s an inhibitory structure that makes sure that when we’re
00:38:31 sitting here talking, that I’m mainly focused on whatever I’m seeing visually, that I’m essentially
00:38:36 eliminating a lot of sensory information. Under conditions where people take psychedelics and
00:38:41 these particular serotonin receptors are activated, that inhibitory shell, it’s literally shaped like
00:38:48 a shell, starts losing its ability to inhibit the passage of sensory information. But mostly
00:38:55 the effects of psychedelics are because the lateral connectivity in layer five of cortex
00:39:00 across cortical areas is increased. And what that does is that means that the space time relationship
00:39:08 for vision, like moving my finger from here to here, very rigid space time relationship,
00:39:12 right? If I slow it down, it’s slower, obviously, but there’s a prediction that can be made based on
00:39:15 the neurons in the retina and the cortex. On psychedelics, this could be a very strange
00:39:19 experience. But the auditory system has one that’s slightly different space time, and they’re matched
00:39:25 to one another in deeper circuits in the brain. The olfactory system has a different space time
00:39:29 relationship to it. So under conditions of these increased activation of these serotonin receptors,
00:39:38 space and time across sensory area starts being fluid. So I’m no longer running the algorithm for
00:39:44 moving my finger from here to here and making a prediction based on vision alone. I’m now,
00:39:49 this is where people talk about hearing sites, right? You start linking, this might actually
00:39:57 make a sound in a psychedelic state. Now I’m not suggesting people run out and do psychedelics
00:40:01 because it’s very disorganized, but essentially what you’re doing is you’re mixing the algorithms.
00:40:05 And so when you talk about being able to access new solutions, you don’t need to rely on
00:40:10 psychedelics. If people choose to do that, that’s their business. But in drowsy states, this lateral
00:40:15 connectivity is increased as well. The shell of the thalamus shuts down. And these are through
00:40:21 these so called pons chiniculate occipital waves. And what’s happening is you’re getting whole brain
00:40:25 activation at a level that you start mixing algorithms. And so sometimes I think solutions
00:40:32 come not from being in that narrow tunnel of space time and strong activation of working memory and
00:40:38 trying to well iterate if this, then this very strong, deductive and inductive thinking and
00:40:43 working from first principles, but also from states where something that was an algorithm
00:40:49 that you never had in existence before suddenly gets lumped with another algorithm. And all of a
00:40:55 sudden a new possibility comes to mind. And so space and time need to be fluid and space and
00:41:03 time need to be rigid in order to come up with something meaningful. And I realize I’m riffing
00:41:08 long on this, but this is why I think, you know, there was so much interest a few years ago with
00:41:11 Michael Pollan’s book and other things happening about psychedelics as a pathway to exploration and
00:41:17 all this kind of thing. But the real question is what you export back from those experiences,
00:41:21 because dreams are amazing, but if you can’t bring anything back from them, they’re just amazing.
00:41:27 I wonder how to experiment with the mind without, without any medical assistance
00:41:34 first. Like, you know, I, I pushed my mind in all kinds of directions. I definitely want to,
00:41:39 I did, uh, shrooms a couple of times. I definitely want to, uh, figure out how I can experiment with,
00:41:47 um, with psychedelics. I’m talking to, uh, Rick Doblin, uh, soon. I even went back and forth. So
00:41:57 he does all these studies on psychedelics and he keeps ignoring the parts of my email that asks,
00:42:02 like, how do I participate in these studies? Well, there are some legality issues. I mean,
00:42:06 conversation, I want to be very clear. I’m not saying that anyone should go out and do psychedelics.
00:42:09 I think that drowsy states and sleep states are super interesting for accessing some of
00:42:14 these more creative states of mind. Hypnosis is something that my colleague, David Spiegel,
00:42:19 associate chair of psychiatry at Stanford works on where also, again, it’s a unique state because
00:42:24 you have narrow context. So this is very, um, kind of tunnel vision and yet deeply relaxed,
00:42:29 excuse me, deeply relaxed where new algorithms, if you will, can start to surface, um, strong
00:42:36 state for inducing neuroplasticity. And I think, you know, so if I had a, um, I’m part of a group,
00:42:43 um, that, uh, it’s called the liminal collective as a group of people that get together and talk
00:42:47 about, um, just wild ideas, but they try and implement. Um, and it’s a, it’s a really interesting
00:42:53 group. Some people from a military, from a logitech and some other backgrounds, academic
00:42:58 backgrounds. And I was asked, you know, what would be, um, if you could create a tool,
00:43:03 you just had a tool like your magic wand wish for the day, what would it be? I thought it’d
00:43:07 be really interesting if someone could develop psychedelics that have, um, on off switches.
00:43:14 So you could go into a psychedelic state very deeply for 10 minutes, but you could launch
00:43:22 yourself out of that state and place yourself into a linear real world state very quickly
00:43:27 so that you could extract whatever it was that happened in that experience. And then go back
00:43:30 in if you wanted, because the problem with psychedelic states and dream states is that
00:43:37 first of all, a lot of the reason people do them is they’re lying. They say they want plasticity
00:43:42 and they want all this stuff. They want a peak experience inside of an amplified experience.
00:43:47 So they’re kind of seeking something unusual. And I think we should just be honest about that
00:43:51 because a lot of times they’re not trying to make their brain better. They’re just trying
00:43:54 to experience something really amazing. But the problem is space and time are so unlocked
00:44:01 in these states, just like they are in dreams, that you can really end up with a whole lot of
00:44:06 nothing. You can have an amazing amplified experience housed in an amplified experience
00:44:12 and come out of that thinking you had a meaningful experience when you didn’t bring anything back.
00:44:18 You didn’t bring anything back. All you have is a fuzzy memory of having a transformational
00:44:24 experience, but you don’t actually have tools to bring back, sorry, actually concrete ideas to
00:44:32 bring back. Yeah, it’s interesting. I wonder if it’s possible to do that with a mind to be able to
00:44:38 hop back and forth. I think that’s where the real power of adjusting states is going to be. It
00:44:45 probably will be with devices. I mean, maybe it will be done through pharmacology. It’s just that
00:44:50 it’s hard to do on off switches in human pharmacology that we have them for animals.
00:44:54 I mean, we have Cree flip recombinases and we have channel opsins and halo root opsins and
00:45:02 all these kinds of things. But to do that work in humans is tricky, but I think you could do it
00:45:07 with virtual reality, augmented reality and other devices that bring more of the somatic experience
00:45:12 into it. You’re of course, a scientist who’s studying humans as a collective. I tend to be
00:45:19 just a one person scientist of just looking at myself and I play when these deep thinking,
00:45:27 deep work sessions, I’m very cognizant in the morning that there’s times when my mind is so
00:45:34 eloquent at being able to jump around from ideas and hold them all together. I’m almost like I
00:45:43 step back from a third person perspective and enjoy that, whatever that mind is doing,
00:45:49 I do not waste those moments. I’m very conscious of this little creature that woke up that’s only
00:45:59 awake for, if we’re being honest, maybe a couple hours a day. Early part of the day for you.
00:46:04 Early part of the day. Not always. Well, early part of the day for me is a very fluid concept.
00:46:11 You’re one of those.
00:46:12 Yeah, I’m one.
00:46:12 Yeah, you’re one of those.
00:46:13 Being single, one of the problems, single and no meetings. I don’t schedule any meetings.
00:46:20 I’ve been living at like a 28 hour day. So it drifts. So it’s all over the place. But
00:46:28 after a traditionally defined full night’s sleep, whatever the heck that means, I find that in those
00:46:38 moments, there’s a clarity of mind that’s just, everything is effortless. And it’s the deepest
00:46:44 dives intellectually that I make. And I’m cognizant of it. And I try to bring that to the other parts
00:46:52 of the day that don’t have it and treasure them even more in those moments because they only last
00:46:57 like five or 10 minutes. Because of course, in those moments you want to do all kinds of stupid
00:47:02 stuff that are completely is worthless, like check social media or something like that.
00:47:07 But those are the most precious things in intellectual life is those mental moments
00:47:15 of clarity. And I wonder, I’m learning how to control them. I think caffeine is somehow involved.
00:47:21 I’m not sure exactly.
00:47:22 Sure. Well, because if you learn how to titrate caffeine,
00:47:25 and everyone’s slightly different with this, what they need, but if you learn to titrate caffeine
00:47:29 with time of day and the kind of work that you’re trying to do, you can bring that autonomic arousal
00:47:33 state into a close to perfect place. And then you can tune it in with, sometimes people want a little
00:47:39 bit of background music. Sometimes they want less, these kinds of things. The early part of the day
00:47:43 is interesting because the one thing that’s not often discussed is this transition out of sleep.
00:47:48 So there’s a book, I think it’s called Winston Churchill’s Nap. And it’s about
00:47:53 naps and the transition between wake and sleep as a valuable period. A long time ago,
00:48:02 someone who I respect a lot was mentoring me said, be very careful about bringing in
00:48:08 someone else’s sensory experience early in the day. So when I wake up, I’m very drowsy. I sleep
00:48:14 well, but I don’t emerge from that very quickly. I need a lot of caffeine to wake up and whatnot.
00:48:20 But there’s this concept of getting the download from sleep, which is in sleep, you were essentially
00:48:28 expunging the things that you don’t need, the stuff that is meaningless from the previous day,
00:48:32 but you were also running variations on these algorithms of whatever it is you’re trying to
00:48:36 work out in life on short timescales like the previous day and long timescales like your whole
00:48:41 life. And those lateral connections in layer five of the neocortex are very robustly active and
00:48:51 across sensory areas. And you’re running an algorithm or it’s a brain state that will be
00:48:56 useless in waking. You wouldn’t get anything done. You’d be the person talking to yourself
00:49:00 in the hallway or something about something that no one else can see. But in those states,
00:49:06 the theory is that you arrive at certain solutions and those solutions will reveal
00:49:10 themselves in the early part of the day, unless you interfere with them by bringing in,
00:49:16 social media is a good example of you immediately enter somebody else’s
00:49:20 space time sensory relationship. Someone is the conductor of your thoughts in that case.
00:49:25 And so many people have written about this. What I’m saying isn’t entirely new, but allowing the
00:49:30 download to occur in the early part of the day and asking the question, am I more in my head
00:49:38 or am I more of an interoceptive or exteroceptive mode? And depending on the kind of work you need
00:49:43 to do, if it sounds like for you, it’s very interoceptive and you’ve got a lot of thinking
00:49:50 going on and a lot of computing going on, allowing yourself to transition out of that sleep state and
00:49:54 arrive with those solutions from sleep and plug into the work really deeply. And only then allowing
00:50:01 things like music, news, social media, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t talk to loved ones and see
00:50:06 faces and things like that. But some people have taken this to the extreme. When I was a graduate
00:50:09 student at Berkeley, there was a guy there, a professor, brilliant, odd, but brilliant,
00:50:16 who was so fixated on this concept that he wouldn’t look at faces in the early part of the
00:50:21 day because he just didn’t want anything else to impact him. Now he didn’t have the most rounded
00:50:29 life, I suppose. But if you’re talking about cognitive performance, this could actually be
00:50:35 very beneficial. You said so many brilliant things. So one, if you read books that describe
00:50:41 the habits of brilliant people like writers, they do control that sensory experience in the
00:50:51 hours after wake. Like many writers, you know, they have a particular habit of several hours
00:50:58 early in the morning of actual writing. They don’t do anything else for the rest of the day,
00:51:02 but they control, they’re very sensitive to noises and so on. I think they make it very difficult to
00:51:07 live with them. I try to, I’m definitely like that. Like I could, I love to control the sensory
00:51:16 how much information is coming in. There’s something about the peaceful, just everything
00:51:20 being peaceful. At the same time, and we were talking to a mutual friend of Whitney Cummings,
00:51:26 who has a mansion, a castle on top of a cliff in the middle of nowhere. She actually purchased her
00:51:34 own island. She wants silence. She wants to control how much sound is coming in.
00:51:41 She’s very sensitive to sound and environment. Beautiful home and environment, but like clearly
00:51:46 puts a lot of attention into details. Yeah. And very creative.
00:51:51 Yeah. And that’s, yeah, that allows for creativity to flourish. I’m also, I don’t like that feels
00:51:58 like a slippery slope. So I enjoy introducing the noises and signals and training my mind to
00:52:07 be able to tune them out. Cause I feel like you can’t always control the environment so perfectly
00:52:12 because, cause your mind gets comfortable with that. I think it’s a skill that you want to learn
00:52:17 to be able to shut it off. Like I often go to like back before COVID to a coffee shop.
00:52:23 It really annoys me when there’s sounds and voices and so on, but I feel like I can train my mind
00:52:29 to, to block them out. So it’s, it’s a balance, I think.
00:52:32 Yeah. And I think you know, two things come to mind as you’re saying this first of all,
00:52:37 yeah. I mean, we’re talking about what’s best for work is not always what’s best for, you know,
00:52:42 completeness of life. I mean, you know, autism is probably many things like when you hit autism,
00:52:47 just like feet, there are probably 50 ways to get a fever. There are probably 50 ways to,
00:52:52 that the brain can create what looks like autism or what people call autism.
00:52:55 There’s an interesting set of studies that have come out of David Ginty’s lab at Harvard med,
00:53:02 looking at these are mouse mutants where these are models for autism, where nothing is disrupted
00:53:09 in the brain proper and in the central nervous system, but the sensory app, the sensory neurons,
00:53:15 the ones that innervate the skin and the ears and everything are, are hypersensitive. And this maps
00:53:19 to a mutation in certain forms of human autism. So this means that the, the overload of sensory
00:53:27 information and sensory experience that a lot of autistics feel, they’re like that they can’t
00:53:31 tolerate things. And then they get the stereotype behaviors, the rocking and the kind of the
00:53:35 shouting it, you know, we always thought of that as a brain problem. In some cases it might be,
00:53:41 but in many cases it’s because they just can’t, they, they seem to have a, it’s like turning the
00:53:46 volume up on every sense. And so they’re overwhelmed and none of us want to become like
00:53:51 that. I think it’s very hard for them and it’s hard for their parents and so forth. So I, I like
00:53:55 the coffee shop example because the way I think about trying to build up resilience, you know,
00:54:02 physically or mentally or otherwise is one of I guess we could call it limb. I like to call it
00:54:07 limbic friction. That’s not a real scientific term. And I acknowledge that I’m making it up
00:54:10 now because I think it captures the concept, which is that, you know, we always hear about
00:54:14 resilience. It makes it sound like, oh, you know, under stress where everything’s coming at you,
00:54:18 you’re going to stay calm, but there’s another, you know, so limbic, the limbic system wants to
00:54:23 pull you in some direction, typically in the direction of reflexive behavior and the prefrontal
00:54:30 cortex through top down mechanisms has to suppress that and say, no, we’re not going to respond to
00:54:35 the banging of the coffee cups behind me, or I’m going to keep focusing. That’s pure top down
00:54:41 control. So limbic friction is high in that environment. You’ve put yourself into a high
00:54:45 limbic friction environment, meaning that the prefrontal cortex has to work really hard.
00:54:49 But there’s another side to limbic friction too, which is when you’re very sleepy,
00:54:54 there’s nothing incoming. It can be completely silent and it’s hard to engage and focus because
00:54:59 you’re drifting off and you’re getting sleepy. So their limbic friction is high, but for the
00:55:03 opposite reason, autonomic arousal is too low. So they’re turning on Netflix in the background or
00:55:08 looping a song might boost your level of alertness that will allow top down control to be in exactly
00:55:15 the sweet spot you want it. So this is why earlier I was saying it’s all about how we feel inside
00:55:21 relative to what’s going on on the outside. We’re constantly in this, I guess one way you
00:55:26 could envision it spatially, especially if people are listening to this just on audio,
00:55:31 is I like to think about it kind of like a glass barbell where one sphere of perception and
00:55:37 attention can be on what’s going on with me. And one sphere of attention can be on what’s going on
00:55:42 with you or something else in the room or in my environment. But this barbell isn’t rigid. It’s
00:55:48 not really glass. Would plasma work here? I don’t know anything about plasma. Sorry. I don’t know.
00:55:55 So imagine that this thing can contort the size of the globes at the end of this barbell can get
00:56:00 bigger or smaller. So let’s say I close my eyes and I bring all my experience into what’s going on
00:56:06 through interoception internally. Now it’s as if I’ve got two orbs of perception just on my
00:56:12 internal state, but I can also do the opposite and bring both orbs of perception outside me.
00:56:17 I’m not thinking about my heart rate or my breathing. I’m just thinking about something
00:56:20 I see. And what you’ll start to realize as you kind of use this spatial model is that two things.
00:56:27 One is that it’s very dynamic and that the more relaxed we are, the more these two orbs of
00:56:34 attention, the two ends of the barbell can move around freely. The more alert we are,
00:56:40 the more rigid they’re going to be tethered in place. And that was designed so that if I have
00:56:45 a threat in my environment, it’s tethered to that threat. If something’s coming to attack me, I’m not
00:56:50 going to be like, oh, my breathing cadence is a little bit quick. That’s not how it works. Why?
00:56:54 Because both orbs are linked to that threat. And so my behavior is now actually being driven by
00:57:01 something external, even though I think it’s internal. And so I don’t want to get too abstract
00:57:05 here because I’m a neuroscientist. I’m not a theorist. But when you start thinking about
00:57:10 models of how the brain works, there are only really three things that neurons do. They’re
00:57:15 either sensory neurons, they’re motor neurons, or they’re modulating things. And the models of
00:57:22 attention and perception that we have now, 2020, tell us that we’ve got interoception
00:57:28 and exteroception. They’re strongly modulated by levels of autonomic arousal. And that if we want
00:57:33 to form the optimal relationship to some task or some pressure or some thing, whether or not it’s
00:57:40 sleep, an impending threat, or coding, we need to adjust our internal space time relationship with
00:57:47 the external space time relationship. And I realize I’m repeating what I said earlier.
00:57:51 But we can actually assign circuitry to this stuff. It mostly has to do with how much limbic
00:57:56 friction there is, how much you’re being pulled to some source. That source could be internal.
00:58:01 If I have pain, physical pain in my body, I’m going to be much more interoceptive than I am
00:58:06 exteroceptive. You could be talking to me and I’m just going to be thinking about that pain. It’s
00:58:09 very hard. And the other thing that we can link it to is top down control, meaning anything in
00:58:17 our environment that has a lot of salience will tend to bring us into more exteroception than
00:58:21 interoception. And again, I don’t want to litter the conversation with just a bunch of terms, but
00:58:26 what I think it can be useful for people is to do what essentially you’ve done,
00:58:31 Lex, is to start developing an awareness. When I wake up, am I mostly in a mode of interoception
00:58:37 or exteroception? When I work well, what does working well look like from the perspective of
00:58:43 autonomic arousal? How alert or calm am I? What kind of balance between internal focus and external
00:58:49 focus is there? And to sort of watch this process throughout the day. Can you linger just briefly
00:58:54 on, because you use this term a lot and it’d be nice to try to get a little more color to it,
00:59:00 which is interoception and exteroception. What are we exactly talking about? So like
00:59:07 what’s included in each category and how much overlap is there? Interoception would be an
00:59:14 awareness of anything that’s within the confines or on the surface of my skin that I’m sensing.
00:59:20 So literally physiological. Physiologically, like within the boundaries of my skin
00:59:24 and probably touched to the skin as well. Exteroception would be perception of anything
00:59:30 that’s beyond the reach of my skin. So that bottle of water, a scent, a sound, and this
00:59:40 can change dramatically actually. If you have headphones in, you tend to hear things in your
00:59:44 head as opposed to a speaker in the room. This is actually the basis of ventriloquism.
00:59:49 So there are beautiful experiments done by Greg Reckenzone up at UC Davis, looking at how auditory
00:59:55 and visual cues are matched and you have an array of speakers and this will become obvious as I say
01:00:01 it, but obviously the ventriloquist doesn’t throw their voice. What they do is they direct your
01:00:06 vision to a particular location and you think the sound is coming from that location. And there are
01:00:10 beautiful experiments that Greg and his colleagues have done where they suddenly introduce an
01:00:13 auditory visual mismatch and it freaks people out because you can actually make it seem from a
01:00:20 perception standpoint as if the sound arrived from the corner of the room and hit you physically and
01:00:26 people will recoil. And so sounds aren’t getting thrown across the room. They’re still coming from
01:00:31 a defined location, an array of speakers, but this is the way the brain creates these internal
01:00:37 representations. And again, I don’t want to go down a rabbit hole, but I’m sure the listeners
01:00:46 appreciate this, but everything in the brain is an abstraction, right? I mean, the sensory
01:00:53 apparatus, there are the eyes and ears and nose and skin and taste and all that are taking
01:00:58 information and with interoception, taking information from sensors inside the body,
01:01:03 the enteric nervous system for the gut. I’ve got sensory neurons that innervate my liver,
01:01:08 um, et cetera, taking all that. And the brain is abstracting that in the same way that if I
01:01:16 took a picture of your face and I handed it to you and I’d say, that’s you, you’d say, yeah, that’s
01:01:21 me. But if I were an abstract artist, I’d be doing a little bit more of what the brain does, where if
01:01:26 I took a pen, pad and paper, maybe I could do this because I’m a terrible artist and I could just
01:01:30 mix it up. And I, let’s say I would make your eyes like water bottles, but I’d flip them upside down
01:01:34 and I’d start assigning fruits and objects to the different features of your face. And I show it to
01:01:38 you, I say, Lex, that’s you say, well, that’s not me. And I’d say, no, but that’s my abstraction
01:01:42 of you. But that’s what the brain does. The space time relationship of the neurons that fire that
01:01:47 encode your face has have no resemblance to your face. Right. And I think people don’t really,
01:01:53 I don’t know if people have fully internalized that, but the day that I, and I’m not sure I
01:01:58 fully internalized that because it’s weird to think about, but all neurons can do is fire in
01:02:04 space and in time, different neurons in different sequences, perhaps with different intensities.
01:02:08 It’s not clear. The action potential is all or none. Although people, neuroscientists don’t like
01:02:12 to talk about that, even though it’s been published in nature a couple of times, the
01:02:16 action potential for a given neuron doesn’t always have the exact same waveform. People,
01:02:20 it’s in all the textbooks, but you can modify that waveform.
01:02:23 Well, I mean, there’s a lot of fascinating stuff with neuroscience about the fuzziness of all the,
01:02:29 of the transfer of information from neuron to neuron. I mean, we certainly touch upon it every
01:02:35 time we at all try to think about the difference between artificial neural networks and biological
01:02:40 neural networks. But can we maybe linger a little bit on this, on the circuitry that you’re getting
01:02:45 at? So the brain is just a bunch of stuff firing and it forms abstractions that are fascinating
01:02:53 and beautiful, like layers upon layers upon layers of abstraction. And I think it, just like
01:02:58 when you’re programming, you know, I’m programming in Python, it’s awe inspiring to think that
01:03:05 underneath it all, it ends up being zeros and ones. And the computer doesn’t know about, you know,
01:03:11 stupid Python or Windows or Linux. It only knows about the zeros and ones. In the same way with
01:03:16 the brain, is there something interesting to you or fundamental to you about the circuitry of the
01:03:25 brain that allows for the magic that’s in our mind to emerge? How much do we understand? I mean,
01:03:35 maybe even focusing on the vision system, is, is there something specific about the structure of
01:03:41 the vision system, the circuitry of it that allows for the complexity of the vision system to emerge?
01:03:49 Or is it all just the complete chaotic mess that we don’t understand?
01:03:52 It’s definitely not all a chaotic mess that we don’t understand, if we’re talking about vision.
01:03:58 And that’s not just because I’m a vision scientist.
01:04:00 Let’s stick to vision.
01:04:01 Let’s stick to vision. Well, because in the beauty of the visual system, the reason David Hubel and
01:04:05 Torrance and Wiesel won the Nobel prize was because they were brilliant and forward thinking and
01:04:09 adventurous and all that good stuff. But the reason that the visual system is such a great
01:04:13 model for addressing these kinds of questions and other systems are hard, is we can control
01:04:18 the stimuli. We can adjust spatial frequency, how finer the gratings are, thick gratings,
01:04:23 thin gratings. We can adjust temporal frequency, how fast things are moving. We can use cone
01:04:28 isolating stimuli. We can use it. There’s so many things that you can do in a controlled way.
01:04:33 Whereas if we were talking about cognitive encoding, like encoding the space of concepts
01:04:39 or something. I, like you, if I may, am drawn to the big questions.
01:04:46 The big questions in neuroscience. But I confess in part because of some good advice I got early
01:04:53 in my career and in part because I’m not perhaps smart enough to go after the really high level
01:05:01 stuff. I also like to address things that are tractable and we need to address what we can
01:05:10 stand to make some ground on at a given time.
01:05:12 There you can construct brilliant controlled experiments to study, to really literally
01:05:18 answer questions about, yeah.
01:05:20 Yeah. I mean, I’m happy to have a talk about consciousness, but it’s a scary talk. And I
01:05:24 think most people don’t want to hear what I have to say, which is, we can save that for later,
01:05:29 perhaps.
01:05:30 I mean, it’s an interesting question of, we talk about psychedelics. We can talk about
01:05:36 consciousness. We can talk about cognition. Can experiments in neuroscience be constructed
01:05:43 to shed any kind of light on these questions?
01:05:45 So, I mean, it’s cool that vision, I mean, to me, vision is probably one of the most beautiful
01:05:52 things about human beings. Also from the AI side, computer vision has some of the most
01:05:59 exciting applications of neural networks is in computer vision. But it feels like that’s a
01:06:04 that’s a neighbor of cognition and consciousness. It’s just that we maybe haven’t come up with
01:06:10 experiments to study those yet.
01:06:11 Yeah. The visual system is amazing. We’re mostly visual animals to navigate,
01:06:15 survive. Humans mainly rely on vision, not smell or something else, but it’s a filter
01:06:22 for cognition and it’s a, it’s a strong driver of cognition. Maybe just cause it came up and
01:06:28 then we’re moving to higher level concepts. Just the way the visual system works can be
01:06:32 summarized in it in a few relatively succinct statements. Unlike most of what I’ve said,
01:06:37 which has not been succinct at all.
01:06:39 Let’s go there.
01:06:39 You know, the retina, yeah. So the retina is this three layers of neuron structure at the
01:06:47 back of your eye. It’s about as thick as a credit card. It is a piece of your brain.
01:06:51 And sometimes people think I’m kind of wriggling by out of a reality by saying that it is,
01:06:56 it’s absolutely a piece of the brain. It’s, it’s a forebrain structure that in the first
01:07:00 trimester, there’s a genetic program that made sure that that neural retina, which is part of
01:07:05 your central nervous system was squeezed out into what’s called the embryonic eye cups.
01:07:10 And that the bone formed with a little hole where the optic nerve is going to connect
01:07:14 it to the rest of the brain. And those, that window into the world is the only window into
01:07:20 the world for a, for a mammal, which has a thick skull. Birds have a thin skull. So their pineal
01:07:24 gland sits and lizards too, and snakes actually have a hole so that light can make it down into
01:07:29 the pineal directly. And in train melatonin rhythms for time of day and time of year,
01:07:33 humans have to do all that through the eyes. So three layers of neurons that are a piece of your
01:07:38 brain, their central nervous system, and the optic nerve connects to the rest of the brain,
01:07:42 the neurons in the eye, somewhat just care about luminance, just how bright or dim it is.
01:07:48 And they inform the brain about time of day. And then the central circadian clock informs every
01:07:52 cell in your body about time of day and make sure that all sorts of good stuff happens. If you’re
01:07:55 getting light in your eyes at the right times and all sorts of bad things happen. If you are getting
01:07:59 light randomly throughout the 24 hour cycle, we could talk about all that, but this is a good
01:08:04 incentive for keeping a relatively normal schedule, consistent schedule, light exposure,
01:08:10 consistent schedule, try and keep a consistent schedule. When you’re young, it’s easy to go off
01:08:15 schedule and recover. As you get older, it gets harder, but you see everything from outcomes in
01:08:20 cancer patients to diabetes improves when people are getting light at a particular time of day and
01:08:29 getting darkness at a particular phase of the 24 hour cycle. We were designed to get light and
01:08:36 dark at different times of the circadian cycle. All that information is coming in through
01:08:42 specialized type of neuron in the retina called the melanopsin intrinsically photosensitive
01:08:46 ganglion cell discovered by David Berson at Brown University. That’s not spatial information. It’s
01:08:53 subconscious. You don’t think, Oh, it’s daytime. Even if you’re looking at the sun, it doesn’t
01:08:56 matter. It’s a photon counter. It’s literally counting photons. And it’s saying, Oh, even
01:09:01 though it’s a cloudy day, lots of photons coming in at winter in Boston, it must be winter. And
01:09:05 your system is a little depressed. It’s spring. You feel alert. That’s not a coincidence. That’s
01:09:09 these melanopsin cells signaling the circadian clock. There are a bunch of other neurons in the
01:09:14 eye that signal to the brain and they mainly signal the presence of things that are lighter
01:09:20 than background or darker than background. So a black objects would be darker than background,
01:09:25 a light object lighter than background. And that all come, it’s mainly it’s looking at pixels.
01:09:29 Mainly it’s they look at circles and those neurons have receptive fields,
01:09:34 which not everyone will understand, but those neurons respond best to little circles of dark
01:09:38 light or little circles of bright light, little circles of red light versus little circles of
01:09:43 green light or blue light. And so it sounds very basic. It’s like red, green, blue and circles
01:09:50 brighter or dimmer than what’s next to it. But that’s basically the only information that sent
01:09:55 down the optic nerve. And when we say information, we can be very precise. I don’t mean little bits
01:10:01 of red traveling down the optic nerve. I mean, spikes neural action potentials in space and time,
01:10:06 which for you is like makes total sense. But I think for a lot of people, it’s actually beautiful
01:10:12 to think about all that information in the outside world is converted into a language
01:10:17 that’s very simple. It’s just like a few syllables, if you will. And those syllables
01:10:21 are being shouted down the optic nerve, converted into a totally different language, like Morse code
01:10:28 goes into the brain. And then the thalamus essentially responds in the same way that
01:10:31 the retina does, except the thalamus is also waiting things. It’s saying, you know what,
01:10:37 that thing was moving faster than everything else, or it’s brighter than everything else.
01:10:43 So that signal I’m going to get up, I’m going to allow up to cortex or that signal is much
01:10:50 redder than it is green. So I’m going to let that signal go through that signal as much.
01:10:54 It’s kind of more like the red next to it. Throw that out. The information just doesn’t get up into
01:10:59 your cortex. And then in cortex, of course, is where perceptions happen. And in V1, if you will,
01:11:04 visual area one, but also some neighboring areas, you start getting representations of
01:11:10 things like oriented lines. So there’s a neuron that responds to this angle of my hand versus
01:11:15 vertical. This is the defining work of Hubel and Wiesel’s Nobel. And it’s a very systematic map
01:11:21 of orientation, line orientation, direction of movement, and so forth. And that’s pretty much,
01:11:28 and color, and that’s how the visual system is organized all the way up to the cortex.
01:11:32 So it’s hierarchical. I want to be clear. It’s hierarchical because you don’t build up that line
01:11:37 by suddenly having a neuron that responds to lines in some random way. It responds to lines
01:11:43 by taking all the dots that are aligned in a vertical stack, and they all converge on one
01:11:48 neuron. And then that neuron responds to vertical lines. So it’s not random. There’s no abstraction
01:11:53 at that point, in fact. In fact, if I showed you a black line, I could be sure that if I
01:11:58 were imaging V1, that I would see a representation of that black line as a vertical line somewhere in
01:12:04 your cortex. So at that point, it’s absolutely concrete. It’s not abstract. But then things get
01:12:12 really mysterious. Some of that information travels further up into the cortex and goes from
01:12:18 one visual area to the next, to the next, to the next, so that by time you get into an area that
01:12:23 Nancy Kanwisher at MIT has studied much of her career, the fusiform face area, you start finding
01:12:30 single neurons that respond only to your father’s face or to Joe Rogan’s face, regardless of the
01:12:38 orientation of his face. I’m sure if you saw Joe, because you know him well, from across the room
01:12:43 and you just saw his profile, you’d be like, oh, that’s Joe. Walk over and say hello.
01:12:48 The orientation of his face isn’t there. You wouldn’t even see his eyes necessarily,
01:12:52 but he’s represented in some abstract way by a neuron that actually would be called the Joe
01:12:57 Rogan neuron. He might have limits. I might not recognize him if he was upside down or
01:13:03 something like that. It’d be fascinating to see what the limits of that Joe Rogan concept is.
01:13:08 So Nancy’s lab has done that because early on she was challenged by people that said
01:13:12 there aren’t face neurons. There are neurons that they only respond to space and time,
01:13:17 shapes and things like that, moving in particular directions and orientations. It turns out
01:13:22 Nancy was right. They use these stimuli called greeble stimuli, which any computer programmer
01:13:27 would appreciate, which kind of morphs a face into something gradually that eventually just
01:13:32 looks like this alien thing they call the greeble. The neurons don’t respond to greebles.
01:13:37 In most cases, they only respond to faces and familiar faces. Anyway, I’m summarizing a lot
01:13:42 of literature and forgive me, Nancy, and for those of the greeble people, if they’re ours,
01:13:46 they’re like, don’t come after me with pitchforks. Actually, you know what? Come after me with
01:13:49 pitchforks. I think you know what I’m trying to do here. So the point is that in the visual system,
01:13:54 it’s very concrete up until about visual area four, which has color pinwheels and seems to
01:14:00 respond to pinwheels of colors. And so the stimuli become more and more elaborate, but at some point
01:14:07 you depart that concrete representation and you start getting abstract representations that can’t
01:14:12 be explained by simple point to point wiring. And to take a leap out of the visual system to
01:14:18 the higher level concepts, what we talked about in the visual system maps to the auditory system
01:14:23 where you’re encoding what? Frequency of tone sweeps. So this is going to sound weird to do,
01:14:29 but you know, like a Doppler, like hearing something, a car passing by, for instance,
01:14:34 but at some point you get into motifs of music that can’t be mapped to just a, what they call a
01:14:41 tonotopic map of frequency. You start abstracting. And if you start thinking about concepts of
01:14:47 creativity and love and memory, like what is the map of memory space? Well, your memories are very
01:14:54 different than mine, but presumably there’s enough structure at the early stages of memory processing
01:15:00 or at the early stages of emotional processing or at the earlier stages of creative processing
01:15:06 that you have the building blocks, your zeros and ones, if you will,
01:15:10 but you depart from that eventually. Now the exception to this, and I want to be really clear
01:15:16 because I was just mainly talking about neocortex, the six layered structure on the outside of the
01:15:22 brain that explains a lot of human abilities, other animals have them too, is that subcortical
01:15:28 structures are a lot more like machines. It’s more plug and chug. And what I’m talking about
01:15:35 is the machinery that controls heart rate and breathing and receptive fields, neurons that
01:15:41 respond to things like temperature on the top of my left hand. I came into neuroscience from
01:15:48 more of a perspective initially of psychology, but one of the reasons I forced upon myself to learn
01:15:54 some electrophysiology, not a ton, but enough, and some molecular biology and about circuitry
01:16:00 is that one of the most beautiful experiences you can have in life, I’m convinced, is to lower
01:16:06 an electrode into the cortex and to show a person or an animal, we do this ethically of course,
01:16:14 stimulus like an oriented line or a face. And you can convert the recordings coming off of
01:16:20 that electrode into an audio signal or an audio monitor, and you can hear what they call hash.
01:16:25 It’s not the hash you smoke, it’s the hash you hear. And it sounds like, it just sounds like
01:16:31 noise. And in the cortex, eventually you find a stimulus that gets the neuron to spike and
01:16:37 fire action potentials that are converted into an auditory stimulus that are very concrete,
01:16:41 crack, crack, crack, sounds like a bat cracking, like home runs or outfield balls.
01:16:49 When you drop electrodes deeper into the thalamus or into the hypothalamus or into the brainstem
01:16:55 areas that control breathing, it’s like a machine. You never hear hash. You drop the electrode down.
01:17:00 This could be like a grungy old Tugston electrode, not high fidelity electrode, as long as it’s got
01:17:07 a little bit of insulation on it. You plug it into an audio monitor, it’s picking up electricity.
01:17:11 And if it’s a visual neuron and it’s in the thalamus or the retina and you walk in front
01:17:16 of that animal or person, that neuron goes, and then you walk away and it stops. And you put your
01:17:23 hand in front of the eye again and it goes, and you could do that for two days. And that neuron
01:17:30 will just, every time there’s a stimulus, it fires. So whereas before, it’s a question of
01:17:34 how much information is getting up to cortex. And then these abstractions happening where
01:17:38 you’re creating these ideas, when you go subcortical, everything is.
01:17:44 There’s no abstraction.
01:17:45 It’s two plus two equals four. There’s no abstractions. And this is why I know we have
01:17:50 some common friends at Neuralink and I love the demonstration they did recently. I’m a huge fan
01:17:54 of what they’re doing and where they’re headed. And no, I don’t get paid to say that. And I have
01:17:59 no business relationship to them. I’m just a huge fan of the people in the mission.
01:18:03 But my question was to some of them, when are you going to go subcortical? Because if you want to
01:18:09 control an animal, you don’t do it in the cortex. The cortex is like the abstract painting I made
01:18:14 of your face. Removing one piece or changing something may or may not matter for the abstraction.
01:18:21 But when you are in the subcortical areas of the brain, a stimulating electrode can
01:18:26 evoke an entire behavior or an entire state. And so the brain, if we’re going to have a
01:18:31 discussion about the brain and how the brain works, we need to really be clear which brain,
01:18:36 because everyone loves neocortex. It’s like, oh, canonical circuits in cortex. We’re going to get
01:18:41 the cortical connectome. And sure, necessary, but not sufficient. Not to be able to plug in
01:18:47 patterns of electrical stimulation and get behavior. Eventually we’ll get there. But if
01:18:51 you’re talking subcortical circuits, that’s where the action is. That’s where you could potentially
01:18:56 cure Parkinson’s by stimulating the subthalamic nucleus, because we know that it gates motor
01:19:01 activation patterns in very predictable ways. So I think for those that are interested in
01:19:06 neuroscience, it pays to pay attention to like, is this a circuit that abstracts the sensory
01:19:11 information? Or is it just one that builds up hierarchical models in a very predictable way?
01:19:18 And there’s a huge chasm in neuroscience right now, because there’s no conceptual
01:19:23 leadership. No one knows which way to go. And this is why I think Neuralink has captured an
01:19:28 amazing opportunity, which was, okay, well, while all you academic research labs are figuring all
01:19:32 this stuff out, we’re going to pick a very specific goal and make the goal, the end point. And some
01:19:37 academic laboratories do that, but I think that’s a beautiful way to attack this whole thing about
01:19:42 the brain, because it’s very concrete. Let’s restore motion to the Parkinsonian patient.
01:19:48 Academic labs want to do that too, of course. Let’s restore speech to the stroke patient.
01:19:54 But there’s nothing abstract about that. That’s about figuring out the solution to a particular
01:19:59 problem. So anyway, those are my… And I admit I’ve mixed in a lot of opinion there,
01:20:04 but having spent some time, like 25 years digging around in the brain and listening to neurons
01:20:09 firing and looking at them anatomically, I think given it’s 2020, we need to ask the right… The
01:20:15 way to get better answers is ask better questions. And the really high level stuff is fun. It makes
01:20:22 for good conversation and it has brought enormous interest. But I think the questions about
01:20:28 consciousness and dreaming and stuff, they’re fascinating, but I don’t know that we’re there yet.
01:20:34 So you’re saying there might be a chasm in the two views of the power of the brain arising from
01:20:46 the circuitry that forms abstractions or the power of the brain arising from the majority
01:20:53 of the circuitry that’s just doing very brute force, dumb things that don’t have any fancy
01:21:02 kind of stuff going on. That’s really interesting to think about.
01:21:05 And which one to go after first. And here I’m poaching badly from someone I’ve never met,
01:21:11 but whose work I follow, which is, and it was actually on your podcast. I think Elon Musk
01:21:16 said, basically the brain is a, I want to say a monkey brain with a supercomputer on top.
01:21:21 And I thought that’s actually probably the best description of the brain I’ve ever heard because
01:21:25 it captures a lot of important features like limbic friction. But we think of like, oh,
01:21:30 when we’re making plans, we’re using the prefrontal cortex and we’re executive function
01:21:34 and all this kind of stuff. But think about the drug addict who’s driven to go pursue
01:21:40 heroin or cocaine. They make plans. So clearly they use their frontal cortex. It’s just that
01:21:45 it’s been hijacked by the limbic system and all the monkey brain as he referred to. It’s really
01:21:49 not fair to monkeys though, Elon, because actually monkeys can make plans. They just don’t make plans
01:21:53 as sophisticated as us. I’ve spent a lot of time with monkeys, but I’ve also spent a lot of time
01:21:57 with humans. Anyway, you’re saying like, there’s a lot of value to focusing on the monkey brain
01:22:02 or whatever the heck you call it. I do because let’s say I had an ability to place a chip anywhere
01:22:08 I wanted in the brain today and activate it or inhibit that area. I’m not sure I would put that
01:22:14 chip in neocortex, except maybe to just kind of have some fun and see what happens. The reason
01:22:19 is it’s an abstraction machine. And especially if I wanted to make a mass production tool,
01:22:24 a tool in mass production that I could give to a lot of people, because it’s quite possible that
01:22:28 your abstractions are different enough than mine that I wouldn’t know what patterns of firing to
01:22:33 induce. But if I want, let’s say I want to increase my level of focus and creativity. Well, then I
01:22:40 would love to be able to, for instance, control my level of limbic friction. I would love to be
01:22:45 able to wake up and go, Oh, you know what? I have an eight o clock appointment. I wake up slowly.
01:22:49 So between seven, eight, but I want to do a lot of linear thinking. So you know what? I’m going to
01:22:52 just, I’m going to turn down the limbic friction and or ramp up prefrontal cortexes activation.
01:23:00 So there’s a lot of stuff that can happen in the thalamus with sensory gating. For instance,
01:23:04 you could shut down that shell around the thalamus and allow more creative thinking by allowing more
01:23:09 lateral connections. These would be some of the, those would be the experiments I’d want to do.
01:23:13 So they’re in the subcortical quote unquote monkey brain, but you could then look at what sorts of
01:23:19 abstract thoughts and behaviors would arise from that rather than, and here I’m not pointing my
01:23:26 finger at neural link at all, but there’s this obsession with neocortex, but I, I’m going to,
01:23:31 well, I might lose a few friends, but I’ll hopefully gain a few. And also one of the
01:23:36 reasons people spend so much time in neocortex. Yes. I have a fact and an opinion. One fact is
01:23:42 that you can image there and you can record there right now, the two photon and one photon microscopy
01:23:49 methods that allow you to image deep into the brain still don’t allow you to image down really
01:23:53 deep unless you’re jamming prisms in there and endoscopes. And then the endoscopes are very
01:23:57 narrow. So you’re getting very, you know, it’s like looking at the bottom of the ocean through a,
01:24:02 through a spotlight. And so you much easier look at the waves up on top. Right. So let’s face it,
01:24:07 folks. A lot of the reasons why there’s so many recordings in layer two, three of cortex with all
01:24:12 this advanced microscopy is because it’s very hard to image deeper. Now the microscopes are getting
01:24:17 better and thanks to the amazing work, mainly of engineers and chemists and physicists. Let’s face
01:24:22 it. They’re the ones who brought this revolution to neuroscience in the last 10 years or so.
01:24:27 You can image deeper, but we don’t really, that’s why you see so many reports on layer two, three.
01:24:33 The other thing, which is purely opinion, and I’m not going after anybody here, but is that
01:24:38 as long as there’s no clear right answer, it becomes a little easier to do creative work
01:24:43 in a structure where no one really knows how it works. So it’s fun to probe around because anything
01:24:48 you see is novel. If you’re going to work in the thalamus or the pulvinar or the hypothalamus or
01:24:54 these structures that have been known about since the sixties and seventies, and really since the,
01:24:58 you know, centuries ago, you are dealing with existing, you have to combat existing models.
01:25:04 And whereas in cortex, no one knows how the thing works, the neocortex, six layer cortex.
01:25:10 And so there’s a lot more room for discovery. There’s a lot more room for discovery and I’m
01:25:14 not calling anyone out. I love cortex. We’ve published some papers on cortex. It’s super
01:25:18 interesting. But I think with the tools that are available nowadays and where people are trying
01:25:24 ahead of, of not just reading from the brain, monitoring activity, but writing to the brain,
01:25:29 I think we really have to be careful and we need to be thoughtful about what are we trying to write?
01:25:34 What script are we trying to write? Because there are many brain structures for which we already
01:25:38 know what scripts they write. And I think there’s tremendous value there. I don’t think it’s boring.
01:25:42 The fact that they act like machines makes them predictable. Those are your zeros and ones.
01:25:47 Let’s start there. But let the, what they’re, what’s sort of happening in this field of writing
01:25:52 to the brain is there’s this idea. And again, I want to be clear. I’m not pointing at Neuralink.
01:25:56 I’m mainly pointing at the neocortical jockeys out there that you go and you observe patterns.
01:26:02 And then you think replaying those patterns is going to give rise to something interesting.
01:26:06 Yeah. I should call out one experiment or two experiments, which were done by Susumu
01:26:11 Tonagawa, Nobel prize winner from MIT, done important work in memory and immunology,
01:26:16 of course, is where he got his Nobel as well as Mark Mayford’s lab at UC San Diego.
01:26:21 They did an experiment where they monitored a bunch of neurons while an animal learned something.
01:26:26 Then they captured those neurons through some molecular tricks so they could replay the neurons.
01:26:32 So now there’s like perfect case scenario. It’s like, okay,
01:26:35 you monitor the neurons in your brain. Then I say, okay, neurons one through 100 were played
01:26:40 in the particular sequence. So, you know, the space time, you know, the keys on the piano that
01:26:43 were played that gave rise to the song, which was the behavior. And then you go back and you
01:26:47 reactivate those neurons, except you reactivate them all at once, like slamming on all the keys
01:26:52 once on the piano and you get the exact same behavior. So the space time code
01:27:00 may be meaningless for some structures. Now that’s freaky. That’s a scary thing because what that
01:27:07 means is that all the space time firing in cortex, the space part may matter more than the time part.
01:27:16 So, you know, rate codes and space time codes, we don’t know. And, you know, I’d rather have,
01:27:21 I’d rather deliver more answers in this discussion questions, but I think it’s an important
01:27:25 consideration. You’re saying some of the magic is in the early stages of what the closer to the
01:27:31 raw information. I believe so. You know, the stimulus, you know, the neuron that encodes
01:27:38 that stimulus. So, you know, the transformation. When I say this for those who don’t think about
01:27:42 sensory transformations, it’s like, I can show you a red circle. And then I look at how many times
01:27:48 the neuron fires in response to that red circle. And then I could show the red circle a bunch of
01:27:52 times, green circle, see if it changes. And then essentially the number of times that is the
01:27:56 transformation. You’ve converted red circle into like three action potentials, you know, beep, beep,
01:28:02 beep, or whatever you want to call it, you know, for those that think in sound space.
01:28:05 So that’s what you’ve created, you know, the transformation and you march up the,
01:28:09 it’s called the neuro axis as you go from the periphery up into the cortex. And we know that,
01:28:16 and I know Lisa Feldman Barrett, or is it Barrett Feldman? Barrett Feldman, excuse me,
01:28:25 Lisa, that talked a lot about this, that, you know, birds can do sophisticated things and whatnot as
01:28:30 well, but humans, there’s a strong, what we call cephalization. A lot of the processing
01:28:35 has moved up into the cortex and out of these subcortical areas, but it happens nonetheless.
01:28:39 And so as long as you know the transformations, you are in a perfect place to build machines
01:28:44 or add machines to the brain that exactly mimic what the brain wants to do, which is take events
01:28:51 in the environment and turn them into internal firing of neurons.
01:28:55 So the mastery of the brain can happen at their early level. You know, another perspective of it
01:28:59 is you saying this means that humans aren’t that special. If we look at the evolutionary time scale,
01:29:07 the leap to intelligence is not that special. So like the extra layers of abstraction
01:29:12 isn’t where most of the magic happens of intelligence, which gives me hope that maybe,
01:29:18 if that’s true, that means the evolution of intelligence is not that rare of an event.
01:29:23 I certainly hope not.
01:29:24 Oh, so you hope there’s…
01:29:27 I hope there are other forms of intelligence. I mean, I think what humans are really good at,
01:29:32 and here I want to be clear that this is not a formal model, but what humans are really good at
01:29:38 is taking that plasma barbell that we were talking about earlier and not just using it for analysis
01:29:45 of space, like the intermediate environment, but also using historical information. Like I can read
01:29:50 a book today about the history of medicine. I happen to be doing that lately for some stuff
01:29:54 I’m researching and I can take that information and if I want, I can inject it into my plans for
01:29:58 the future. Other animals don’t seem to do that over the same time scales that we do. Now,
01:30:06 it may be that the chipmunks are all hiding little notebooks everywhere in the form of little dirt
01:30:11 castles or something that we don’t understand. I mean, the waggle dance of the bee is in the most
01:30:15 famous example. Bees come back to the hive, they orient relative to the honeycomb and they waggle.
01:30:21 There’s a guy down in Australia named Serena Vasson who studied this. It’s really interesting.
01:30:25 No one really understands it except he understands it best. The bee waggles in a couple of ways
01:30:32 relative to the orientation of the honeycomb and then all the other bees see that it’s visual and
01:30:38 they go out and they know the exact coordinate system to get to the source of whatever it was,
01:30:43 the food and bring it back. He’s done it where they isolate the bees, he’s changed the visual
01:30:47 flight environment, all this stuff. They are communicating and they’re communicating something
01:30:52 about something they saw recently, but it doesn’t extend over very long periods of time.
01:30:57 The same way that you and I can both read a book or you can recommend something to me and then we
01:31:02 could converge on a set of ideas later. And in fairness, because she was the one that said it
01:31:07 and I didn’t and I hadn’t even thought of it, when you talk to Lisa on your podcast,
01:31:12 she brought up something beautiful, which is that it never really occurred to me and I was
01:31:18 sort of embarrassed that it hadn’t, but it’s really beautiful and brilliant, which is that
01:31:23 we don’t just encode senses in the form of like color and light and sound waves and taste,
01:31:28 but ideas become a form of sensory mapping. And that’s where the really, really cool and
01:31:35 exciting stuff is, but we just don’t understand what the receptive fields are for ideas. What’s
01:31:38 an idea receptive field? And how they’re communicated
01:31:43 between humans because we seem to be able to encode those ideas in some kind of way.
01:31:49 You’d be able to encode those ideas in some kind of way. Yes, it’s taking all the raw information
01:31:54 and the internal physical states, that sensory information put into this concept blob that we
01:32:01 cut in the store and then we’re able to communicate that. Yeah, your abstractions are different than
01:32:04 mine. I actually think the comment section on social media is a beautiful example of where
01:32:10 the abstractions are different for different people. So much of the misunderstanding of the
01:32:15 world is because of these idea receptive fields, they’re not the same. Whereas I can look at a
01:32:22 photoreceptor neuron or olfactory neuron or a V1 neuron, and I am certain, I would bet my life
01:32:28 that yours look and respond exactly the same way that Lisa’s do and mine do. But once you get
01:32:34 beyond there, it gets tricky. And so when you say something or I say something and somebody gets
01:32:39 upset about it or even happy about it, their concept of that might be quite a bit different.
01:32:45 They don’t really know what you mean. They only know what it means to them.
01:32:50 Yeah. So from a neural link perspective, it makes sense to optimize the control and the
01:32:55 augmentation of the more primitive circuitry. So like the stuff that is closer to the raw sensory
01:33:03 information. Go deeper. If they, I think, go deeper into the brain. And to be fair,
01:33:08 so Matt McDougall, who’s a neurosurgeon at Neuralink and also a clinical nurse, a great guy,
01:33:13 brilliant. They have amazing people. I have to give it to them. They’ve been very cryptic in
01:33:18 recent years. Their website was just like nothing there. They really know how to do things with
01:33:23 style. And they’ve upset a lot of people, but that’s good too. But Matt is there. I know Matt,
01:33:30 he actually came up through my lab at Stanford, although he was a neurosurgery resume. He spent
01:33:34 time in our lab. He actually came out on the shark dive and did great white shark diving with my lab
01:33:38 to collect the VR that we use in our fear stuff. I’ve talked to Matt and I think he and other folks
01:33:44 there are hungry for the deeper brain structures. The problem is that damn vasculature, all that
01:33:49 blood supply. It’s not trivial to get through and down into the brain without damaging the
01:33:56 vasculature in the neocortex, which is on the outer crust. But once you start getting into
01:33:59 the thalamus and closer to some of the main arterial sources, you really risk getting massive
01:34:04 bleeds. And so it’s an issue that can be worked out. It just is hard. Maybe it’d be nice to educate.
01:34:12 I’m sure my ignorance. So the smart stuff is on the surface. So I didn’t realize this. I didn’t
01:34:19 quite realize because you keep saying deep. Yeah. So like the early stages are deep.
01:34:26 Yeah. So in actual, physically in the brain. Yeah. So the way that, of course you got your
01:34:33 deep brain structures, they’re involved in breathing and heart rate and kind of lizard
01:34:36 brain stuff. And then on top of that, this is the model of the brain that no one really subscribes
01:34:42 to anymore, but anatomically it works. And then on top in mammals. And then on top of that,
01:34:46 you have the limbic structures, which gate sensory information and decide whether or not
01:34:50 you’re going to listen to something more than you’re going to look at it, or you’re going to
01:34:53 split your attention to both kind of sensory allocation stuff. And then the neocortex is on
01:34:59 the outside. And that is where you get a lot of this abstraction stuff. And now not all cortical
01:35:06 areas are doing abstraction. Some like visual area one, auditory area one, they’re just doing
01:35:11 concrete representations. But as you get into the higher order stuff, that when you start hearing
01:35:17 names like inferoparietal cortex, and when you start hearing multiple names in the same, then
01:35:22 you’re talking about higher order areas. But actually there’s an important experiment that
01:35:28 drives a lot of what people want to do with brain machine interface. And that’s the work of Bill
01:35:33 Newsome, who is at Stanford and Tony Movshin, who runs the Center for Neuroscience at NYU.
01:35:38 This is a wild experiment. And I think it might freak a few people out if they really think about
01:35:42 it too deeply. But anyway, here it goes. There’s an area called MT in the cortex. And if I showed
01:35:50 you a bunch of dots all moving up, and this is what Tony and Bill and some of the other people
01:35:57 in that lab did way back when, is they show a bunch of dots moving up. Somewhere in MT,
01:36:02 there’s some neurons that respond. They fire when the neurons move up. And then what they did is
01:36:06 they started varying the coherence of that motion. So they made it so only 50% of the dots moved up
01:36:10 and the rest move randomly. And that neuron fires a little less. And eventually it’s random and that
01:36:15 neuron stops firing because it’s just kind of dots moving everywhere. It’s awesome. And there’s a
01:36:19 systematic map so that other neurons are responding and things moving down and other things responding
01:36:24 left and other things moving right. Okay. So there’s a map of direction space. Okay, well,
01:36:29 that’s great. You could lesion MT, animals lose the ability to do these kind of coherence
01:36:34 discrimination or direction discrimination. But the amazing experiment, the one that just
01:36:40 is kind of eerie is that they lowered a stimulating electrode into MT, found a neuron
01:36:46 that responds to when dots go up, but then they silence that neuron. And sure enough,
01:36:54 the animal doesn’t recognize the neurons are going up and then they move the dots down.
01:37:01 They stimulate the neuron that responds to things moving up and the animal responds because it can’t
01:37:08 speak. It responds by doing a lever press, which says the dots are moving up. So in other words,
01:37:13 the sensory, the dots are moving down in reality on the computer screen. They’re stimulating the
01:37:19 neuron that responds to dots moving up. And the perception of the animal is that dots are moving
01:37:25 up, which tells you that your perception of external reality absolutely has to be a neuronal
01:37:32 abstraction. It is not tacked to the movement of the dots in any absolute way. Your perception
01:37:39 of the outside world depends entirely on the activation patterns of neurons in the brain.
01:37:45 And you can hear that and say, well, duh, because if I stimulate the stretch reflex and you kick or
01:37:51 something or whatever, the knee reflex and you kick, of course, there’s a neuron that triggers
01:37:55 that, but it didn’t have to be that way. Because A, the animal had prior experience, B, you’re way
01:38:01 up in the higher order cortical areas. What this means is that, and I generally try and avoid
01:38:08 conversations about this kind of thing, but what this means is that we are constructing our reality
01:38:14 with this space time firing the zeros and ones. And it doesn’t have to have anything to do with
01:38:20 the actual reality. And the animal or person can be absolutely convinced that that’s what’s
01:38:25 happening. Are you familiar with the work of Donald Hoffman? So he makes an evolutionary argument
01:38:35 that’s not important of that. We, our brains are completely detached from reality in the sense that
01:38:47 he makes a radical case that we have no idea what physical reality is. And in fact,
01:38:54 it’s drastically different than what we think it is. So he goes, that’s scary. So he doesn’t say
01:39:02 like there’s just, cause you’re kind of implying there’s a gap. There might be a gap with constructing
01:39:08 an illusion and then maybe using communication to maybe create a consistency that’s sufficient for
01:39:17 human collaboration or whatever, or mammal, you know, just maybe even just life forms constructing
01:39:23 a consistent reality that’s maybe detached. I mean, that’s really cool that neurons are constructing
01:39:28 that, like that you can prove that this is when neuroscience at its best vision science. But he
01:39:34 says that like our brain is actually just lost its shit on the, on the, on the path of evolution to
01:39:43 where we’re normal. We’re just playing games with each other in constructing realities that allow
01:39:49 our survival. But it’s, it’s, it’s completely detached from physical reality. We’re missing a
01:39:54 lot. We’re missing like most of it, if not all of it. Well, this was, it’s, it’s fascinating because
01:40:04 I just saw the Oliver Sacks documentary. There’s a new documentary out about his life. And there’s
01:40:09 this one part where he’s like, I’ve spent part of my life trying to imagine what it would like to be,
01:40:14 be, to be a bat or something, to see the world through the life, the sensory apparatus of a bat.
01:40:21 And he did this with his, these patients that were locked into these horrible syndromes that
01:40:26 to pull out some of the, the beauty of their experience as well, not just communicate the
01:40:31 suffering, although the suffering too. And as I was listening to him talk about this,
01:40:35 I started to realize it’s like, well, what, you know, like they’re these mantis shrimps that can
01:40:40 see 60 shades of pink or something. And they, they see this stuff all the time and animals,
01:40:44 they can see UV light. Every time I learn about an animal that can sense other things in the
01:40:50 environment that I can’t like heat sensing, well, not, I don’t crave that experience the same way
01:40:55 Sacks talked about craving that experience, but it does throw another penny in the jar for what
01:41:00 you’re saying, which is that it could be that most, if not all of what I perceive and believe
01:41:07 is just a neural fabrication and that for better, for worse, we all agree on enough
01:41:14 of the same neural fabrications in the same time and place that we’re able to function.
01:41:18 Not only that, but we agree with the things that are trying to eat us
01:41:23 enough to where we don’t, they don’t eat us. Meaning like that it’s not just us humans,
01:41:30 you know, right?
01:41:30 I see. Because it’s interactive.
01:41:32 It’s interactive. So like, so like now I think it’s a really nice thought experiment.
01:41:40 I think because Donald really frames it in a scientific, like he makes a hard,
01:41:47 like as hard as our discussion has been now, he makes a hard scientific case that
01:41:53 we don’t know shit about reality. I think that’s a little bit hardcore, but I think it’s,
01:42:00 I think it’s hardcore, but I think it’s a good thought experiment that kind of cleanses the
01:42:06 palette of the confidence we might have about, because we are operating in this abstraction
01:42:13 space, you know, and, you know, the sensory space, it might be something very different.
01:42:21 And it’s kind of interesting to think about if you start to go into the realm of Neuralink or
01:42:27 start to talk about just everything that you’ve been talking about with dream states and
01:42:31 psychedelics and stuff like that, which part of the, which layer can we control and play
01:42:36 around with to maybe look into a different slice of reality?
01:42:40 I just got to do the experiment. The key is to just do the experiment in the most ethical way
01:42:47 possible. You just, I mean, that’s the beauty of experiments. This is why, you know, there’s
01:42:53 wonderful theoretical neuroscience happening now to make predictions. But that’s why experimental
01:42:59 science is so wonderful. You can go into the laboratory and poke around in there and be a
01:43:03 brain explorer and listen to and write to neurons. And when you do that, you get answers. You don’t
01:43:09 always get the answers you want, but that’s, you know, that’s the beauty of it. When you were
01:43:14 saying this thing about reality and the Donald Hoffman model, I was thinking about children,
01:43:20 you know, like when I have an older sister, she’s very sane. But when she was a kid, she had an
01:43:28 imaginary friend and she would play with this imaginary friend. And it had, there was this
01:43:33 whole, there was a consistency. This friend was like, it was Larry lived in a purple house.
01:43:37 Larry was a girl. It was like all this stuff that a child, a young child wouldn’t have any issue
01:43:42 with. And then one day she announced that Larry had died. Right. And it wasn’t traumatic or
01:43:46 traumatic and that was it. And she just stopped. And I always wonder what that neuro developmental
01:43:51 event was that kept her out of a psychiatric ward had she kept that imaginary friend. But it’s also,
01:44:02 there was something kind of sad to it. I think the way it was told to me, cause I’m the younger
01:44:06 brother, I didn’t, I wasn’t around for that. But my, my dad told me that, you know, there was a
01:44:10 kind of a sadness because it was this beautiful reality that had been constructed. And so we kind
01:44:14 of won. I wonder as you’re telling me this, whether or not, you know, as adults, we try and
01:44:19 create as much reality for children as we can so that they can make predictions and feel safe
01:44:24 because the ability to make predictions is a lot of what keeps our autonomic arousal in check. I
01:44:28 mean, we go to sleep every night and we give up total control and that should frighten us deeply.
01:44:33 But you know, unfortunately, autonomic arousal, the yanks us down under and we don’t negotiate
01:44:38 too much. So you sleep sooner or later. I don’t know. I was a little worried. We get into
01:44:44 discussions about the nature of reality because I’m I it’s interesting in the laboratory. I’m a
01:44:49 very much like, what’s the experiment? What would the, you know, what’s the analysis going to look
01:44:53 like? What mutant mouse are we going to use? What, what, what experience are we going to put
01:44:57 someone through? But I think it’s wonderful that in 2020, we can finally have discussions about
01:45:02 this stuff and look, kind of peek around the corner and say, well, Neuralink and people,
01:45:08 others who are doing similar things are going to figure it out. They’re going to,
01:45:13 the answers will show up and we just have to be open to interpretation.
01:45:17 Do you think there could be an experiment centered around consciousness? I mean,
01:45:21 you’re plugged into the neuroscience community. I think for the longest time, the quote unquote
01:45:27 C word was totally not, was almost anti scientific, but now more and more people are
01:45:33 talking about consciousness. Elon is talking about consciousness. AI folks are talking about
01:45:38 consciousness. It’s, it’s still nobody knows anything, but it feels like a legitimate domain
01:45:46 of inquiry. That’s hungry for a real experiment. So I have fortunately three short answers to
01:45:57 this. The first one is, I’m not, I’m not particularly succinct. I agree that the joke
01:46:05 I always tell is there are two things you never want to say to a scientist. One is what do you
01:46:10 do? And the second one is take as much time as you need. And you definitely don’t want to say
01:46:14 them in the same sentence. I have three short answers to it. So there’s a, there’s a cynical
01:46:21 answer kind of, and it’s not one I enjoy giving, which is that if you look into the seventies and
01:46:29 eight back at the 1970s and 1980s, and even into the early two thousands, there were some very
01:46:35 dynamic, very impressive speakers who are very smart in the field of neuroscience and related
01:46:42 fields who thought hard about the consciousness problem and fell in love with the problem,
01:46:48 but overlook the fact that the technology wasn’t there. So I admire them for falling in love with
01:46:58 the problem, but they gleaned tremendous taxpayer resources essentially for nothing. And these
01:47:06 people know who they are. Some of them are alive. Some of them aren’t. I’m not referring to Francis
01:47:10 Crick, who was brilliant by the way, and thought the claustrum was involved in consciousness,
01:47:13 which I think is a great idea. It’s this obscure structure that no one’s really studied. People
01:47:17 are now starting to study it. So I think Francis was brilliant and wonderful, but there it, you
01:47:22 know, there were books written about it. It makes for great television stuff and thought
01:47:30 around the table or after a couple of glasses of wine or whatever. It’s an important problem
01:47:35 nonetheless. And so I think, I do think the consciousness, the issue is it’s not operationally
01:47:41 defined, right? That psychologists are much smarter than a lot of hard scientists in that
01:47:48 for the following reason, they put operational definitions. They know that psychology, if we’re
01:47:54 talking about motivation, for instance, they know they need to put operational definitions on that
01:47:58 so that two laboratories can know they’re studying the same thing. The problem with consciousness is
01:48:02 no one can agree on what that is. And this was a problem for attention when I was coming up. So in
01:48:08 the early two thousands, people would argue, what is attention? Is it spatial attention,
01:48:11 auditory attention? Is it, and finally people were like, you know what, we agree.
01:48:16 Have they agreed on that one?
01:48:17 Sort of.
01:48:17 I remember hearing people scream about attention.
01:48:21 Right. They couldn’t even agree on attention. So I was coming up as a young graduate student,
01:48:24 I’m thinking like, I’m definitely not going to work on attention and I’m definitely not
01:48:28 going to work on consciousness. And I wanted something that I could solve or figure out.
01:48:33 I want to be able to see the circuit or the neurons. I want to be able to hear it on the
01:48:37 audio. I want to record from it. And then I want to do gain a function and loss a function,
01:48:41 take it away, see something change, put it back, see something change in a systematic way.
01:48:46 And that takes you down into the depths of some stuff that’s pretty plug and chug, you know,
01:48:51 but you know, I’ll borrow from something in the military because I’m fortunate to do some work
01:48:56 with units from special operations and they have beautiful language around things because their
01:49:00 world is not abstract. And they talk about three meter targets, 10 meter targets and 100 meter
01:49:04 targets. And it’s not an issue of picking the 100 meter target because it’s more beautiful
01:49:09 or because it’s more interesting. If you don’t take down the three meter targets and the 10
01:49:12 meter targets first, you’re dead. So that’s, I think scientists could pay to, you know, adopt
01:49:19 a more kind of military thinking in that, in that sense. The other thing that is really important is
01:49:26 that just because somebody conceived of something and can talk about it beautifully and can glean a
01:49:30 lot of resources for it, doesn’t mean that it’s led anywhere. So this isn’t just true of the
01:49:37 consciousness issue. And I don’t want to sound cynical, but I could pull up some names of
01:49:41 molecules that occupied hundreds of articles in the very premier journals that then were later
01:49:47 discovered to be totally moot for that process. And biotech companies folded everyone in the lab
01:49:54 pivots and starts doing something different with that molecule. And nobody talks about it because
01:49:59 as long as you’re in the game, we have this thing called anonymous peer review. You can’t afford to
01:50:03 piss off anybody too much, unless you have some other funding stream. And I have avoided battles
01:50:09 most of my career, but I pay attention to all of it. And I’ve watched this and I don’t think it’s
01:50:14 ego driven. I think it’s that people fall in love with an idea. I don’t think there’s any,
01:50:18 there’s not enough money in science for people to sit back there rubbing their hands together,
01:50:22 you know, the beauty of what Neuralink and Elon and team, cause obviously he’s very impressive,
01:50:28 but the team as a whole is really what gives me great confidence in their mission is that he’s
01:50:34 already got enough money. So it can’t be about that. He doesn’t seem to need it at a level of,
01:50:41 I don’t know him, but it doesn’t, he doesn’t seem to need it at a kind of an ego level or something.
01:50:46 I think it’s driven by genuine curiosity and the team that he’s assembled include people that are
01:50:52 very kind of abstract neuro neocortex, space time coding people. There are people like Matt,
01:50:58 who is a neurosurgeon. You can’t, I mean, you know, you can’t BS neurosurgery. Failures in
01:51:05 neurosurgery are not tolerated. So you have to be very good to exceptional to even get through the
01:51:10 gate. And he’s exceptional. And then they’ve got people like Dan Adams, who was at UCSF for a long
01:51:15 time as a good friend and a known him for years, who is very concrete studied the vasculature in
01:51:20 the eye and how it maps to the vasculature and cortex. When you get a team like that together,
01:51:25 you’re going to have dissenters. You’re going to have people that are high level thinkers,
01:51:29 people that are coders. When you get a team like that, it no longer looks like an academic laboratory
01:51:34 or even a field in science. And so I think they’re going to solve some really hard problems.
01:51:40 And again, I’m not here. They don’t, you know, I have nothing at stake with them, but I think
01:51:47 that’s the solution. You need a bunch of people who don’t need first author papers,
01:51:52 who don’t need to complete their PhD, who aren’t relying on outside funding, who have a clear
01:51:56 mission. And you have a bunch of people who are basically will adapt to solve the problem.
01:52:03 I like the analogy of the three meter target and the a hundred meter target.
01:52:07 So the folks at Neuralink are basically many of them are some of the best people in the world at
01:52:11 the three meter target. Like you mentioned Matt and neurosurgery, like they’re solving real problems.
01:52:17 There’s no BS, philosophical smokes and weed and look back and look at the stars. But
01:52:26 so both on Elon and because I think like this, I think it’s really important to think about
01:52:31 the hundred meter and the hundred meter is not even a hundred meter, but like
01:52:36 like the stuff behind the hill that’s too far away, which is where I put consciousness. Maybe
01:52:50 I tend to believe that consciousness can be engineered. I mean, part of the reason,
01:52:58 part of the business I want to build leverages that idea that consciousness is a lot simpler
01:53:04 than we’ve been talking about. Well, if someone can simplify the problem,
01:53:10 right, that will be wonderful. I mean, the reason we can talk about something as abstract as face
01:53:14 representations, infusive form face area is because Nancy Kanwisher had the brilliance
01:53:19 to tie it to the kind of lower level statistics of visual scenes. It wasn’t because she was like,
01:53:26 oh, I bet it’s there. That wouldn’t have been interesting. So people like her understand how
01:53:31 to bridge that gap and they put a tractable definition. So I, so I just, I, that’s what
01:53:38 I’m begging for in science is a tractable definition. This is what, but I want people
01:53:44 to sit in the, I want people who are really uncomfortable with woo woo, like consciousness,
01:53:50 like high level stuff to sit in that topic and sit uncomfortably because it forces them
01:53:55 to then try to ground and simplify it into something that’s concrete because too many
01:54:00 people are just uncomfortable to sit in the consciousness room because there’s no definitions.
01:54:05 It’s like attention or, or intelligence in the artificial intelligence community. But the reality
01:54:11 is it’s easy to avoid that room altogether, which is what, I mean, there’s analogies to everything
01:54:16 you’ve said with the artificial intelligence community with Minsky and even Alan Turing that
01:54:22 talked about intelligence a lot. And then they drew a lot of funding and then it crashed because
01:54:27 they really didn’t do anything with it. And it was a lot of force of personality and so on. But that
01:54:31 doesn’t mean the topic of the Turing test and intelligence isn’t something we should sit on
01:54:38 and think like, think like, what is, well, first of all, Turing actually attempted this with the
01:54:44 Turing test. He tried to make concrete this very question of intelligence. It doesn’t mean that
01:54:49 we shouldn’t linger on it. And we shouldn’t forget that ultimately that is what our efforts are all
01:54:58 about in the artificial intelligence community. And in the people, whether it’s neuroscience or
01:55:04 whatever bigger umbrella you want to use for understanding the mind, the goal is not just
01:55:11 about understanding layer two or three of the vision. It’s, it’s to understand consciousness
01:55:18 and intelligence and maybe create it or just all the possible biggest questions of our universe.
01:55:25 That’s, that’s ultimately the dream. Absolutely. And I think what I really
01:55:30 appreciate about what you’re saying is that everybody, whether or not they’re working on a
01:55:34 kind of a low level synapse, that’s like a reflex and the musculature or something very high level
01:55:39 abstract can benefit from looking at those who prefer three, you know, everyone’s going after a
01:55:45 three meter, 10 meter and a hundred meter targets in some sense, but to be able to tolerate the
01:55:50 discomfort of being in a conversation where there are real answers, where the zeros and ones are,
01:55:56 are known zeros and ones are those, the equivalent of that in the nervous system.
01:56:00 And also, as you said, for the people that are very much like, Oh, I can only trust what I can
01:56:05 see and touch. Those people need to put themselves into the discomfort of the high level conversation
01:56:10 because what’s missing is conversation and conceptualization of things at multiple levels.
01:56:19 I think one of the, this is, um, I don’t gripe about my life’s been fortunate. We’ve been funded
01:56:24 from the start and we’ve been happy, um, in that, in that regard and lucky, and we’re grateful for
01:56:29 that. But I think one of the challenges of research being so expensive is that there isn’t a lot of
01:56:37 time, especially nowadays for people to just convene around a topic because there’s so much
01:56:43 emphasis on productivity. Um, and so there, there are actually, believe it or not, there aren’t that
01:56:48 many concepts, formal concepts in neuroscience right now. The last 10 years has been this huge
01:56:54 influx of tools. And so people in neural circuits and probing around and connect homes, it’s been
01:56:59 wonderful, but w you know, 10, 20 years ago, when the consciousness stuff was more prominent,
01:57:05 the C word, as you said, um, what was good about that time is that people would go to meetings and
01:57:11 actually discuss ideas and models. Now it’s sort of like, it’s sort of like demonstration day at
01:57:18 the school science fair where everyone’s got their thing and some stuff is cooler than others.
01:57:22 But, um, I think we’re going to see a shift. I’m grateful that we have so many computer scientists
01:57:29 and theoreticians and, um, or theorists, I think they call themselves. Um, and somebody tell me
01:57:36 what the difference is someday. Um, and you know, psychology and even dare I say philosophy,
01:57:43 you know, these things are starting to converge. We, you know, neuroscience that the name
01:57:46 neuroscience, there wasn’t even such a thing when I started graduate school or as a postdoc,
01:57:50 it was neurophysiology or you were a neuro anatomist or what now every it’s sort of
01:57:56 everybody’s invited and that’s beautiful. That means that something’s useful is going to come
01:58:00 of all this. And there’s also tremendous work of course happening on it for the treatment of disease
01:58:04 and we shouldn’t overlook that. That’s where, you know, endings, you know, eliminating,
01:58:08 reducing suffering is also a huge initiative in neuroscience. So there’s a lot of beauty in the
01:58:13 field, but the consciousness thing continues to be a, uh, it’s like an exotic bird. It’s like,
01:58:20 no one really quite knows how to handle it and it dies very easily.
01:58:24 Well, yeah, I think also from the AI perspective, I, uh, so I view the brain as less sacred. Uh,
01:58:36 I think from a neuroscience perspective, you’re a little bit more sensitive to BS,
01:58:42 like BS narratives about the brain or whatever. I’m a little bit more, uh, comfortable with just
01:58:49 poetic BS about the brain as long as it helps engineer intelligence systems. Well, you know
01:58:54 what I mean? Well, and I have to, you know, I confess, um, ignorance when it comes to,
01:59:00 you know, most things about coding and I’m, I’m have some quantitative ability,
01:59:04 but I don’t have strong quantitative leanings. And so I know my limitations too. And so I,
01:59:09 I think the next generation coming up, you know, a lot of the students at Stanford are really
01:59:13 interested in quantitative models and theory and AI. And I remember when I was coming up, um,
01:59:20 a lot of the people who were doing work ahead of me, I kind of rolled my eyes at some of the stuff
01:59:23 they were doing, um, including some of their personalities, although I have many great,
01:59:27 um, senior colleagues, uh, everywhere in the world. So it’s the way of the world. So nobody
01:59:32 knows what it’s like to be a, you know, a young graduate student in 2020, except the young graduate
01:59:36 students. So I, I know what I, I’m, I know there are a lot of things I don’t know. And, um, in
01:59:42 addition to wanting to do a lot of public education, increased scientific literacy and
01:59:45 neuroscientific thinking, et cetera, a big goal of mine is to try and at least pave the way so that
01:59:51 these really brilliant and forward thinking, um, younger scientists can make the biggest
01:59:56 possible dent and make what will eventually be all us old guys and gals look stupid. I mean,
02:00:01 that’s, that’s what we were all trying to do. That’s what we were trying to do. So yeah.
02:00:05 Yeah. So from the highest possible topic of consciousness to the, to the lowest level,
02:00:14 uh, topic of David Goggins, uh, let’s go.
02:00:18 I don’t know if it’s low, low level. He’s high performance.
02:00:22 High performance, but like low, like there’s no, I don’t think David has any time for philosophy.
02:00:30 Let’s just put it this way. Uh,
02:00:32 well, it’s, I mean, I think we can tack it to what we were just saying in a, in a,
02:00:36 in a meaningful way, which is whatever goes on in that abstraction part of the brain,
02:00:43 he’s figured, you know, he’s figured out how to dig down in whatever the limbic friction.
02:00:48 Yeah.
02:00:49 He’s figured out how to grab ahold of that,
02:00:52 scruff it and send it in the direction that he’s decided it needs to go. And what’s wild is that
02:00:59 he’s, what we’re talking about is him doing that to himself, right? He’s, it’s like he’s scruffing
02:01:04 himself and directing himself in a particular direction and sending himself down that trajectory.
02:01:11 And he, what’s beautiful is that he acknowledges that that process is not pretty. It doesn’t feel
02:01:19 good. It’s kind of horrible at every level, but he’s created this rewarding element to it. And I
02:01:27 think that’s, what’s so it, it’s so admirable. And it’s what so many people crave, which is
02:01:33 regulation of the self at that level.
02:01:36 And he practices, I mean, there’s a ritual to it. There’s a, every single day, like no exceptions.
02:01:44 There’s a practice aspect to the suffering that he goes through.
02:01:48 It’s principled suffering.
02:01:50 Principled suffering.
02:01:51 It is.
02:01:52 I mean, I just, I mean, I admire all aspects of it, including him and his girlfriend slash wife.
02:01:58 I’m not sure. She’ll probably know this.
02:01:59 I don’t know.
02:01:59 Fiance.
02:02:00 Wonderful person.
02:02:01 I’m not asking him.
02:02:02 No, no. We’ve only communicated, I’ve only communicated with her by text about some stuff
02:02:08 I was asking David, but yeah, they clearly formed a powerful team.
02:02:14 And it’s a beautiful thing to see people working in that kind of synergy.
02:02:18 And it’s inspiring to me, same as with Elon, that a guy like David Goggins can find love.
02:02:25 That you find a thing that works, which gives me hope that like whatever,
02:02:30 whatever flavor of crazy I am, you can always find another thing that works with that.
02:02:37 But I, I’ve had the, so maybe let’s trade Goggins stories.
02:02:44 Uh, you from a neuroscience perspective, me from a, uh, self inflicted pain perspective,
02:02:50 I somehow found myself in communication with David about some challenges that I was undergoing.
02:03:01 One of which is we were communicating every single day, email, phone,
02:03:06 about a particular 30 day challenge that I did.
02:03:09 That stretched for longer of, uh, pushups and pullups.
02:03:12 And you made a call out on social media.
02:03:14 Yeah. Social media was dumb.
02:03:16 Actually, I think that was the point I, I knew of you before,
02:03:19 but that’s where I started tracking some of what you were doing with these physical challenges.
02:03:22 And I, um, well, no, I think I actually, I don’t often comment on people’s stuff,
02:03:28 but I think I commented something like, uh, neuroplasticity loves a nonnegotiable rule.
02:03:33 No, I said a nonnegotiable contract because at the point where neuroplasticity really loves a
02:03:40 nonnegotiable contract, because, you know, and I’ve said this before, so forgive me,
02:03:45 but you know, the brain is doing analysis of duration, path and outcome.
02:03:49 And that’s a lot of work for the brain. And the more that it can pass off duration,
02:03:54 path and outcome to just reflex, the more energy and it can allocate to other things.
02:04:00 So if you decide there’s no negotiation about how many pushups, how far I’m going to run,
02:04:06 how many days, how many pullups, et cetera, you actually have more energy for pushups,
02:04:10 running and pullups.
02:04:11 And when you say neuroplasticity, you mean like the brain, once the decision is made,
02:04:15 it’ll start rewiring stuff to, to make sure that this, we can actually make this happen.
02:04:20 That’s right. I mean, so much of what we do is reflexive at the level of just
02:04:23 core circuitry, breathing, heart rate, all that, that boring stuff, digestion.
02:04:27 But then there’s a lot of reflexive stuff, like how you drink out of a mug of coffee
02:04:31 that’s reflexive too, but that you had to learn at some point in your life earlier
02:04:35 when you were very little, analyzing duration, path and outcome.
02:04:38 And that involves a lot of top down processing with the prefrontal cortex,
02:04:42 but through plasticity mechanisms, you now do it. So when you take on a challenge,
02:04:47 provided that you understand the core mechanics of how to run pushups and pullups and whatever
02:04:52 else you decided to do, once you set the number and the duration and all that,
02:04:57 then you, all you have to do is just go, but people get caught in that tide pool of just,
02:05:03 well, do I really have to do it? How do I not do that? What if I get injured? What if I,
02:05:06 you know, can I sneak a this or that, you know? And that’s work. And to some extent,
02:05:12 I look, I not David Goggins, obviously, nor, nor do I claim to understand his process
02:05:20 partially, you know, but maybe a little bit, which is that it’s clear that by making the decision,
02:05:26 there’s more resources to devote to the effort of the actual execution.
02:05:30 Well, that’s a really, like what you’re saying was not a lesson that was obvious to me. And
02:05:35 it’s still not obvious. It’s something I really work at, which is there is always an option to
02:05:40 quit. And I mean, that’s something I really struggle with. I mean, I’ve quit some things
02:05:47 in my life, sick, stupid stuff. And, uh, one lesson I’ve learned is if you quit once,
02:05:57 it opens the door that like, it’s really valuable to trick your brain into thinking
02:06:07 that you’re, you’re going to have to die before you quit. Like it’s actually really convenient.
02:06:12 So actually what you’re saying is very profound, but you shouldn’t intellectualize it. Like
02:06:19 it took me time to develop like psychologically in ways that I think it would be another
02:06:27 conversation, cause I’m not sure how to put it into words, but it’s really tough on me to, uh,
02:06:32 to do certain parts of that challenge, which is a huge, you know, is a huge output. The number,
02:06:38 the number that I was, I thought it would be, the number would be hard, but it’s not. It’s
02:06:42 the entirety of it. Uh, especially in the early days was just spending a kind of embarrassed to
02:06:52 say how many hours this took. So I didn’t say publicly how many hours, cause people,
02:06:58 I knew people would be like, don’t you, aren’t you supposed to do other stuff?
02:07:03 Well, it’s, um, again, I don’t want to speculate too much, but occasionally David has said this
02:07:08 publicly where people will be like, don’t you sleep or something. And his process used to just
02:07:13 be that he would just block delete, you know, like gone, but it’s, it’s actually, um, it’s,
02:07:18 it’s a super interesting topic. And because self control and directing our actions and the role of
02:07:26 emotion and quitting, these are, these are vital to the human experience and they’re vital to
02:07:32 performing well at anything. And at a high, obviously at a super high level, being able to
02:07:37 understand this about the self is crucial. Um, so I have a friend who was also in the teams.
02:07:44 His name is Pat Dossett. He did nine years in the seal teams. Um, and in a similar way,
02:07:49 there’s, there’s a lore about him among team guys, um, because of a kind of funny challenge he gave
02:07:55 himself, which was, so he and I swim together, although he swims for a long time. Um, and he
02:08:00 doesn’t swim together, although he swims further up front than I do. Um, and he’s very patient. Um,
02:08:06 but you know, he was on a, uh, he was assigned when he was in the teams to a position that gave
02:08:13 him a little more time behind a desk than he wanted. And it’s not as much time out out and
02:08:17 deployments, although he did deployments. Um, so he didn’t know what to do at that time,
02:08:21 but he thought about it and he asked himself, what, what does he hate the most? And it turns
02:08:26 out the thing that he hated doing the most was bear crawls, you know, walking on your hands and
02:08:30 so he decided to bear crawl for a mile for time. So he was bear crawling a mile a day.
02:08:34 Right. And I thought that was an interesting example that he gave because, you know, like
02:08:38 why pick the thing you hate the most? And I think it maps right back to limbic friction.
02:08:44 It’s the thing that creates the most limbic friction. And so if you can overcome that,
02:08:48 then there’s carry over. And I think the notion of carry over has been talked about psychologically
02:08:53 and in kind of in the self help space, like, Oh, if you run a marathon, it’s going to help you in
02:08:56 other areas of life, but will it really will it? Well, I think it depends on whether or not there’s
02:09:00 a lot of limbic friction because if there is what you’re exercising is not a circuit for bear crawls
02:09:07 or a circuit for pull ups. What you’re doing is you’re exercising a circuit for top down control
02:09:12 and that circuit was not designed to be for bear crawls or pull ups or coding
02:09:17 or waking up in the middle of the night to do something hard. That circuit was designed to
02:09:22 override limbic friction. And so neural circuits were designed to generalize, right? The stress
02:09:28 response to an incoming threat that’s a physical threat was designed to feel the same way and be
02:09:34 the same response internally as the threat to an impending exam or divorce or marriage or whatever
02:09:40 it is that’s stressing somebody out. And so neural circuits are not designed to be for one particular
02:09:46 action or purpose. So if you can, as you did, if you can train up top down control under conditions
02:09:52 of the highest limbic friction that when the desire to quit is at its utmost, either because
02:09:58 of fatigue or hyper arousal, being too stressed or too tired, you’re learning how to engage a
02:10:05 circuit and that circuit is forever with you. And if you don’t engage it, it sits there, but it’s
02:10:12 atrophied. It’s like a plant that doesn’t get any water. And a lot of this has been discussed in
02:10:17 self help and growth mindset and all these kinds of ideas that circle the internet and social media.
02:10:23 But when you start to think about how they map to neural circuits, I think there’s some utility
02:10:26 because what it means is that the limbic friction that you’ll experience in, I don’t know, maybe
02:10:31 some future relationship to something or someone, it’s a category of neural processing that should
02:10:38 immediately click into place. It’s just like the limbic friction you experienced trying to engage
02:10:43 in the God knows how many pushups, pull ups and running runs you were doing.
02:10:49 25,000. Who’s counting?
02:10:52 So folks, if Lex does this again, more comments, more likes. This is the problem with you getting
02:11:00 more followers is you’re going to get more. Actually, I should say that’s the benefit.
02:11:04 I don’t know. Maybe it’s not politically correct for me to ask, but there is this
02:11:07 a stereotype about Russians being like being really durable. And I started going to that
02:11:17 Russian banya that way back before COVID and they could tolerate a lot of heat and they would sit
02:11:25 very stoic. No one was going, oh, it’s hot in here. They’re just kind of like ease into it.
02:11:30 So maybe there’s something there, who knows?
02:11:32 Might be something there, but it could be also just personal. I just have some, I found myself,
02:11:38 everyone’s different, but I’ve found myself to be able to do something unpleasant for very long
02:11:45 periods of time. Like I’m able to shut off the mind and I don’t think that’s been fully tested.
02:11:53 Monkey mind or the supercomputer?
02:11:55 Well, it’s interesting. I mean, which mind tells you to quit exactly?
02:12:02 Limbic. Limbic friction tells you.
02:12:05 Well, limbic friction is the source of that, but who are you talking with exactly?
02:12:09 So there’s a, we can put something very concrete to that. So there’s a
02:12:13 paper published in Cell, super top tier journal, two years ago, looking at effort.
02:12:21 And this was in a visual environment of trying to swim forward toward a target and a reward.
02:12:26 And it was a really cool experiment because they manipulated virtually the visual environment. So
02:12:32 the same amount of effort was being expended every time. But sometimes the perception was
02:12:36 you’re making forward progress. And sometimes the perception was you’re making no progress
02:12:40 because stuff wasn’t drifting by meant no progress. So you can be swimming and swimming
02:12:44 and swimming and not making progress. And it turns out that with each bout of effort, there’s epinephrine
02:12:52 and norepinephrine is being released in the brainstem and glia, what traditionally were
02:12:58 thought of as support cells for the neurons, but they do a lot of things actively too,
02:13:02 are measuring the amount of epinephrine and norepinephrine in that circuit.
02:13:06 And when it exceeds a certain threshold, the glia send inhibitory signals that shut down
02:13:11 top down control. They literally it’s the quit. You stop. There’s no more. It’s you quit enduring.
02:13:18 It can be rescued. Endurance can be rescued with dopamine. So that’s where the subjective part
02:13:28 really comes into play. So you quit because you’ve learned how to turn that off or you’ve
02:13:34 learned how to, some people will reward the pain process so much that friction becomes the reward.
02:13:41 And when you talk about people like Goggins and other people I know from special operations and
02:13:46 people have gone through cancer treatments three times, you hear about, just when you hear about
02:13:52 people, the Viktor Frankl stories, I mean, you hear about Nelson Mandela, you hear about these
02:13:56 stories. I’m sure the same process is involved. Again, this speaks to the generalizability of
02:14:01 these processes as opposed to a neural circuit for a particular action or cognitive function.
02:14:06 So I think you have to learn to subjectively self reward in a way that replenishes you.
02:14:13 Goggins talks about eating souls. It’s a very dramatic example in his mind, apparently that’s
02:14:19 a form of reward, but it’s not just a form of reward where it’s like you’re picking up a trophy
02:14:26 or something. It’s actually, it gives you energy. It’s a reward that gives more neural energy. And
02:14:33 I’m defining that as more dopamine to suppress the noradrenaline adrenaline circuits in the
02:14:39 brainstem. So ultimately maps to that. Yeah. He creates enemies. He’s always fighting enemies.
02:14:45 I never, I think I have enemies, but there are usually just versions of me inside my head. So
02:14:51 I thought about through that 30 day challenge, I tried to come up with like fake enemies. It wasn’t
02:14:57 working. The only enemy I came up with is David. Well, now you have a, you certainly have a form
02:15:06 formidable adversary in this one. I don’t care. I’m David. I’m willing to die on this one. So let’s
02:15:12 go there. Well, let’s hope you both survive this one. My problem is the physical. So everything
02:15:22 we’ve been talking about in the mind, there’s a physical aspect that’s just practically difficult,
02:15:27 which is like, I can’t like, you know, when you injure yourself at a certain point, like you just
02:15:33 can’t function or you’re doing more damage. Yeah. Talking about it, taking yourself out of running
02:15:39 for the rest of your life potentially, or like, you know, or did it for years. So, you know,
02:15:45 I’d love to avoid that, right? There’s just like stupid physical stuff that you just want to avoid.
02:15:52 You want to keep it purely in the mental. And if it’s purely in the mental, that’s when the race
02:15:57 is interesting. But yeah, the problem with these physical challenges as David has experienced,
02:16:03 I mean, it has a toll on your body. I tend to think of the mind is limitless and the body is
02:16:09 kind of unfortunately quite limited. Well, I think the key is to dynamically control your output.
02:16:15 And that can be done by reducing effort, which doesn’t work for throughout, but also by
02:16:24 restoring through these subjective reward processes. And we don’t want to go down the
02:16:30 rabbit hole of why this all works, but these are ancient pathways that were designed to
02:16:34 bring resources to an animal or to a person through foraging for hunting or mates or water,
02:16:40 all these things. And they work so well because they’re down in those circuits where we know the
02:16:46 zeros and ones. And that’s great because it can be subjective at the level of, oh, I reached this
02:16:52 one milestone, this one horizon, this one three meter target. But if you don’t reward it, it’s
02:17:00 just effort. If you do self reward it, it’s effort minus one in terms of the adrenaline output.
02:17:07 I have to ask you about this. You’re one of the great communicators in science. I’m really a big
02:17:16 fan of yours, enjoying in terms of the educational stuff you’re putting on neuroscience.
02:17:21 Thank you.
02:17:23 What’s the, do you have a philosophy behind it or is it just an instinct,
02:17:30 unstoppable force? Do you have, like, what’s your thinking? Because it’s rare and it’s exciting.
02:17:36 I’m excited that, you know, somebody from Stanford. So I, okay, I’m in multiple places
02:17:45 in the sense of like where my interests lie. And one, you know, politically speaking, academic
02:17:52 institutions are under fire, you know, for many reasons we don’t need to get into. I get into it
02:17:59 in a lot of other places, but I believe in places like Stanford and places like MIT as one of the
02:18:10 most magical institutions for inspiring people to dream, people to build the future. I mean,
02:18:18 it’s, I believe that it is a really special, these universities are really special places.
02:18:24 And so it’s always exciting to me when somebody as inspiring as you represents those places. So
02:18:33 it makes me proud that somebody from Stanford is like, somebody like you is representing Stanford.
02:18:41 So maybe you could speak to what’s, how did you come to be who you are in being a communicator?
02:18:52 Well, first of all, thanks for the kind words, especially coming from you. I think Stanford is
02:18:58 an amazing place as is MIT and it’s such a. MIT is better by the way. I’ll let it out. Anything
02:19:04 you say at this point. I have many friends at MIT. Yeah. Smarter friends. Yeah. Ed Boyden is
02:19:14 among the best in class. There’s some people, not me that can hold a candle to him, but not many,
02:19:19 maybe one or two. I think the great benefit of being in a place like MIT or Stanford is that
02:19:25 when you look around, the average is very high. You have many best in class among the one or two
02:19:34 or three best in the world at what they do. And it’s a wonderful privilege to be there. And one
02:19:40 thing that I think also makes them and other universities like them very special is that
02:19:44 there’s an emphasis on what gets exported out of the university, not keeping it ivory tower and
02:19:50 really trying to keep an eye on what’s needed in the world and trying to do something useful.
02:19:55 And I think the proximity to industry and Silicon Valley and in the Boston area and Cambridge also
02:20:01 lends itself well to that. And there are other institutions too, of course. So the reason I got
02:20:07 involved in educating on social media was actually because of Pat Dossett, the mile bear call guy.
02:20:15 It was at the turn of 2018 to 2019. We had formed a good friendship and he talked me into doing these
02:20:22 early morning cold water swims. I was learning a lot about pain and suffering, but also the beauty
02:20:27 of cold water swims. And we were talking one morning and he said, so what are you going to
02:20:32 do to serve the world in 2019? It’s like, that’s the way that like a Texan former seal talks.
02:20:37 Like we’re just literally like, what are you going to do to serve the world in 2019?
02:20:40 Like, well, I’ve run my lab. It’s like, no, no, what are you going to do? That’s new.
02:20:43 And he wasn’t forceful in it, but I was like, that’s interesting question. I said, well,
02:20:47 if I had my way, I would just teach people, everyone about the brain. Because I think
02:20:52 it’s amazing. He goes, we’ll do it. I go, all right. He goes, shake on it. So we did it, you
02:20:56 know? And so I started putting out these posts and it’s grown into, to include a variety of things,
02:21:04 but you asked about a governing philosophy. So I want to increase interest in the brain and in the
02:21:10 nervous system and in biology generally, that’s one major goal. I’d like to increase scientific
02:21:15 literacy, which can’t be rammed down people’s throats of talking about how to look at a graph
02:21:21 and statistics and Z scores and P values and genetics. It has to be done gradually, in my
02:21:27 opinion. I want to put valuable tools into the world, mainly tools that map to things that we’re
02:21:34 doing in our lab. So these will be tools centered around how to understand and direct one’s states
02:21:40 of mind and body. So reduce stress, raise one’s stress threshold. So it’s not always just about
02:21:45 being calm. Sometimes it’s about learning how to tolerate being not calm, raise awareness for
02:21:51 mental health. There’s a ton of micro missions in this, but it all really maps back to, you know,
02:21:58 like the eight and 10 year old version of me, which is I used to spend my weekends when I was
02:22:02 a kid reading about weird animals. And I had this obsession with like medieval weapons and stuff
02:22:07 like catapults. And then I used to come into school on Monday and I would ask if I could talk
02:22:12 about it to the class and teach. And I just, it’s really, I promise, and some people might
02:22:18 not believe me, but it’s really, I don’t really like being the point of focus. I just get so
02:22:23 excited about these gems of that I find in the world in books and in experiments and in
02:22:30 discussions with colleagues and discussions with people like you and around the universe.
02:22:34 And I can’t just compulsively, I got to tell people about it. So I try and package it into
02:22:39 a form that people can access. You know, I think if I’ve, I think the reception has been really
02:22:44 wonderful. Stanford has been very supportive, thankfully. I’ve done some podcasts even with
02:22:51 them and they’ve reposted some stuff on social media. It’s a precarious place to put yourself
02:22:55 out there as a research academic. I think some of my colleagues, both locally and elsewhere,
02:23:00 probably wonder if I’m still serious about research, which I absolutely am. And I also
02:23:05 acknowledge that their research and the research coming out of the field needs to be talked about
02:23:13 and not all scientists are good at translating that into a language that people can access.
02:23:18 And I don’t like the phrase dumb it down. What I like to do is take a concept that I think people
02:23:25 will find interesting and useful and offer it sort of like you would offer food to somebody visiting
02:23:32 your home. You’re not going to cram foie gras in their face. You’re going to say, like, do you want
02:23:36 a cracker? And they say, yeah. And like, do you want something on that cracker? Like, do you like
02:23:40 cheese? Like, yeah. Like, do you want Swiss cheese or you want that really like stinky, like French?
02:23:45 I don’t like cheese much. Or do you want foie gras? Like, what’s that? Like, so you’re trying,
02:23:50 the best information prompts more questions of interest, not questions of confusion,
02:23:55 but questions of interest. And so I feel like one door opens, then another door opens,
02:23:59 then another door opens. And pretty soon, the image in my mind is you create a bunch of
02:24:04 neuroscientists who are thinking about themselves neuroscientifically. And I don’t begin to think
02:24:09 that I have all the answers at all. I cast a neuroscience, sometimes a little bit of a psychology
02:24:15 lens onto what I think are interesting topics. And someday I’m going to go into the ground or
02:24:23 the ocean or wherever it is I end up. And I’m very comfortable with the fact that not everyone’s
02:24:31 going to be happy with how I deliver the information, but I would hope that people
02:24:34 would feel like some of it was useful and meaningful and got them to think a little bit
02:24:39 harder. Since you mentioned going into the ground and Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning,
02:24:48 I reread that book quite often. Let me ask the big ridiculous question about life. What do you
02:25:02 think is the meaning of it all? And maybe why do you, do you mention that book from a psychologist
02:25:08 perspective, which Victor Frankl was, or do you ever think about the bigger philosophical questions
02:25:16 that raises about meaning? What’s the meaning of it all? One of the great challenges in assigning a
02:25:25 good, you know, giving a good answer to the question of like, what’s the meaning of life is,
02:25:29 um, I think illustrated best by the Victor Frankl example, although there are other examples too,
02:25:36 which is that our sense of meaning is very elastic in time and space. And I’m, I’m,
02:25:43 uh, we talked a little bit about this earlier, but it’s amazing to me that somebody locked in a cell
02:25:49 or a concentration camp can bring the horizon in close enough that they can then micro slice their
02:25:56 environment so that they can find rewards and meaning and power and beauty, even in a little
02:26:03 square box or, or a horrible situation. And I think this is really speaks to one of the most
02:26:09 important features of the human mind, which is we could do, let’s take two opposite extremes.
02:26:14 One would be, let’s say the alarm went off right now in this building and the building started
02:26:19 shaking our vision, our hearing, everything would be tuned to this space, time bubble for those
02:26:26 moments and everything that we were processed, all that would matter. The only meaning would be
02:26:32 get out of here, safe, figure out what’s going on, contact loved ones, et cetera.
02:26:36 If we were to sit back, totally relaxed, we could do the, you know, I think it’s called pale blue
02:26:40 dot thing or whatever, where we could imagine ourselves in this room. And then they were in
02:26:43 the United States and this continent and the earth, and then it’s peering down us. And all of
02:26:47 a sudden you get back, it can seem so big that all of a sudden it’s meaningless, right? If you
02:26:53 see yourself as just one brief glimmer in all of time and all of space, you go to, I don’t matter.
02:27:00 And if you go to, oh, every little thing that happens in this text thread or this, you know,
02:27:06 comment section on YouTube or Instagram, your space time bubble is tiny, then everything seems
02:27:12 inflated and the brain will contract and dilate its space, time, vision and time, but also sense
02:27:22 of meaning. And that’s beautiful. And it’s what allows us to be so dynamic in different environments
02:27:28 and we can pull from the past and the present and future. It’s why examples like Nelson Mandela and
02:27:33 Viktor Frankl had to include, it makes sense that it wasn’t just about grinding it out. They had to
02:27:39 find those dopamine rewards, even in those little boxes they were forced into. So I’m not trying to
02:27:46 dodge an answer, but for me personally, and I think about this a lot because I have this complicated
02:27:54 history in science where my undergraduate, graduate advisor and postdoctoral advisor all died young.
02:28:00 So, you know, and they were wonderful people and had immense importance in my life. But what I
02:28:07 realized is that we can get so fixated on the thing that we’re experiencing, holding tremendous
02:28:15 meaning, but it only holds that meaning for as long as we’re in that space, time regime.
02:28:21 And this is important because what really gives meaning is the understanding that you can move
02:28:28 between these different space, time dimensionalities. And I’m not trying to sound like a
02:28:32 theoretical physicist or anyone that thinks about the cosmos and saying that it’s really the fact
02:28:39 that sometimes we’d say and do and think things and it feels so important. And then two days later,
02:28:44 like what happened? Well, you had a different brain processing algorithm entirely. You were in a
02:28:51 completely different state. And so what I want to do in this lifetime is I want to engage in as many
02:28:59 different levels of contraction and dilation of meaning as possible. I want to go to the micro.
02:29:07 I sometimes think about this. I’m like, if I just pulled over the side of the road, I bet you there’s
02:29:10 an anthill there and their whole world is fascinating. You can’t stay there. And you also
02:29:15 can’t stay staring up at the clouds and just think about how we’re just these little beings and it
02:29:20 doesn’t matter. The key is the journey back and forth, up and down that staircase, back and forth
02:29:27 and back and forth. And my goal is to get as many trips up and down that staircase as I can before
02:29:32 the reaper comes for me. Oh, beautiful. So the, the, the dance of dilation of meaning,
02:29:36 contraction between the different space, zoom in, zoom out, and get as many steps in on that
02:29:44 staircase. That’s, that’s my goal anyway. And I’ve watched people die. I watched my postdoc advisor
02:29:50 die wither away. My graduate, it was tragic, but they found beauty in these closing moments
02:29:56 because their bubble was their kids in one case, or like one of them was a Giants fan and like got
02:30:03 to see a Giants game, you know, in her last moments and like, and you just realize like it’s a Giants
02:30:08 game, but not in that moment because time is closing. And so those time bins feel huge because
02:30:13 she’s slicing things so differently. So I think, um, learning how to do that better and more fluidly,
02:30:20 recognizing where one is and not getting too taxed to the idea that there’s one correct answer,
02:30:27 like that’s what brings meaning. That’s my goal anyway. I don’t think there’s a better way to end
02:30:33 it. Andrew, I really appreciate that you would, uh, come down and contract your space time and
02:30:40 focus on this conversation for a few hours. Uh, is a huge honor. I’m a huge fan of yours. As I told
02:30:47 you, I hope you keep growing and educating the world about the human mind. Thanks for talking
02:30:53 today. Thank you. I really appreciate the invitation to be here. And people might think I’m
02:30:58 saying it just cause I’m here, but I’m a huge fan of yours. I send your podcasts to my colleagues
02:31:02 and other people. And I think what you’re doing is, isn’t just, uh, amazing. It’s important. And
02:31:09 so thank you. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Andrew Huberman. And thank
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02:31:51 And now let me leave you with some words from Carl Jung. I am not what happened to me.
02:31:58 I am what I choose to become. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.