Andrew Huberman: Neuroscience of Optimal Performance | Lex Fridman Podcast #139
the following is a conversation with Andrew huberman a neuroscientist at Stanford working to understand how the brain works how it can change their experience and how to repair brain circuits damaged by injury or disease he has a great Instagram account at huberman lab where he teaches the world about the brain and the human mind also he's a friend and an inspiration in that he shows that you can be humble giving and still succeed in the Science World quick mention of me sponsor followed by some thoughts related to the episode a sleep a mattress that cools itself and gives me yet another reason to enjoy sleep sem Rush the most advanced SEO optimization tool I've ever come across and cash app the app I use to send money to friends please check out these sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast as a side note let me say that I heard from from a lot of people about the previous conversation I had with euron Brooke about objectivism some people loved it some people hated it I misspoke in some parts was more critical on occasion than I meant to be didn't push on certain points that I should have was undereducated or completely unaware about some major things that happened in the past or major ideas out there I bring all that up to say that if we are to have difficult conversations we have to give each other space to make mistakes to learn to grow taking one or two statements from our three-hour podcast and suggesting that they encapsulate who I am I was or ever will be is a standard that we can't hold each other to I don't think anyone could live up to that kind of standard at least I know I can't the conversation with Yan is mild relative to some conversations that I will likely have in the coming year please continue to challenge me but please try to do so with love and with patience I promise to work my ass off to improve whether I'm successful at that or not we shall see if you enjoy this thing subscribe on YouTube review it with fast stars on Apple podcast follow on Spotify support on patreon or connect with me on Twitter at Lex fredman and now here's my conversation with Andrew huberman you've mentioned that in your lab at Stanford you induced stress by putting people into uh virtual reality and having them go through one of a set of experiences I think you mentioned this on Rogan or with Whitney that scare them so just uh on a practical psychological level and maybe on a philosophical level what are people afraid of what are the fears what are these fear experiences that you find to be effective yeah so it depends on the person obviously um and we should probably define fear right because you can without going too far down the rabbit hole of of defining these things um you know you can't really have fear without stress but you could have stress without fear and you can't really have trauma without fear and stress but you could have fear and stress without trauma so you know we can start playing the word game and that actually is one of the motivations for even having a laboratory that studies these things is that we really need better physiological neuroscientific and operational definitions of what these things are I mean the the field of understanding um emotions and states which is mainly what I'm interested in is very complicated but we can um we can do away with a lot of complicated debate and say in our laboratory what we're looking for to assign it a value of fear is a big inflection in autonomic arousal so increases in heart rate increases in breathing um persp ation pupil dilation all the Hallmark signature features of the stress response uh and in some cases we have the benefit of getting neurosurgery patients where we've got electrodes in their amydala and their insula and the orbital frontal cortex um down beneath skull so these are chronically implanted electrodes we're getting multiunit signals and we can start seeing some Central features of uh meaning within the brain and what's interesting is that as trivial as it might seem in listening to it almost everybody responds to Heights and falling from a high virtual place with a very strong stress if not fear response and that's because the visual vestibular apparati right the the optic flow and how it links to the you know balanc semicircular canals of the inter all this technical stuff but really all of that pulls all your phys ology the the feeling that your stomach is dropping the feeling that you're suddenly you're sweating even though you're not afraid of falling off this virtual platform but you feel as if you're following falling excuse me because of the optic flow that one is universal so we've got a dive with great white sharks experience where you actually exit the cage we went out and did this in the real world and brought back 360 video that's built out pretty oh so this is exual 360 video 360 video and this was important to us right so when we decided to set up this platform a lot of the motivation was that a lot of the studies of of these things in Laboratories I don't want to call them lame because I want to be respectful of the the people that did this stuff before but they'd study fear by you know showing subjects a picture of a bloody arm or a snake or something like that or and it just unless you have a snake phobia it just wasn't creating a real enough experience so we need to do something where people aren't going to get injured but where we can tap into the physiology and that thing of presence of people momentarily not the whole time but moment arily forgetting they're in a laboratory and so Heights will always do it and I if people want to challenge me on this I I like to point to that movie free solo which was wild because you know it's incredible movie but I think a lot of its popularity can be explained by a puzzle which is you knew he was going to live when you walked in the theater or you watched it on at home you knew before that he he survived and yet it was still scary that people somehow were able to put themselves in into that experience or into Alex's experience enough that they they were concerned or worried or afraid at some level so Heights always does it if we get people who have generalized anxiety these are people who walk wake up and move through life at a generally higher state of autonomic arousal and anxiety then we can tip them a little bit more easily with things that don't necessarily get everyone afraid things like um claustrophobia public speaking that's going to vary from person to person um and then if you're afraid of sharks like my sister for instance is afraid of sharks she won't even come to my laboratory because there there's a thing about sharks in it that's how terrified some people are of these specific stimuli but Heights gets them every time yeah and I'm terrified of heights it it's you know when we have you step off a platform virtual platform and it's a flat floor in my lab but we you're up there well you actually allow them the possibility in the virtual world world to actually take the leap of faith yeah maybe I should describe a little bit of the experiment so um without giving away too much in case someone wants to be a subject in one of these uh experiments we have them playing a cognitive game it's a simple lights out kind of game where you're you know pointing a cursor and turning out lights on a grid but it gets increasingly complex and it speeds up on them and um you know there's a failure point for everybody where they just can't make the motor commands fast enough and then we surprise people essentially by placing them virtu all of a sudden they're SS they're on a narrow platform between two buildings yeah and then we encourage them or we cue them with a with by talking to them through a microphone to continue across that platform to continue the game and you know some people they they just won't they actually will hold get down on the ground and hold on to a virtual beam that doesn't even exist on a flat floor and so what this really tells us is the power of the brain to enter these virtual States as if they were real and we really think that anchoring the visual and the vestibular the balance components of the nervous system are what bring people into that presence so quickly there's also the potential and we haven't done this yet to bring in 360 sound so the reason we did 360 video is when we started all this back in 2016 a lot of the VR was pretty lame frankly it was CGI it just wasn't real enough but with 360 video we knew that we could get people into this presence where they think th in a real experience more quickly and our friend Michael meller who I was introduced to because of the project I reached out to some friends Michael Muller is a very famous um portrait photographer in Hollywood but he Dives with great white sharks and he leaves the cage and so we worked with him to build a 360 video apparatus that we could swim under water with went out to gual Lupe Island Mexico and actually got the experience it was a lot of fun it was there were some interesting moments out there of danger but it came back with that video and built that for the Sharks and then we realize we need to do this for everything we need to do it for Heights we need to do it for public speaking for claustrophobia and what what's missing still is 360 sound where 360 sound would be U for instance um if I were to turn around and there was a like a giant attack dog there the moment I would turn around and see it the dog would growl but if I turn back toward you right then it would it would be silent so and that brings a very real element to one's own be Behavior where you don't know what's going to happen if you turn a corner whereas if there's a dog growling behind me and I'm and I turn around and then I turn back to you and it's still growling yeah that might seem like more of an impending threat but um and sustained threat but actually it's when you start linking your own body movements to the experience so when it's closed loop where my movements and choices are starting to influence things and they're getting scarier and scarier that's when you can really Drive people's nervous system down these Paths of high high states of stress and fear now we don't want to traumatize people obviously but uh we also we also study a number of tools to that allow them to calm themselves in these environments so the short answer is Heights heights yeah well from a psychology and from a neuroscience perspective this whole construction that you've developed is fascinating we did this a little bit with autonomous vehicles so to try to understand the decision making process of a pedestrian when they cross the road and trying to create an experience of a car you know that can run you over so there's a danger of there I was so surprised how real that whole world was and the graphics that we built wasn't ultra realistic or anything but I was still afraid of being hit by a car but everybody we tested were really afraid of being hit by that car even though it was all a simulation it was all simulation it was uh it was kind of boxy actually I mean it wasn't like ultra realistic simulation and it's fascinating looms and Heights so any kind of depth we're just programmed to um to not necessarily recoil but to be cautious about that edge and that depth and then looms things coming at us that are getting larger there are looming sensing neurons even in the retina at a very very early stage of visual processing and um incidentally uh the way Muller and you know folks learned how to not get eaten by great white sharks when you're swimming outside the cage is as they start lumbering in you swim toward them and they get very confused when you loom on them because clearly you're smaller clearly they could eat you if they wanted to but there's something about forward movement toward uh any creature that that creature questions whether or not it would be a good idea to generate forward movement toward you and so that's actually the survival tool of these cage exit white shark divers are you playing around with like one of the critical things for the autonomous vehicle research is you couldn't do 360 video because the there's a game theoretic there's an interactive element that's really necessary so maybe people realize this maybe they don't but 360 video you obviously well it's actually not that obvious to people but you can't change the reality that you're watching that's right so uh but you find that that's like is there something fundamental about fear and stress that the intera development is essential for or do you find you can you can arous people with just the video great question um it works best to use mixed reality so we have a snake stimulus I personally don't like snakes at all I don't mind spiders we also have a spider stimulus but like snakes I just don't like them they's something about the the slithering and the it just it creates a visceral response for me um some people not so much and they have lower levels of stress and fear in there but one way that we can get them to feel more of that is to use mixed reality where we have a an actual physical bat and they have to stomp out the snake as opposed to just um walk to a little safe Corner which then makes the snake disappear that tends to be not as stressful as if they have a physical weapon and so you got people in there you know banging on the floor against this thing and there's something about engaging that makes it more of a more of a threat now I should also mention we we always get the sub report from the subject of what they experience because I we never want to project our own ideas about what they were feeling but that's a beauty of working with humans is you can ask them how they feel exct and humans aren't great at explaining how they feel um but it's a lot easier to understand what they're saying than a mouse or a macak monkey is saying um so it's the best we can do is language plus these physiological and neurophysiological signals is there something you've learned about yourself about your deepest fears like you said snakes is there something that like if I were to torture you I'm so I'm Russian so you know I always kind of think how can I murder this people that this person that enter the room but also how how can I torture you to get some information out of you what what would I go with h it's interesting you should say that I never considered myself claustrophobic mhm but um cuz I don't mind small environments provided they're well ventilated but I uh before covid I started going to this Russian B yeah um you know and then which I'm and I had never been to a b so you know the whole experience of really really hot sauna yeah and the what do they call it the plot they're hitting you with the leaves and and it gets really hot and humid in there and there were a couple times where I thought okay this thing is below ground it's in a city where there are a lot of earthquakes like if this place crumbled and we were stuck in here and I'd start getting a little panicky and I I'm like I don't like small confined spaces with poor ventilation so I realize I think I have some claustrophobia and I wasn't aware of that before so I've put myself into our own claustrophobia stimulus which involves getting into an elevator um and with a bunch of people virtual people and the elevator gets stalled and at first you're fine you feel fine but then as we start modulating the environment and we actually can control levels of oxygen in the environment if we want to um it is really uncomfortable for me and I never would have thought you know I fly I'm comfortable in Planes I but it is really uncomfortable and so I think I've un unhatched a bit of a claustrophobia yeah yeah for me as well probably that one that one is pretty bad the heights I tried to overcome so I went to skydiving to try to overcome the fear of heights but that didn't help did you jump out yeah jum yeah jumped out but it was it was a it was fundamentally different experience and I guess there could be a lot of different flavors of f Heights maybe but the one I have didn't seem to be connected to jumping out of a plane is a very different cuz like once you accept that you're going to jump then it's it's a different thing I I think what I'm afraid of is the moments before it is is the was the scariest part absolutely and I I don't think that's emphasized in the skydiving experience as much and also just the acceptance of the fact that it's going to happen so so once you accept it it's going to happen it's not as scary it's the fact that it's not supposed to happen and it might that's the scary part that I guess I'm not being eloquent in this description but there's something about skydiving that uh was actually philosophically liberating I was it I was like wow it it was uh the possibility that you can walk on a surface and then at a certain point there's no surface anymore to walk on and it's all of a sudden the world becomes three-dimensional and there's this freedom of floating that the concept of like of Earth disappears for a brief few seconds I don't know that was that was wild that was wild but I'm still terrified of height so I mean one one thing I I want to ask just un fear because it's so fascinating is have you um learned anything about what it takes to overcome fears yes and that comes from two from a you know research study standpoint two parallel tracks of research one was done actually in mice uh because we have a mouse lab also where we can prob out in different brain areas and try and figure out what interesting brain areas we might want to prob around in humans and a graduate student of my lab she's now at Caltech um Lindsay SLE um published a paper back in 2018 showing that what at first might seem a little bit obvious but the mechanisms are not which is that there really three responses to fear you can pause you can freeze essentially um you can Retreat you can back up or you can go forward and there's a single Hub of neurons in the midbrain in the it's actually not the midbrain but it's in the middle of the thalamus which is a forbrain structure uh and depending on which neurons are active there there's a much higher probability that a mouse or it turns out or a human will advance in the face of fear or will pause or will Retreat now that just assigns a neural structure to a behavioral phenomenon but what's interesting is that it turns out that the lowest level of stress or autonomic arousal is actually associated with the pausing and freezing response then as the threat becomes more impending and we used visual Looms in this case The Retreat response has a slightly higher level of autonomic arousal and stress so think about playing hide and go seek and you're trying to stay quiet in a uh in a closet that you're hiding if you're very calm it's easy to stay quiet and still as your level of stress goes up it's harder to maintain that level of quiet and Stillness you see this also in animals that are stalking a cat will chatter its teeth that's actually sort of top down inhibition and trying to restrain Behavior so the freeze response is actually an active response but it's fairly low stress and what was interesting to us is that the highest level of autonomic arousal was associated with the forward movement toward the threat so in your case um jumping out of the plane however the forward movement in the face of threat was linked to the activation of what we call collateral which means just a side connection literally a wire in the brain that connects to the dopamine circuits for reward and so when one safely and adaptly meaning you survive moves through a threat or tor a threat it's rewarded as a positive experience and so the key it actually Maps very well the cognitive behavioral therapy and a lot of the existing treatments for trauma is that you have to confront the thing that makes you afraid so otherwise you exist in this very low level of reverberatory circuit activity where the the circuits for autonomic arousal are humming and they're humming more and more and more and we have to remember that that stress and fear and threat were designed to agitate us so that we actually move so the reason I mentioned this is I think a lot of times people think that the maximum you know stress response or fear response is to freeze and to lock up yeah but that's actually not the maximum stress response the maximum stress response is to advance but it's associated with reward it has positive veilance interesting so so there's this kind of everyone always thinks about the Bell sh you know the sort of Hump shaped uh curve for you know at low levels of arousal performance is low and as increases performance goes higher and then it drops off as you get really stressed but there's another bump further out the distribution where you perform very well under very high levels of stress and so we've been spending a lot of time in humans and in animals exploring what it takes to get people comfortable to go to that place and also to let them experience how there heightened states of cognition there there's um changes in time perception that allow you to evaluate your environment in fast at a faster frame rate essentially this is the Matrix as a lot of people think of it um but we tend to think about fear as all the low-level stuff where things aren't worked out but there are many um there are a lot of different features to the fear response and so we think about it quantitatively and we think about it from a circuit perspective in terms of outcomes and we try and weigh that against the threat so we never want people to put themselves in unnecessary risk but that's where the VR is fun because you can push people hard without risk R of physically injuring them and that's uh like you said a little bump that that seems to be a very small fraction of The Human Experience right so it's kind of fascinating to study it because um most of us move through life without ever experiencing that kind of uh Focus well everything's in a peak State there I really think that's where Optimal Performance lies there's so many interesting words here but what's performance and what's Optimal Performance we're talking about mental ability to what to perceive the environment quickly to make actions quickly what's Optimal Performance yeah well it's very subjective and it varies depending on um task and environment so one way that we can make it a little bit more operational and concrete is to say um there is a sweet spot if you will where the level of internal autonomic arousal AKA stress or alertness whatever you want to call it is ideally matched to the speed of whatever challenge you have be facing in the outside world so we all have um perception of the outside world as exteroception and then perception of our internal real estate interoception and when those two thing when interception and exteroception are matched along a couple Dimensions performance uh tends to increase or tends to be in in optimal range so for instance if you're I don't play guitar but I know you play guitar so let's say you're trying to learn something new on the guitar I'm not saying that being in these super high states of activation are the best place for you to be in order to learn it may be that you your internal arousal needs to be at a level where your analysis of space and time has to be well matched to the information coming in and what you're trying to do in terms of performance in terms of playing chords and notes and so forth now in these cases of high threat where things are coming in quickly and animals and humans need to react very quickly the higher your state of autonomic arousal the better because you're slicing time more finely just because of the way the autonomic system works it you know the the P P the pupil dilation for instance and movement of the lens essentially changes your your Optics that's obvious but in with the change in Optics is a change in how you bin time and slice time which allows you to get more frames per second read out with the guitar learning for instance it might actually be that you want to be almost sleepy almost in a uh kind of drowsy state to be able to and I don't play music so I can't I'm guessing here but sense some of the Nuance in the chords or the ways that you're to be relaxed enough that your fingers can follow an external cue so matching the movement of your fingers to something that's pure exteroception and so there is no perfect autonomic state for uh performance this is why I don't favor terms like flow because they're not well operationally defined enough but I do believe that optimal or Peak Performance is going to rise when internal state is ideally matched to the SpaceTime features of the external demands so there's some some slicing of time that happens and then you're you're able to adjust slice time more finely or more less finely in order to adjust to the the stimulus the Dynamics of the stimulus what about the the realm of ideas so like you know I'm I'm a big believer uh this guy named Cal Newport wrote a book about deep work oh yeah I love that book yeah he's great uh so he I mean one of the nice things I've always practic deep work but he it's always nice to have words uh put to the the concepts that you've practice ractice it somehow makes them more concrete and allows you to uh to get better it turns it into a skill that you can get better at but you know I also value deep thinking where you think it's almost meditative you think about a particular concept for long periods of time so programming you have to do that kind of thing for you just have to hold this concept like like you you hold it and then you take steps with it you take further steps and you you're holding relatively complicated things in your mind as you're thinking about them and there's a lot of I mean the hardest part is there's uh frustrating things like you take a step and it turns out to be the wrong direction so you have to calmly turn around and take a step back and then it's you kind of like exploring through the space of ideas is there something about your study of Optimal Performance that could be applied to the act of thinking as opposed to action well we haven't done too much work there but what um but I think I can comment on it from a neuroscience perspective which is really all I do is well I I mean we do experiments in the lab but um looking at things through the lens of Neuroscience so what you're describing um can be mapped fairly well to working memory just keeping things online and updating them as they change in information it's coming back into into your brain uh Jack Feldman who I'm a huge fan of and um fortunate to be friends with is a uh professor at UCLA works on respiration and breathing but he has a physics background and um and so he thinks about respiration and breathing in terms of ground States and how they modulate other states very very interesting and I think um important work Jack uh has an answer to your question so I'm not going to get this exactly right because this is lifted from a coffee conversation that we had about a month ago but uh so um apologies in advance for the but I think I it mostly right so we were talking about this about how the brain updates cognitive States depending on demands and thinking in particular and he used an interesting example I'd be curious to know if you agree or disagree uh he said you know most great mathematics that's done by people in their late teens and 20s and even you could say early 20s sometimes into the late 20s but not much further on maybe I just insulted some mathematicians no that's that's that's true and I think that it demands his argument was um there's a tremendous Demand on working memory to work out theorems in math and to keep a number of plates spinning so to speak mentally and run back and forth between them updating them in physics Jack said and I I'm in I think this makes sense to me too that there's a Reliance on working memory but an increased Reliance on some sort of deep deep memory and deep memory stores probably stuff that's moved out of the hippocampus and forbrain and into the cortex and is um more some episodic and declarative stuff but really so you're you're pulling from your library basically it's not all Ram it's not all working memory and then in biology and physicists tend to have very active careers into their you know 30s and 40s and 50s and so forth um sometimes later and then in biology you see careers that have a much longer Arc kind of these protracted careers often uh people still their 60s and 70s doing doing really terrific work not always doing it with their own hands because there people in the labs are doing them of course but um and that work does tend to rely on insights gained from having a very deep knowledge base where you can remember a paper and a or maybe a figure in a paper you could go look it up if you wanted to but it's very different than the working memory of the mathematician and so when you're talking about coding or being in that tunnel of thought and trying to iterate and keeping a lot of plates spinning it it speaks directly to working memory my lab hasn't done too much of that working memory but we are pushing working memory when we have people do things like these simple lights out tasks while they're under we can increase the cognitive load by increasing the level of autonomic arousal to the point where they start doing less well Y and you know everyone has a cliff this is what's kind of fun we've had um you know Seal Team operators come to the lab we've had people from other units in the military very you know we've had a range of of intellects and backgrounds and all sorts of things and everyone has a cliff and those Cliffs uh sometimes show up as a function of the demands of speed of processing or how many things you need to keep online I mean we're all Limited at some point in the number of things we can keep online so what you're describing is very interesting because it I think it has to do with how narrow or broad the information set is because and I don't proog I'm not an active programmer so and this is a regime I don't really fully know so I don't want to comment about it uh in that in anyway uh that that you know doesn't suggest that but I think that what you're talking about is top- down control so this is prefrontal cortex keeping every bit of reflexive circuitry at Bay the one that makes you want to get up and use the restroom the one that makes you want to check your phone all of that but also running these anterior Thalamus to prefrontal cortex Loops which we know are very important for working memory yeah let me try to think through this a little bit so reducing the process of thinking to working memory access is tricky he's probably ultimately correct but if I were to say some of the most challenging things that uh an engineer has to do and a scient scientific thinker I would say it's kind of pressing to think that we do that best in our 20s but is uh this kind of first principles thinking step of of saying you're you're accessing the things that you know and then saying well let me how do I do this differently than I've done it before this this weird like stepping back like is this right let's try it this other way that that's the the most mentally taxing step it's like you you've gotten quite good at this particular pattern of how you solve this particular problem so there's a there's a pattern recognition first you're like okay I know how to build a thing that solves this particular problem in programming say and then the question is but can I do it much better and I don't know if that's I don't know what the hell that is I don't know if that's accessing working memory that's that's almost access maybe it is accessing memory in a sense that's trying to find similar patterns in a totally different place that could be uh projected onto this but you're you're it's you're not quering uh facts you're quering like functional things like yes it's patterns I mean you're running you're testing algorithms yeah right you're testing algorithms I so I want to just um because I know some of the people listening to this and you have have basis in you know scientific training and have scientific training so I want to be clear I think we can be correct about some things like the role of working memory in these kinds of processes without being exhaustive we're not saying they're the only thing we're you know we can be correct but not assume that that's the only thing involved right and I mean Neuroscience let's face it is still in its infancy I mean we probably know 1% of what there is to know about the brain um you know we've learned so much and yet there may be Global states that underly this that make prefrontal circuitry work differently than it would in a in a different regime or even time of day I mean there's a lot of mysteries about this but so I just want to make sure that we we sort of are we're aiming for precision and accuracy but but we're not going to be we're not going to be exhausted so there's a difference there and I think uh you know sometimes in the vastness of the internet uh that gets forgotten um so the other is that um you know we we think about um you know we think about these operations uh at you know really focused keeping a lot of things online but what you were describing is actually um it it speaks to the the very real possibility probably that the with certainty there's another element to all this which is when you're trying out lots of things in particular lots of different algorithms you don't want to be in a in a state of very high autonomic arousal that's not what you want because the higher level of autonomic arousal and stress in the system the more rigidly you're going to analyze space and time right and what you're talking about is playing with space-time dimensionality and I want to be very clear I mean I'm the son of a physicist I am not a physicist when I talk about space and time I'm literally talking about visual space and how long it takes for my finger to move from this point to this point you you are facing a tiger and trying to figure out how to avoid being eaten by the and that's primarily going to be determined by the visual system in humans we don't walk through space for instance like a sen Hound would and look at three-dimensional scent plumes you know when a senent Hound goes out in the environment they have depth to their odor tra the odor Trails they're following and they don't think about them we don't think about odor Trails you might say oh well the smell's getting more intense aha but they actually have threedimensional odor Trail so there see a cone of odor see of course with nose with their Factory cortex we do that with our visual system and we parse time often subconsciously with mainly with our visual system also with our auditory system and this shows up for the musicians out there metronomes are a great way to play with this um you know bass drumming when the frequency of bass drumming changes your perception of time changes quite a lot so in any event space and time are linked in the through the sensory appara eye through the eyes and ears and nose and um probably through taste too and through touch um for us but mainly through vision so when you drop into some coding or iterating through a creative process or trying to solve something hard you can't really do that well if you're in a rigid um high level of autonomic arousal because you're plugging in algorithms that are in this space regime this time regime matches it's SpaceTime matched whereas creativity I always think the Lava Lamp is actually a pretty good example even though it has these counterculture new AG connotations because you actually don't know which direction things are going to change and so in drowsy States sleeping and drowsy States space and time become dislodged from one another somewhat and they're very fluid and I think that's why a lot of solutions come to people after sleep and naps and this could even take us into a discussion if you like about psychedelics and what we now know for instance that people thought that psychedelics work by just creating spontaneous bursting of neurons and hallucinations but the the 5H 2ca and 2C and 2A receptors which are the main sites for things like LSD and psilocybin and some of the other um huc the ones that create hallucinations the drugs that create hallucinations the most of those receptors are actually in the um collection of neurons that encase the thalamus which is where all the sensory information goes into a structure called the thalamic reticular nucleus um and it's an inhibitory structure that makes sure that when we're sitting here talking that I'm mainly focused on whatever I'm seeing visually that I'm essentially eliminating a lot of sensory information under conditions where people take psychedelics and these uh particular serotonin receptors are activated that inhibitory shell it's literally shaped like a shell starts losing its ability to inhibit the passage of sensory information but mostly the effects of psychedelics are because lateral connectivity in layer five of Cortex across cortical areas is increased and what that does is that means that the SpaceTime relationship for vision like moving my finger from here to here very rigid SpaceTime relationship right if I slow it down it's slower obviously but there's a prediction that can be made based on the neurons and the retina and the cortex on psychedelics this could be very strange experience yeah but the auditory system has one that's slightly different SpaceTime and they're matched to one another in deeper Circ in the brain thefactory system has a different SpaceTime relationship to it so under conditions of of these increased activation of these serotonin receptors space and time across sensory area starts being fluid so I'm no longer running the algorithm for moving my finger from here to here and making a prediction based on Vision alone I'm now this is where people talk about um hearing sites right you start linking the this might actually make a sound in a psychedelic State now I'm not suggesting people run out and do psychedelics because it's very disorganized but essentially what you're doing is you're mixing the algorithms and so when you talk about being able to access new Solutions you don't need to rely on psychedelics if people choose to do that that's their business but in drowsy States this lateral connectivity is increased as well the shell of the thalamus shuts down and what's H there there through these so-called pwns chicl occipital waves and what's happening is you're getting whole brain activation at a level that you start mixing algorithms and so sometimes I think Solutions come not from being in that narrow tunnel of space time and strong activation of working memory and trying to well iterate if this then this very strong deductive and inductive thinking and working from first principles but also from states where something that was an algorithm that never you never had in existence before suddenly gets lumped with another algorithm and all of a sudden a new possibility comes to mind and so space and time need to be fluid and space and time need to be rigid in order to come up with something meaningful and I realize I'm riffing long on this but this is why I think you know there was so much interest a few years ago with Michael pollen's book and and other things happening about psychedelics as a pathway to exploration and all this kind of thing but the real question is what you export back from those experiences because dreams are amazing but if you can't bring anything back from them they're just amazing I wonder how to experiment with a mind without without any medical assistance first like you know I I push my mind in all kinds of directions I definitely want to I did uh shrooms a couple of times I definitely want to uh figure out how I can experiment with um with psychedelics I'm talking to uh Rick dolin I Thinkin doblin uh soon I went back and forth so he does all these studies in psychedelics and he keeps ignoring the parts of my email that asks like how do I participate in these studies yeah well there are some legality issues I mean conversation I want to be very clear I'm not saying that anyone should run out and do psychedelics I think that drowsy States and sleep states are are super interesting for accessing some of these more creative states of Mind hypnosis is something that my colleague David Spiegel associate chair of Psychiatry at Stanford works on where also again it's a unique State because you have narrow context so this is very um kind of tunnel vision and yet deeply rela excuse me deeply relaxed where new algorithms if you will can start to surface um strong state for inducing neuroplasticity and I think that you know so if I had a um I'm part of a group um that uh it's called the linal collective is a group of people that get together and talk about um just wild ideas but they try and Implement um and it's a it's a really interesting group some people from military from uh logic Tech and some other backgrounds academic backgrounds and I was asked you know what would be um if you could create a tool if you just had a tool like your magic Wan wish for the day what would it be I thought it' be really interesting if someone could develop psychedelics that have um onoff switches so you could go into a psychedelic State very deeply for 10 minutes but you could launch yourself out of that state and place yourself into a linear real world State very quickly so that you could extract whatever it was that that happened in that experience and then go back in if you wanted because the problem with psychedelic States and dream states is that first of all a lot of the reason people do them is they're lying they say they want plasticity and they want all this stuff they want a peak experience yeah inside of an amplified experience so they're kind of seeking something unusual I think we should just be honest about that because a lot of times they're not trying to make their brain better they're just trying to experience something really amazing but the problem is space and time are so unlocked in these states just like they are in dreams that you can really end up with a whole lot of nothing you can have an amazing Amplified experience housed in an amplified experience and come out of that thinking you had a meaningful experience when you didn't bring anything back you didn't bring anything back all all you have is a fuzzy memory of having a transformational experience but you don't actually have yeah tools to bring back or sorry actual actually concrete ideas to bring back yeah it's interesting yeah I wonder if it's possible to do that with the with a mind to to be able to hop back and forth I think that's where the real power of you know adjusting States is going to be it probably will be with devices um I mean maybe it'll be done through pharmacology it's just that it's hard to do onoff switches in in human pharmacology that we have them for Animals I mean we we have you know cre flip common Aces and we have um you know Channel opsins and Halo root opsins and um all these kinds of things but to to do that work in humans is tricky but I think you could do it with um virtual reality augmented reality and other devices that bring more of the sematic experience into it you're of course a scientist who's studying humans as a collective I tend to be just a one person scientist of just looking at myself and you know I play when these deep thinking deep work sessions I'm very cognizant like in the morning that there's times when my mind is so like eloquent at being able to jump around from ideas and hold them all together and I I'm almost like I step back from a third person perspective and enjoy that whatever that mind is doing I'm I do not waste those moments I and I'm very conscious of um this like little creature that woke up that's only awake for if we're being honest maybe a couple hours a day uh early part of the day for you early part of the day not always well early part of the day for me is a very uh fluid concept so you're one of those yeah I'm one yeah you're one of those being single one of the problems single and no meetings I don't schedule any meetings I I will I've been living at like a 28h hour day so I like I uh it drifts so it's it's all over the the place but after a uh traditionally defined full night sleep uh whatever the heck that means I I find that like in in those moments there's a Clarity of mind that's just this everything is effortless and it's the it's the deepest Dives intellectually that I make and I I'm cognizant of it and I try to bring that to the other parts of the day that don't have it and treasure them even more in those moments cuz they only last like 5 or 10 minutes like cuz of course in those moments you want to do all kinds of stupid stuff that are completely is is is worthless like check social media or something like that but those are the most precious things in in in in intellectual life is those mental moments of clarity and I wonder I'm learning how to control them I think caffeine is somehow involved I'm not sure exactly sure well because if you learn how to titrate caffeine everyone's slightly different with this what they need but if you learn to titrate caffeine with time a day and the kind of work that you're trying to do you can bring that autonomic arousal State into the close to perfect place and then you can tune it in with you know sometimes people want a little bit of background music sometimes they want less these kinds of things the the the early part of the day is interesting because the one thing that's not often discussed is the transition out of sleep so there's a a book um I think it's called Winston Churchills nap and it's about naps and and the transition between wake and sleep as a valuable period um I've a long time ago um someone who I respect a lot was mentoring me said um be very careful about bringing in someone else's sensory experience early in the day so when I wake up I'm very drowsy I sleep well but I I don't emerge from that very quickly I need a lot of caffeine to wake up and whatnot but there's this concept of getting the download from sleep which is you know in sleep you're you were essentially expunging the things that you don't need the stuff that was meaningless from the previous day but you were also running variations on these algorithms of whatever it is you're trying to work out in life on short time scales like the previous day and long time scales like your whole life and those lateral Connections in layer five of the of the neocortex are very robustly um active and AC cross sensory areas and and you're running a an algorithm or a colle you know a brain it's a brain state that would be useless and waking you wouldn't get anything done you'd be the person talking to yourself in the hallway or something about something that no one else can see but in those States you do that the theory is that you arrive at certain Solutions and those Solutions will reveal themselves in the early part of the day unless you interfere with them by bringing in social media is a good example of you immediately enter somebody else's space time sensory relationship someone is the conductor of your thoughts in that case and so many people have written about this um what I'm saying isn't entirely new but but allowing the download to occur in the early part of the day and and asking the question am I more in my head or extern am I in more of an interoceptive or exteroceptive mode and depending on the kind of work you need to do if it's it sounds like for you it's very interoceptive in the and very you got a lot of thinking going on and a lot of computing going on allowing yourself to transition out of that sleep State and arrive with those solutions from sleep and plug into the work really deeply and then and only then allowing things like music news social media doesn't mean you should talk to loved ones and see faces and things like that but some people have taken this to the extreme when I was a graduate student at Berkeley there was a guy um there a professor brilliant odd but brilliant um who was so fixated on this concept that he wouldn't look at faces in the early part of the day MH because he just didn't want to anything else to impact him now he would didn't have the most um rounded life I suppose but if you're talking about um cognitive performance this could actually be very beneficial you said so many brilliant things so one if you read books that describe the habits of uh brilliant people like uh writers they do control that sensory experience in in the in the in the hours after wake like many writers you know they have a particular habit of several hours early in the morning of actual writing they do don't do anything else for the rest of the day but they control they're very sensitive to noises and so on I think they make it very difficult to live with them I try to I'm definitely like that like I can I I love to control the sensory uh how much information is coming in there's something about the peaceful just everything being peaceful at the same time and we we're talking to a me your friend of Whitney come who um has has a has a mansion a castle on top of a cliff in in the middle of nowhere she actually purchased her own Island uh so she wants silence she wants to control how much sound is coming in and she's very sensitive to to sound and environment yeah beautiful home and environment but like clearly puts a lot of attention into into details yeah and and very creative yeah and that's yeah that allows her creativity to flourish I'm also I don't like that feels like a slippery slope so I I enjoy introducing the noises and signals and uh training my mind to be able to tune them out cu I feel like you can't always control the environment so perfectly because uh because your mind gets comfortable with that I think it's a skill that you want to learn to be able to shut it off like I often go to like back before Co to a coffee shop it really annoys me when there's sounds and voices and so on but I feel like I can train my mind to to block them out so it's it's a balance I think yeah and I think um you know two things come to mind um as you're saying this um first of all yeah I mean we're talking about what's best for work is not always what's best for you know completeness of life I mean you know autism is probably many things like when we autism just like Fe there probably 50 ways to get a fever there probably 50 ways to that the brain can create what looks like autism or what people call autism there's an ing set of studies that have come out of David ginty's Lab at Harvard Med um looking at these are Mouse mutants where um these are models for autism where nothing is disrupted in the brain proper and in the central nervous system but the sensory the sensory neurons the ones that inate the skin and the ears and everything are are hyp sensitive and this maps to a mutation in certain forms of human autism so this means that the the overload of sensory information and sensory experience that a lot of autistics feel they like that they can't tolerate things and then they get the stereotype behaviors the rocking and the kind of the shouting it you know we always thought of that as a brain problem in some cases it might be but in many cases it's because they just can't they they seem to have a m it's like turning the volume up on every sense and so they're overwhelmed and none of us want to be come like that I think it's very hard for them and it's hard for their parents and so forth so I I like the the coffee shoing example because um the way I think about trying to build up resilience uh you know physically or mentally or otherwise is one of um I guess we could call it Lim I like to call it lyic friction that's not a real scientific term and I acknowledge that I'm making it up now because I think it captures the concept which is that you know we always hear about resilience it makes it sound like oh you know under stress where everything's coming at you you're going to stay calm but there's another you know so limic the lyic system wants to pull you in some Direction typically in the direction of reflexive Behavior and the prefrontal cortex through top down mechanisms has to suppress that and say no we're not going to respond to the banging of the coffee cups behind me or I'm going to keep focusing that's pure top- down control so lyic friction is high in that environment youve put yourself into a high lyic friction environment mean that the prefrontal cortex has to work really hard but there's another side to lyic friction too which is when you're very sleepy there's nothing incoming it can be completely silent and it's hard to engage and focus because you're drifting off you're getting sleepy so their limic friction is high but for the opposite reason autonomic arousal is too low so there turning on Netflix in the background or looping a song might boost your level of alertness that will allow top down control to be in in the pl exactly The Sweet Spot you want it so that this is why earlier I was saying it's all about how we feel inside relative to what's going on on the outside we're constantly in this I guess one way you could Envision it spatially especially if uh people are listening to this just on audio is I like to think about it kind of like a glass barbell where one sphere of perception and attention can be on what's going on with me and one sphere of attention can be on what's going on with you or something else in the room or in my environment but those this barbell isn't rigid it's not really glass would plasma work here I don't know anything about plasma sorry I don't know okay but so imagine that this thing can contort the size of the the the globes at the end of this barbell can get bigger or smaller so let's say I close my eyes and I bring all my experience into what's going on inter in through interoception internally now it's as if I've got two orbs of perception just on my internal state but I can also do the opposite and bring two both orbs of perception outside me I'm not thinking about my heart rate or my breathing I'm just thinking about something I see and what you'll start to realize as you kind of use this spatial model is that two things one is that it's very Dynamic and that the more relaxed we are the more these two orbs of attention the two ends of the barbell can move around freely the more alert we are the more rigid they're going to be tethered in place and that was designed so that if I have a threat in my environment it's Tethered to that threat I'm not going to be if something's coming to attack me I'm not going to be like oh my breathing Cadence is a little bit quick that's not how it works why because both orbs are l linked to that uh to that threat and so my behavior is now actually being driven by something external even though I think it's internal and so I don't want to get too abstract here because I'm a neuroscientist I'm not a a theorist but when you start thinking about models of how the brain work I mean brain works excuse me they're only really three things that neurons do they're either Sensory neurons they're motor neurons or they're modulating things and the the models of attention and perception that we have now 2020 tell us that we've got interoception and exteroception they're strongly modulated by levels of autonomic arousal and that if we want to form the optimal relationship to some task or some pressure or some thing whether or not it's sleep an impending threat or coding we need to adjust our internal space-time relationship with the external space-time relationship and I realize I'm repeating what I said earlier but we can actually assign circuitry to this stuff it mostly has to do with how much lyic friction there is how much you're being pulled to some source that Source could be internal if I have if I have pain physical pain in my body I'm going to be much more interoceptive than I am EXT receptive you could be talking to me and I'm just going to be thinking about that pain it's very hard and the other thing that we can link it to is top- down control meaning anything in our environment that has a lot of salience will tend to bring us into more exteroception than interoception and again I don't want to litter the conversation with just a bunch of terms but um what I think it can be useful for people is to do what essentially you've done Lex is to start developing an awareness when I wake up am I mostly in a mode of interoception or exteroception when I work well is that what is working well look like from the perspective of autonomic arousal how alert or calm I am I what kind of balance between internal focus and external focus is there and to sort of watch this process throughout the day can you linger just briefly and cuz use this term a lot it be nice to try to get a little more color to it which is interoception and exteroception uh what are what are we exactly talking about so like what's included in each category and how much overlap is there interception would be uh an awareness of anything that's within the confines or on the surface of my skin that I'm sensing Al so literally physiological physiologically like within the boundaries of my skin and probably touch to the skin as well exteroception would be perception of anything that's ex beyond the reach of my skin so that that bottle of water um a scent um a sound although and this can change dramatically actually if you have headphones in you tend to hear things in your head if as opposed to a speaker in the room this is actually the basis of ventriloquism so there are beautiful experiments done by Greg Reen Zone up at UC Davis looking at how auditory and visual cues are matched and you have an array of speakers and you can this will become obvious as I say it but you know obviously the ventriloquist doesn't throw their voice what they do is they direct your vision to a particular location and you think the sound is coming from that location and there are beautiful experiments that Greg and his colleagues have done where they suddenly introduce a auditory visual mismatch and it freaks people out because you can actually make it seem from a perception standpoint as if the sound arrived from the corner of the room and hit you like it physically and people will recoil and so sounds aren't getting thrown across the room they're still coming from this defined location array of speakers but this is the way the brain creates these internal representations and again not to I don't want to go down a rabbit hole but um I think as much as you you know I'm sure the listeners appreciate this but you know everything in the brain is an abstraction right I mean they're they're the sensory apparati there are the eyes and ears and nose and skin and taste and all that are taking information and with interoception it's taking information from sensors inside the body the anic nervous system for the gut I've got Sensory neurons that intermate my liver um Etc taking all that and the brain is abstracting that in the same way that if I took a picture of your face and I handed it to you and I'd say that's you you'd say yeah that's me but if I were an abstract artist I'd be doing a little bit more of what the brain does where if I took a pen pad and paper maybe I could do this because I'm a terrible artist and I could just mix it up and I let's say I would make your eyes like water bottles but I'd flip them upside down and I'd start assigning fruits and objects to the different features of your face and I showed to you I say Lex that's you say well that's not me and I'd say no but that's my abstraction of you but that's what the brain does the space time relationship of the neurons that fire that encode your face has have no resemblance to your face right and I think people don't really I don't know if people have fully internalized that but the day that I and I'm not sure I fully internalized that because it's weird to think about but all neurons can do is fire in space and in time different neurons in different sequences perhaps with different intensities it's not clear the action potential is all or none although people neuroscientists don't like to talk about that even though it's been published in nature a couple times the action potential for a given neuron doesn't always have the exact same wave form people it's in all the textbooks but you can modify that wave for well there I mean there's a lot of fascinating stuff with uh with Neuroscience about the fuzziness of all the uh of the transfer of information from neuron to neuron I mean there we we certainly touch upon it every time we at all try to think about the difference between artificial neural networks and biological neural networks but can we uh maybe linger a little bit on this uh on the circuitry that you're getting at so the brain is just a bunch of stuff firing and it forms abstractions that are fascinating and beautiful like layers upon layers upon layers of abstraction and I think it uh just like when you're programming you know I'm programming in Python it's uh it's all inspiring to think that Underneath It All it ends up being zeros and ones and the computer doesn't know about no stupid python or Windows or Linux it it only knows about the zeros and ones in the same way with the brain is there something interesting to you or fundamental to about the circuitry of the brain that allows for the magic that's in our mind to emerge how much do we understand I mean maybe even focusing on the vision system is is there something specific about the structure of the vision system the circuitry of it that uh allows for the complexity of the vision system to emerge or is it all just a complete chaotic mess that we don't understand it's definitely not all a cha mess that we don't understand if we're talking about vision and that's not just because I'm a vision scientist let's stick to Vision let's stick to Vision well because in the beauty of the visual system the reason David huble and torr and weasel won the Nobel Prize was because they were brilliant in Forward Thinking and adventurous and all that good stuff but the reason that the visual system is such a great model for addressing these kinds of questions and other systems are hard is we can control the stimul we can adjust spatial frequency how finer the gradings are thick gradings thin gradings we can just temporal frequency how fast things are moving we can um use con isolating stimuli we can use there's so many things that you can do in a controlled way whereas if we were talking about cognitive encoding like the you know encoding the space of Concepts or something you know I I I've you know I like you I if I may are am drawn to the the big questions in Neuroscience but I confess in part because of some good advice I got early in my career and in part because I'm um not perhaps smart enough to go after the really high level stuff I also like to address things that are tractable and I want you know we need to we need to address what we can stand to make some ground on at a given time they you can construct brilliant controlled experiments just to study to really literally answer questions about yeah yeah I mean I'm happy to have a talk about Consciousness but it's it's a scary talk and I think most people don't want to hear what I have to say which is you know which is uh we can save that for later perhaps or it's an interesting question of uh we talk about psychedelics we can talk about Consciousness we can talk about cognition can experiments in Neuroscience be constructed to shed any kind of light on these questions so I mean it's cool that Vision I mean to me vision is probably one of the most beautiful things about human beings uh also from the AI side computer vision has the is some of the most exciting applications of uh neural networks is in computer vision but it feels like that's a that's a neighbor of cognition and Consciousness it's just that we maybe haven't come up with experiments to study those yet yeah the visual system is amazing we're mostly visual animals to navigate survive humans mainly rely on Vision not smell or something else but um it's a filter for cognition and it's a it's a strong driver of cognition maybe just because it came up and then we're moving to higher level Concepts just the the way the visual system works can be summarized in it um in a few relatively succinct statements unlike most of what I've said which has not been succinct at all let's go there you Thea what's involved yeah so the retina is this three layers of neuron structure at the back of your eye it's about as thick as a credit card it is a piece of your brain and sometimes people think I'm kind of wriggling by out of a real by saying that it is it's absolutely a piece of the brain it's it's a forbrain structure that in the first trimester there's a genetic program that made sure that that neural retina which is part of your central nervous system was squeezed out into What's called the embryonic eye cups and that the bone formed with a little hole where the optic nerve is going to connected to the rest of the brain and those that window into the world is the only window into the world for a for a mammal which has a thick skull birds have a thin skull so their pineal gland sits and lizards too and snakes actually have a hole so that light can make it down into the pineal directly and entrain melatonin rhythms for time of day and time of year humans have to do all that through the eyes so three layers of neurons that are a piece of your brain they are central nervous system and the optic nerve connects to the rest of the brain the neurons in the eye some just care about luminance just how bright or dim it is and they inform the brain about time of day and then the central circadian clock informs every cell in your body about time of day and make sure that all sorts of good stuff happens if you're getting light in your eyes at the right times and all sorts of bad things happen if you are getting light randomly throughout the 24-hour cycle we could talk about all that but this is a good incentive for keeping a relatively normal schedule consistent schedule of light exposure consistent schedule try and keep a consistent schedule when you're young it's easy to go off schedule and recover as you get older it gets harder but you see everything from outcomes in cancer patients to um diabetes um you know improves when people are getting light at a particular time of day and getting Darkness at a particular phase of the 24-hour cycle we were designed to um get light and dark at different times of the of the Circadian cycle that's all being all that information is coming in through specialized type of neuron in the retina called the melanops an intrinsically photosensitive gangling cell discovered by David buron at Brown University that's not spatial information it's subconscious you don't think oh it's daytime even if you're looking at the sun it doesn't matter it's a photon counter it's literally counting photons and it's saying oh even though it's a cloudy day lots of photons coming in it's winter in Boston it must be winter and your system is a little depressed it's spring you feel alert that's not a coincidence that's these melanops and cells signaling the circadian clock there are a bunch of other neurons in the eye that signal to the brain and they mainly signal the presence of things that are lighter than background or darker than background so a black objects would be darker than background a light object lighter than background and that all come it's mainly a it's looking at pixels mainly it's they look at circles and those neurons have receptive fields which not everyone will understand but those neurons respond best to little Circles of dark light or little Circles of bright light little Circles of red light versus little Circles of green light or blue light and so it sounds very basic it's like red green blue and circles brighter or dimmer than what's next to it but that's basically the only information that sent down the optic nerve and when we say information we can be very precise I don't mean little bits of red traveling down the optic nerve I mean spikes neural Action potentials in space and time which for you is like makes total sense but I think for a lot of people it it's actually beautiful to think about all that information in the outside world is converted into a language that's very simple it's just like a few syllables if you will and those syllables are being shouted down the optic nerve converted into a totally different language like mors code goes into the brain and then the thalamus essentially responds in the same way that the retina does except the thalamus is also waiting things it's saying you know what that thing um was moving faster than everything else or it's brighter than everything else so that signal I'm going to get up I'm going to allow up to Cortex or that signal is much redder than it is green so I'm going to let that signal go through that signal is much eh it's kind of more like the red next to it throw that out the information just doesn't get up into your cortex and then in cortex of course is where perceptions happen and in V1 if you will visual area one but also some neighboring areas you start getting representations of things like oriented lines so there's a neuron that responds to this angle of my hand versus vertical MH right this is the defining work of Hub visil Nobel and it's a very systematic map of orientation line orientation direction of mve movement and so forth and that's pretty much and color and that's how the visual system is organized all the way up to the cortex so it's hierarchical you don't build I want to be clear it's hierarchical because you don't build up that line by suddenly having a neuron that responds to lines in a some random way it responds to Lines by taking all the dots that are aligned in a vertical stack and they all converge on one neuron and then that neuron response to vertical lines so it's not random there's no abstraction at that point in fact in in fact if I showed you a black line I could be sure that if I were Imaging V1 that I would see a representation of that black line as a vertical line somewhere in in your cortex so at that point uh it's absolutely concrete it's not abstract but then things get really mysterious some of that information travels further up into the cortex so that and goes from one visual era to the next to the next to the next so that by time you get into an area that um Nancy kwish are at MIT has studied her much of her career the fusiform face area you start finding single neurons that respond only to your father's face or to Joe Rogan's face regardless of the orientation of his face I'm sure if you saw Joe because you know him well from across the room and you just saw his profile be like oh that's Joe walk over and say hello the orientation of his face isn't there you wouldn't even see his eyes necessarily but he's represented in some abstract way by a neuron that actually would be called The Joe Rogan neuron or neurons it might have limits like I might not recognize him if he was upside down or something like that it'd be fascinating to to see what the limits of that Joe Rogan concept is so nany's lab has done that because early on she was challenged by people that said there aren't face neurons there are neurons that they only respond to space and time shapes and things like that moving in particular directions and orientations and turns out Nancy was right um they used the stimula called called grible stimuli which um any computer programmer would appreciate which kind of morphs a face into something gradually that eventually just looks like this like alien thing they call the gal and the neurons don't respond to grebles in most cases they only respond to faces and familiar faces anyway I'm summarizing a lot of literature and forgive me Nancy and for those of the gbo people if there ours they like don't come after me with pitchforks actually you know what come out fors I think you know what I'm trying to do here yeah so the point is that in the visual system it's very concrete up until about visual area 4 which has color pin wheels and seems to respond to pin wheels of colors and um and so the stimula become more and more elaborate but at some point you depart that concrete representation and you start getting abstract representations that can't be explained by simple point-to-point wiring MH and to take a leap out of the visual system to the higher level Concepts what we talked about in the visual system maps to the auditory system where you're encoding what frequency of tone sweeps so this gonna sound weird to do but you know a like a Doppler like hearing something a car passing by for instance but at some point you get into motifs of music that can't be mapped to just a a a what they call a tonotopic map of frequency you start abstracting and if you start thinking about concepts of creativity and love and memory like what is the map of memory space right well your memories are very different than mine but presumably there's enough structure at the early stages of memory processing or at the early stages of emotional processing or at the earlier stages of creative processing that you have the building blocks your zeros and ones if you will but you depart from that eventually now the exception to this and I want to be really clear because I was just mainly talking about neocortex the six layered structure on the outside of the brain that explains a lot of human abilities other animals have them too is that subcortical structures are a lot more like machines it's more plung and chug and what I'm talking about is the Machinery that controls heart rate and breathing and receptive Fields um you know neurons that respond to things like temperature on the top of my left hand and one of the you know I came into Neuroscience from a more of a perspective initially of psychology but one of the reasons I forced upon myself to learn a some electrophysiology not a ton but enough and some molecular biology and about circuitry is that one of the most beautiful experiences you can have in life I'm convinced is to lower an electrode into the cortex and to show a person or an animal you do this ethically of course a stimulus yes like an oriented line or a face and you can convert the recordings coming off of that electrode into an audio signal an Audio Monitor and you can hear what they call hash it's not the hash you smoke it's the hash you hear and it's it sounds like it just sounds like noise MH and in the cortex eventually you find a stimulus that gets the neuron to spike and fire Action potentials they're converted into an auditory stimulus that are very concrete crack crack crack sounds like a bat cracking you know like home runs you know or or outfield balls when you drop electrodes deeper into the thalamus or into the hypothalamus or into the brain stem areas that control breathing it's like a machine you never hear hash you drop the electrode down this could be like a like a grungy old tugon electrode not high fideli electrode as long as it's got a little bit of insulation on it you plug it into an audio monitor it's picking up electricity and if it's a visual neuron and it's in the thalamus of the retina and you walk in front of that animal or person that that neuron goes and then you walk away and it stops and you put your hand in front of the eye again and it goes and you could do that for two days and that neuron will just every time there's a stimulus it fires so whereas before it's a question of how much information is getting up to Cortex and then these abstractions happening where you're creating these ideas when you go subcortical everything is there's no abstractions it's 2 plus 2 equals 4 there's no abstractions and this is why I um you know I know we have some common friends at neurol link and I love the demonstration they did recently I'm a huge fan of what they're doing and and where they're headed and no I don't get paid to say that and I have no you know business relationship to them I'm just a huge fan of the people and the mission but my question was to some of them you know when are you going to go subcortical because if you want to control an animal you don't do it in the cortex the cortex is like the abstract painting I made of your face stim moving removing one piece or changing something may or may not matter for the abstraction but when you are in the subcortical areas of the brain stimulating electrod can evoke an entire Behavior or an entire State and so the brain if we're going to have a discussion about the brain and how the brain works we need to really be clear which brain because everyone loves neocortex it's like oh canonical circuits in cortex we're going get the cortical connectome and sure necessary but not sufficient not to be able to plug in patterns of electrical stimulation and get Behavior eventually we'll get there but if you're talking subcortical circuits that's where the action is that's where you could potentially cure Parkinson's by stimulating the subthalamic nucleus because we know that it Gates motor activation patterns in very predictable ways so I think for those that are interested in Neuroscience it pays to pay attention to like is this a circuit that abstracts the sensory information or is it just one that builds up hierarchical models in a very predictable way and there's a huge chasm in Neuroscience right now because there's no conceptual leadership no one knows which way to go and this is why I think neuralink has captured an amazing opportunity which was okay while while all you academic research labs are figuring all this stuff out we're going to pick a very specific goal and make the goal the end point and some academic Laboratories do that but I think that's a beautiful way to attack this whole thing about the brain because it's very concrete let's restore motion to the parkinsonian patient academic Labs do that want to do that too of course let's restore um speech to the stroke patient but there's nothing abstract about that that's about figuring out the solution to a particular problem so anyway those are my and i' and I admit I've mixed in a lot of opinion there but having spent some time like 25 years digging around in the brain and listening to neurons firing and looking at them anatomically I think given it's 2020 we we need to uh ask the right you know the way to get better answers is ask better questions and the really high level stuff is fun it makes for good conversation and it has um brought enormous interest but I think the questions about Consciousness and dreaming and stuff they're fascinating but I don't know that we're there yet so you're seeing there might be a chasm in the two views of uh the power of the brain arising from the from the circuitry that forms abstractions or the power of the brain arising from the majority of the circuitry that's just doing very uh boot Force dumb things that are like that don't have any fancy kind of stuff going on that's really interesting to think about and which one to go after first and and and here I'm poaching badly from someone I've never met but whose you know work I I follow which is and it was actually on your podcast I think Elon Musk said you know basically the brain is a what you say a monkey brain with a supercomputer on top and I thought that's actually probably the best description of the brain I've ever heard because it captures a lot of important features like lyic friction right we think of like oh you know when we're making plans we're using the prefrontal cortex and we're executive function and all this kind of stuff but think about the drug addict who's driven to go pursue herin or cocaine they make plans so clearly they use their frontal cortex it's just that it's been hijacked by the lyic system and all the mon the monkey brain as he referred to it's really not fair to monkeys though Elon because actually monkeys can make plans they just don't make plans as sophisticated is AES I've spent a lot of time with monkeys but I've also spent a lot of time with humans anyway I'm but you're you're putting you're saying like we there's a lot of value to focusing on the monkey brain or whatever the heck you call it like I do because let's say I had an ability to place a chip anywhere I wanted in the brain today and activate it or inhibit that area I'm not sure I would put that chip in neocortex except maybe to just kind of have some fun and see what happens the reason is it's an abstraction machine and especially if I wanted to make a Mass Production Tool a tool in mass production that I could give to a lot of people because it's quite possible that your abstractions are different enough than mine that I wouldn't know what patterns of firing to induce but if I want let's say I want to increase my level of focus and creativity well then I would love to be able to for instance control my level of lyic friction I would love to be able to wake up and go oh you know I have an 8:00 appointment I wake up slowly so between S8 but I want to do a lot of linear thinking so you know what I'm going to just I'm going to turn down the limic friction and or ramp up prefrontal cortex's Activation so there's a lot of stuff that can happen in the thalamus with sensory gating um for instance you could shut down that shell around the thalamus and allow more creative thinking by allowing more lateral connections these would be some of the those would be the experiments I'd want to do so they're in the subcortical quote unquote monkey brain but you could then look at what sorts of abstract thoughts and behaviors would arise from that rather than and and here I'm not pointing my finger at neural Link at all but there's this obsession with neocortex but I I'm going to well I might lose a few friends but I'll hopefully gain a few and and also um one of the reasons people spend so much time in neocortex yes I have a fact in an opinion one fact is that you can image there and you can record there right now the two Photon and one Photon microscopy methods that allow you to image deep into the brain still don't allow you to image down really deep unless you're jamming prisms in there and endoscopes and then in the endoscopes are very narrow so you're getting very you know it's like looking at the bottom of the ocean through a through a spotlight yeah and so you much easier look at the waves up on top right so let's face it folks a lot of the reasons why there's so many recordings in layer 2 three of Cortex with all this Advanced microscopy is because it's very hard to image deeper now the microscopes are getting better and thanks to amazing work mainly of Engineers and chemists and physicists let's face it they're the ones who brought this revolution in Neuroscience in the last 10 years or so you can image deeper but we don't really that's why you see so many reports on layer 2 three the other thing which is purely opinion and I'm not going after anybody here but is that as long as there's no clear right answer it becomes a little easier to do creative work in a structure where no one really knows how it works so it's fun to probe around because anything you see is novel if you're going to work in the thalamus or the pulvinar or the hypothalamus so these structures that have been known about since the' 60s and 70s and really since the you know centuries ago you are dealing with exist you have to combat existing models yeah and where whereas in cortex no one knows how the thing works the neocortex six layer cortex and so L more room for Discovery there's a lot more room for Discovery and I'm not calling anyone out I love cortex we've published some papers on cortex it's super interesting but I I think with the tools that are available nowadays and where people are trying ahead of of not just reading from the Brain Monitoring activity but writing to the brain I think we really have to be careful and we need to be thoughtful about what are we trying to write what script are we trying to write because there are many brain structures for which we already know what scripts they write and I think there's tremendous value there I don't think it's boring the fact that they act like machines makes them predictable those are your zeros and ones yeah let's start there but let what they're what's sort of happening in this field of writing to the brain is there's this idea and again I want to be clear I'm not pointing at neuralink I'm mainly pointing at the the neocortical jockeys out there that you go and you observe patterns and then you think replaying those patterns is going to give rise to something interesting yeah I I should call out one experiment or two experiments which were done by susumu tagawa Nobel Prize winner from MIT done important work in memory and Immunology of course is where you got Nobel as well as Mark morford's Lab at UC San Diego they did an experiment where they monitored a bunch of neurons while an animal learns something MH then they captur those neurons through some molecular tricks so they could replay the neurons mhm so now there's like perfect case scenario it's like okay you monitor the neurons in your brain then I say okay neurons 1 through 100 were played in the particular sequence so you know the space time you know the keys on the piano that were played that gave rise to the song which was the behavior and then you go back and you reactivate those neurons except you reactivate them all at once like slamming on all the keys once on the piano and you get the exact same behavior so the SpaceTime code may be meaningless for some structures now that's freaky that's a scary thing because what that means is that all the space-time firing in cortex the space part May matter more than the time part so you know rate codes and SpaceTime codes we don't know and you know I'd rather have I'd rather deliver more answers in this discussion questions but I think it's an important consideration you're saying some of the magic is in the early stages of what the the closer to the raw information that bra ising I believe so you you know the stimulus you know the neuron then codes that stimulus so you know the transformation when I say this for those you that don't think about sensory Transformations it's like I can show you a red um Circle and then I look at how many U times the neuron fires in response to that red circle and then I show the red circle a bunch of times green circle see if it changes and then essentially the number of time that is the the transformation you've converted red circle into like three Action potentials you know beep beep or whatever you want to call it you know for those that think in sound space so that's what you've created you know the transformation and you march up the it's called the Nur axis as you go from the periphery up into the cortex and we know that and I know Lisa um Feldman Barrett or is it Barrett Feldman Barrett f F excuse me um Lisa that um talked a lot about this that you know birds can do sophisticated things and whatnot as well but humans there's a strong what we call seiz a lot of the processing is moved up into the cortex and out of these subcortical areas but it happens nonetheless and so as long as you know the Transformations you are in a perfect place to build machines or add machines to the brain that exactly mimic what the brain wants to do which is take events in the environment and turn them into internal firing of neurons so the Mastery of the brain can happen at their early level you know another perspective of it is uh you saying this means that humans aren't that special if we look at the evolutionary time scale the leap to intelligence is not that special so like the extra layers of abstraction isn't where most of the magic happens of intelligence which gives me hope that maybe if that's true that means the evolution of intelligence is not that rare of an event I certainly hope not um Al so you you hope there's I I hope there are other forms of intelligence I mean I think what humans are really good at um and here I want to be clear that this is not a formal model but what humans are really good at is taking that um plasma barbell that we were talking about earlier and not just using it for analysis of space like the your mediate environment but also using historical information like I can read a book today about the history of Medicine I happen to be doing that lately for some stuff I'm researching and I can take that information and if I want I can inject it into my plans for the future other animals don't seem to do that over the same time scales that we do now it may be that the Chipmunks Are All Hiding little like notebooks everywhere in the form of like little dirt castles or something that we don't understand I mean the waggle dance of the bee is in the most famous example bees come back to the hive they Orient relative to the honeycomb and they waggle a guy down in Australia named seren vissan who studied this and it's really interesting no one under really understands it except he understands it best the bee Waggles at a in a couple ways relative to the orientation of the honeycomb and then all the other bees see that it's Visual and they go out and they know the exact coordinate system to get to the to the source of whatever it was the food and bring it back and he's done it where they isolate the bees he's changed the visual flight environment all this stuff they are communicating and they're communicating something about something they saw recently but it doesn't extend over very long periods of time the same way that you and I can both read a book or you can recommend something to me and then we could Converge on a set of ideas later and uh In fairness because she was the one that said it and I didn't and I hadn't even thought of it um when you talked to Lisa on your podcast she brought up something beautiful which is that I never really occurred to me and I was sort of embarrassed that it hadn't but it's really beautiful it and Brilliant which is that you know we don't just encode senses in the form of like color and light and sound waves and taste but ideas become a form of sensory mapping and that's where the cool you know the really really cool and exciting stuff is but we just don't understand what the receptive fields are for ideas what's an idea receptive field and how they're communicated between humans because we seem to be U to be able to encode those ideas in some kind of way it's yes it's taking all the wrong information and the internal physical States the the that sensory information put into this concept blob that we in a store and then we're able to communicate that yeah your abstractions are different than mine I actually think the comment section you know on on social media is a beautiful example of where the abstractions are different for different people so much of the misunderstanding of the world yeah is because of these abst these idea receptive Fields they're not the same whereas I can look at a photo receptor neuron or factoring neuron or a V1 neuron and I am certain I would bet my life that yours look and respond exactly the same way that Lisa's do and mine do but once you get Beyond there it gets tricky and so when you say something or I say something and somebody gets upset about it or even happy about it their concept of that might be quite a bit different they don't really know what you mean they only know what it means to them yeah so from a neurolink perspective it makes sense to optimize the control and the augmentation of the of the more primitive uh circuitry so like the the stuff that is closer to the raw sensory information go deeper if they I think go deeper into the brain and I and to be fair so Matt McDougall um who's a neurosurgeon neurolink and also clinical neurosur great guy brilliant they have amazing people I have to give it to them they have been very cryptic in recent years their website was just like a like neur like nothing there that you know they know they really know how to do things with style and um and they've upset a lot of people but that's good too um but Matt is there I know Matt he actually came up through my lab at Stanford although he you know he was a neurosurgery resum we spent time in our lab he actually came out on the shark dive and did great white shark diving with my lab to collect the VR that we use in our fear stuff I've talked to Matt and I think you know he and other folks there are hungry for the deeper brain structures the problem is that damn vasculature all that blood supply it's right it's not trivial to get through and down into the brain without damaging the vasculature in the neocortex which is on the outer crust but once you start getting into the thalamus and closer to some of the main arterial sources you really risk getting massive bleeds and so it's it's a it's an issue that can be worked out it just is hard this just maybe be nice to educate I'm showing my ignorance so the the smart stuff is is on the surface so I didn't realize this I didn't quite realize because you keep saying deep yeah so so like the the early stages are deep yeah in in actually physically in the brain yeah so the way to um you know of course you got your your deep brain structures they're involved in breathing and heart rate and kind of lizard brain stuff and then on top of that this is the the um the the model of the brain that no one really subscribes to anymore but anatomically it works and then on top in mammals and then on top of that you have the lyic structures which gate sensory information and decide whether or not you're going to listen to something more than you're going to look at it or you're going to split your attention to both kind of sensory allocation stuff um and then the neocortex is on the outside um and that is where you get a lot of this abstraction stuff and now not all cortical areas are doing abstraction some like visual area one auditory area one they're just doing concrete uh representations but um as you get into the higher order stuff that when you start hearing names like infro parietal cortex and you know when you start hearing multiple names in the same then you're talking about higher order areas but actually there's a an important experiment that um that drives a lot of what people want to do with brain machine interface and that's the work of Bill Nome who is at Stanford and Tony maavin who's at runs the center for neural science at NYU this is a wild experiment and I think it might freak a few people out if they really think about it too deeply but um anyway here he goes there's an area called Mt in the cortex and if I showed you a bunch of dots all moving up and this is is what they this is what Tony and Bill and some of the other people um in that lab did way back when is they show a bunch of dots moving up somewhere in Mt there's some neurons that respond they fire when the neurons move up and then what they did is they started varying the coherence of that motion so they made it so only 50% of the dots moved up and the rest move randomly and that neuron fires a little less and eventually it's random and that neuron stops firing because it's just kind of dots moving everywhere it's awesome and there's a systematic map so that other neurons are responding and things moving down and other things are responding left and other things are moving right okay so there's a map of direction space you okay well that's great you could leion Mt animals lose the ability to do these kind of coherence discrimination or Direction discrimination but the Amazing Experiment the one that just is kind of eerie is that they lowered a stimulating electrode into Mt found a neuron that responds to when dots go up but then they silence that neuron and and sure enough the animal doesn't recognize the neurons are going up and then they move the dots down they stimulate the neuron that responds to things moving up and the animal responds because it can't speak it responds by doing a lever press which says the dots are moving up so in other words the sensory the dots are moving down in reality on the computer screen they're stimulating the neuron that responds to dots moving up and the perception of the animal is that dots are moving up which tells you that your perception of external reality absolutely has to be a neuronal abstraction it is not tacked to the movement of the dots in any absolute way your perception of the outside world depends entirely on the activation patterns of neurons in the brain and you you can hear that and say well duh because if I stimulate you know the stretch reflex and you kick or something or whatever you know the knee F Lex and you kick of course there's a neuron that triggers that but it didn't have to be that way yeah because a the animal had prior experience B you're way up in the you know higher order C cortical areas what this means is that and I generally try to avoid conversations about this kind of thing but what this means is that we are constructing our reality with this SpaceTime firing the zeros and ones and it doesn't have to have anything to do with the actual reality and the animal or person be absolutely convinced that that's what's happening are you familiar with the work of Donald Hoffman so he's uh uh so he makes an evolutionary argument that's not important of that we our brains are completely detached from reality in the sense that he makes a radical case that we have no idea what physical reality is and in fact it's drastically different than what we think it is oh my so so he goes scary so he doesn't say like there's just cuz you're kind of implying there's a there's a gap there there might be a gap with constructing an illusion and then maybe using uh communication to maybe uh create a consistency that's sufficient for our human collaboration whatever or mammal you know just maybe even just life forms are construct a consistent reality that's may be detached I mean that's really cool that neurons are constructing that like that you can prove that this is what you're science at his best vision science but he says that like our brain is actually just lost its on the on the on the path of evolution to where we're no long we're just playing games with each other in constructing realities that allow our survival but it's it's it's completely detached from phys IAL reality like we're we're missing a lot we're missing like most of it if not all of it well this was um it's it's fascinating because I just saw the Oliver Sachs documentary there's a new documentary out about his life and there's this one part where he's like I've spent part of my life trying to imagine what it would like to be be uh to be a bat or something to see the world through the life you know the sensory apparat of a bat and he did this with his these patients that were locked into these horrible syndromes that to pull out some of the the beauty of their experience as well not just communicate the suffering although the suffering too and as I was listening to him talk about this I started to realize it's like what you know like they're these mantis shrimps that can see 60 shades of pink or something and they they see the stuff all the time and animals they can see UV light every time I learn about an animal that can sense other things in the environment that I can't like heat sensing what not I don't crave that experience the same way saxs talked about craving that experience but it does throw another penny in the jar for what you're saying which is that it could be that most if not all of what I perceive and believe is just um a a neural fabrication and that For Better or For Worse we all agree on enough of the same neural Fabrications in the same time and place that we're able to function not only that but we agree with the things that are trying to eat us uh enough to where we don't they don't eat us meaning like that it's not just us humans you know right I see because it's interactive it's interactive so like so like uh now I think it's a really um nice thought experiment I think because uh Donald really frames it in a scientific like he makes a hard like as hard as our discussion has been now he makes a hard scientific case that we don't know about reality uh I think that's a little bit uh hardcore but I I think it's I think is hardore is hardore I think it's a good thought experiment that kind of uh cleanses the pallet of the confidence we might have about uh about cuz we are operating in this abstraction space and you know and uh you know the sensory spaces might be something very different and and it's kind of interesting to think about if if you start to go into the realm of neuralink or start to talk about just everything you've been talking about with dream states and psychedelics and stuff like that which part of the which layer can we control and play around with to maybe look into a different slice of reality it you know you just got to do the experiment the key is to just do the experiment in the most ethical way possible you just I mean that's the beauty of experiments this is why um you know there there there's wonderful theoretical Neuroscience Happening Now make to make predictions and but the but that's why experimental science is so wonderful you can go into the laboratory and poke around in there and be a brain Explorer and and listen to and write to neurons and when you do that you get answers you don't always get the answers you want but that's you know that's the beauty of it I I think when you were saying um this thing about reality and the Donald Hoffman model I was thinking about children you know at um like when I have an older sister Shir uh she's very sane um uh but when she was a kid she had an imaginary friend yeah and she would play with this imaginary friend and it had there was this whole there was a consistency this friend was like it was Larry lived in a purple house Larry was a girl it was like all this stuff that a child a young child wouldn't have any issue with and then one day she announced that Larry had died right and it wasn't dramatic or traumatic and that was it and she just stopped and I always wonder what that um neurodevelopmental event was that um a kept her out of a a psychiatric ward had she got you know kept that imaginary friend but but it I it's also there was something kind of sad to it I think the way it was told to me because I'm the younger brother I didn't I wasn't around for that but my my dad told me that you know there was a kind of a sadness because it was this beautiful reality that had been constructed and so we kind of w i i wonder as you're telling me this whether or not you know as adults we try and create as much reality for children as we can so that they can make predictions and feel safe because the ability to make predictions is a lot of what keeps our autonomic arousal in check I mean we go to sleep every night and we give up total control and that should frighten us deeply but you know unfortunately autonomic rousel Yanks us down under and we don't negotiate too much so you sleep sooner or later um I don't know um I was a little worried we'd get into discussions about the nature of reality because I'm I it's interesting in the laboratory I'm a very much like what's the experiment what would the you know what's the analysis going look like what mutant Mouse are we going to use what what what experience are we going to put someone through but I think it's wonderful that in 2020 we can finally have discussions about this stuff and look kind of peek around the corner and say well neur link and people others who are doing similar things are going to figure it out they're going to the the answers will show up and we just have to be open to interpretation do you think there could be an experiment uh centered around Consciousness I mean you're plugged into the Neuroscience Community I think for the longest time the quote unquote c-word was totally not uh was almost anti-scientific but now more and more people are talking about Consciousness Elon is talking about Consciousness AI folks are talking about Consciousness it's it's still nobody knows anything but it feels like a legitimate domain of inquiry that's hungry for a real experiment so I have fortunately three short answers to this um uh the first one is a I'm not I'm not particularly sucin I I agree that no the joke I always tell is um there two things you never want to say to a scientist one is uh what do you do and the second one is um take as much time as you need and you definitely don't want to say them in the same sentence um I have three short answers to it so there's a um there's a cynical answer kind of uh and it's not one I enjoy giving Which is that um if you look into the 70s and back at the 1970s and 1980s and even into the early 2000s there were some very Dynamic um very impressive speakers who were very smart in the field of Neuroscience and related fields who thought hard about the Consciousness problem and fell in love with the problem but uh overlooked the fact that the technology wasn't there yeah so um I admire them for falling in love with the the problem but they gleaned tremendous taxpayer resources essentially for nothing and these people know who they are some of them are alive some of them aren't I'm not referring to Francis Crick who was brilliant by the way and thought the claustrum was involved in Consciousness which I think is a great idea it's this obscure structure that no one's really studied people are now starting to study it so I think Francis was brilliant and wonderful but there it you know there were books written about it it makes for great television stuff and thought around the table or after a couple glasses of wine or whatever um it's an important problem nonetheless and so I think I do think the Consciousness the issue is it's not operationally defined right that psychologists are much smarter than um a lot of uh heart scientists in that for the following reason they put operational definitions they know know that psychology if we're talking about motivation for instance they know they need to put operational definitions on that so that two Laboratories can know they're studying the same thing the problem with Consciousness is no one can agree on what that is and this was a problem for attention when I was coming up so in the early 2000s people would argue what is attention is it spatial attention auditory attention is it and finally people were like you know what we agree have they agreed on that one I remember sort of I remember hearing people scream a lot of tension right they couldn't even agree on attention so I was coming up as a young graduate student I'm thinking like I'm definitely not going to work on attention and I'm definitely not going to work on Consciousness and I wanted something that I could solve or figure out I want to be able to see the circuit or the neurons I want to be able to hear it on the Audio I want to record from it and then I want to do gain of function and loss a function take it away see something change put it back see something change in a systematic way and that takes you down into the depths of some stuff that's pretty um uh plug and chug you know but you know I'll borrow from something in the the military because I'm fortunate to do some work with units from Special Operations and they have beautiful language around things because their world is not abstract and they talk about 3 meter targets 10 meter targets and 100 meter targets and it's not an issue of picking the 100 meter Target because it's more beautiful or because it's more interesting if you don't take down the 3 meter targets and the 10 meter targets first you're dead so that's a I think scientists could pay to you know adopt a more kind of military thinking in that in that sense the other thing that is really important is that just because somebody conceived of something and can talk about it beautifully and can glean a lot of um resources for it doesn't mean that it's LED anywhere so but this isn't just true of the Consciousness issue and I don't want to sound cynical but I could pull up some names of molecules that occupied hundreds of articles in the very Premier journals that then were later discovered to be totally moot for that process and biotech companies folded everyone and the lab pivots and starts doing something different with that molecule and nobody talks about it because as long as you're in the game we have this thing called Anonymous peer review you can't afford to piss off anybody too much unless you have some other funding stream and I have avoided battles most of my career but I pay attention to all of it and I've watched this and I don't think it's ego- driven I think it's that people fall in love with an idea I don't think there's any there's not enough money in science for people to sit back there rubbing their hands together you know the beauty of what neural link and Elon and and team because obviously he's very impressive but the the team as a whole is really what gives me great confidence in their mission is that he's already got enough money so it can't be about that he doesn't seem to need it at a level of uh 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 I think it's driven by genuine curiosity and the team that he's assembled include people that are very kind of abstract neuro neocortex space-time coding people there're people like Matt who's a neurosurgeon you can't I mean you know you can't BS neurosurgery failures in neurosurgery are not tolerated so you have to be very good to exceptional to even get through the gate and he's exceptional and then they've got people like Dan Adams who was at UCSF for a long time he's a good good friend and known him for years um who is very concrete studied the vasculature in the eye and how it maps to the vasculature cortex when you get a team like that together you're going to have denters you're going to have people that are highlevel thinkers people that are coders when you get a team like that it no longer looks like an academic laboratory or even a field in science and so I think they're going to solve some really hard problems and again I'm not here they don't you know I have nothing in at stake with them but I think that's the solution you need a bunch of people who don't need first author papers who don't need to complete their PHD who aren't relying on outside funding who have a clear Mission and you have a bunch of people who are basically will adapt to solve the problem I like the analogy of the 3 meter Target and the 100 meter Target so the folks in neur link are basically many of them are some of the best people in the world at the 3 meter Target like that you mentioned Matt new surger like they're solving real problems there's no BS philos philosophical uh smokes and weed and look back at look at the stars but uh so both on Elon and because I think like this I think it's really important to think about the 100 meter and the 100 meter is not even not even 100 meter but like like the stuff behind the hill that's that's that's too too far away which is which is where I put Consciousness I'm maybe I tend to believe that uh Consciousness can be engineered I me part of the reason part of the the the business I want to build leverages that idea that Consciousness is a lot simpler that we've than we've been talking about well if if someone can simplify the problem that will be wonderful I mean the reason we can talk about something as abstract as face representations infusive form face area is because Nancy caner had the Brilliance to tie it to the um kind of lower level um statistics of visual scenes it wasn't cuz she was like oh I bet it's there that wouldn't have been interesting so people like her understand how to bridge that Gap and they put a tractable definition so so I just I that's what I'm begging for in science is a tractable definition this is what but I want people to sit in the I want people who are really uncomfortable with woow woo like Consciousness like high Lev stuff to sit in that topic and sit uncomfortably because it forces them to then try to ground and simplify it into something that's concrete because too many people are just uncomfortable to sit in the Consciousness room because there's no definitions it's like attention or or intelligence in the artificial intelligence Community but the reality is it's easy to avoid that room altoe which is what I mean there's analogies to everything you've said with the artificial intelligence Community with the Minsky and even Alan ing that talked about intelligence a lot and then they drew a lot of funding and then it crashed because they really didn't do anything with it and it was a lot of force of personality and so on but that doesn't mean the topic of the touring test and intelligence isn't something we should sit on and think like think like what is first of all I mean touring actually attempted this with a touring test he tried to make concrete this very question of intelligence it doesn't mean that we shouldn't Linger on it and uh for we shouldn't forget that ultimately that is what our efforts are all about in the artificial intelligence community and in the people whether it's Neuroscience or whatever bigger umbrella you want to use for understanding the mind the goal is not just about understanding layer two or three of the vision it's it's to understand Consciousness and intelligence and maybe create it or or just all the possible biggest questions of our universe that's that's ultimately the dream absolutely and I think what I really appreciate about appreciate about what you're saying is that everybody whether or not they're working on a kind of low-level synapse that's like a reflex in the musculature or something very high level abstract can benefit from looking at those who prefer three you know everyone's going after a 3 meter 10 m and 100 meter Targets in some sense but to be able to tolerate the discomfort of being in a conversation where there are real answers where the zeros and ones are are known zeros and ones those the equivalent of that in the nervous system and also as you said for the people that are very much like oh I can only trust what I can see and touch those people need to put themselves into the discomfort of the high level conversation because what's missing is conversation and conceptualization of things at multiple levels I think one of the this is um I I don't gripe about my lab's been fortunate we've been funded from the start and we've been happy um in that in that regard and lucky and we're grateful for that but I think one of the challenges of research being so expensive is that there isn't a a lot of time especially nowadays for people to just convene around a topic because there's so much emphasis on productivity um and so there there actually believe it or not there aren't that many Concepts formal Concepts in Neuroscience right now the last 10 years has been this huge influx of tools and so people have been neural circuits and probing around and connectomes it's been wonderful but you know 10 20 years ago when the Consciousness stuff was more prominent the seword as you said um what was good about that time is that people would go to meetings and actually discuss ideas and models now it's sort of like demon it's sort of like demonstration day at the school science fair where everyone's got their thing and you some stuff is cooler than others but um I think we're going to see a shift I'm grateful that we have so many computer scientists and theoreticians and um or theorists I think they call themselves um somebody tell me what the difference is someday um and you know psychology and even dare I say philosophy you know these things are starting to converge we you know Neuroscience that the name Neuroscience there wasn't even such a thing when I started graduate school or as a postto it was neurophysiology you're a neur anatomist or what now every it's sort of everybody's invited and that's beautiful that means that something's useful is going to come up all this and there's also tremendous work of course happening on for the treatment of disease and we shouldn't Overlook that that's where you know ending you know eliminating reducing suffering is also a huge initiative in Neuroscience so there's a lot of Beauty in the field but the Consciousness thing continues to be a uh it's like an exotic bird it's like no one really quite knows how to handle it and it dies very easily well yeah I I think also from the AI perspective I so I view the brain as less sacred uh I think from a neuroscience perspective you're a little bit more sensitive to BS like BS narratives about the brain or whatever I'm a little bit more uh comfortable with just poetic BS about the brain as long as it helps engineer intelligence systems well you know what I mean well and and I have to you know I confess um ignorance when it comes to you know most things about coding and I'm I'm have some quantitative ability but I don't have strong quantitative leanings and so I I know my limitations too and so I I think the Next Generation coming up you know a lot of the students at Stanford are really interested in quantitative models and theory and Ai and I remember when I was coming up um a lot of the people who were doing work ahead of me kind of rolled my eyes at some of the stuff they were doing um including some of their personalities although I have great many great um senior colleagues everywhere the world so it's the way of the world so nobody knows what it's like to be a you know a young graduate student in 2020 except the young graduate student so I I know what I I'm I know there are a lot of things I don't know and um in addition to why I do a lot of public education increase scientific literacy and neuroscientific thinking Etc a big goal of mine is to try and at least pave the way so that these really brilliant and forward thinking um younger scientists can make the biggest possible dent and make what will eventually be all us old guys and gals look stupid I mean that's that's what we were all trying to do that's what we were trying to do so yeah so from the highest possible topic of Consciousness to the to the lowest level uh topic of David goggin's uh let's I don't know if it's low lowlevel he's high perform high performance but like low like there's I don't think David has a has any time for philosophy let's just put it this way uh well it's I mean I think we can tack it to what we were just saying in a in a in a meaningful way which is whatever goes on in that abstraction part of the brain he's figured you know he's figured out how to dig down in whatever the lyic friction yeah he's figured out how to grab a hold of that Scruff it and send it in the direction that he's decided it needs to go and what's Wild is that he's what we're talking about is him doing that to himself right he's it's like he's scruffing himself and directing himself in a particular direction and sending himself down that trajectory and he what's beautiful is that he acknowledges that that process is not pretty it doesn't feel good it's kind of horrible at every level but he's created this re rewarding element to it and I think that's what's so it it's so admirable and it's what so many people crave which is regulation of the self at that level and he practices I mean there's a ritual to it there's a every single day like no exceptions there's a practice aspect to the suffering that he goes through it's principled suffering principled suffering it is and I mean I just I mean I admire all aspects of it including him and his girlfriendwife I'm not sure she'll probably know this fiance wonderful person asking no no we've only commun I um we've only I've only communicated with her um by a text about some stuff um I was asking David but yeah they they clearly have formed a powerful team yeah um and it's beautiful thing to to see people working in that kind of synergy it's inspiring to me same as with Elon that guy like David Goggins can find love uh that that you find a thing that works which gives me hope that like whatever whatever flavor of crazy I am you can always find another thing that works with that but I I I've had the so maybe let's trade goggin stories uh you from a neuroscience perspective me from a uh self-inflicted pain perspective I somehow found myself in communication with David about some challenges that I was undergoing um one of which is we were communicating every single day email phone about a particular 30-day challenge I did that stretched for a longer of uh push-ups and pull-ups you made a call out on social media yeah social media actually I think that the point I I knew of you before but that's where I started tracking some of what you were doing with these physical challenges and I um the hell's wrong with that guy well no I think I actually I don't often comment on people's stuff but I think I commented something like uh neuroplasticity loves a non-negotiable rule no I said a non-negotiable contract because at the point where yeah neural neurop plasticity really loves a non-negotiable contract because you know and I've said this before so forgive me but you know the brain is doing analysis of duration path and outcome and that's a lot of work for the brain and more that it can pass off duration path and outcome to just reflex the more energy and and it can allocate to other things so if you decide there's no negotiation about how many push-ups how far I'm going to run how many days how many pull-ups Etc you actually have more energy for push-ups running and pull-ups and when you say neuroplastic you mean like the brain once the decision is made it'll start rewiring stuff to to make sure that this we can actually make this happen that's right I mean so much of what we do is reflexive at the level of just core circuitry breathing heart rate all that that boring stuff digestion but then there's a lot of reflexive stuff like how you drink out of a a mug of coffee that's reflexive too but that you had to learn at some point in your life earlier when you were very little analyzing duration path and outcome and that involved a lot of top down processing with the prefrontal cortex but through plasticity mechanisms you now do it so when you take on a challenge provided that you understand the core mechanics of how to you know run push-ups and and pull and whatever else you decided to do once you set the number and the duration and all that then you all you have to do is just go but people get caught in that tide poool of just well do I really have to do it how do I not do that what if I get injured what if I you know can I sneak at this so that you know and that's work yeah and to some extent I I look I not David goggin obviously um nor nor do I claim to understand his process U partially you know um but maybe a little bit which is that it's clear that by making the decision there's more resources to devote to the effort of the actual execution well that's a really like what you're saying was not a lesson that was obvious to me and it's still not obvious it's something I really work at which is there is always an option to quit and I mean that's something I really struggle with I mean I've quit some things in my life it's like stupid stuff and uh one lesson I've learned is if you quit once it opens the door that like it's really valuable to trick your brain into thinking that you you're going to have to die before you quit like it's actually really convenient so actually what you're saying is very profound but you shouldn't intellectualize it like it took me time to develop like out psychologically in ways that I think I would be another conversation CU I'm not sure how to put it into words but it's really tough on me to uh to do certain parts of that challenge which is a huge is a huge output the the number that see I was I thought it would be the number would be hard but it's not it's the entirety of it especially in the early days was just spending I'm kind of embarrassed to say how many hours this took so I I didn't say publicly how many hours cuz people I I knew people would be like don't you aren't you supposed to do other stuff well it's um hell are you doing again I don't want to speculate too much about but occasionally David has said this publicly where people will be like don't you sleep or something and his process used to just be that he would just block delete you know like gone but it's it's actually um it's it's a super interesting topic and because self-control and directing our actions and the role of emotion and quitting these are these are vital to The Human Experience and they're vital to performing well at anything and at a high obviously at a super high level being able to understand this about the self is crucial um so I have a friend who was also in the teams his name is Pat dosset he did nine years in the SEAL Teams um and in a similar way there's there's a lore about him among Team guys um because of a kind of funny challenge he gave himself which was so he and I swim together although he swims further up front than I do um and he's very patient um but you know he was on a he was assigned when he was in the teams to a position that gave him a little more time behind the desk than he wanted and not as much time out out in deployments although he did deployments um so he didn't know what to do at that time but he thought about it and he asked himself what what does he hate the most mhm and it turns out the thing that he hated doing the most was bear crawls you know walking on your hands and knees so he decided to Bear crawl for a mile for time so he was Bear crawling a mile a day right and I thought that was an interesting example they gave because you know like why pick the thing you hate the most and I think it Maps right back to lyic friction it's the thing that creates the most limic friction and so if you can overcome that then there's carryover and I think the notion of carryover has been talked about psychologically and kind of in the self-help space like oh if you run a marathon it's going to help you in other areas of life but will it really will it well I think it depends on whether or not there's a lot of lyic friction because if there is what you're exercising is not a circuit for bear crawls or a circuit for pull-ups what you're doing is you're exercising a circuit for top- down control and that circuit was not designed to be for bear crawls or pull-ups or coding or waking up in the middle of the night to do something hard that circuit was designed to override lyic friction and so neural circuits were designed to generalize right the stress response to an incoming threat that's a physical threat was designed to feel the same way and be the same response internally as the threat to an impending exam or divorce or marriage or whatever it is that's stressing somebody out and so neural circuits are not designed to be for one particular action or purpose so if you can as you did if you can train up top beond control under conditions of the highest limbic friction that when the desire to quit is at its utmost either because of fatigue or hyperarousal being too stressed or too tired you're you're learning how to engage a circuit and that circuit is forever with you and if you don't engage it you it sits there but it's atrophied it's not it's like a plant that doesn't get any water and a lot of this has been discussed in self-help and growth mindset and all these kinds of ideas that Circle the internet and social media but when you start to think about how they map to neural circuits I think there's some utility because what it means is that the lyic friction that you'll experience in I don't know maybe some future relationship to something or someone it will it's a category of neural processing that should immediately click into place it's just like the lyic friction you experienced trying to engage in the God knows how many uh push-ups pull-ups and and running you uh you know runs you were doing 25,000 so folks if if Lex does this again more comments more likes no well this the problem with you getting more followers is you're going to get more actually I should say that's the benefit I I don't know maybe it's not politically correct for me to ask but like there is this uh stereotype about Russians being you know like correct no like like like uh like being really um you know durable and and you know I I started going to that Russian B that way back uh before Co and um they could tolerate a lot of heat you know and and they would sit very stoic you know no one was going oh it's hot in here they just kind of like ease into it um so maybe there's something there who knows there might be something there but it could be also just personal I just have some I found myself everyone's different but I've found myself to be able to do something unpleasant for very long periods of time like I'm able to shut off the mind and I don't think that's been fully tested and I monkey mind or the supercomputer uh well it's interesting I mean um which mind is which mind tells you to quit exactly limic limic friction tells you well limic friction is the source of that but what who are you talking with exactly so there's a um we can uh put something very concrete to that so there's a paper publish in cell you know super top tier Journal uh two years ago um looking at f and this was in a visual environment of trying to swim forward toward a a Target and a reward and it was a really cool experiment because they manipulated uh virtually the visual environment so um the same amount of effort was being expended every time but sometimes the perception was you're making forward progress and sometimes the perception was you're making no progress because stuff wasn't Drifting by meant no progress so you can be swimming and swimming and know making progress and it turns out that with each bout of effort there's a epinephrine and norepinephrine is being released in the brain stem and glea the what traditionally were thought of a support cells for the neurons but they do a lot of things actively too are measuring the amount of EP epinephrine and norepinephrine in that circuit and when it exceeds a certain threshold the glea send inhibitory signals that shut down top down control they literally it's the quit you stop there's no no more it's you quit enduring it can be rescued endurance can be rescued with dopamine uh be so that's where the subjective part really comes into play so you quit because um you've learned how to turn that off or you've learned how to ro some people will reward the pain process so much that friction becomes the reward and I you know when you talk about people like goggin and other people I know from Special Operations and people have gone through Cancer Treatments three times you hear about you know just when you hear about people the Victor Frankle stories I mean you hear about Nelson Mandela you hear about these stories I'm sure the same process is involved again this speaks to the generalizability of these processes as opposed to a neural circuit for a particular action or cognitive function so I think um you have to learn to subjectively self-reward in a way that replenishes you uh goggin talks about eating Souls it's a very dramatic example in his mind apparently that's a form of reward but it's not just a form of reward where you're it's like a you're picking up a a trophy or something it's it's actually it gives energy it's a reward that gives more neural energy and I'm defining that as more dopamine to suppress the nor adrenaline adrenaline circuits in the brain Stone so ultimately maps of that yeah he creates enemies he's always fighting enemies I never I think I have enemies but there are usually just versions of me inside my head uh so I I thought about through that 30-day challenge I tried to come up with like fake enemies it wasn't working the only enemy I came up with is David well now you have you certainly have a a a form formidable adversary in this one I don't care I'm David I'm willing to die on this one so let's go there uh but well let's hope you you both uh uh both survive this um this one but my problem is the physical there's uh so everything we've been talking about in the mind there's a physical aspect that's just practically difficult which is like I can't like you know when you injure yourself at a certain point like you just can't function or you're doing more damage you're talking about it taking yourself out of running for yeah um for the the rest of your life potentially or like you know or for years so you know I'd love to avoid that right there's just like stupid physical stuff that you just want to avoid you want to keep it purely in the mental and if it's purely in the mental that's when the race is interesting but yeah the the the problem with these physical challenges as as David has experienced I mean it has a toll on your body I tend to think of the mind is Limitless and the body is kind of unfortunately quite limited well I think the key is to dynamically control your output and that can be done by reducing effort which doesn't work for for throughout but also by um restoring through these uh subjective reward processes and and we don't want to go down the rabbit hole of why this all works but these are ancient Pathways that were designed to bring resources to an animal or to a person through foraging for hunting or mates or water all these things and they work so well because they're down in those uh uh circuits where we know the zeros and ones and that's great because it can be subjective at the level of oh I reached this one uh Milestone this one horizon this one 3 meter Target but if you don't reward it you it's just effort if you do self-reward it it's effort minus one in terms of the adrenaline output I have to uh ask you about this you're one of the great communicators in science I'm really big fan of your enjoying in terms of like this the educational stuff you putting it in on Neuroscience thank you what's the uh do you have a philosophy behind it or is it just uh an instinct oh Unstoppable Force do you have a like what's your thinking because it's rare and it's exciting I'm I'm I'm excited that you know uh somebody from Stanford so I okay I'm in multiple places in the sense of like where my interests lie and one you know politically speaking academic institutions are Under Fire uh you know for many reasons we don't need to get into I get into it in a lot of other places but I believe in uh in places like Stanford and places like MIT as uh one of the most magical institutions for inspiring people to dream people to build the future I mean it's I I believe that it is a really special these universities are really special places and so it's always exciting to me when uh somebody as inspiring as you represents those places so it makes me proud that uh somebody from Stanford is is like somebody like you is representing Stanford so uh maybe you could speak to what's how did you come to be who you are in being being a communicator well first of all thanks for the the kind words especially um coming from you I I think um Stanford is an amazing place as is MIT and it's such a MIT is better by the I'll let it out anything you say at I have many friends at Mi yeah you know hi Ed smarter friends yeah Ed boen is is is is uh best in CL you know among the Best in Class there's some people not me that can hold hold a candle to him but not many maybe one or two I think the the great benefit of being in a place like MIT or Stanford um is that when you look around you know that the the average is very high right that you have many best-in class among the you know one or two or three best in the world at what they do and um It's a Wonderful privilege to be there and uh one thing that I think also uh makes them and other universities like them very special is that there's an emphasis on what gets exported out of the University what you know not keeping it Ivory Tower and really trying to keep an eye on what's needed in the world and trying to do something useful um and I think the proximity to Industry and Silicon Valley and in the Boston area in Cambridge also lends itself well to that and there are other institutions of too of course so um the reason I got involved in educating on social media was actually because of a a Pat dosset the be mile bear call Guy it was at the turn of 2018 to 2019 uh we had formed a a a good friendship we were we he talked to me into doing these early morning um cold water swims I was learning a lot about pain and suffering but also the beauty of cold water swims and and we were talking one morning and he said um so what are you going to do to serve the world in 2019 it's like that's the way that like a Tex and former seal talks like we're just literally what are you going to do to serve the world in 2019 like well I run my lab it's like no no no what are you going to do that's new and he wasn't forceful in it but I was like that's an interesting question I said well um if I had my way I would just you know teach people everyone about the brain because I think it's amazing he goes we'll do it and I all right he goes Shake on it so we did it you know and so I started putting out these posts and it's grown into um to include a variety of things but you asked about a governing philosophy so I want to increase interest in the brain and in the nervous system and in biology generally that's one major goal I'd like to increase scientific literacy which can't be rammed down people's throats of talking about how to look at a graph and statistics and you know zc scores and P values and uh genetics it has to be done gradually in my opinion um I want to put valuable tools into the world mainly tools that map to things that we're doing in our lab so these will be tools um centered around how to um understand and direct one's states of mind and body so reduce stress raise one's stress threshold so it's not always just about being calm sometimes it's about learning how to tolerate not being not calm um raise awareness for mental health I me there's a ton of micro missions in this but it all really Maps back to you know like the eight and 10-year-old version of me which is I used to spend my weekends when I was a kid reading about weird animals and I had this obsession with like medieval weapons and stuff like catapults and and then I used to come into school on Monday and I would ask if I could talk about it to the class and teach and I just it's really I I promise and some people might not believe me but it's really I don't really like being the point of focus I just get so excited about these gems of that I find in the world in books and in experiments and in discussions with colleagues and discussions with people like you and and around the universe and I can't just compulsively I got to tell people about it so I try and package it into a form that people can access you know I think if I've uh I think the reception has been really wonderful Stanford has been very supportive um thankfully um I've given done some podcast even with them and they've reposted some stuff on social media it's a precarious place to put yourself out there as a research academic I think some of my colleagues both locally and elsewhere probably wonder if I'm still serious about research which I absolutely am and I also acknowledge that um you know their research and the the research coming out of the field needs to be talked about and not all scientists are good at translating that into a language that people can access and I don't like the phrase dumb it down what I like to do is take a concept that I think people will find interesting and useful and offer it sort of like a um you would offer food to somebody visiting your home you're not going to cram frog RA in their face you're going to say like do you want a cracker like and they say yeah and like do you want something on that Cracker like do you like cheese like yeah like do you want swiss cheese or you want that really like stinky like French I don't like cheese much but um or do you want frog like what's that like so you're trying the best information prompts more questions of Interest not questions of confusion but questions of interest and so I feel like one door opens then another door opens then another door opens and pretty soon um the image in my mind is you create a bunch of neuroscientists who are thinking about themselves neuroscientifically and I don't begin to think that I have all the answers at all um I cast a neuroscience sometimes a little bit of a psychology lens onto what I think are interesting topics and you know I um you know someday I'm going to go into the ground or the ocean or wherever it is I end up and um uh I'm very comfortable with the fact that not everyone's going to be happy with how I deliver the information but I would hope that people would feel um like some of it was useful and meaningful and got them to think a little bit harder since you mentioned going into the ground and uh Victor Franco man search for meaning I read that I reread that book uh quite often what uh let me ask the uh the big ridiculous question about life uh what do you think is the the meaning of it all like and maybe why do you do you mention that book from a psychologist perspective which Victor Franco was or do you do you ever think about the the bigger philosophical questions it raises about meaning what's and the meaning of it all one of the great challenges in assigning a good you know giving a good answer to the question of like what's the meaning of life is um I think Illustrated best by the Victor Frankle example although there are other examples too which is that our sense of meaning is very elastic in time and space and I'm I'm uh we talked a little bit about this earlier but it's amazing to me that somebody locked in a or concentration camp can bring the Horizon in close enough that they can then micr slice their environment so that they can find rewards and meaning and power and Beauty even in a little square box or or a horrible situation and I think this is really speaks to one of the most important features of the human mind which is we could do let's take two opposite extremes one would be let's say the alarm went off right now in this building and the building started shaking our vision our hearing everything would be tuned to this SpaceTime bubble for those moments MH and everything that we would process all that would matter the only meaning would be get out of here safe figure out what's going on contact loved ones Etc if we were to sit back totally relaxed we could do the you know I think it's called pale blue dot thing or whatever where we could imagine ourselves in this room and then they were in the United States and this continent and the Earth and then peering down us and all of a sudden you get back it can seem so big that all of a sudden it's meaningless right if you see yourself as just one brief glimmer in all of time and all of space you go to I don't matter and if you go to oh every little thing that happens in this text thread or this you know comment section on YouTube or Instagram your SpaceTime bubble is Tiny MH then everything seems inflated and the Brain will contract and dilate it SpaceTime yeah vision and time but also sense of meaning and that's beautiful and it's what allows us to be so dynamic in different environments and we can pull from the past and the present and future um it's why examples like Nelson Mandela and Victor Frankle had to include it makes sense that it wasn't just about grinding it out they had to find those dopamine rewards even in those little boxes they were forced into so I'm not trying to dodge any answer but for me personally and I think about this a lot because I have this um complicated history in science where my undergraduate graduate adviser and post-doctoral adviser all died young so uh you know and they were wonderful people and had immense importance in my life but what I realized is that be we can get so fixated on the thing that we're experiencing holding tremendous meaning but it only holds s that meaning for as long as we're in that SpaceTime regime and this is important because what really gives meaning is the understanding that you can move between these different space-time dimensionalities and I'm not trying to sound like a theoretical physicist or anyone that thinks about the cosmos in saying that it's really the fact that sometimes we say and do and think things and it feels so important and then two days later we're like what what happened well you had a different brain processing algorithm entirely you were in a completely different state and so what I want to do in this lifetime is I want to I want to engage in as many different levels of contraction and dilation of meaning as possible I want to go to the micro I sometimes think about this I'm like if I just pulled over the side of the road I bet you there's an ant hill there and their whole world is fascinating you can't stay there and you also can't stay staring up at the clouds and just think about how we're just these little beings and it doesn't matter the key is the journey back and forth up and down that staircase back and forth and back and forth and my goal is to get as many trips up and down that St staircase as I can before the reaper comes for me oh beautiful so the the the dance of dilation and contraction between the different SP zoom in zoom out and uh get as many steps in on on that staircase that's that's my goal anyway and I've watched people die I watched my postto advisor die wither away my graduate it was tragic but they found beauty in these closing moments because their bubble was their kids in one case or like one of them was a Giants fan and like got to see a Giants game you know in her last moments and like and you just realize like it's a Giants game but not in that moment because time is closing and so those time bins feel huge because she's slicing things so differently so I I think um learning how to do that better and more fluidly recognizing where one is and not getting too tacked to the idea that there's one correct answer like that's what brings meaning that's my goal anyway I don't think there's a better way to end it Andrew I really appreciate that you would uh come down and contract your SpaceTime and focus on this conversation for a few hours uh is a huge honor I'm a huge F of yours as I told you I hope you keep growing and educating the world about the the human mind thanks for talking today thank you I really appreciate the invitation to be here and people might think that I'm saying it just because I'm here but I'm a huge fan of yours I send your podcast to my colleagues and other people and I think what you're doing is isn't just uh amazing it's important and so thank you thanks for listening to this conversation with Andrew huberman and thank you to our sponsors as sleep a mattress that cools itself and gives me yet another reason to enjoy sleep sem Rush the most advanced SEO optimization tool I've ever come across and cash app the app I use to send money to friends please check out the sponsors in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast if you enjoy this thing subscribe on YouTube review it with five stars on Apple podcast follow on Spotify support on patreon or connect with me on Twitter at Lex fredman and now let me leave you with some words from Carl Yung I am not what happened to me I am what I choose to become thank you for listening and hope to see you next time