Dr. Andrew Huberman - Breathing Exercises for Optimized Brain Performance

and you, Huberman, have become a good friend and an interesting case. Swim with sharks creating virtual reality experiences so that people desensitize them and are not afraid. He is an expert in many things related to optics and eyes. I think the image is nice, you know. guy I hang out with a lot these days and who needs to help us a lot, we've been beating people up for a cerebral mind for the last year, but most of the other things you've heard about now obey machine interfaces. my Lou. Jepsen using infrared light, you know, essentially loitering through a hologram, you've heard about Ed's use of sound and stuff or using genetics and stuff like that, obviously those aren't consumer or friendly ways of hacking your mind because you need equipment to at least for now, another trick made of your system is to simply control your

breathing

in new ways and some of these techniques are old, some are new and you, as an expert, know many of them and well, but you just want to.

In fact, listen to it right now. Well, thank you very much to the organizers for giving me the opportunity to speak. I'm going to cover some facts that give an idea of ​​how I arrived at the type of tools that I will share with you and I. I'm in some kind of practical talk. I've found myself in a bit of an awkward position lately of both wanting to do very rigorous neuroscience, which I think my lab is doing and will continue to do, but also in front of people in the wellness community and military communities and interacting with them and you learn that neither community is exactly right because, as we've heard many times today, we need very rigorous detailed protocols before we can make things viable, and yet there are a lot of people out there doing interesting things. things that may have kernels of value and knowledge that maybe we could use and mine in the lab to develop even better protocols, so if all of that was very cryptic, I'll just start and hope it becomes less cryptic so my lab works. about these three things visual development how the visual system is connected visual repair how it is fixed in blind people and in particular people who suffer from glaucoma we carry out clinical trials we also do studies in animals and today I will talk about visual processing and internal states, this is how What you see interacts with how you feel to determine what you do and the reason I am focusing primarily on vision is not only historical but also because the number one determinant of what you do is what you see as Humans are extremely animals. visuals, so let's say we go for a walk to the plate, after this we would see an animal perhaps similar to this, at this point our behavior changes correctly, so our behavior is unconstrained and suddenly it is limited the logical adaptive choice is to pause and maintain awareness, right, you wouldn't want to run, you might draw attention to yourself, you want to limit your detectability, okay, there's a single, clear, adaptive response, you might as well crouch and hide, but then you can no longer monitor the threat, okay, assuming you see this as a threat, which I do, the game has now changed, the visual perception has changed only slightly, but through a pseudo empathy theory of mind , whatever you want to call it, you see the eyes of this animal. and you assume he sees you, you can stay there all day and hope he moves on, but maybe your behavior would be more adaptive now if you went and hid or sought shelter, the game changed again so you could pause or hide, but probably the best thing you can do would be to run or walk backwards very slowly and at this stage pausing, hiding or running are not good options and your best option is to really fight for your life.

Well, the reason this is interesting to me is because visual perception. in context varies dramatically between them on the one hand, but the internal state that you can imagine can also vary and much of what has been studied in visual neuroscience about how we detect stimuli and make sense of them and we realized by wanting to think about how we analyze visual threats, we were probably going to have to start thinking about organs outside the

brain

and that is the interface with both the

brain

and the organs of the body like the lungs and the heart and how they relate to states of arousal or to some people they like Call it stress, so I'm going to change back quite loosely, forgive me, that doesn't exactly fit with other people's notions of arousal and stress, but for the sake of this talk it should work fine, so if we really want to understand how are we doing.

From what we see to how we see and combine that with how we feel to determine what we do, we must consider the body and the brain and how they work together, so maybe the lungs are the way everything is integrated and that's how we do it. This is first in the mouse lab in mice, so I'll tell a quick story that in the world of a mouse this is a bad situation and it is necessary for the mouse to make very good decisions about the things that are above because a lot of things fly on the trees.

Up high there are many things that are not threats and animals need to look for food and believe or not believe in mice to spend time in daylight, so you can recreate a mouse's innate natural response to a so-called imminent threat in the lab below. So this was a protocol developed by my postdoc when I was in Marcos Meister's lab, so here's a mouse hanging, a loon comes, pauses, runs, and then very quickly slams its tail against the wall. I'll get back in that queue. mice do this without learning they do it the first time they do it every time at least for a few days until they realize it's actually not that threatening this is the other answer the mouse is frozen like a stone you would almost do it I think would pause the video, except the loom continues, so the mice freeze or run and hide, and that is the natural response of the mouse, so we are very curious about where the stimulus detection is and the state internal of the animal.

They somehow come together, so we decided to examine the brain for areas outside the visual system and outside the traditional arousal system that could gather this kind of information and lead to intelligent, let's call them adaptive, behaviors on the part of the mouse, so We exposed a lot of mice to these threats, then we examined the brain for genes that are activated in neurons that were recently active, called cephas for the amateurs, and we found this nucleus or collection of nuclei, meetings of nuclei and something called the xiphoid nucleus, and although I teach neuroanatomy I had only heard of this once or twice, there isn't much information about what they actually do.

It turns out that they are just reflex neural recordings. If you record from this structure, it becomes more active under conditions of visual threat and other types of threat. auditory threat olfactory threat, etcetera, so my graduate student Lindsey slay mapped out all the inputs and the short story is that this structure receives inputs from both the sensory areas that detect things and the areas of your brain stem that are called brain areas. excitation that lead to a kind of state of alertness or drowsiness depending on your activity, it is a very interesting core, not a traditional visual core, so she went ahead and activated this structure and what she found was the following: this mouse is the so-called ventral medial thalamus, that region that includes those nuclei have been activated, so the activity is much greater than normal and instead of fleeing from this threat, the animal makes noise with its tail, which in reality is in mice a threat signal to the real predator or, you see, we put my C is about to fight, so instead of running and hiding or freezing, this mouse now goes out into the open and stays outdoors and says, "It's Well, let's fight," we know people like this and there is a healthy context for doing so. this and there is an unhealthy context for doing this, so muting the structure didn't lead to tremendous changes, but activating it in the following way did, so we thought it was extremely interesting.

I'll tell you the short story here, Lindsay. skip the quantification, but what you essentially saw is that the mice now not only go out and rattle their tails quite a bit more than before, but they also do it outdoors, they are not afraid to stay outdoors, which mice normally aren't do, you can think of different types of confrontation threats, historical like Rosa Parks or the Tiananmen Square scene, confrontation of a threat that could somehow hurt you or kill you or change your life in a negative way is something that I can Let you know, depending on how you look at it and the consequences, it could be adaptive or non-adaptive, we could discuss that offline, so Lindsay went on to map the results of the different structures here and found something very interesting, which is this path red that What I'm showing here is the Freese pathway, so you have a pathway in your brain that takes what's happening and integrates it with how you feel inside.

I'll talk about that in a moment and it makes you freeze or pause, it puts you in paralysis. which might actually be the healthy response if someone came through that window right now with a machine gun, which is unusual on this campus, the smart thing to do is probably pause and see if they continue without hiding, because if they come in here , I am more vulnerable, the other structure and the exit route is the green route and that caused confrontation, so we ask what this route is doing and I will simply summarize it by saying that it is changing the state of the animal and we know this because If you activate the activation of this path, this path of confrontation before hitting an animal or threatening, then the animal will confront the stimulus even if it is not related to it at all, it doesn't have to be locked in time, excuse me, so you don't have to do it exactly at the same time. same time, so this is like getting very excited before facing something, or if you stimulate the other path in an animal that would normally face a stimulus, now the animal hides, you can turn them into cowards, so look at this type of path of courage funky, although it could be adaptive, so it doesn't matter if you stimulate during or before, it's fine, accelerating through all of this you will see the same tail noise whether or not you stimulate activation in the structure before. or you stimulate the activation of this structure during the threat.

It's okay, we all know what it is to be in a good or bad state and I would say that this is more in the tenor of this meeting which is to integrate areas that many of the ills of society have to do with people who cannot manage well his state, you know, most violent crimes are a failure to properly manage the state's anger and things of that nature, okay, we'll skip the movie for now, okay, so he asked, okay, everything's okay , we have identified these brain structures, but what does the mouse really feel? And of course you can ask the mouse all day long, but he won't tell you anything because he talks.

Mouse, not human, so we looked and measured his autonomic arousal levels, it turns out his pupil size increased, a sign of autonomic arousal, his heart rate increased in his

breathing

increased in the condition where he was actually facing the stimulus , so the highest level of arousal is associated with threat confrontation, which makes sense if you think about the lion example you can imagine when you pause while animals walk, your autonomic arousal levels may be high, but not as high as when the animals are on top of you and you are fighting. for your life, so we thought, well, animals are very stressed and they're fighting, but the crazy thing, or at least surprising to us, is that if you give the animal the option of whether or not to stimulate this area of ​​the brain.

They choose to stimulate it, it has a positive valence and it is actually rewarded, we think through a connection through the dopamine pathway, so there is something very rewarding about dealing with stress in this way for the animal, so they prefer do it than freeze it to hide. which at least for us was surprising, those lines just reflect the fact that they spend a lot more time on the laser sideways, so when the laser goes off, okay, I'll figure this out, we're very interested, I'll figure it out quickly. rather on whether or not this structure has something to do with phobia and desensitization.

You know, we would love to partner with physicians to address that and we are partnering with physicians. I'll talk about how we're doing it below. slides I'm going to speed up here so this is the chamber in which we measure mouse behavior this is the chamber in which my lab does not measure human behavior because humans can tell you what they feel and think. Mele SEOmoz, who is here at the meeting with our coordinated clinical coordinator and Mackenzie have been putting humans in the equivalent of the mouse box. ItI'm sorry, it's a slow motion movie. It was just a cap so you could capture everything.

I don't know why programmers don't comb their hair, but you know someone. someone else can answer that question, so we put humans in this box, we measure a lot of things and they like to fall off such a high bridge, both normal people and people who are very afraid of heights or people with generalized anxiety and we measure a lot of metrics of your body as well as recordings of the human brain in partnership with people in neurosurgery like Casey Halpern or my friend Eddie Chang at UCSF, so this is, I'm going to move forward here, the other thing is that we we realize. that computer-generated imagery for virtual reality isn't great, it's just not realistic enough, so I had been networking a lot with communities, particularly the elite military community, some of whom were in the audience today, although they are elite military so you didn't know it was a joke they were just here to look at the science and in fact what you find is that there are all these communities of people who are doing things that are really scary and they do them by regulating their status in very specific ways, so when they interact with these military communities and people like my friend Michael Muller, who you know, kjx at White Shark Dive. to collect our virtual reality images, you ask, do you know what you are doing?

Are these people really crazy? I think the video for the movie comes out this month about Hawks Honnold, who does a free solo without safety equipment on El Cap, you know Alex, he's a nice one. calm guy, right, he's not crazy, he's not an adrenaline junkie, so how do guys like Muller do this? I don't really care about your neurology, what I care about are the protocols that people use to expose themselves to high stress situations that are truly life or death and can be exported to people in a more typical civilian form that might allow them to stay calm. under stress conditions now why don't I have to tell this audience why it's because you have a high level of suicide In the high school I went to two miles from here, you have tons of stress in the valley.

Stress is everywhere and it is at the heart of many psychiatric illnesses and health failures, let's say, and we have to do something to mitigate it. What you find is that these people are not using the brain-machine interface, some of them meditate but mainly They're using tools that relate to how they use their visual system and how they regulate their breathing patterns, so in the last few minutes I'm going to talk about the tools that exist that my lab is now applying science to and other labs are applying science to. trying to understand how to mitigate stress in more conventional scenarios, but what I do understand and what I have experienced myself. because I've been on some of these adventures and I've done some of this is that everything is fine and good in life when you meditate you exercise you sleep well until your pulse reaches 150 when you're on the highway you're in traffic and you get a text of text informing you that something might be very wrong with a family member or you're in a long-term stress event, such as coping with a close friend's cancer diagnosis, so how do you do it?

If you regulate and maintain optimal decision making, it turns out that the elite military is the place to look because those guys have proven this in the field, whether or not they knew they were building the protocols or not, that they were building them in life or death scenarios and also We are very interested in involving those protocols, so this is a human amygdala recording done in Eddie Chang's lab of a patient watching the VR shark so we can get things like the pupil size of respiratory heart rate, as well as recording the local field potential of these patients.

I'm not going to conclude anything from this data yet, except that we are now in a position to make these kinds of measurements of the body and brain of humans in these realistic virtual reality scenarios which, of course, are the only way we realistic results can be achieved. emotional scenarios to the hospital and the laboratory, well, real quick, this is the world of wellness that I have come across and it is somewhat disturbing and exciting, having people who take ice baths every day and that probably has many interesting effects on metabolism and capacity opened this guy is world famous for ice baths, you know the great success of things like mental space.

I'm definitely interested in mindfulness, the problem with mindfulness is that I don't know how to measure it because the opposite of mindfulness is inattention and I can't really measure that in my lab, it's hard to do that unless you define it. as a state or brain rhythm that people are doing and there are also many people who are taking it. drugs now something I don't approve of the number one question I get as a neuroscientist and interacting with the general public used to be how do I maintain my memory as I get older now is what do you think is still an ayahuasca siphon from people ten years ago older than Me, 20 years old, my mother asks me about psilocybin, okay, she also asks me while I'm not in a hurry.

Hashanah today, that's a different story, but that tells you where the collision is and this is serious stuff and I have thoughts on this, but the question is what are the behavioral interventions that will allow people to adjust their state and which ones are available? and which ones work for everyone because individual differences are great until they become a barrier to doing something. and what kind of states are we trying to achieve and here are a number of different states of arousal and I don't have to describe this slide for you to understand, but I think the two things that people really want to know how what they are commanded to do is being alert but calm, that's nice and being asleep when they want to be asleep.

It would be a great advance for neuroscience and well-being to be able to achieve those states reasonably well 90% of the time when you want to write, let's forget about it. about emotions for the moment, completely fine, I ran out of time, so now I'll give you a tool. The two I'm going to talk about are based on the fact that our lab and Mark Krasnow are labs at Stanford and others. Other labs are finding an incredible link between the state of the portions of the brain that link the emotion centers to the arousal center, so they innovate reciprocally, so breathing patterns influence the state of emotion, a state of excitement and the opposite is also true, well, let's forget about that. visions tools for now, so there are three types of breathing and I'm just going to give you these tools.

I'm happy to provide you with the slides and information below. There is tons of breathing. Holotropic breathing. Stan Grof. Respiratory apnea. Induced respiration. Freediver's breathing. Here's the shot. -Home message that I think is more relevant here and forgive me for the people on this side of the room. Breathing protocols that emphasize inhalation will generally lead you to states of higher arousal, so if you inhale for four seconds, hold your breath for a moment and exhale for two seconds and keep repeating you are going to increase your autonomic arousal levels if you look at holotropic breathing in these weeds, it's all about nasal and mouth breathing and closing one nostril, but let's make it really simple.

The opposite is also true: exhale, emphasize that breathing generally decreases arousal, so you can start thinking about this inhalation for a period of time that is perhaps a count of two, hold for two, exhale for one, hold for one and then repeat to increase arousal, reduce arousal. Now, what if I just want to maintain an optimal kind of calm and marked focus, well, people in the elite military community call this box breathing, you inhale for part of the time, hold, exhale for part of the time , you hold, you repeat, is a great way to anchor your neurology in a kind of excited state to stay in the same place and be able to function properly.

These can be used to push you up or down the path of arousal and now there are individual variations. If I could have a minute, I'll give it to you. An important detail is how long you should do each phase. I just put the ratios 2 2 2 2 or 1 2 2 2 has to do with your ability to handle carbon dioxide. You don't breathe because you need oxygen. You handle it. carbon dioxide when breathing, okay, if I hold your head under water, at some point your blood starts to feel acidic, you want to panic and you want to breathe, okay, then it's all about CO2 tolerance, who are the better people in managing CO2 freedivers and so what?

Do they do it? They measure your CO2 tolerance and you can do this too. So what should you do if you want to know your CO2 tolerance? And sorry for marathon runners, this has nothing to do with Fitness zero, this has to do with how well you handle stress. in the moment, so when you wake up in the morning or now you will have a very different CO2 tolerance. The way to measure it is to breathe deeply through your nose a couple of times, in and out, closed, and then measure how long it lasts. it leads you to get rid of all your oxygen in a slow nasal exhalation, that CO2 expulsion time tells you your tolerance to CO2 at the moment it tells you how well you are handling CO2 if you are an expert free diver and you go down four minutes Houdini should going into a box for nine minutes doing this administering your carbon dioxide, it wasn't superhuman, okay, that's how David Blaine does it;

There's nothing mysterious or magical about this, so if you explode in less than 25 seconds, I recommend you do it. If you blow in 30 to 60 seconds, which is how most people blow in a sort of pseudo-calm, pseudo-alert state, then I recommend inhaling for five and holding for five, exhaling for five, holding for five, and repeating for maybe 20. cycles, 10 cycles, whatever you want. I have it available even in real time and then you can adjust it, you could have it or double it depending on whether your blow time is less than 25 seconds or more than 60 seconds, although I'm pretty, you know, happy. and up here and doing this I can tell you right now if I were to measure my CO2 tolerance, my CO2 expulsion time right now will be significantly less than 20 seconds because I'm not doing anything but exhaling as I talk, inhaling and exhaling.

You know I'm in a state of high autonomous arousal and if you're sleepy you can run this through the arousal protocol and so on, so anyway I've tried to give you something that you can use in real time and that builds on what we're starting. to understand about breathing and arousal and what I would like to do and my hope for the future with this meeting is that we have seen some wonderful talks and important points have been raised about where the gaps are. I would love to see an intelligent and rigorous bridge and I think this meeting really represents the first effort between the clinical and the type of wellness and the things that people generally ask and worry about in psychiatry and psychological neuroscience and therefore, It is something conscious. communities if I dare say it, but anyway thanks for your time, sorry for going over it, yeah.