The Science of Emotions & Relationships

- Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss

science

and

science

-based tools for everyday life. - My name is Andrew Huberman and I am a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. This podcast is independent of my teaching and research duties at Stanford. However, it is part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is InsideTracker. InsideTracker is a personalized nutrition platform that analyzes data from your blood and DNA to help you better understand your body and inform your health goals.

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Use code Huberman at checkout and get $5 off your order. That's magicspoon.com/huberman, and use the code Huberman to get $5 off. This month we will talk about the science of

emotions

and tools related to the science of

emotions

. We've talked about the science of stress and resilience, tools to access more calm, tools to raise your stress threshold and become more resilient. We've talked about motivation and the role of the dopamine system. I'd like to make a couple of announcements about some new resources. The first is that we have now subtitled all Huberman Lab episodes in English and Spanish.

We were able to do this thanks to the support of our sponsors and Patreon. Now, all podcasts have a subtitle feature on YouTube, and they were made by experts. So while there may be the occasional error, for the most part, they are very accurate. We have done this so that people who prefer to consume content in Spanish or who like to read content from English subtitles can do so. And we will continue to expand the number of languages ​​with subtitles for the Huberman Lab Podcast. That's why we want to thank you for that resource. It is now available for all episodes.

Also, in previous episodes I have talked about NSDR or non-sleeping depression. NSDRs come in a variety of different forms, there is self-hypnosis. I've pointed you to some resources for that above. There is yoga nidra. NSDR is really about achieving calm quickly and doing it in a self-directed way, for many reasons, to be able to access sleep more easily, to de-stress very deeply, and to replace sleep that has been lost. It also appears to help neuroplasticity. It can improve the rearrangements of connections in the brain that occur during learning; There is scientific support for this. There's a link in the title of today's episode to a new site.

This is a YouTube video that the folks at Madefor, a company that has been a sponsor of the podcast before, brought in for free. So this is an NSDR script that does not contain any of the intentions or some of the more typical language of yoga nidra, but instead focuses exclusively on the breathing protocols, as well as including a sort of body scan that you direct your attention to. different places around your body. It has all the core elements of deep sleepless rest, but it is different from yoga nidra. I only offer this to you as a resource.

If you want to use it, it lasts about 30 minutes and should be very effective in bringing you into deep states of relaxation for all the reasons I mentioned above. So let's talk about emotions. Emotions are a fascinating and vital aspect of our life experience. It's fair to say that emotions make up most of what we consider our life experience, including the things we do, our behaviors and the places we go, and the people we end up meeting in our life, all of that really channels into our emotional perception of what those things mean, whether they made us happy, sad, depressed or lonely, or whether they were all inspiring.

Now, one thing that is absolutely true is that everyone's perception of emotions is slightly different. That is, it is very likely that your idea of ​​happiness is different from my idea of ​​what a state of happiness is. And we know this for color vision too, for example, although the cells in your eye and my eye that perceive the color red are identical down to the genes they express, we can be sure based on experimental evidence, and what are called studies psychophysicists, that your idea of ​​the most intense red is going to be very different from my idea of ​​the most intense red if you gave us a selection of 10 different reds and asked us which one is the most intense, which one looks redder, and that seems crazy, You would think that something as simple as color would be universal and yet it is not.

That's why we must agree from the beginning that emotions are complicated and yet manageable. They can be understood. And today we are going to talk about a lot of tools to understand what emotions are so that you can understand what your emotional states mean and what they don't mean. And by doing that, that will allow you to assess whether or not you should consider an emotional state as true or not, whether it has meaning or not, as well as the emotions of others or not. are important to you in a given context. We are going to talk a lot about development.

In fact, today we will focus much of our discussion around childhood and puberty. We are also going to talk about tools to improve emotional range and to face difficult emotional situations. I am not a clinical psychologist, I am not a therapist, but I have some experience in psychology. And today I am going to turn to the greats of psychology, not to me, but to the greats of psychology who studied emotions, who studied emotional development, and will link it with the neuroscience of emotions. Because today we understand a lot about the chemicals, hormones, and neural circuits in the brain and body that underlie emotions.

So while there is no single universally true theory of emotion, at the intersection of many of the existing theories, there are actually some fundamental truths. So today we are going to visit those fundamental truths. Let's talk about the tools that emerge from them. And we're going to talk about some absolutely crazy, outlandish experiments that people are doing right now, that I don't necessarily recommend that you do, of inhaling different types of hormones and trying to get attached more quickly. In fact, today you're going to do some experimental things if you want. There are a few things you can do in real time while listening to the podcast, to take advantage of some of the mechanics I'll talk about.

So today is going to be very interactive in a way that previous podcast episodes weren't. If we want to understand emotions, we must look at where emotions develop first. In fact, this is a fundamental central topic if you want to understand the science and psychology of the brain. There is a rule in neuroanatomy. Because if you look at 50 different human brains or compare the brains of dogs and humans, there are a lot of differences. Certain things are the same but others are different. And the rule that every good neuroanatomist knows is that if you want to understand what a part of the brain does, you have to address two questions.

First, do we have to know what connections that area of ​​the brain makes? What is it connected to? Where do you get tickets from and where do you send tickets to? So, for example, if there is an area of ​​the brain that receives direct input from neurons in the nose, we can be pretty sure that it has some function in analyzing odor, in measuring something related to odors, or in analyzing of something related to smells. Now, if it also receives information from the eye, it can also be concluded that it receives information from the visual system and is concerned with light and photons.

This is something obvious. And yet, it is necessary to know that connectivity and what is called the origin of the development of that structure. You need to know where you were in the early stages of development, because things move around a lot as the brain develops. The brain, of course, is that more or less soft thing that floats in a liquid that gets inside the skull. And as a result, things move a lot. They are not always found in the same place in two different species or in two individuals of the same species. So you have to know where they started, because where they started also informs what they do.

And when we talk about emotions, we can't single out one area of ​​the brain. We cannot say that this is the area of ​​the brain responsible for emotions. There is this so-called limbic system that has been related to emotions in various ways. Let's talk about that today. But the limbic system is only one component of the inputs to creating emotions. It is not the place for emotions. You can't go in and injure a spot in the brain and eliminate emotions completely, it just doesn't work that way. So, first of all, we must ask ourselves: what are thecircuits of emotions?

What are the areas of the brain for emotions? And today there is a lot of debate about this. For years it was thought that there could be circuits, that is, connections in the brain that generate the feeling of happiness or circuits that generate the feeling of sadness, etc. That has been questioned. In fact, Lisa Feldman Barrett has been the person who has really challenged this head-on and has very good evidence for the fact that such circuits probably do not exist. And yet, I think there's good evidence that there are circuits in the brain, like limbic circuits and other circuits that change our general states or our general level of alertness or calm, or if they're not, they predispose us to see the outside world or pay more attention to what is happening inside our bodies.

If none of this makes sense now, I promise it will soon. But the important thing to understand is that emotions arise in the brain and body. They arise because there are specific connections between specific areas of the brain and the body. And if we want to understand how emotions work, we have to observe how they are constructed. And they are built during childhood, adolescence and puberty, and then continue into adulthood. But the foundations are laid in the early stages of development, when we are young children. So let's think about what happens to a baby who comes into the world.

A baby comes into the world. You were born into this world without really understanding the things around you. Now, there are two ways you can interact with the world and you always do them more or less to some extent at the same time. Those are interoception, paying attention to what's happening inside you, what you feel internally, and exteroception, paying attention to what's happening outside of you. Please keep that in mind. Because the fact that you are interoceiving and exteroceiving is true for your entire life and lays the foundation for understanding emotions. It is absolutely critical. When you were a baby, you didn't know what you needed.

You didn't understand hunger, you didn't understand toys when you first came into the world, you didn't understand cold or heat or anything like that. When you needed something, you experienced it as anxiety. You would feel an increase in alertness if you had to go to the bathroom. You would feel an increase in alertness if you were hungry and would vocalize, scream, and act agitated. You could give signs, you could do several different things, but the only thing you knew was what you felt internally. And then his caretaker, whoever it was, would respond to that. Then you would feel some agitation, a caregiver would come and make a decision, Oh, you need food, and they would give you milk, or change your diaper, or wrap you in a blanket if you were cold, but they didn't know if you were cold, they might assume that you You were also cold.

So it's really important to understand that a baby, when you were a baby and when I was a baby, we had no sense of the outside world except that it responded essentially to our acts of anxiety. Now, this is not a Freudian theory. There are components of it that are integrated into Freudian theory, but all developmental psychologists agree that babies lack the ability to make cognitive sense of the outside world, but in this feeling of anxiety and to register one's inner self. state, and then crying out to the outside world, whether through crying or subtle vocalizations, or even just giving signals, making some noise, we begin to develop a relationship with the outside world in which our internal states, our changes and the Anxiety begins to drive us. requests, and people come and respond to those requests, hopefully.

And the reason I say hopeful is because we've all probably heard of these negligence cases. There are many cases where if you neglect a baby, neglect a teenager or a teenager, development is not going well, and we will touch on some of them. But those are really extreme cases. They're kind of a parallel to the experiments that are often done in the lab with animals, where you've probably heard of these enriched environments where they give the mice a bunch of toys and they give them different foods. from time to time, and they will be housed with other mice.

And then what we find is that animals say, "Oh, their brain is thicker and their neurons have more branches and all that." But that's really comparing deprivation to normality. Instead, today we want to focus on what happens when things are going well and why things might not go well under certain circumstances. But to me, it's not as interesting as what looks like healthy emotional development. And if healthy emotional development has not been achieved, what can be done as an intervention at later times to rescue it? So the baby, you as the baby, are rolling around in your crib, getting attention where you need it and when you need it, presumably, and this gets to the core of what emotions are, what emotions are really about. form bonds and be able to predict things in the world.

That's what emotions are really about. Whether the baby feels angry, happy or sad, we don't know, we can guess, but we don't know. In fact, most of the time we don't even know how we feel, let alone how others feel, and that's true for adults. So if I asked you how you feel right now, I don't know if you could tell me in any kind of rich language that I would say, "Oh, I really get it." If you said you were very, very depressed or very, very happy, it would make some sense because of how extreme that is, but I don't know if I would really know, and I don't think you'd know how I do it. feel now either.

He could be furious right now or he could be very happy, you have no idea. And of course, we have these things called expressions, our pupils dilate. There are several signs of how people feel. We're going to talk about those signs, but you don't really know. And at this point I just want to pause and mention a really interesting tool that tries to address this question of what emotions are and what they are, that you can use if you want. This is an app, I didn't develop it, I have no relationship with them, but the app was developed by people at Yale, by Yale research groups, and it's called Mood Meter.

And it's actually quite interesting. I think it's free or it costs 0.99. Again, there is no business relationship with them. But what they're trying to do is put more nuance, more subtlety into our words and our language for emotions, and be able to allow you to predict how you're going to feel in the future. And it's actually quite interesting. I'm on the app right now and I know you can't see this, but it's called Mood Meter. And you can find it on Apple or Android. And you walk in and he asks you and he's like, "Hey Andrew, how are you doing now?

And I click on the little tab that says 'I'm feeling.' And I can choose high energy and unpleasant, high energy and pleasant." , low-energy unpleasant or low-energy pleasant. And I would say that right now I feel pleasant with a lot of energy. So I just revealed to you how I feel. So I click on that, and then it gives you a gallery of colors, and you just move your finger to the location where you think it matches the most. And as you do, little words appear. I know some people are listening to this on audio only.

So it says motivated, happy, inspired. I would say, I feel joyful right now. So you click on that and then you go to the next window and it says, What are you doing? And this seems like a game to me, but I'll call it work. And then that's it. And then what it does is it basically starts collecting data about you. You give him information. And it starts linking it to other features that you allowed access to if you want, and it starts helping you. You will be able to predict how you will feel at different times of the day.

It's actually quite accurate in some ways, quite interesting. And it points to a couple of really interesting features, which is that we don't really have enough language to describe all emotional states, and yet there are some central truths in what constitutes an emotion. And I want to go over that twice during today's podcast, because this can really help people, children and adults, better understand what they're feeling and why, and when it's best to do certain activities and, hopefully, when it's best to avoid certain activities. activities too. . So the way this works is as follows. At any point you should ask yourself, you can do this right now if you want, what is your level of autonomic arousal?

Autonomous arousal is just the continuum, the range from alert to calm. So if you're panicking right now, you're like a 10 out of 10 on the arousal scale. If you are asleep you are probably not understanding what I am telling you, although maybe a little. But let's say you're really sleepy, you might be one or two. So you always have to ask yourself: where are you on the arousal scale? And then there is this other axis, this other question, which is what we call valence. Now valence is a value. Do you feel good or bad? I'd say I feel pretty good right now.

On a scale of one to 10, I say, I don't know, I feel like a seven. I slept well last night, I had a good walk with Costello this morning, I'm fed, I'm hydrated. I feel good, so I'm like a seven. So I'm alert and I feel pretty good. And then there's a third thing, which is how much we interocept and how much we exterocept. So how much attention is focused internally on what we feel and how much is focused externally? And this will always be in a dynamic equilibrium. So, for example, if you're very, very stressed, a lot of times that puts you in a position to really be in touch with what's going on in your body.

If you start having a lot of somatic and bodily sensations, like your heart is beating so fast that you can't ignore it, then you are very interoceptive. But also sometimes you're really stressed because someone is stressing you out or someone texts you or makes a comment about something you posted on YouTube or something, and it triggers you a lot. That never happens to me. But if it happens to you, then you are exterocepting. So these three things, how alert or sleepy you are, that's one, how good or bad you feel, that's two, and then whether or not most of your attention is directed outward, or whether or not it's directed into.

And much of what we call emotions is made up of those three things. So let's get back to development now, but let's put it aside and just think about it, alert versus asleep, good versus bad, and internally focused or externally focused. Because when I looked at all the theories of emotion that were out there, there were a lot of different components to them, but they all seem to focus on these same three characteristics in some way or to some degree or another. And it can be very powerful to understand and observe your emotions through that lens.

So let's go back to the child. There's the baby in the crib. It's mainly interception. As the caregivers bring you what you need, hopefully milk, diaper changes, etc., a warm blanket if it's cold, take the blanket off when the baby is fussy and it's too hot, because babies get too hot too, it begins to exterocept. Sorry, I was wrong, I want to be very clear, she begins to exterocept herself. The baby begins to look at the outside world and make predictions. He begins to wonder how much he needs to cry or to predict: "Well, if I cry a little, then mom comes and gives me milk.

Or if I cry a lot, mom doesn't come and give me milk." , so I really need to scream at the top of my head." So babies are starting to evaluate and do all of this, but they're not doing it consciously. They're doing it strategically to relieve anxiety. And I'm not going to propose that that's what let's do until adulthood. But a lot of what we do in adulthood is that when we feel something, we start to exterocept. Some people are much better at just sitting like a container and intercepting and paying attention to what they feel internally.

But most of people do a little balance between the two. We don't feel good, so we look for an item or food that might make us feel better. We feel anxious about going to the dentist or something, so we text someone. We do This is almost reflexive, not always conscious. Babies do this and we continue to do this. Now we begin to balance our interoceptive and exteroceptive focus, looking in and out. And as we do that, we begin to discover what meets our needs. Remember, emotions are really there to form bonds and make predictions. And then our needs will be satisfied to some extent or not.

Sometimes unfortunately there is abandonment. Sometimes people don't present themselves the way we would like. And generally our responses to that have to do with whether or not we predict whether they would do it or not. When we expect something and it doesn't happen, it's a big disappointment. That was the discussion about dopamine in the last episode. So the many theories of emotion, the triune brain theory, that you have a primitive, involved brain, something that's a little shaky these days. The idea that Darwin proposed is that there are these universal expressions of emotions. Helen Fisher's work on love, that you have circuits in your brain formissing circuits in the brain, for love and circuits in the brain for long-term bonds, as well as the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett, who says that emotions are contextual. , which have a social component.

And I'll talk more about this, but the work of Allan Schore, a clinical psychologist and researcher at UCLA, on the right brain, the left brain, and their role in emotional development. They all have strong elements of this idea of ​​paying attention to what's going on inside and outside. When you were a young creature, a baby and a toddler, you focused primarily inward and began to understand what was happening outside as a way of predicting what would bring you relief, what would eliminate your anxiety. And that is where the fundamental rules of your experience, of your emotional experience, were established.

And I realized that it's a lot of information and it's kind of like an academic talk, but there were two tools that I just want to highlight, one is the Mood Meter app. If you're interested, it can give you insight into the different types of nuances within emotions and allow you to predict emotional states, if you want to try it and may find it interesting. The other is the idea that there are three axes, two emotions, three interacting continua, the level of alertness and calm, how good or bad you feel and whether or not you are focused primarily inward or outward, because those go. to form a useful toolkit for future information.

So now let's talk about what kind of baby you were, because that really influences your emotionality now. These are classics. They are actually famous experiments conducted by Bowlby and Ainsworth. Anyone who studies psychology or has taken a psychology class could have learned about this. This is this classic experiment of what was called the strange situation task in which, and I'm describing it here very crudely, I notice. But a mother and her son enter the laboratory. Yes, this is now done with parents too. The baby and the mother or father play together for a while and then the mother leaves.

The mother leaves for a while and then returns. And research is dedicated to understanding the child's response when the caregiver, mother or father returns, most children, not all, but most children will cry when their primary caregiver leaves. They don't like that. And there are good reasons for it. They formed a bond and an attachment. And we'll talk about some of the deeper chemical reasons for those bonds. However, the experiment focuses on the return of the caregiver. Because Bowlby and Ainsworth, and many of their scientific descendants and colleagues, identified at least four patterns that babies show when their caregiver returns, and grouped them into groups a, b, c, d, to the point that reference was made to children as a babies, b babies, c babies or d babies.

Maybe you know which one you were. But the categories are really interesting. The first babies are the a babies. So these were children who got angry when their caregiver left. But when her caregiver returned, the baby responded with happiness, with what seemed to her delight. They would go to the caretaker. They seemed happy. If they had been restless or sad before, they felt relieved. These are known as securely attached children. Therefore, they have a healthy response to separation and they have a healthy response to reengaging with the caregiver. The b babies, as they are called, were less likely to seek comfort from their caregiver when the caregiver returned.

So sometimes they would continue playing with their toys or, if there was an adult in the room while their parents were away, they would stay with them. It was complicated and nuanced at times, but these were known as avoidant babies. Don't jump to conclusions about the language here yet. It's not clear that avoidant babies become avoidant adults, but be patient. Babies c would respond to the caregiver's return with acts of annoyance. They seemed a little angry. So it's not like they ignored them, they seem kind of angry. And those were called ambivalent babies, which should not be confused with babies.

These are the c babies, they were the ambivalent babies. So the baby's reaction to the caregiver's return was inconsistent. It seemed like they wanted to bond with them again but they seemed a little upset. I think we've all felt this way before with people we care about a lot, especially people we care about a lot. And then the third category, the d babies, were the disorganized babies, that's what they call them. They weren't disorganized or messy, the child avoided interacting with everyone and acted fearful when the caregiver returned, and his behavior didn't really change whether the caregiver was there or not.

And that fourth category was actually added quite late in the course of this research. I should mention that these experiments have been repeated in a variety of different contexts. There was work done by Mary Main at UC Berkeley and many others, looking at all kinds of variations on this theme. But over time, it became clear that certain babies may feel safe reconnecting with their caregiver and others may not, or are confused about it. So we probably don't know whether or not you were an a, b or c, d baby unless you were in these experiments and somehow had that knowledge.

But this work, this classic work, opened up a huge set of important questions that relate to what re-bonding is really about. I mean, what's really being discovered here is not whether or not there are four categories of babies, that's interesting, but presumably it's more interesting to focus on what defines a really good attachment, a secure attachment or an insecure attachment. attachment or avoidant attachment. And the four things are the look. literally eye contact, and it doesn't have to be direct, beaming eye contact without blinking like people have accused me of before. It can just be a look, people look at each other, you see couples, they look at each other, they don't always stare at each other for long periods of time, sometimes they do.

Vocalizations, so what we say and how we say it. Affection or emotion, then the way we express it, crying, smiling, etc., and touching, those four things. And probably a fifth dimension could be added once language is developed and written language, which is the written word, the exchange of letters, the exchange of texts, the exchange of things of that type, emails, are another way in which people can connect. But gaze, vocalization, affection and touch are really the core of what we call social bonds and emotionality. Now that's important. We know, for example, that there are areas of the brain like the fusiform face area, which is located deep in the brain and is responsible for processing faces.

Children's recognition of their parents' faces and voices is extremely accurate and powerful. Likewise, parents' recognition of their children's vocalizations is notable, not only voices, but also cries. If you've ever had the experience of being at a party with someone who has small children and you're talking to them, and suddenly they hear something but you don't, it's like they have wolf hearing. , and suddenly, they run into the other room. And in fact, the child says, I don't know, some child is hitting her child or her child is hitting another child, or the child is hurt or emotionally hurt.

This perception of voices. There is very good evidence to support the fact that we are attuned to the frequencies of the voices and vocalizations of the people we care about. Not only is this true in rodents, birds, and other mammals, but it's definitely true in humans as well. And babies are highly attuned to the sound of their mother's voice, even, yes, while they are in the womb. There is this whole world of what is called maternal reassurance, which is the particular style of speaking that we now know mothers and other caregivers use with children. So those are the core elements.

How you look at someone and how they look at you, what you say, what they say, what they seem to feel and how that makes you feel, smile, frown. If you know someone really well, you can read inflections, even subtle little things like, um, they don't really believe me, or, oh, they're really excited about this, or, oh, now I know what they are. I'm thinking. Some people do better than others at that kind of processing, but everyone does better with people we recognize and know. In fact, couples get to know each other extremely well, to the point that constantly having these perceptions can benefit or harm their relationship.

But there is a range. Some people are more in tune with this than others. And that probably has its roots in the type of attachments that are formed early on. So Bowlby and his colleagues develop these things a, b, c, d. And it has a lot to do with the processing of the face, gaze, vocalizations and touch, all of this happens when returning to the mother, but they were not analyzed, they were not looked at individually. So this raises a really interesting question: what happens when we feel something? Is it because of something that happened spontaneously in us, is it a memory, or is it something we realize, saw on the internet, or received news from someone?

Nowadays, people get a lot of information about the people they meet, both those they like and those they don't, through viewing online activities. So they are exterocepting and then they are impacting their internal state. And it is clear from most theories of emotional health that the ability to recognize when your own internal state is being driven primarily by external events is important to being able to emotionally regulate. People who are constantly being carried away by external events in the world would be said to be emotionally labile, they have no control over their emotions, even if they are calm all the time, if that calm only comes because they are in a placid environment and then You put a cookie in that environment and they get scared, well, then they're not really calm.

Its calm to the extent that there is nothing disturbing in the environment. So the degree to which the outside environment alters your internal environment has a lot to do with this balance between interoception and exteroception. And it most likely has its roots in whether or not you had a secure or insecure, disorganized or ambivalent attachment as a baby. And of course, you can't travel back in time and know, but there are some clues about what kind of emotionality each of us has by examining two periods of development, one is adolescence and puberty and the other is adulthood. .

So while we can't travel back in time, there is an exercise you can do to address at least right now, whether or not you have an exteroception bias or an interoception bias, whether or not you're better at it at least. right now, to pay attention to what is happening internally or externally. And of course this will vary depending on the circumstances. I think we all know people who, maybe it's you, you go to a party and you get there, and everyone seems to be talking and having a great time, and you wonder whether or not you have food in your teeth. or whether there is something on your face or not or whether your hair is good or not or whether you said something wrong or not, whether you are turning red or not.

People also experience this a lot when speaking in public. It's not just about learning to control your stress level, but also how much you are exteroceptive, how much you are out of your head, as they call it. But how much are you focused on the events around you versus the events within you? It's actually interesting when you talk to people who are very effective athletes or who have high-stress, high-consequence jobs, they talk about this notion of getting out of your head. You have a limited attention resource and you can divide it between two things, you'll see in a moment.

They can be anchored to one thing. You can focus entirely on what's happening internally or you can focus entirely on what's happening externally. And if you want to be effective in the world, be effective in quotes, it's helpful in very dynamic environments, especially social environments, to have a lot of your attention focused on the outside rather than trying to pay attention to whether or not you are. You're saying things correctly or the drumming of your own voice, that's more or less destructive to the ability to relate socially. So here is the exercise. You can do it.

Please don't do this if you are driving. But let's try to illustrate or allow you to experience this interoceptive and exteroceptive balance and how far you can move interoception and exteroception deliberately. If you close your eyes right now and concentrate on the contact of any part of your body with, say, the chair or the car seat, although please, again, do not do this while driving, wherever you are, even if you're just standing or you're in the kitchen, you're lying on the couch and you're trying to draw as much attention as possible to that touch point. And then from there, you will move your attention even deeper into the sensation of what is happening in your gut.

You are full? Are you empty? Are you hungry? Not these? Your heart beats, at what rate? What is the cadence of your breathing? Basically, focus your attention on everything that is on the surface of your skin and towardsinside. So I'm going to do something unusual on the Huberman Lab Podcast. I'm going to introduce five to eight seconds of silence to allow you to do that a little bit. This is an exercise that you can continue later if you want to extend the time you do it. But now try doing something that, for most people, is actually a little more difficult, which is purely exterocept, putting your eyes or your ears, or both, on anything in your immediate space, a thing.

And I would restrict that thing to something small enough that at least in your field of view it took up 20% of your field of view. So it doesn't have to be a point unless the pin is right in front of you and you hold it very close. I would say look across the room, pick out a wall panel or a table leg or something and try to pay as much attention to that as possible. And again, I'm going to take about five seconds of silence to allow you to do exteroception. So what you probably discovered is that you were able to do that, but that some degree of interoception is maintained.

It's hard to put 100% of your attention on something external, unless it's really exciting, really novel. If you've ever watched a really cool movie, presumably you're exteroceptive more than interoceptive until something exciting happens and then you feel something. You are actually linking your emotional experience to something external. And now you can do this dynamically as well. You can decide to focus internally and externally. You can decide to split it 50%, 50% or 70/30. You can develop a greater ability to do this. And the power of doing that is that when you're in environments where you feel like you're too focused internally and you'd like to focus more externally, you can do it deliberately.

But as you will notice, it takes work, it involves taking your focus of attention and what we call the aperture of your attention, and narrowing that aperture towards the self or something external or dividing the two. And yet, practices have been developed that focus on making interoception and exteroception outweigh each other, more outwardly focused or more inwardly focused. And it is dynamic. And the circuits in the brain that underlie interoception and exteroception are not exactly known, but they are anchored in the areas of the brain that are involved in attention, such as the frontal eye fields and the areas that when you put yourself in third person, When you can see yourself doing something, like extending your hand into your environment and focusing on it, you know it's your hand and not a random object.

There are areas of the brain that are involved in that, in recognizing the location of yourself in relation to the rest of your body. These exercises are really what are at the center of this development of emotional bonds. Because as we mentioned before, these four things, gaze, vocalization, touch and affection, are happening in a very dynamic way. So if someone winks at you, you're paying attention to their wink, but you're also noticing how you're feeling. Then they could say something, then you could say something, this is very dynamic. So if it seems overwhelming to try to interocept an exterocept and then change the balance, you do it all the time.

Your brain and nervous system are fantastic at doing this. Now, some people find it very difficult to get out of a strongly interoceptive mode. Some people find it harder to get out of their exteroceptive mode. It's very interesting to look at the extent to which we have biases in terms of how interoceptive or exteroceptive we are. Remember those three axes we talked about before, you have valence, good or bad, you have alertness, alertness or calm, and you have interoceptive or exteroceptive bias. And it will vary throughout the day, it will vary throughout life. It will certainly differ depending on what you are doing.

But early in development, you start with this interoceptive bias. You are beginning to develop expectations, predictions about how the outside world will work. And you are trying to find out the reliability of external events in people. And when things are trustworthy, when people are trustworthy, we can give up more of our interoception. There is literally trust that our interoceptive needs, our internal needs, will be met through the attachments and actions of others. This begins to veer into the discussion of neglect and trauma. We're going to dedicate entire episodes, probably an entire month, to trauma and PTSD.

But that has its roots in what we're talking about now. And it is important to internalize and understand what we are talking about now to make the most of those future conversations. So, if all of this seems like a lot of information and very complicated to you, I just invite you to pay attention from time to time to what extent you are interoceiving or exteroceiving, because the emotions and the intensity of those emotions will grow or decrease depending on how much we are intercepting. If we feel extremely sad and there is an external event that made us sad, there is probably a balance, but extreme pain, extreme sadness will lead us to greater interoception.

While when we feel extremely happy, the same thing happens. Something great is happening in the world and we are just going to feel it. Most of our perception, most of our consciousness will be in our internal state. That is why we are always tied to the outside world to one degree or another. That was true when you were a baby, and it was true when you were a teenager, and it's true when you're an adult. So now I want to pause, put aside for a moment the discussion of interoception and exteroception. And I want to talk about what is possibly the second most important, if not equally important, aspect of your development when it comes to emotionality and this, what I call confidence, but this ability to predict if things in the future they are or not. outside world are either reliable or unreliable in terms of their ability to help you meet your interoceptive needs.

And that period is puberty. So far we have been talking mainly about psychology, not biology or mechanism. And now we are going to talk about mechanisms, hormones, receptors, etc. Puberty is an absolute biological event. It has a beginning and has a specific definition, which is the transition to reproductive maturity. So there are a lot of hormonal changes. Yes, there are also many brain changes. And most people don't realize it, but brain changes happen first. The brain activates hormonal systems that allow puberty to occur. Puberty occurs earlier today than in the past. The current figures I could find are that in women and girls, the transition begins around age 10, while in boys it is around age 12, that will vary depending on several different factors.

Those are averages. It depends on where you are in the world, it depends on all kinds of things. One of the main puberty triggers is actually body fat. This is interesting. The peptide hormone, leptin, some people call it a peptide, some people call it a hormone, but it fits both definitions depending on how you look at it, is produced by fat. So, leptin was very popular in the '90s, because it was discovered that it was produced by fat and it was seen in animal studies that it could promote leanness. It actually tells the brain that there is enough body fat to allow metabolic factors and processes to occur to release more fat.

This is why people have trouble losing the last five kilos. It is because leptin levels are very low. This was actually the basis of the whole cheat day, the idea of ​​refeeding, which the idea was that if you eat a lot for one day a week while dieting intensely, you can signal to the brain that there is enough leptin. I don't know if that's the reason or if the cheat days just provided some psychological relief, probably both. But in any case, leptin is produced from body fat. And when there is enough leptin, it signals the brain to trigger puberty.

There was an article published in the mid-90s in Journal Science, an excellent journal, that showed that leptin could be injected into younger women who had not yet entered puberty. And you could speed up the onset of puberty with leptin. So, the higher the body fat, the earlier the puberty, that's true. Leptin is also involved in various growth effects in the body in general. And it's interesting that very obese children don't necessarily reach puberty earlier. Sometimes they do, but they tend to have larger bones. Your bones actually grow faster and tend to have higher bone density because leptin is also involved in bone density.

The whole puberty onset thing also has some really interesting social effects. And I really want to highlight that most of these effects, also called pheromone effects. Remember that a hormone is a substance secreted by one area of ​​the body, it travels and impacts tissues and cells in other parts of the body. A pheromone is a chemical substance released by a member of a species that acts and impacts other members of that species or even other species. So, for example, rodents are very good at detecting the urine and olfactory marks of large carnivores that want to eat them.

So that's a pheromone interaction. It is highly debated whether or not these are pheromonal effects in humans. I made a post about this on Instagram a while ago about some pheromone effects that have been reported in humans. And a couple of people came to me and said, "Look, it's never really been shown in humans that there's a pheromone vomer," what's called the vomeronasal organ. There is something called a Jacobson organ. It's rudimentary. Some people have it, some don't, which is very controversial. That's why I want to point out that the effects of human pheromones are controversial.

Although I think that, in my opinion, there is ample evidence in favor of the synchronization of menstrual cycles. Many people report, then say that there are some studies that show that it is not true. Then there has been some data showing very impressive pheromonal effects when female partners can detect the scent of their loved ones on t-shirts that are washed multiple times. So they can't consciously perceive it, but they say this one smells like them, this one smells like my partner. And indeed, the match was far above chance. So there seem to be weak pheromonal effects at least in my opinion when I look at the data, but a lot more needs to be done.

So, one of the most interesting pheromone effects that impacts puberty, at least in animal models, is the so-called Vandenbergh effect, which is, if you take a prepubescent woman, a woman who has not experienced sexual maturation, and you introduces a new man who is neither the father nor a sibling, he will go through puberty almost immediately. So this is really surprising. For years, it was thought that this did not occur in primate species, but there was a paper published last year in Current Biology, Cell Press, excellent journal, that shows that baboons, a particular type of primate, exhibit this Vandenbergh effect.

There are all kinds of other pheromone effects too. The most infamous is called the Bruce effect, in which the introduction of a new male into a pregnant female causes a miscarriage. And that effect seems to be protected by the presence of the father. This interpretation of this, and I really want to highlight that these are animal studies, but the way this works is that if a pregnant female is in the company of the male who impregnated her, then her offspring are protected by his olfactory presence or his presence. of pheromones. But if he is gone and a new male appears, there is a tendency for her to miscarry and essentially lose the fetus.

Now, it is still very controversial whether or not this occurs in humans, but either way, these pheromone effects exist. And that is called the Bruce effect, in honor of Hilda Bruce, who is the scientist who discovered it. The one that is relevant to the discussion about puberty is the Vandenbergh effect, which I mentioned a few minutes ago, which is the emergence of a new man, he has to be a sexually competent man, so he must have already gone through puberty, and Its presence triggers the activation of puberty in a woman who would otherwise have remained prepubertal longer.

Again, it is unclear whether or not this happens in humans. Well, what can we be sure of when we think about puberty? Puberty is triggered by several different factors. There are changes in the expression of GABA, an inhibitory transmitter, in the brain. One of the most interesting molecules that triggers puberty in all individuals is something called kisspeptin, K-I-S-S-P-E-P-T-I-N, kisspeptin. Kisspeptin is produced by the brain. And it stimulates the release of large amounts of all the different hormones called GnRH, gonadotropin-releasing hormone. Gonadotropin-releasing hormone then causes the release of another hormone called luteinizing hormone, or LH, which travels through the bloodstream and stimulates the ovaries in women to produce estrogen and the testicles in men to produce testosterone.Kisspeptin also has other effects.

But those are some of the main ones related to puberty. This is interesting, because at this point, men's testicles start producing tons of testosterone to trigger the development of secondary sexual characteristics, body hair and all the rest, deeper voice, etc. And in women, estrogen does other things, like breast development, etc. Normally, in an adult, someone who has gone through puberty, a large increase in gonadotropin-releasing hormone and luteinizing hormone would eventually stop, because the way the brain works, the hypothalamus and the pituitary, they are actually measuring how much hormone is in the blood. And if testosterone, estrogen, or any other hormone rises too much, they shut down the release of things like luteinizing hormone.

It's called a negative feedback loop. It's basically like a thermostat in the house. It's more complicated than that, but once the levels get too high in the bloodstream, it shuts down. But kisspeptin is able to drive very high levels of these hormones continuously so that puberty can begin and continue. And, by the way, kisspeptin has now become another panoply of hormones, peptides and cocktails that athletes take to try to stimulate natural hormone production, essentially to endogenously create their own performance-enhancing drugs. No need to judge, but that's a fact: a lot of kisspeptin is used. I'm not really suggesting anyone do this, but people buy and inject kisspeptin for the specific reason that even after puberty it can stimulate big increases in things like estrogen, big increases in testosterone and things like that.

It also has a number of psychological effects, it seems to have great effects on libido, etc. All of these things, of course, are subject to feedback loops, so they don't work indefinitely. And I'll emphasize, again, that I'm not suggesting that anyone do it, but I do like to pay attention to what's out there. And kisspeptin, because it wasn't discovered that long ago, is one of the things that isn't often talked about when people talk about performance-enhancing drugs or therapeutic endocrinology. These things also have therapeutic uses in the endocrine realm. So, for example, children who don't reach puberty or children who are hypogonadal or adults who are hypogonadal and don't produce enough hormone will take things like kisspeptin, among other things.

This is how puberty occurs on a biological level, leptin and kisspeptin trigger it. And then this little boy is now a different creature to some extent, not only because he is reproductively competent, of course, but because there is a change in a number of things that underlie these social ties, there is a market change in a number of things that allow children and adults to engage in predictive behaviors with each other. And the whole nature of adolescence and puberty is to take a child who was a generalist and turn him into a specialist. And this is very important when it comes to the conversation about emotionality.

But it is important in terms of aspects of brain function and in terms of learning and in terms of who each and every one of us will be and who we will become. In adolescents and childhood, of course, there are some genetic prejudices, hair color, eye color, height and things like that. Much of that is programmed into the genome. Of course, there are also other genetic biases that we inherit. But it is in adolescents at puberty that we go from being essentially somewhat good at a lot of things or somewhat bad at a lot of things, to being very good at a few things and very bad at many others.

And that's because of the relationship with puberty and neuroplasticity, this ability to change the brain in response to experience is starting to diminish in such a way that, by the time we're in our early 20s, it's harder to do. Now, the transition from generalist to specialist is one aspect of adolescence and puberty, but the other is the formation of social and emotional bonds. And most of what consumes the minds and waking hours of adolescents and children who have gone through puberty and are going through puberty are questions about how they relate to social structures, who they can trust, and how they can trust. make reliable predictions about the world. now that there is more urgency for them to change physically.

In fact, one could argue that puberty is the fastest pace of maturation you will go through at any time in your life. It's the biggest change you'll go through at any point in your life in terms of who you are, because your biology has fundamentally changed at the level of your brain and your body organs, all of your organs from the skin onwards. So I want to visit some of the research on some of the core needs that emerged during puberty and adolescence, not just for parents or for people who might be in puberty and adolescence, but also so that people can Reflect on which of these types of boxes were checked for them as they approached emotional maturity.

So there's an excellent review article that was published in the journal Nature, which is, if not the leading one, certainly one of the three leading journals in the field of science on the biology of adolescence and puberty, as well as some of the main needs and demands that must be met for successful emotional maturation during that time. We'll provide a link to that, but I just want to highlight some of the things they put on the final table. I don't want to go through all the results now, because you can do it yourself if you want.

They mainly highlight many of the changes in neurons and neuronal circuits. For example, I'll just highlight one: there is a connection between the dopamine centers in the brain and an area of ​​the brain that is involved in emotion and dispersion. The dispersion is very interesting. What is observed in animals and humans is that towards the end of adolescence and during the transition to puberty, both due to changes in the brain and hormonal changes, there is an intense desire on the part of the child to move further and further away from primary. The caregivers, not permanently, always come back, similar to a child walking away and then looking back and seeing if everything is okay and then moving on.

During adolescence and puberty, in both animals and children, there almost seems to be a tendency toward action, and the action always goes in a direction away from the primary caregiver. Now, as soon as I say that, I can imagine someone saying, "Well, no, my son, as soon as he hits puberty, he just wants to stay home with us all the time." That's not typical. It happens, but it's not typical. Mainly there is the desire to start spending more time with friends, more time with peers and less time with adults. And I find it extremely interesting to note that that is not only true in humans, but also in other primate species.

This is true in rodents. This is true of almost all other mammal species. There is something in these hormones that not only allows sexual reproduction. Not only do they change the brain, body organs and our shape, but they also predispose us to dispersal, moving us further and further away from primary caregivers in particular. So, for parents of teenagers or future teenagers, it is not only normal, but it is built into the biology of humans to disperse among teenagers and into adolescence. Again, I just want to highlight a few of them, the ones that were listed as intervention strategies to promote healthy adolescence and puberty.

It's very interesting because in the entire article, I must mention who wrote this article, apologies. One of them is a friend of mine. So the first author is Ronald Dahl, not the author of the children's book, I guess, no, from the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley and Nicholas Allen, Linda Wilbert and Anna Balanoff Suliman, forgive me for the pronunciation of the last. I know Dr. Wilbert quite well. She has done work on dispersion, she is quite well known for that work and it is a very long review, but I think she will find it accessible.

Many changes and thickness of the brain in different stages, etc. But I think most people will be interested in what that translates to in the real world. And the interesting thing is that during puberty there is a greater connection, connectivity as we call it, between the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in motivation and decision making, being able to suppress action to make long-term goals possible, as well as the dopamine centers and the amygdala. So there's this really extensive integration and testing. I think this is the key element here: testing emotion and reward circuits in relation to decisions.

And I think that's helpful because when you look at adolescent behavior, they're testing social interactions, they're testing physical interactions with the world. They often have unsafe behaviors. I would never try to justify that with the underlying neurology, but neuroscience points to greater connectivity between areas of the brain that are related to emotionality and threat detection like the amygdala, but also reward. So it's a time to behaviorally test how different behaviors lead to success or not. It is how different behaviors lead to states of fear or not. Now, of course, you could say that about any stage of development, but it seems that puberty is a very, very heightened stage in which contingencies, good or bad, are tested.

And of course, you are operating in a body that is now more capable than the baby. So a baby can harm himself by mistake, but it is harder for him to harm himself through deliberate planning. That's why it's important, of course, to lock up all the medicines in the house, make sure that babies can't get to them, but it's not likely that the baby is going to come up with some extremely diabolical plan to get into the cabinet and get a certain substance. While a teenager could do it. Then you can begin to map the neurology into some of this emotional exploration.

I realize this episode is about emotions. Puberty is a time when the internal state of the person or animal is being sampled and tested against different exteroceptive events, only now they are able to guide those events with greater urgency. It's no longer just a matter of whether the caregiver brings milk or food. Now, of course, every parent will say, "Yes, but I pay for everything they do. I pay for the car and I pay for food." Oh, right. But biology doesn't care about the source, the child or adolescent is now capable, the adolescent really, is now capable of sampling many, many more exteroceptive events through behavior.

That's why some of these recommendations are interesting. The theory is that one of the motivations is to learn to mitigate the risk of famine and malnutrition. As teenagers get older, they begin to wonder if their parents are everything they thought they were, whether or not they are the best thing there ever was or perhaps the worst thing there ever was. Including whether or not they will be able to provide them with resources. So they test whether they can really feed themselves or not, whether they can sustain themselves or not. Although rarely not, it certainly happens, but rarely are they really taken care of.

Although some teenagers are forced to take care of themselves, of course, because parents and other caregivers are not available. Recommendations that align with biology include that there has been a big push for schools to start later to match changes in circadian rhythms and the need for longer sleep. Something we talk about during sleep episodes. Insist on sleep interventions for youth who are at higher risk for mental health problems. Almost all mental health problems are solved with regular, quality sleep of sufficient duration. Sufficient duration will vary from person to person. Take advantage of different types of social

relationships

that reinforce positive behavior.

This is starting to sound typical. And yet, really the goal is during puberty to encourage as many safe forms of interaction that allow children, adolescents, really and adolescents, I still call them children, but what I mean are children going through puberty, that allow them to try this. of autonomy so that they can begin to make good judgments about the exteroceptive events they are selecting and how they make them feel internally. They are basically doing a buffet. The buffet has now been expanded to include not only the events and experiences that their parents and other caregivers bring to them, but they can now expand the buffet with things that they themselves can provide.

And so adolescence and puberty are really seen as the period of development where you sample these two elements that we talked about at the beginning, which are, how do I form attachments and how do I make predictions about what will make me happy? ? Feel good at the level ofinteroception. Some of that may sound a little transactional, that all we're trying to do is figure out how we can bond with people so we can get what we need and feel what we need. I think that's true to some extent, of course, there's also a richer, more abstract aspect to

relationships

, which is that in relationships you can access things that you couldn't do before, you can cooperate.

There are things like teamwork. You can do all kinds of things. But in terms of biology, it's clear that there is a stage of development where these hormonal changes in the brain and these peptide changes in the brain and the body trigger more autonomy and more physical capacity. And that, however, returns us to exactly the same model that we started with in childhood, of alertness or calmness, of feeling good or feeling bad, mainly exteroception, mainly interoception. So I keep coming back to this, I'm like a repeat record on that, because the same core algorithm, the same core function is at play throughout life.

And that's a useful framework in my opinion, because it allows you to sort through all the data and information that's out there about, well, this area, the astria terminalis is active or the basal lateral amygdala is active or gray matter thickening or this hormone. . or that hormone, and returning to a sort of core of truth that is certainly not exhaustive, it does not cover all aspects of emotionality, but at least it establishes some bases from which one can begin to evaluate how different behaviors might or might not make sense. . how certain emotional responses may or may not make sense, regardless of the age of the person or organism.

A discussion of emotions would not be complete without talking about the right side of the brain and the left side of the brain. And this is a very interesting aspect of sociology, psychology and neuroscience. There's a theory of emotional development that I find particularly interesting, from Allan Schore at UCLA, which talks about how most of our bonding and relationship testing is this back-and-forth between highly dopaminergic, driven by dopamine, or highly serotonergic, driven by dopamine. serotonin states. And this starts with the baby and the mother or with the baby and the father. I talked a little bit about this in the last episode, but just to remind you, or anyone who hasn't heard of this, that during development, healthy emotional development clearly begins with the caregiver's and child's ability to be calm.

Peaceful, calming, touch-oriented, and eye-gazing behaviors. Those really boost serotonin, the endogenous opioid system, oxytocin, things are very relaxing and focus on the pleasure of the here and now, as well as the states of excitement of what we're going to do next. There is actually a characteristic sign of dopaminergic interaction: both the caregiver and the child have their eyes wide open and the pupils dilate. That's a sign of excitement. They get very excited. Often the baby will look away if he gets too excited, those are signs of the release of dopamine in the body, and in teenagers, these same things continue, where their good bonding is achieved by hanging out, watching TV, playing video games or texting together. or talking, whatever the local relaxing activity is, as well as adventures and exciting things, so it could be sports, shopping or a summer adventure.

It could be the next big thing. And so, this type of back-and-forth between different reward systems seems to be the basis from which healthy emotional bonds are created. And I invite anyone who is interested in this to look up some of Dr. Schore's work. I think I was wrong in the last episode. He is not a psychiatrist, he is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, but he has deep backgrounds in neuroscience. So I think he's a fascinating aspect. But the way he's framed in his book and some of the language about right brain and left brain. And we've all heard this before, that the right side of the brain is believed to be the emotional side.

This is the typical thing you hear out there. That the right brain is holistic, emotional and that the left brain is logical, sequential and analytical. And that is not what Schore was proposing. There are some differences between the right and left sides of the brain. But the idea that the right brain is synthetic, holistic and emotional, and that the left brain is logical, sequential and analytical is false. There is no neuroscientific evidence for this. We're going to cover this in more detail for a month talking about learning, memory, and dementia, but let's talk about some truths, some differences between the left brain and the right brain, because we can't have a discussion about emotions without doing that.

The left side of the brain, at least for right-handed people, is linguistically dominant. That is, most of language is centered on the left side of the brain of right-handed people. If you are left-handed and were forced to be right-handed, this is probably still true due to the timing of language settling in the brain. For left-handers, people who write naturally with their left hand and always have, language is still primarily found on the left side of the brain, but it is also found more often on the right side of the brain. So it is not as lateralized as we say, it is more or less distributed between both.

So for right-handers, most of their language comes from the left side of their brain. For lefties, it's probably a little more evenly distributed. And there are some variations, whether you're a right hooker or a lefty hooker or not, there's all kinds of nuances to this, but that's the general look. Therefore, language tends to focus on the left side of the brain. And that includes lexicon, grammar, syntax, everything but one. And we'll talk about an aspect of language that seems to be more right-brained. That is very interesting. There seems to be some arithmetic advantage. So math ability is on the left side of the brain.

And I'll talk about how all this was discovered in a minute. And the right side of the brain, however, is linguistically primitive. Most people don't realize this because the right side of the brain is always described as the emotional side, it's super emotional and holistic, but it's actually linguistically primitive. And there is a way to find out through experiments. He is very good at manipulating spatial things and visuospatial tasks. It's mostly about handling those things, but in some ways it's not language, except in one respect. And there's not a lot of evidence for this, but the evidence is strong, which is prosody.

Prosody is the song and fall of language. So a good example would be Italian. I do not speak Italian. I only know a little Italian, but most of the Italian I know is when my Italian colleagues have told me, which means: what are you trying to say, what are you saying? I think I'm doing well. They basically say I don't speak Italian, which is true. Or because one of them knows I love Costello a lot, they always say, which means big, lazy guy, which accurately captures Costello. So even in those few examples, there's a lot of LILT and fall in Italian, other languages, not so much.

And it varies depending on the language. One of the reasons I find Italian so beautiful, not the Italian that I speak, but the Italian that other people speak so beautiful to hear, is that that prosody and the changes in intonation are actually quite noticeable. It's almost like singing a song listening to them talk. And I liked going to scientific meetings. And I always hang out with the Italians, because I had good friends at the Italian labs, but also because they always knew where the best food was, their food standards are incredible. They'd rather starve than eat terrible pasta, and the pasta they find and are willing to eat is always fantastic.

But they also always brought a guitar. They were much more fun to hang out with in meetings than many of my other colleagues. So in any case, the right brain is doing things that have more to do with manipulating spatial information. And I'll talk more about this in a future episode. This was discovered in split-brain patients, people who lack a connection between the two sides of the brain, and this had to be discovered through very complicated experiments. People like Roger Sperry, who won a Nobel Prize for this, who was at Caltech, Mike Gazzaniga and others, discovered these lateralized differences. but let's try to debunk the myth that the right side is synthetic, holistic and emotional, and the left side is logical, sequential and analytical, that you are a left-brained or right-brained person.

Could not be farther from the truth. There is no scientific evidence to support that. And there are some injury studies that can uncover effects that make you think that's what's happening, but really careful work points in a totally different direction. We can't have a complete conversation about emotions, bonds, and social connections without talking about oxytocin. Oxytocin has become so important in the last decade and it seems to be everywhere. Whenever you hear a discussion about neuroscience in the brain or hormones in the brain, oxytocin is released in response to breastfeeding in women and it is released in response to sexual interactions.

It is released in response to non-sexual contact. It is released in males and females and, in fact, participates in pair bonding and the establishment of social bonds in general. How it does this appears to be by matching the internal state. It seems that both increase the synchrony of the internal state in some way, perhaps establishing a level of calm or alertness. This seems like a reasonable hypothesis, in addition to making people aware of their partner's emotional state. And again, this brings us back to this alert, calm axis and this interoceptive and exteroceptive axis. To form good bonds, we can't just think about how we feel, we must also pay attention to how others feel and evaluate a match.

We're trying to see if there seems to be some kind of synchronicity between the states. And oxytocin seems to increase that synchrony and increase awareness of the emotional state of others. Now I know many of you are probably shouting mirror neurons, mirror neurons. Mirror neurons, as some of you may know, and others may not, are neurons that were discovered in animals and humans for their ability to respond when people perform certain physical actions such as lifting a pen, but the same neurons would respond when someone saw someone else pick up a pen. So they were actually mirrors, they represented mirrors of behavior, both in oneself and in others.

Mirror neurons are very controversial. There are a lot of neuroscientists who I respect a lot, who don't believe they exist, because they look at the data, and the data, at least in their mind, was overinterpreted in the area of ​​empathy and in assigning value to emotional states. of others. And when I look at the literature, my opinion is that there are indeed neurons in the brain that clearly represent the actions of others, but it is not clear that they are connected to the emotion and empathy system directly. And I think the growing consensus is that mirror neurons, while the name is fantastic and very catchy, and encompasses a lot of what we'd love it to encompass, the data doesn't really support it.

But this is controversial and I'm delighted to have experts here who can debate it better than I can. However, there are neurons in the brain that were discovered by my colleague Keren Haroush at Stanford when he was working in Noam Ziv's lab, that clearly point to the fact that primate species make assumptions and try to predict the behavior of other members of their group. species. his species. It's an experiment, I don't have time to go into details, we should probably bring Keren here. For those of you who are familiar with the prisoner's dilemma, which is actually a model of cooperation, you can cooperate or one member of a given interaction can cooperate and the other cannot, where both cannot cooperate.

There are ways to solve this so-called prisoner's dilemma by observing previous behavior and making predictions about the next likely behavior the other individual will perform. And it seems like there are neurons that are doing this kind of thing. predictions or calculations. Again, I will go into this in more detail in the future. So instead of thinking about mirror neurons, like empathy neurons, I think it's more correct to think about neurons that try to predict the behavior of others. And that is, as we said, one of the central characteristics of emotions, which is to establish links and, through those links, be able to predict behavior.

So oxytocin is a component of this ability to predict the behavior of others and to guide our own behavior. Here are some experiments involving the administration of intranasal oxytocin. Now I think you need a prescription, although in some places you don't. There are people who take intranasal oxytocin to try to increase the depth of the bond. And I don't recommend you do that. I've never tried that. Any oxytocin there isreleased, I have produced it without an exogenous intranasal application. But what has been reported is increased positive communication between couples. That's why in studies people have taken intranasal oxytocin.

So, for those who want, that study was published in Biological Psychiatry, which my psychiatry colleagues say is an excellent journal. And the title is Intranasal oxytocin increases positive communication and reduces levels of cortisol, the stress hormone, during couple conflicts, they make them fight, or they make them fight with and without oxytocin. So interesting. Very much in line with the idea that oxytocin is the "trust hormone." That's more or less in line with that. That was an article from 2009. There is other evidence, for example, that men report a greater sense of connection and intimacy with their partners during sex after taking intranasal oxytocin.

There are studies in autistic children. Giving them intranasal oxytocin as a way to try to help them establish better social connection and "empathy" or theory of mind. I've talked before about theory of mind, to understand what other children and adults are experiencing. Oxytocin seems to create these general effects, and I don't know what nuances they have in one situation or another. I am aware and have been told, and definitely do not recommend, that an oxytocin and ketamine nasal spray is marketed. Now I have no idea. Maybe someone can comment on why they would like to combine oxytocin and ketamine.

I can't imagine why. Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic used to treat post-traumatic stress disorder. It used to be used as a recreational drug. It is very similar to PCP and actually seems quite dangerous. I don't know why those two things would be combined, why one would want to combine them. But there are products that seem to combine those two things. And I'm not sure why anyone would do that, but it's interesting to note that it's happening. A particularly interesting study on oxytocin is the one that was published in the journal Neuroscience, which is a good journal, which states that oxytocin modulates the social distance between men and women.

So that's interesting. What they did was give oxytocin to people who were in monogamous relationships and then assess the extent to which, in this case, men in those relationships would pay visual attention to other attractive potential partners. And it seemed like the overall conclusion of this study is that oxytocin administration seemed to promote monogamous behavior. So behavior that was not in line with the monogamy of the relationship they were in, rather than potentially seeking out new partners. Now, of course, these are either somewhat contrived experiments or very contrived experiments, depending on how you interpret them. But the general theme is that oxytocin promotes monogamy, it promotes pair bonding, it promotes understanding of the internal state of others, which requires enhanced exteroception for those particular others.

So not only have them look everywhere and see what's going on in the world, but pay special attention to the emotional states of others. I'm sure several of you are wondering, "Well, what can I do to increase oxytocin?" if that's your goal. There is some evidence. And I invite you again to visit examine.com or another similar site like PubMed if you want to search on PubMed, that vitamin D is necessary for proper production and in some cases can increase oxytocin levels when supplemented, which is interesting. And that, believe it or not, is melatonin, or the old friend melatonin, which I have rejected as a sleep supplement, due to what I consider adverse side effects of melatonin in most cases, but it seems that in some cases melatonin can prime the system to slightly increase oxytocin release.

There is even a report, although I didn't find it that strong, that low doses of caffeine could increase the release of oxytocin. But to me that falls into the category of what was once described as a drug, when injected into a person or an animal it is always effective in producing a scientific paper. Which means you can get a result, but the result is not always that strong. Therefore, it is always a good idea to read beyond the titles and summaries and delve into the meat of the article. And when I did that, the effects of caffeine on oxytocin were pretty negligible.

But interestingly, vitamin D and melatonin may have some positive effects on the release of oxytocin. But like I said, a lot of people just take oxytocin directly through these intranasal sprays. I'm pretty sure it's prescribed most places, but check it out. And I repeat, I do not recommend anyone do that. I have never tried it. I don't know if I will. I think I'm going to continue with the oxytocin I have. The other molecule that we produce that is extremely important for social bonds and emotionality is one that we will talk more about in hormone month: vasopressin.

Vasopressin suppresses urination. It's produced by the body, but it was developed as a treatment for something called diabetes insipidus, where people urinate excessively and actually run the risk of dehydration and can lose a lot of electrolytes and so on. So it causes water retention. Alcohol consumption inhibits vasopressin. Many people excrete large amounts of alcohol, a lot of liquid, etc. Vasopressin has effects directly on the brain. In fact, it creates feelings of dizzying love. It also increases memory in very powerful ways. There is an entire biohacking community that has been dabbling in vasopressin for some time now.

I have never tried it. I certainly don't recommend it. It's prescription. It's a pretty serious compound to start playing with, because it has a lot of different effects on the body. It is interesting because it creates a feeling of dizzying love. It is also used as an aphrodisiac, making it similar to oxytocin. It also has very interesting effects on monogamous or non-monogamous behavior. This, again, we will review in the future. But there is a beautiful series of experiments that have been done on a small species of rodent called the prairie vole. It turns out that there are two different populations of prairie voles, some are monogamous, always encountering the same other prairie vole, and some are very non-monogamous, mating with as many other prairie voles as they can.

And it turns out that vasopressin and/or vasopressin receptor levels dictate whether they are monogamous or not. And in fact, there is some interesting evidence in humans. When people report their behavior, assuming they do so accurately, vasopressin and vasopressin levels may also be related to monogamy or non-monogamy in humans. We will talk about this in hormone month. If we talk about the neuroscience of emotions, we have to talk about the vagus nerve. I described what the vagus nerve is in a previous episode, that it is these connections between the body and the viscera, including the gut, the heart, the lungs, and the immune system and the brain, and that the brain also controls these organs.

So it's a two-way street. There is a big myth that I mentioned before, that stimulating the vagus in various ways leads to calmness. That will always calm you down. And that is false. I just want to repeat that that is completely false. In fact, it was just a paper, yet another paper published the other day, which is fantastic, from the David McCormick Laboratory at the University of Oregon. It's published in Current Biology, a great journal, and it shows, I'm just reading the title, that stimulation of the vagus nerve induces widespread cortical activation, the neocortex, and behavior.

I've read the newspaper, it's fantastic. This illustrates once again that stimulation of the vagus increases the release of dopamine and increases the alertness activation of the brain. It is an alertness stimulant, it does not calm people down. Now, this is interesting in light of the emotionality because of the work that many groups have done, but in particular, I'm going to focus on the work of a colleague of mine, Karl Deisseroth at Stanford, who is a psychiatrist, but who has also developed many tools to adjust the activity of neurons in real time through light and electrical stimulation, etc.

I'll refer you to an article in the New Yorker that ran about this a few years ago. I'm going to read a short excerpt. I'll also put the link in the title. You are talking to an extremely suicidal depressed patient who has been implanted with a small device that allows her to adjust the activity of the vagus nerve. Now, vagus stimulation was originally developed for the treatment of epilepsy. Now it is used for other purposes. Apparently, vague stimulation can even increase plasticity. Again, increasing the activity of the vagus increases alertness, and it is simply incredible to see what happens in real time with emotionality when the vagus is stimulated, again, not to calm it, but to activate alertness.

They're in her office and they're talking, and he asks her how she's doing, and she describes how things went before as "pancakeing," which to her just means totally lying down, not much to do. She talks about how she doesn't want to look for a job. She is really depressed. And she says, in the typical style of a good psychiatrist, "Well, there's a lot to think about," that's actually the quote. And they talk about her blood pressure, etc. And then she says that the mood has been declining, that she is spiraling down, she talks about insomnia, nightmares, lack of appetite.

So this is severe depression. This is what we call major depression. And then she asks, "Can we increase the vagus stimulation to 1.5?" She had been receiving 1.2 milliamps of stimulation every five minutes to 30 seconds, but she could no longer feel the effects. So he says, "Okay, I think we can go up a little bit, you're tolerating things well." They begin the stimulation and, "Over the course of the next few minutes," her name was Sally, "he underwent a noticeable change, his frown disappearing. He became cheerful, describing the pleasure he had had during the Christmas holidays and telling how he had recently "I've seen some of Deisseroth's videos on YouTube.

He was still smiling and talking when the session ended and they walked to the reception area." So this is simply stimulating and activating the vagus. Now why do I mention this? Well, for several reasons, one is that the vagus is fascinating in terms of the connection between the brain and the body, two, I would like to try to dispel the myth that vagus stimulation is about being calm, it is actually about to be alert. I don't know how that started to recede, but it's about being alert. And again, the level of alertness or the level of calmness is impacting the emotion, this axis of alertness and calmness is a major axis in the emotion.

It is not the only one, because there is also this valence component of good or bad. Those two are not the only ones, because there is also this interoceptive and exteroceptive component that we talked about before. And there will be others too. Again, not exhaustive. But I find it fascinating and it really brings us back to square one: what are the core elements of emotion and what can be done about them? And before I close today, I just want to make sure that while I mentioned some tools, I talked about the Mood Meter app, I talked about oxytocin and some of the things that affect oxytocin, I talked about some of the Ways that you can conceptualize the emotions.

This question of how you conceptualize emotions is really the most powerful tool you can have in terms of understanding and regulating your emotional state. If you're willing to try to understand it, I realize it's not the easiest thing to do. But instead of thinking of emotions just as these labels, happy, sad, or depressed, think of emotions, excuse me, as elements of the brain and body that encompass levels of alertness that include a dynamic with the outside world and the perception of his own being. internal state. And starting to really think about emotions in a structured way will not only allow you to understand some of the pathologies that lead to when you may feel depressed or anxious or others are depressed and anxious, but also to develop a richer emotional experience about anything.

Now, of course, I don't expect that while you're interacting with friends, watching TV, and experiencing life, you should analyze every part of your experience in some reductionist, mechanistic way. That's not the goal here. But for those of you who are practitioners, teachers of any kind, for those of you who are children, for those of you who are trying to understand what your emotional life and consciousness really consists of, I dare say the word, I believe. that these are fundamental elements that are well supported by science through a variety of researchers doing things from a variety of different perspectives and some of whom agree with each other and some of whom don't.

So I offer it to you as a source of knowledge from which you can begin to think about your emotional life differently, I hope, as well as others, in a way that adds richer to that experience, not detracts from it. . One last point related to that, many of you have told measked about psychedelic therapies emerging now, such as psilocybin and MDMA; Of course, let's delve into that topic. We have an expert guest coming to discuss that topic. These compounds clearly affect the aspects of emotionality that we were talking about today, calmness, alertness, valence, good or bad, interoceptive and exteroceptive positioning.

And so rather than just doing sort of a superficial exploration of those compounds and what the therapeutic and scientific community thinks about them and how they work, I think it's more important to incorporate that framework into our thinking so that when we approach psychedelics and address other types of therapies, cognitive behavioral therapy, different types of emotive therapies that relate to individuals and couples, etc., that we can think about them with some kind of structure and rigor instead of just talking about them as a bunch of chemicals . that produce these incredible experiences that people need to tell you about.

Because if there is a truth, it seems that psychedelics seem to promote the activity of telling stories about the psychedelic experience. But that in itself is not really what interests the therapeutic community and the academic communities; They are interested in trying to understand the universal truths, the universal biological changes, and the psychological changes that occur in the clinical use of those compounds. So we'll wait for now, but we'll get to them. Once again, today we have covered a tremendous amount of material. In reality, it's the equivalent of two, if not three, college lectures in one podcast episode.

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