Transcript for #139 – Andrew Huberman: Neuroscience of Optimal Performance

Yeah, so it depends on the person, obviously. And we should probably define fear, right? Because without going too far down the rabbit hole of defining these things, you can't really have fear without stress, but you could have stress without fear. And you can't really have trauma without fear and stress, but you could have fear and stress without trauma. So we can start playing the word game. And that actually is one of the motivations for even having a laboratory that studies these things is that we really need better physiological neuroscientific and operational definitions of what these things are. I mean, if the field of understanding emotions and states, which is mainly what I'm interested in, is very complicated. But we can do a way with a lot of complicated debate and say, in our laboratory, what we're looking for to assign it a value of fear is a big inflection in autonomic arousal, so increases in heart rate, increases in breathing, perspiration, pupil dilation, all the hallmark signature features of the stress response. And in some cases, we have the benefit of getting neurosurgery patients where we've got electrodes in there. Mygdala and their insula and the orbital frontal cortex, down beneath the skull. So these are chronically implanted electrodes. We're getting multi-units signals. And we can start seeing some central features of meaning within the brain. And what's interesting is that as trivial as it might seem in listening to it, almost everybody responds to heights and falling from a high virtual place with a very strong stress, if not fear response. And that's because the visual of a Stibular apparatus, right, the optic flow and how it links to the, you know, balance, semi-circular, canals, the inner ears, all this technical stuff, but really, All of that pulls all your physiology, the feeling that your stomach is dropping, the feeling that you're suddenly you're sweating even though you're not afraid of falling off this virtual platform, but you feel as if you're following me falling, excuse me, because of the optic flow. That one is universal. So we've got a dive with great white sharks experience where you actually exit the cage. We went out in this in the real world and brought back 360 video that's built out pretty. So this is actually 360 video and this was important to us, right? So when we decided to set up this platform, a lot of the motivation was that a lot of the studies of of these things in laboratories. I don't want to call them lame because I want to be respectful of the people that did this stuff before, but they'd steady fear by showing subjects a picture of a bloody arm or a snake or something like that. And it just unless you have a snake phobia, it just wasn't creating a real enough experience. So we need to do something where people aren't going to get injured, but where we can tap into the physiology and that thing of presence of people momentarily, not the whole time, but momentarily for getting there in a laboratory. And so heights will always do it. And if people want to challenge me on this, I like to point to that movie Free Solo, which was wild because, you know, it's incredible movie, but I think a lot of its popularity can be explained. by a puzzle which is you knew he was going to live when you walked in the theater or you watched it on at home. You knew before that he survived and yet it was still scary that people somehow were able to put themselves into that experience or into Alex's experience enough that they were concerned or worried or afraid at some level. So heights always does it. If we get people who have generalized anxiety, these are people who walk wake up and move through life at a generally higher state of autonomic arousal and anxiety, then we can tip them a little bit more easily with things that don't necessarily get everyone afraid. Things like claustrophobia, public speaking, That's going to vary from person to person. And then if you're afraid of sharks, like my sister friends is afraid of sharks, you won't even come to my laboratory. Because there's a thing about sharks in it. That's how terrified some people are of these specific stimuli. But heights get some every time. Yeah. And I'm terrified of heights. You know, when we have you step off a platform, virtual platform, and it's a flat floor in my lab.

Yeah, maybe I should describe a little bit of the experiment. So without giving away too much in case someone wants to be a subject in one of these experiments, we have them playing a cognitive game. It's a simple lights out kind of game where you're pointing a cursor and turning out lights on a grid. But it gets increasingly complex and it speeds up on them. And there's a failure point for everybody where they just can't make the motor commands fast enough. And then we surprise people, essentially, by placing them virtually all of a sudden, they're on a narrow platform between two buildings. And then we encourage them, or we queue them with, I talking them through a microphone to continue across that platform to continue the game. And, you know, some people they just won't, they actually will get down on the ground and hold on to a virtual beam that doesn't even exist on a flat floor. And so what this really tells us is the power of the brain to enter these virtual states as if they were real. And we really think that anchoring the visual and the vestibular, the balance components of the nervous system are what bring people into that presence so quickly. There's also the potential when we haven't done this yet to bring in 360 sound. So the reason we did 360 video is when we started all this back in 2016, a lot of VR was pretty lame, frankly. It was CGI. It just wasn't real enough. But with 360 video, we knew that we could get people into this presence where they think they're in a real experience more quickly. And our friend Michael Muller, who I was introduced to because of the project I reached out to some friends, Michael Muller is a very famous portrait photographer in Hollywood, but he dives with great white sharks and he leaves the cage. And so we worked with him to build a 360 video apparatus that we could swim under water with, went out to Guadalupe Island, Mexico, and actually got the experience it was a lot of fun it was there's some interesting moments out there of danger but it came back with that video and built that for the sharks and then we realized we need to do this for everything we need to do it for heights we need to do it for public speaking for claustrophobia and what what's missing still is 360 sound where 360 sound would be for instance if I were to turn around and there was a like a giant attack dog there. The moment I would turn around and see it, the dog would grow. But if I turn back toward you, then it would be silent. And that brings a very real element to one's own behavior where you don't know what's going to happen if you turn a corner. Whereas if there's a dog growling behind me and I turn around and then I turn back to you and it's still growling. That might seem like more of an impending threat, but unsustain threat. But actually, it's when you start linking your own body movements to the experience. So when it's closed loop, where my movements and choices are starting to influence things, and they're getting scarier and scarier, that's when you can really drive people's nervous system down these paths of high, high states of stress and fear. Now, we don't want to traumatize people, obviously, but we also study a number of tools to let allow them to calm themselves in these environments. So the short answer is Height. Height.

Looms and heights. So any kind of depth, we're just programmed to not necessarily recoil, but to be cautious about that edge in that depth. And then looms, things coming at us that are getting larger. There are looming sensing neurons even in the retina. at a very, very early stage of visual processing. And incidentally, the way Mueller and, you know, folks learned how to knock it eaten by great white sharks when you're swimming outside the cage is as they start lumbering in, you swim toward them. And they get very confused when you loom on them, because clearly you're smaller, clearly they could eat you if they wanted to. But there's something about forward movement toward any creature that that creature questions, whether or not it would be a good idea to generate forward movement toward you. And so that's actually the survival tool of these kjags at white shark divers.

Great question. It works best to use mixed reality. So we have a snake stimulus. I personally don't like snakes at all. I don't mind spiders. We also have a spider stimulus. But like snakes, I just don't like them. There's only about the slithering and the it just creates a visceral response for me. Some people not so much and they have lower levels of stress and fear in there. But one way that we can get them to feel more of that is to use mixed reality where we have an actual physical bat and they have to stomp out the snake as opposed to just walk to a little safe corner which then makes the snake disappear. That tends to be not as stressful as if they have a physical weapon and so you got people in there you know banging on the floor against this thing and there's something about engaging that makes it more of a more of a threat. Now, I should also mention, we always get the subjective report from the subject of what they experienced because we never want to project our own ideas about what they were feeling, but that's a beauty of working with humans as you can ask them how they feel. And humans aren't great at explaining how they feel, but it's A lot easier to understand what they're saying than a mouse or a Macach monkey is saying. So it's the best we can do is language plus these physiological and neurophysiological signals.

It's interesting you should say that I never considered myself claustrophobic, but because I don't mind small environments provided their well ventilated. But before COVID, I started going to this Russian banja. And I never been to a banja. So the whole experience of really, really hot sauna. And what are they called the plots? They're hitting you with the leaves. And it gets really hot and humid in there. And there were a couple of times where I thought, OK, this thing is below ground. It's in a city where there are a lot of earthquakes like if this place crumbled and we were stuck in here and I'd start getting a little panicky and I realized I don't like small confined spaces with poor ventilation. So I realized I think I have some claustrophobia and I wasn't aware that before. So I put myself into our own claustrophobia stimulus which involves getting into an elevator and with a bunch of people, virtual people. And the elevator gets stalled. And at first, you're fine. You feel fine. But then as we start modulating the environment, and we actually can control levels of oxygen in the environment if we want to, it is really uncomfortable for me. And I never would have thought, you know, I fly, I'm comfortable in planes, but it is really uncomfortable. And so I think I've unhatched a bit of a cluster photo.

Yes. And that comes from two, for my, You know, research studies standpoint, two parallel tracks of research. One was done actually in mice, because we have a mouse lab also, where we can probe around different brain areas and try and figure out what interesting brain areas we might want to probe around in humans. And graduate student my lab, she's now at Caltech. Let's see, Soleil, Polish a paperback in 2018 showing that at first might seem a little bit obvious. But the mechanisms are not, which is that there are really three responses to fear. You can pause, you can freeze essentially. You can retreat, you can back up or you can go forward. And there's a single hub of neurons in the midbrain, this is actually not the midbrain. It's in the middle of the thalamus, which is a four-brain structure. And depending on which neurons are active there, there's a much higher probability that a mouse or it turns out or a human will advance in the face of fear or will pause or will retreat. Now, that just assigns a neural structure to a behavioral phenomenon. But what's interesting is that it turns out that the lowest level of stress or autonomic arousal is actually associated with the pausing and freezing response. Then as the threat becomes more impending and we use visual looms in this case, the retreat response has a slightly higher level of autonomic arousal distress. So think about playing high and go seeking a trying to stay quiet in a closet that you're hiding. If you're very calm, it's easy to stay quiet and still. As your level of stress goes up, it's harder to maintain that level of quiet and stillness. You see this also in animals that are stalking a cat will chatter its teeth. That's actually sort of top down an ambition of trying to restrain behavior. So the freeze response is actually an active response, but it's fairly low stress. And what was interesting to us is that the highest level of autonomic arousal was associated with the forward movement toward the threat. So in your case, jumping out of the plane. However, the forward movement in the face of threat was linked to the activation of what we call collateral, which means just a side connection, literally a wire in the brain that connects to the dopamine circuits for reward. And so when one safely and adaptively meaning you survive moves through a threat or toward a threat, It's rewarded as a positive experience. And so the key, it actually maps very well the cognitive behavioral therapy and a lot of the existing treatments for trauma is that you have to confront the thing that makes you afraid. So otherwise you exist in this very low level of revertory circuit activity where the circuits for autonomic arousal are humming and they're humming more and more and more. And we have to remember that stress and fear and threat were designed to agitate us so that we actually move. So the reason I mention this is I think a lot of times people think that the maximum stress response our fears wants is to freeze and to lock up. But that's actually not the maximum stress response. The maximum stress response is to advance, but it's associated with reward. It has positive valence. So there's this kind of, everyone always thinks about the belt shape curve for at low levels of rousal performance is low and as the increase is performance goes higher and then it drops off as you get really stressed. But there's another bump. further out the distribution where you perform very well under very high levels of stress. And so we've been spending a lot of time in humans and in animals exploring what it takes to get people comfortable to go to that place. also to let them experience how there are heightened states of cognition there. There's changes in time perception that allow you to evaluate your environment at a faster frame rate, essentially. This is the matrix that has a lot of people think of it. But we tend to think about fear as all the low level stuff where things aren't worked out. But there are many, there are a lot of different features to the fear response. And so we think about it. quantitatively and we think about it from a circuit perspective in terms of outcomes and we try and weigh that against the threat. So we never want people to put themselves in unnecessary risk, but that's where the VR is fun because you can push people hard without risk of physically injuring them.

Everything's in a peak state there. I really think that's where optimal performance lies.

Well, it's very subjective and it varies depending on task and environment. So one way we can make it a little bit more operational and concrete is to say, there is a sweet spot, if you will, where the level of internal autonomic arousal aka stress or alertness, whatever you want to call it. is ideally matched to the speed of whatever challenge you have got to be facing in the outside world. So we all have perception of the outside world, is exteroception and then perception of our internal real estate interoception. And when those two things, when interoception and exteroception are matched along a couple of dimensions, performance tends to increase. It were tends to be in an optimal range. So for instance, if you're, I don't play guitar, but I know you play guitar. So let's say you're trying to learn something new on the guitar. I'm not saying that being in these super high states of activation are the best place for you to be in order to learn. It may be that your internal arousal needs to be at a level where your analysis of space and time has to be well matched to the information coming in and what you're trying to do in terms of performance in terms of playing chords and notes and so forth. Now, in these cases of high threat where things are coming in quickly and animals and humans need to react very quickly, the higher your state of autonomic arousal, the better. because you're slicing time more finely, just because of the way the autonomic system works. The people dilation, for instance, and movement of the lens essentially changes your optics, and that's obvious. But with the change in optics is a change in how you've been time in sliced time, which allows you to get more frames per second, read out. with the guitar learning, for instance, it might actually be that you want to be almost sleepy, almost in a kind of drowsy state to be able to, and I don't play music. So I get, I'm guessing here, but since some of the nuance in the chords or the ways that you're to be relaxed enough that your fingers can follow an external cue. So matching the movement of your fingers to something that's pure exteroception. And so there is no perfect autonomic state for performance. This is why I don't favor terms like flow because they're not well operationally defined enough. But I do believe that optimal or peak performance is going to arise when internal state is ideally matched to the space time features of the external demands.

Well, we haven't done too much work there, but I think I can comment on it from a neuroscience, which is really all I do is, well, when we do experiments in the lab, but looking at things through the lens of neuroscience. So what you're describing can be mapped fairly well to working memory, just keeping things online and updating them as they change in information is coming back into your brain. Jack Feldman, who I'm a huge fan of and fortunate to be friends with, is a professor at UCLA, works on respiration and breathing, but he has a physics background. And so he thinks about respiration and breathing in terms of ground states and how they modulate other states. Very, very interesting and I think important work. Jack has an answer to your question. So I'm not going to get this exactly right because this is lifted from a coffee conversation that we had about a month ago, but so apologies in advance for the, but I think I need it mostly right. So we were talking about this about how the brain updates cognitive states, depending on demands, and thinking in particular. And he used it, interesting example. I'd be curious to know if you agree or disagree. He said, you know, most great mathematics is done by people in their late teens and 20s and even you could say early 20s. Sometimes in the late 20s, but not much further on, maybe I just insulted some mathematicians. That's true. And I think that it demands his argument was there's a tremendous demand on working memory to work out theorems in a math and to keep a number of plate spinning, so to speak, mentally and run back and forth between them, updating them. In physics, Jack said, and I, I mean, I think this makes sense to me too, that there's a reliance on working memory, but an increased reliance on some sort of deep, deep memory and deep memory stores, probably stuff that's moved out of the hippocampus and forebrain and into the cortex, and is more some episodic and declarative stuff, but really, so you're pulling from your library. Basically, it's not all RAM, it's not all working memory. and then in biology, and physicists tend to have very active careers into their, you know, 30s and 40s and 50s and so forth. Sometimes later, and then in biology, you see careers that have a much longer arc, these projected careers often. People still in their 60s and 70s doing really terrific work. not always doing it with their own hands because they're my people and the labs are doing them of course but um and that work does tend to rely on insights gained from having a very deep knowledge base where you can remember a paper and a or maybe a figure in a paper you could go look it up if you wanted to but it's very different than the working memory of the mathematician. And so when you're talking about coding or being in that tunnel of thought and trying to iterate and keeping a lot of plate spinning, it speaks directly to working memory. My lab hasn't done too much of that. I work in memory. But we are pushing working memory when we have people do things like the simple lights out tasks while they're under. We can increase the cognitive load by increasing the level of autonomic arousal to the point where they start doing less well. And, you know, everyone has a cliff. This is what's kind of fun. We've had, you know, seal team operators come to the lab. We have people from other units in the military, very, you know, we had a range of intellects and backgrounds and all sorts of things. And everyone has a cliff. And those cliffs sometimes show up as a function of the demands of speed, of processing. or how many things you need to keep online. I mean, we're all limited at some point in the number of things we can keep online. So what you're describing is very interesting because I think it has to do with how narrow or broad the information status. Because I'm not an active programmer, so this is a regime I don't really know. So I don't want to comment about it in any way. You know, it doesn't suggest that, but I think that what you're talking about is top-down control. So this is prefrontal cortex keeping every bit of reflexive circuitry at bay. The one that makes you want to get up and use the restroom, the one that makes you want to check your phone, all of that, but also running these anterior thalamus to prefrontal cortex loops, which we know are very important for working memory.

Yeah, it's patterns. I mean, you're testing algorithms. Yeah, right. You're testing algorithms. So I want to just because I know some of the people listening to this and you have basis in scientific training and have scientific training. So I want to be clear. I think we can be correct about some things like the role of working memory in these kinds of processes without being exhaustive. We're not saying that the only thing, you know, we can be correct but not assume that that's the only thing involved. And I mean neuroscience, let's face it is still in its infancy. I mean we probably know 1% of what there is to know about the brain. Um, you know, we've learned so much and yet there may be global states that underlie this that make prefrontal circuitry work differently than it would in a different regime, or even time of day. I mean, there's a lot of mysteries about this. But so I just want to make sure that we sort of are We're aiming for precision and accuracy, but we're not going to lose that. We're not going to be exhausted. So there's a difference there. And I think sometimes in the vastness of the internet that gets forgotten. So the other is that we think about these operations at really focused, keeping a lot of things online. But what you were describing is actually It speaks to the very real possibility, probably, that with certainty, there's another element to all this, which is when you're trying out lots of things, in particular, lots of different algorithms, you don't want to be in a state of very high autonomic arousal. That's not what you want, because the higher level of autonomic arousal and stress in the system, the more rigidly you're going to analyze space and time. And what you're talking about is playing with space time dimensionality. And I want to be very clear. I'm the son of a physicist. I am not a physicist. When I talk about space in time, I'm literally talking about visual space and how long it takes for my finger to move from this point to this point.

And that's primarily based on time and by the visual system in humans. We don't walk through space, for instance, like a sentown wood and look at three-dimensional sent plumes. You know, when a sentown goes out in the environment, they have depth to their odor trails. Wow. And they don't think about them. We don't think about odor trails. You might say, oh, the smells getting more intense. Aha. But they actually have three-dimensional odor trails. So there you see a cone of odor. That's the seed, of course, with their nose and their factory cortex. We do that with our visual system. And we parse time often subconsciously, mainly with our visual system, also with our auditory system. And this shows up for the musicians out there metronomes, our great way to play with this, based drumming, when the frequency of bass drumming changes, your perception of time changes quite a lot. And any event, space and timer linked through the sensory apparatus through the eyes and ears and nose and probably through taste too and through touch for us, but mainly through vision. So when you drop into some coding or iterating through a creative process or trying to solve something hard, You can't really do that well if you're in a rigid, high level of autonomic arousal because you're plugging in algorithms that are in this space regime, this time regime matches. It's space time matched, whereas creativity, I always think the lava lamp is actually a pretty good example, even though it has these counterculture and new AG connotations, because you actually don't know which direction things are going to change. And so in drowsy states, sleeping and drowsy states space and time become dislodged from one another somewhat and they're very fluid and I think that's why a lot of solutions come to people after sleep and naps and this could even take us into a discussion if you like about psychedelics and what we now know for instance that people thought that psychedelics work by just creating spontaneous bursting of neurons and hallucinations but that the five each to C-A, and two-C and two-A receptors, which are the main sites for things like LSD and psilocybin and some of the other halus, the ones that create hallucinations, the drugs that create hallucinations. The most of those receptors are actually in the collection of neurons that encased the phalamus, which is where all the sensory information goes into. A structure called the phylamic reticular nucleus. and it's an inhibitory structure that make sure that when we're sitting here talking, that I'm mainly focused on whatever I'm seeing visually, that I'm essentially eliminating a lot of sensory information. Under conditions where people take psychedelics and these particular serotonin receptors are activated, That inhibitory shell, it's literally shaped like a shell, starts losing its ability to inhibit the passage of sensory information, but mostly the effects of psychedelics are because lateral connectivity in layer five, a cortex across cortical areas, is increased. And what that does is that means that the space-time relationship for vision, like moving my finger from here to here, a very rigid space-time relationship, right? If I slow it down, it's slower, obviously. But there's a prediction that can be made based on the neurons and the retina and the cortex. On psychedelics, this could be very strange experience. Yeah. But the auditory system has one that's slightly different space-time, and they're matched to one another deeper circuits in the brain. The olfactory system has a different space-time relationship to it. under conditions of these increased activation of these Sartonan receptors, space and time across sensory areas starts being fluid. So I'm no longer running the algorithm for moving my friend from here to here and making a prediction based on vision alone. I'm now, this is where people talk about hearing sites, right? You start linking, this might actually make a sound in a psychedelic state. Now, I'm not suggesting people run out and do psychedelics because it's very disorganized. But essentially what you're doing is you're mixing the algorithms. And so when you talk about being able to access new solutions, you don't need to rely on psychedelics. If people choose to do that, that's their business. But in drowsy states, this lateral connectivity is increased as well. The shell of the phalamus shuts down. And what's happening is you're getting whole brain activation at a level that you start mixing algorithms. And so sometimes I think solutions come not from being in that narrow tunnel of space time and strong activation of working memory and trying to well iterate if this then this very strong deductive and inductive thinking. and working from first principles, but also from states where something that was an algorithm that you never had in existence before, suddenly gets a lumped with another algorithm, and all of a sudden a new possibility comes to mind. Space and time need to be fluid and space and time need to be rigid in order to come up with something meaningful. And I realize I'm riffing long on this, but this is why I think there was so much interest a few years ago with Michael Collins book and other things happening about psychedelics as a pathway to exploration and all this kind of thing. But the real question is what you export back from those experiences. Right. Because dreams are amazing. But if you can't bring anything back from them, they're just amazing.

Domin. Domin.

Well, there are some legality issues. I mean, conversation won't be very clear. I'm not saying anyone should not do psychedelics. I think that drowsy states and sleep states are super interesting for accessing some of these more creative states of mind. hypnosis is something that my colleague David Spiegel, associate chair of psychiatry at Stanford works on, where also, again, it's a unique state because you have narrow context. So this is very kind of tunnel vision and yet deeply relaxed, excuse me, deeply relaxed, where new algorithms, if you will, can start to surface, strong state for inducing neural plasticity. And I think that, you know, so if I had a part of a group, that it's called the Liminal Collective as a group of people that get together and talk about just wild ideas, but they try and implement. And it's a really interesting group, some people from military, from logic tech and some other backgrounds, academic backgrounds. And I was asked, you know, what would be, if you could create a tool, if you just had a tool like your magic wand wish for the day, what would it be? I thought it would be really interesting if someone could develop psychedelics that have on-off switches. So you could go into a psychedelic state very deeply for 10 minutes, but you could launch yourself out of that state and place yourself into a linear real world state very quickly, so that you could extract whatever it was that happened in that experience and then go back in if you wanted. Because the problem with psychedelic states and dream states is that, first of all, a lot of the reason people do them is they're lying. They say they want plasticity and they want all the stuff. They want a peak experience inside of an amplified experience. So they're kind of seeking something unusual. I think we should just be honest about that because a lot of times they're not trying to make their brain better. They're just trying to experience something really amazing. But the problem is space and timer so unlocked in these states, just like they are in dreams, that you can really end up with a whole lot of nothing. You can have an amazing amplified experience housed in an amplified experience and come out of that thinking you had a meaningful experience when you didn't bring anything back.

But you don't actually have

Like I think that's where the real power of you know, adjusting states is going to be. It probably will be with devices. I mean, maybe it will be done through pharmacology. It's just that it's hard to do on-off switches in human pharmacology. That we have them for animals. I mean, we have, you know, free flip, recombinases, and we have, you know, channel options, and hallowed options, and all these kinds of things. But to do that work in humans is tricky, but I think you could do it. with virtual reality, augmented reality, and other devices that bring more of the somatic experience into it.

Well, because if you learn how to titrate caffeine, and everyone's slightly different with this, what they need. But if you learn to titrate caffeine with time a day, and the kind of work that you're trying to do, you can bring that autonomic arousal state into a close to perfect place, and then you can tune it in with, you know, sometimes people want a little bit of background music, sometimes they want less, these kinds of things. The early part of the day is interesting, because the one thing that's not often discussed is this transition out of sleep, So there's a book, I think it's called Winston Churchill's Nap, and it's about Nap's and the transition between Wake and Sleep as a valuable period. I have a long time ago, someone who I respect a lot was mentoring me, said, be very careful about bringing in someone else's sensory experience early in the day. So when I wake up, I'm very drowsy. I sleep well, but I don't emerge from that very quickly. I need a lot of caffeine to wake up and whatnot. But there's this concept of getting the download from sleep. which is you know in sleep you're you were essentially expunging the things that you don't need the stuff that is meaningless from the previous day but you were also running variations on these algorithms of whatever it is you're trying to work out in life on short timescales like the previous day and long timescales like your whole life And those lateral connections in layer five of the neocortex are very robustly active in across sensory areas. And you're running an algorithm or a brain state that would be useless in waking. You wouldn't get anything done. You'd be the person talking yourself in the hallway or something about something that no one else can see. But in those states, you do The theory is that you arrive at certain solutions and those solutions will reveal themselves in the early part of the day. Unless you interfere with them by bringing in social media as a good example of you immediately enter somebody else's space time, sensory relationship. Someone is the conductor of your thoughts in that case. And so many people have written about this. What I'm saying isn't entirely new, but allowing the download to occur in the early part of the day and asking the question, am I more in my head or my more of an interrogative or exteroceptive mode? And depending on the kind of work you need to do, if it sounds like for you it's very interruptive in the end very you got a lot of thinking going on and a lot of computing going on allowing yourself to transition out of that sleep state and arrive with those solutions from sleep and plug into the work really deeply and then and only then allowing things like music, news, social media doesn't mean you shouldn't talk to loved ones and see faces and things like that but some people have taken this to the extreme when I was a graduate student at Berkeley there was a guy there was professor brilliant odd but brilliant, who was so fixated on this concept that he wouldn't look at faces in the early part of the day because he just didn't want to anything else to impact him. Now he didn't have the most rounded life. I suppose, but if you're talking about cognitive performance, this could actually be very beneficial.

She's very sensitive to sound and environment. Yeah, beautiful home and environment, but like clearly puts a lot of attention into details. Yeah.

Yeah, and I think, you know, two things come to mind as you're saying this. First of all, yeah, I mean, we're talking about what's best for work is not always what's best for, you know, completeness of life. I mean, you know, autism is probably many things like when you hit autism just like feet, they're probably 50 ways to get a fever. They're probably 50 ways to that the brain can create what looks like autism or what people call autism. There's an interesting set of studies that have come out of David Ginti's lab at Harvard Med. looking at these are mouse mutants, where these are models for autism, where nothing is disrupted in the brain, proper, and in the central nervous system. But the sensory neurons, the ones that interrogate the skin and the ears and everything are hypersensitive, and this maps to a mutation in certain forms of human autism. So this means that the overload of sensory information and sensory experience that a lot of statistics feel, they like that they can't tolerate things and then they get the stereotype behaviors, the rocking and the kind of the shouting, you know, we always thought of that as a brain problem. In some cases it might be, but in many cases it's because they just can't, they seem to have a, it's like turning the volume up on every sense. And so they're overwhelmed. And none of us want to become like that. I think it's very hard for them and it's hard for their parents and so forth. So I like the coffee shop example because the way I think about trying to build up resilience, you know, physically or mentally or otherwise is one of, I guess we could call it limb, I like to call it limbic friction. That's not a real scientific term and I acknowledge that. I'm making it up now because I think it captures the concept, which is that, you know, we always hear about resilience. It makes it sound like, oh, you know, under stress where everything's coming at you, you're going to stay calm. But there's a limbic system wants to pull you in some direction, typically in the direction of reflexive behavior. And the prefrontal cortex through top-down mechanisms has to suppress that and say, no, we're not going to respond to the banging of the coffee cups behind me or I'm going to keep focusing. That's pure top-down control. So limbic friction is high in that environment. You put yourself into a high limbic friction environment. I mean, the prefrontal cortex has to work really hard. But there's another side to limbic friction, too, which is when you're very sleepy, there's nothing incoming. It can be completely silent. And it's hard to engage in focus because you're drifting off your gang's sleepy. So their limbic friction is high, but for the opposite reason, autonomic arousal is too low. So they're turning on Netflix in the background or looping a song might boost your level of alertness that will allow top-down control to be in the play exactly the sweet spot you want it. So this is why earlier I was saying it's all about how we feel inside relative to what's going on on the outside. We're constantly in this, I guess one way you could envision it spatially, especially if people are listening to this just an audio, is I like to think about it kind of like a glass barbell. where one sphere of perception and attention can be on what's going on with me and one sphere of attention can be on what's going on with you or something else in the room or in my environment. But this barbell isn't rigid. It's not really glass would plasma work here. I don't know anything about plasma. Sorry, I don't know. Yeah. Okay. But so imagine that this thing can contort the size of the the the globes at the end of this barbell can get bigger or smaller. So let's say I close my eyes and I bring all my experience into what's going on in terror. through interrosception internally. Now it's as if I've got two orbs of perception just on my internal state. But I can also do the opposite and bring two both orbs of perception outside me. I'm not thinking about my heart rate or my breathing. I'm just thinking about something I see. And what you'll start to realize as you kind of use this spatial model is that two things, one is that It's very dynamic, and that the more relaxed we are, the more these two orbs of attention, the two ends of the barbell can move around freely. The more alert we are, the more rigid they're going to be tethered in place. And that was designed so that if I have a threaten my environment, It's tethered to that threat. If something's coming to attack me, I'm not going to be like, oh my breathing cadence is a little bit quick. That's not how it works. Why? Because both orbs are linked to that threat. And so my behavior is now actually being driven by something external, even though I think it's internal. And so I don't want to get too abstract here because I'm a neuroscientist, I'm not a theorist, but when you start thinking about models of how the brain works, excuse me, there are only really three things that neurons do. They're either sensory neurons, they're motor neurons, or they're modulating things. The models of attention and perception that we have now 2020 tell us that we've got interception and extra reception. They're strongly modulated by levels of autonomic arousal and that if we want to form the optimal relationship to some task or some pressure or some thing, whether or not it's sleep and impending threat or coding, We need to adjust our internal space time relationship with the external space time relationship. And I realize I'm repeating what I said earlier. But we can actually assign circuitry to this stuff. It mostly has to do with how much limbic friction there is, how much you're being pulled to some source. That source could be internal. If I have pain, physical pain in my body, I'm going to be much more interruptive than I am, extra receptive. You could be talking to me and I'm just going to be thinking about that pain. It's very hard. And the other thing that we can link it to is top-down control, meaning anything in our environment that has a lot of salience will tend to bring us into more externalception than interception. And again, I don't want to litter the conversation with just a bunch of terms, but what I think it can be useful for people is to do what essentially you've done, like says, to start developing an awareness. When I wake up, am I mostly in a mode of interception or extra reception? When I work well, is that what is working well look like from the perspective of autonomic arousal, how alert or calm my, am I? What kind of balance between internal focus and external focuses there? And to sort of watch this process throughout the day.

Interception would be an awareness of anything that's within the confines or on the surface of my skin. that I'm sensing. I'm so literally physiological. Physiology, like within the boundaries of my skin and probably touch to the skin as well. Exteroception would be perception of anything that's beyond the reach of my skin, so that that bottle of water, a scent, a sound, although in this can change dramatically. Actually, if you have headphones in, you tend to hear things in your head if those are a speaker in the room. There's actually the basis of ventriloquism. So there are beautiful experiments done by Greg Reckon's own, but you see Davis looking at how auditory and visual cues are matched and we have a ray of speakers and you can, this will become obvious as I say it, but you know, obviously the ventriloquist doesn't throw their voice. What they do is they direct your vision to a particular location and you think the sound is coming from that location. and there are beautiful experiments that Greg and his colleagues have done where they suddenly introduce an auditory visual mismatch and it freaks people out because you can actually make it seem from a perception standpoint as if the sound arrived from the corner of the room and hit you like physically and people will recoil and so sounds aren't getting thrown across the room they're still coming from the fine location on array of speakers but this is the way the brain creates these internal representations and Again, not to, I don't want to go down a rabbit hole, but I think as much as, you know, I'm sure the listeners appreciate this, but you know, everything in the brain is an abstraction, right? I mean, they're, they're the sensory apparatus that are the eyes and ears and nose and skin and taste and all that are taking information and with interception, taking information from sensors inside the body, the entire nervous system for the gut. I've got sensory neurons that interrate my liver, et cetera. taking all that and The brain is abstracting that. And the same way that if I took a picture of your face and I hand it to you and I'd say, that's you, you'd say, yeah, that's me. But if I were an abstract artist, I'd be doing a little bit more of what the brain does, where if I took a patent paper, maybe I could do this because I'm a terrible artist, and I could just mix it up. And I'd say I would make your eyes like water bottles, but I'd flip them upside down. And I'd start assigning fruits and objects to the different features of your face. And I showed you, I say, Lex, that's you. See what that's not me. And I'd say, no, but that's my abstraction of you. But that's what the brain does. The space time relationship of the neurons that fire that encode your face has no resemblance to your face. I don't know if people have fully internalized that, but the day that I'm not trying fully internalized that, because it's weird to think about. All neurons can do is fire in space and in time. Different neurons in different sequences, perhaps with different intensities. It's not clear the action potential is all or none, although neuroscience is only to talk about that, even though it's been published in nature a couple times. The action potential for a given neuron doesn't always have the exact same waveform. People, it's in all the textbooks, but you can modify that waveform.

It's definitely not all a chaotic mess that we don't understand if we're talking about vision. And that's not just because I'm a vision scientist. Let's take to vision. Let's take to vision. Well, because in the beauty of the visual system, the reason David Huble and torn some weasel on the Nobel Prize was because they were brilliant and forward thinking and adventurous and all that good stuff. But the reason that the visual system is such a great model for addressing these kinds of questions and other systems are hard is we can control the stimuli. We can adjust spatial frequency how finer the gradings are. Thick gradings, thin gradings. We can adjust temporal frequency. How fast things are moving. We can use cone isolating stimuli. We can use it. There's so many things that you can do in a controlled way, whereas if we're talking about cognitive encoding, like the encoding, the space of concepts or something, I like you, if I may, are drawn to the big questions in neuroscience. But I confess in part because of some good advice I got early in my career and in part because I'm not perhaps smart enough to go after the really high level stuff. I also like to address things that are tractable and I want, you know, we need to address what we can stand to make some ground on at a given time.

Yeah, I mean, I'm happy to have a talk about consciousness, but it's a scary talk, and I think most people don't want to hear what I have to say, which is, you know, which is, we can save that for later perhaps.

Yeah, the visual system is amazing. We're mostly visual animals to navigate. Survive humans mainly rely on vision, not smell or something else, but it's a filter for cognition and it's a strong driver of cognition. Maybe just because it came up and then we're moving to higher level concepts, just the way the visual system works can be summarized in it in a few relatively succinct statements, unlike most of what I've said, which is not been succinct at all. Let's go there. The retina. Yeah, so the retina. is this three layers of neuron structure at the back of your eyes, but I think it's a credit card. It is a piece of your brain, and sometimes people think I'm kind of wriggling by out of a reality by saying that it's absolutely a piece of the brain. It's a four brain structure that in the first trimester, there's a genetic program. that made sure that the neural retina, which is part of your central nervous system, was squeezed out into what's called the embryonic eye cups and that the bone formed with a little hole where the optic nerve is going to connect it to the rest of the brain. And those that window into the world is the only window into the world for a mammal, which has a thick skull. Birds have a thin skull so their pineal glands sits and lizards too and snakes actually have a hole so that light can make it down into the pineal directly and in train melatonin rhythms for time of day and time of year. Humans have to do all that through the eyes. So three layers of neurons that are a piece of your brain, they are central nervous system. And the optic nerve connects to the rest of the brain. The neurons in the eye, some just care about luminance, just how brighter dim it is. And they inform the brain about time of day. And then the central circadian clock informs every cell in your body about time of day and make sure that all sorts of good stuff happens if you're getting lighten your eyes at the right times. and all sorts of bad things happen if you are getting light randomly throughout the 24 hour cycle. We could talk about all that, but this is a good incentive for keeping a relatively normal schedule. Consistence schedule, you lost light exposure. Consistence schedule, trying to keep a consistent schedule. When you're young, it's easy to go off schedule and recover. As you get older, it gets harder. But you see everything from outcomes and cancer patients to diabetes improves when people are getting light at particular time a day and getting darkness at a particular phase of the 24 hour cycle. We were designed to get light and dark at different times of the circadian cycle. That's all being all that information is coming in through specialized type of neuron in the retina called the melanops and intrinsically photosensitive gangly cell discovered by David Burson at Brown University. That's not spatial information. It's subconscious. You don't think, oh, it's daytime. Even if you're looking at the sun, it doesn't matter. It's a photon counter. It's literally counting photons. And it's saying, oh, even though it's a cloudy day, lots of photons coming in and adds winter and Boston, it must be winter and your system is a little depressed. It's spring and you feel alert. That's not a coincidence. That's these melanops and cells signaling the circadian clock. There are a bunch of other neurons in the eye. that signal to the brain, and they mainly signal the presence of things that are lighter than background or darker than background. So a black objects will be dark in the background, a light object, lighter than background. And that all come, it's mainly, it's looking at pixels, mainly, they look at circles, and those neurons have receptive fields, which we're not everyone will understand. But those neurons respond best to little circles of dark light or little circles of bright light. Little circles of red light versus little circles of green light or blue light. And so it sounds very basic. It's like red, green, blue, and circles brighter or dimmer than what's next to it. But that's basically the only information that's sent down the optic nerve. And when we say information, we can be very precise. I don't mean little bits of red traveling down the optic nerve. I mean spikes, neural action potentials in space and time, which for you is like makes total sense, but I think for a lot of people, it's actually beautiful to think about All that information in the outside world is converted into a language that's very simple. It's just like a few syllables, if you will. And those syllables are being shouted down the optic nerve converted into a totally different language, like Morse code. Go into the brain. And then the phalamus essentially responds in the same way that the retina does. Except, the phalamus is also waiting things. It's saying, you know what? That thing was moving faster than everything else, or it's brighter than everything else. So that signal I'm going to get up, I'm going to allow up to cortex. Or that signal is much redder than it is green. So I'm going to let that signal go through that signal as much. And it's kind of more like the red next to it, throw that out. The information just doesn't get up into your cortex. And then in cortex, of course, is where perceptions happen. And in v1, if you will, visual area 1, But also some neighboring areas. You start getting representations of things like oriented lines. So there is a neuron that responds to this angle of my hand versus vertical. This defining work of human resource Nobel. And it's a very systematic map of orientation, line orientation, direction of movement, and so forth. And that's pretty much end-collar. And that's how the visual system is organized all the way up to the cortex. So it's hierarchical. I want to be clear. It's hierarchical because you don't build up that line by suddenly having a neuron that responds to lines in a some random way. The response to lines by taking all the dots that are aligned in a vertical stack, and they all converge on one neuron, and then that neuron response to vertical lines. So it's not random. There's no abstraction at that point, in fact. In fact, if I showed you a black line, I could be sure that if I were imaging V1, that I would see a representation of that black line as a vertical line somewhere in your cortex. So at that point, It's absolutely concrete. It's not abstract. But then things get really mysterious. Some of that information travels further up into the cortex so that and goes from one visual area to the next to the next to the next. So that by time you get into an area that Nancy Canwisher at MIT has studied her much of her career, the fusiform face area, you start finding single neurons that respond only to your father's face, or to Joe Rogan's face, regardless of the orientation of his face. I'm sure if you saw Joe, because you know him well, from across the room, and you just saw his profile? Oh, that's Joe. We'll talk over and say hello. The orientation of his faces, and there you wouldn't even see his eyes necessarily, but he's represented in some abstract way by a neuron that actually would be called the Joe Rogan neuron.

So Nancy's lab has done that because early on she was challenged by people that said, there aren't face neurons. There are neurons that they only respond to space and time, shapes and things like that, moving in particular directions and orientations. And it turns out Nancy was right. They used the stimuli called Grieble stimuli, which any computer programmer would appreciate, which kind of morphs a face into something gradually that eventually just looks like this alien thing, they call the Grieble. And the neurons don't respond to Grieble's in most cases that they only respond to faces or familiar faces. Anyway, I'm summarizing a lot of literature and for giving me Nancy and for those of the grieble people. If there are, they're like, you don't come after me with pitchwork. Actually, you know what, come out with pitchwork. I think I know what I'm trying to do here. So the point is that in the visual system, It's very concrete up until about visual area four, which has color pin wheels and seems to respond to pin wheels of colors. And so the stimuli become more and more elaborate. But at some point, you depart that concrete representation and you start getting abstract representations that can't be explained by simple point to point wiring. And to take a leap out of the visual system to the higher level concepts, Well, we talked about in the visual system maps to the auditory system where you're encoding what frequency of tone sweeps. So this is going to sound weird to do, but you know, like a Doppler like hearing something car passing by, for instance, but at some point, you get into motifs of music that can't be mapped to just a what they call a tonotopic map of frequency, you start abstracting. And if you start thinking about concepts of creativity and love and memory, like what is the map of memory space? Well, your memories are very different than mine, but presumably there's enough structure at the early stages of memory processing, or at the early stages of emotional processing, or at the earlier stages of creative processing, that you have the building blocks, your zeros and ones, if you will. But you depart from that eventually. Now, the exception to this, and I want to be really clear, because I was just mainly talking about Neocortex. The six layered structure on the outside of the brain that explains a lot of human abilities. other animals have them too, is that sub-cortical structures are a lot more like machines. It's more plung and chug. And what I'm talking about is the machinery that controls heart rate and breathing and receptive fields, neurons that respond to things like temperature on the top of my left hand. And one of the, you know, I came into neuroscience from the more of a perspective, initially of psychology, but one of the reasons I forced upon myself to learn some electrophysiology. Not a ton, but enough. And some molecular biology and about circuitry is that one of the most beautiful experiences you can have in life I'm convinced is to lower an electrode into the cortex and to show a person or an animal You do this, absolutely, of course. Stimulus, like an oriented line or a face, and you can convert the recordings coming off of that electrode into an audio signal, an audio monitor, and you can hear what they call hash. It's not the hash you smoke, it's the hash you hear, and it sounds like It just sounds like noise. And in the cortex, eventually you find a stimulus that gets the neuron to spike in fire action potentials that are converted into an auditory stimulus that are very concrete. Crack. Crack sounds like a bat cracking, you know, like home runs, you know, or outfield balls. When you drop electrodes deeper into the phalamus, or into the hypothalamus, or into the brain stem areas that control breathing, it's like a machine. You never hear hash. You drop the electrode down. This could be like a grungeal tug instead of electrode, not high fidelity electrode, as long as it's got a little bit of insulation on it. Plug into an audio monitor. It's picking up electricity. And if it's a visual neuron, and it's in the phalamus or the retina, and you walk in front of that animal or person, that neuron goes, And then you walk away and it stops and you put your hand in front of the eye again and it goes and you could do that for two days and that neuron will just every time there's a stimulus it fires. So whereas before it's a question of how much information is getting up to cortex and then these abstractions happening where you're creating these ideas when you go sub-cortical everything is

It's two plus two equals four. There's no abstraction. Yeah. And this is why I know we have some common friends at neural link and I love the demonstration that had recently. I'm a huge fan of what they're doing and where they're headed and no I don't get paid to say that and I have no business relationship to them. I just a huge fan of the people in the mission. But my question was to some of them. When are you going to go sub-cortical? Because if you want to control an animal, you don't do it in the cortex. The cortex is like the abstract painting I made of your face. Removing one piece or changing something may or may not matter for the abstraction. But when you are in the sub-cortical areas of the brain, a stimulating electro can evoke an entire behavior or an entire state. And so the brain, if we're going to have a discussion about the brain and how the brain works, we need to really be clear which brain, because everyone loves neo cortex. It's like, oh, canonical circuits and cortex, we can get the cortical connectome and sure, necessary, but not sufficient, not to be able to plug in patterns of electrical stimulation and get behavior. Eventually, we'll get there. But if you're talking sub-cortical circuits, That's where the action is. That's where you could potentially cure Parkinson's by stimulating the subtylamic nucleus because we know that it gates motor activation patterns in very predictable ways. So I think for those that are interested in neuroscience it pays to pay attention to like is this a circuit that abstracts the sensory information or is it just one that builds up hierarchical models in a very predictable way. And there's a huge chasm in neuroscience right now because there's no conceptual leadership, no one knows which way to go. And this is why I think neural link has captured an amazing opportunity, which was, okay, while all you academic research labs are figuring all this stuff out, we're going to pick a very specific goal and make the goal the end point. And some academic laboratories do that. But I think that's a beautiful way to attack this whole thing about the brain, because it's very concrete. Let's restore motion to the Parkinsonian patient. Academic labs do that, want to do that too, of course. Let's restore speech to the stroke patient. But there's nothing abstract about that. That's about figuring out the solution for a particular problem. So anyway, those are my, and I admit I've mixed in a lot of opinion there. But having spent some time, like 25 years digging around in the brain and listening to neurons firing and looking at them anatomically, I think given it's 2020, we need to ask the right, you know, the way to get better answers is ask better questions. And the really high level stuff is fun. It makes for good conversation. And it has brought enormous interest, but I think the questions about consciousness and dreaming and stuff they're fascinating, but I don't know that we're there yet.

And which one to go after first? And here I'm coaching badly from someone I've never met, but who's you know, work I follow, which is, and it was actually on your podcast. I think Elon Musk said, you know, basically the brain is a, why you say a monkey brain with a super computer on top. And I thought that's actually probably the best description of the brain I've ever heard because it captures a lot of important features like limbic friction, right? But we think of like, oh, you know, when we're making plans, we're using the prefrontal cortex and we're executive function and all this kind of stuff. But think about the drug addict who's driven to go pursue heroin or cocaine, they make plans. So clearly they use their frontal cortex. It's just that it's been hijacked by the limbic system and all the monkey brain is he referred to. It's really not fair to monkeys though, Elon, because actually monkeys can make plans. They just don't make plans as sophisticated as us. I've spent a lot of time with monkeys, but I've also been a lot of time with humans.

I do, because let's say I had an ability to place a chip anywhere I wanted in the brain today and activate it or inhibit that area. I'm not sure I would put that chip in Neo Cortex, except maybe to just kind of have some fun and see what happens. The reason is it's an abstraction machine, and especially if I wanted to make a mass production tool, a tool in mass production that I could give to a lot of people because it's quite possible that your abstractions are different enough than mine, that I wouldn't know what patterns of firing to induce. But if I want, let's say I want to increase my level of ethics and creativity, well then I would love to be able to, for instance, control my level of limbic friction. I would love to be able to wake up and go, oh, you know, I have an eight o'clock appointment. I wake up slowly. So between seven eight, but I want to do a lot of linear thinking. So you know what, I'm going to just turn down the limbic friction and or ramp up prefrontal cortex's activation. So there's a lot of stuff that can happen in the phalamus with sensory gating. For instance, you could shut down that shell around the phalamus and allow more creative thinking by allowing more lateral connections. Those would be the experiments I'd want to do. So they're in the sub-cordical, quote-unquote, monkey brain. But you could then look at what sorts of abstract thoughts and behaviors would arise from that. rather than, and here I'm not pointing the finger at neural link at all, but there's this obsession with Neo Cortex. But I'm going to, well, I might lose a few friends, but I'll hopefully gain a few, and also, one of the reasons people spend so much time in Neo Cortex, yes. I have a fact in an opinion. One fact is that you can image there and you can record there. Right now, the two photon and one photon microscopy methods that allow you to image deep into the brain, still don't allow you to image down really deep unless you're jamming prisms in there and endoscopes and then endoscopes are very narrow. It's like looking at the bottom of the ocean through a spotlight. Yeah, and so you much easier look at the waves up on top, right? So let's face it folks a lot of the reasons why there's so many recordings and layer two, three of cortex with all this advanced microscopy is because it's very hard to image deeper. Now the microscopes are getting better and thanks to the amazing work mainly of engineers and chemists and physicists, let's face it. They're the ones who brought this revolution in neuroscience in the last 10 years or so. You can image deeper, but We don't really, that's why you see so many reports on layer two, three. The other thing, which is purely opinion, and I'm not going after anybody here, but is that as long as there's no clear right answer, it becomes a little easier to do creative work in a structure where no one really knows how it works. So it's fun to probe around because anything you see is novel. If you're going to work in the thalamus, or the pulvanar, or the hypothalamus, or these structures that have been known about since the 60s and 70s, and really since the centuries ago, So you are dealing with existing, you have to combat existing models. And when resin cortex, no one knows how the thing works. Neocortex, six-layered cortex. And so, so everything is found. There's a lot more room for discovery. And I'm not calling anyone out. I love cortex. We've published some papers on cortex. It's super interesting. But I think with the tools that are available nowadays, and where people are trying ahead of not just reading from the brain, monitoring it to be writing to the brain. I think we really have to be careful and we need to be thoughtful about what are we trying to write? What script are we trying to write? Because there are many brain structures for which we already know what scripts they write and I think there's tremendous value there. I don't think it's boring. The fact that they act like machines makes them predictable, those are your zeros and ones. Yeah, let's start there. But what's sort of happening in this field of writing to the brain is there's this idea. And again, I want to be clear. I'm not pointing at neural link. I'm mainly pointing at the the neocordical jockeys out there that You go and you observe patterns and then you think replaying those patterns is going to give rise to something interesting. Yeah. I should call out one experiment or two experiments which were done by Sussumutonagawa, Nobel Prize winner from MIT's done important work in memory and immunology, of course, as well as Mark Mayford's lab at UC San Diego. They did an experiment where they monitored a bunch of neurons while an animal learned something. Then they captured those neurons through some molecular tricks so they could replay the neurons. So now there's like perfect case scenario. It's like, okay, you monitor the neurons in your brain, then I say, okay, neurons 1 through 100 were played in the particular sequence. So you know the space time. You know the keys on the piano that were played that gave rise to the song, which was the behavior. And then you go back and you reactivate those neurons except you reactivate them all at once. Like slamming on all the keys once on the piano and you get the exact same behavior. So the space time code may be meaningless for some structures. Now that's freaky. That's a scary thing because what that means is that all the space time firing in cortex the space part may matter more than the time part. So, you know, rate codes and space time codes, we don't know. And, you know, I'd rather have, I'd rather deliver more answers in this discussion questions, but I think it's an important consideration.

I believe so. You know the stimulus. You know the neuron then codes that stimulus. So you know the transformation. When I say this for those things about sensory transformations, it's like I can show you a red circle and then I look at how many times the neuron fires in response to that red circle and then I can show the red circle a bunch of times green circle and see if it changes and then essentially the number of times that is the transformation. You've converted red circle into like three action potentials, you know, BPP or whatever you want to call it, you know, for those that think in the sound space. So that's what you've created. You know the transformation and you march up the, it's called the neural axis as you go from the periphery up into the cortex and we know that And I know Lisa Feldman Barrett or is it Barrett Feldman? It's Barrett Feldman. Excuse me, Lisa. Talked a lot about this, that birds can do sophisticated things and whatnot as well. But humans, there's a strong, what we call, cephalization. A lot of the processing is moved up into the cortex and out of the subcordical areas. But it happens on the less. And so, as long as you know the transformations, you are in a perfect place to build machines or add machines to the brain that exactly mimic what the brain wants to do, which is take events in the environment and turn them into internal firing of neurons.

I certainly hope not. I'll see you, you hope there's, I hope there are other forms of intelligence. I mean, I think what humans are really good at. And here I want to be clear that this is not a formal model, but what humans are really good at is taking that plasma barbell that we were talking about earlier, and not just using it for analysis of space, like the urmediate environment, but also using historical information. Like I can read a book today about the history of medicine. I happen to be doing that late late for some stuff I'm researching. And I can take that information, and if I want I can inject it into my plans for the future. Other animals don't seem to do that over the same time scales that we do. Now, it may be that the chipmunks are all hiding little notebooks everywhere in the form of like little dirt, castles, or something that we don't understand. I mean, the waggle dance of the bee is in the most famous example. Bees come back to the hive. They orient relative to the honeycomb, and they waggle. There's a guy down in Australia named Srinivasan who studied this in it. It's really interesting. No one under really understands it. It's a pea understands it best. be waggles in a couple of ways relative to the orientation of the honeycomb and then all the other bees see that it's visual and they go out and they know the exact coordinate system to get to the source of whatever was the food and bring it back. and he's done it where they isolate the bees, he's changed the visual flight environment, all this stuff, they are communicating. And they're communicating something about something they saw recently, but it doesn't extend over very long periods of time. The same way that you and I can both read a book or you can recommend something to me and then we could converge on a set of ideas later. And in fairness, because she was the one that said it and I didn't, and I hadn't even thought of it, when you talk to Lisa on your podcast, brought up something beautiful, which is that I never really occurred to me and I was sort of embarrassed that it hadn't, but it's really beautiful and brilliant, which is that, you know, we don't just encode senses in the form of like color and light and sound waves and taste, but ideas become a form of sensory mapping. And that's where the really, really cool and exciting stuff is, but we just don't understand what the receptive fields are for ideas. What's an idea of receptive field?

Hey, your abstractions are different than mine. Yeah. I actually think the comment section, you know, on on social media is a beautiful example of where the abstractions are different for different people. Yeah. So much of the misunderstanding of the world is because of these apps, these idea receptive fields, they're not the same. Whereas I can look at a photo receptor neuron or all factory neuron or a v1 neuron. And I am certain I would bet my life that yours look and respond exactly the same way that Lisa's do in mind do. But once you get beyond there, it gets tricky. And so when you say something or I say something and somebody gets upset about it or even happy about it, their concept of that might be quite a bit different. They don't really know what you mean. They only know what it means to them.

Go deeper. If they, by the way, so deeper into the brain. And I have to end to be fair. So, on that MacDougal, who's the neurosurgeon and the neural link and clinical neurosurgeon, great, brilliant. They have amazing people. I have to give it to them. They have been very cryptic in recent years. Their website was just like a neural like nothing there. They really know how to do things with style and they've upset a lot of people, but that's good too. Matt is there I know Matt he actually came up through my lab at Stanford all the you know he was in our surgery resume spent time in our lab he actually came out on the shark dive and did great weight shark diving with my lab to collect the VR that we use in our fear stuff I've talked to Matt and I think you know he and other folks there are hungry for the deeper brain structures the problem is that damn vascular all that blood supply it's it's not trivial to get through and down into the brain without damaging the vascular in the neocortex, which is on the outer crust. But once you start getting into the dhalomus and closer to some of the main arterial sources, you really risk getting massive bleeds. And so it's an issue that can be worked out. It just is hard.

Yeah, so the way to, you know, of course you got your deep brain structures, they're involved in breathing and heart rate and kind of lizard brain stuff and then on top of that. This is the model, the brain that no one really subscribes to anymore, but anatomically it works and then on top in mammals. And then on top of that, if the limbic structures which gate sensory information and decide whether or not you're going to listen to something more they're going to look at it or you're going to split your attention to both. kind of sensory allocation stuff. And then the Neo Cortex is on the outside. And that is where you get a lot of this abstraction stuff. And now not all cortical areas are doing abstractions, some like visual area one, auditory area one, they're just doing concrete representations. But as you get into the higher order stuff, that when you start hearing names like Infro, Pride, or Cortex, and when you start hearing multiple names in the same, then you're talking about higher order areas. But actually, there's an important experiment that drives a lot of what people want to do with brain machine interface. And that's the work of Bill Newsom, who is at Stanford and Tony Moveshan, who runs the Center for Neural Science at NYU. This is a wild experiment, and I think it might freak a few people out if they really think about it too deeply. But anyway, here it goes. There's an area called MT in the cortex. And if I showed you a bunch of dots all moving up, and this is what they, this is what Tony and Bill and some of the other people in that lab did way back when, is they show a bunch of dots moving up somewhere in MT, there's some neurons that respond. They fire when the neurons move up. And then what they did is they started varying the coherence of that motion. So they made it. So only 50% of the dots moved up and the rest moved randomly. And that neuron fires a little less. And eventually it's random in that neuron stops firing because it's just kind of dots moving everywhere. It's awesome. And there's a systematic map so that other neurons are responding and things moving down and other things are responding left and other things moving right. Okay. So there's a map of direction space. Okay. Well, that's great. You could leash an MT animals lose the ability to do these kind of coherent discrimination or direction discrimination. But the amazing experiment, the one that just is kind of eerie is that they lowered a stimulating electrode into empty. Found a neuron that responds to when dots go up. But then they silenced that neuron and sure enough the animal doesn't recognize the neurons are going up and then they move the dots down. They stimulate the neuron that responds to things moving up and The animal responds, because it can't speak. It responds by doing a lever press, which says the dots are moving up. So in other words, the sensor, the dots are moving down in reality on the computer screen. They're stimulating the neuron that responds to dots moving up. And the perception of the animal is that dots are moving up, which tells you that your perception of external reality absolutely has to be an aeronel abstraction. It is not tacked to the movement of the dots in any absolute way. Your perception of the outside world depends entirely on the activation patterns of neurons in the brain. And you can hear that and say, well, duh, because if I stimulate, you know, the stretch reflex and you kick or something or whatever, you know, the knee reflex and you kick, of course, there's a neuron that triggers that, but it didn't have to be that way, because a the animal had prior experience, b your way up in this, you know, higher order cortical areas. What this means is that And I generally try to avoid conversations about this kind of thing. But what this means is that we are constructing our reality with this space-time firing those zeros and ones. And it doesn't have to have anything to do with the actual reality. And the animal or person can be absolutely convinced that that's what's happening.

Well, this was, it's, it's fascinating because just saw the Oliver Sachs documentary, there's a new documentary out about his life, and there's this one part where he's like, I've spent part of my life trying to imagine what it would like to be, be, to be a bat or something, to see the world through the, like the end of the sensory apparatus of a bat. And he did this with his patients that were locked into these horrible syndromes that to pull out some of the beauty of their experience as well, not just communicate the suffering, although the suffering too. And as I was listening to him talk about this, I started realize it's like, well, you know, like they're these mantis shrimps that can see 60 shades of pain or something and they see this stuff all the time and animals and see UV light every time I learn about an animal that can sense other things in the environment that I can't like heat sensing. Well, not I don't crave that experience the same way sacks talked about craving that experience, but it does throw another penny in the jar for what you're saying, which is that it could be that most if not all of what I perceive and believe is just a neural fabrication and that for better, for worse, we all agree on enough of the same neural fabrications in the same time in place that we're able to function.

You know, Scott, do the experiment. The key is to just do the experiment in the most ethical way possible. You just do it. I mean, that's the beauty of experiments. There's wonderful theoretical neuroscience happening now to make predictions. But that's why experimental science is so wonderful. You can go into the laboratory and poke around in there and be a brain explorer and listen to and write to neurons. And when you do that, you get answers. You don't always get the answers you want, but that's the beauty of it. When you were saying this thing about reality and the Donald Hoffman model, I was thinking about children, you know, like when I have an older sister, she's very sane. But when she was a kid, she had an imaginary friend. And she played with this imaginary friend. And there was this whole, there was a consistency. This friend was like, it was Larry, lived in a purple house, Larry was a girl. It was like, all this stuff that a child, a young child, wouldn't have any issue with. And then one day she announced that Larry had died, right? And it wasn't traumatic or traumatic. That was it. And she just stopped. And I always wonder what that neurodevelopmental event was that a kept her out of a psychiatric ward had she got, you know, kept that imaginary friend. It's also there was something kind of sad to it. I think the way it was told to me because I'm the younger brother. I didn't I wasn't around for that, but my dad told me that, you know, there was a kind of a sadness because it was this beautiful reality that had been constructed. And so we kind of won, I wonder, as you're telling me this, whether or not You know, as adults, we try and create as much reality for children as we can so that they can make predictions and feel safe because the ability to make predictions is a lot of what keeps our autonomic arousal and check. I mean, we go to sleep every night and we give up total control. And that should frighten us deeply, but you know, unfortunately, autonomic, or else, will be angsts us down under, and we don't negotiate too much. So you sleep sooner or later. I don't know. I was a little worried we get into discussions about the nature of reality, because it's interesting in the laboratory, I'm a very much like, what's the experiment, what's the analysis going to look like, what mutant mouse are we getting used, what, what, what, what, experience we're going to put someone through, but I think it's wonderful that in 2020 we can finally have discussions about this stuff and look kind of peek around the corner and say, well, no link and people, others who are doing similar things are going to figure it out. They're going to, the answers will show up and we just have to be open to interpretation.

So I've fortunately three short answers to this. The first one is it. I'm not, I'm not particularly succinct. I agree. No, the joke I always tell is, There are two things you never want to say to a scientist. One is what do you do? And the second one is take as much time as you need. And you definitely don't want to say them in the same sentence. I have three short answers to it. So there's a cynical answer. And it's not one I enjoy giving, which is that if you look into the 70s and a back at the 1970s and 1980s, And even into the early 2000s, there were some very dynamic, very impressive speakers who were very smart in the field of neuroscience and related fields who thought hard about the consciousness problem and fell in love with the problem, but overlooked the fact that the technology wasn't there. So I admire them for falling in love with the problem, but they gleaned tremendous taxpayer resources, essentially for nothing. And these people know who they are, some of them are alive, some of them aren't. I'm not referring to Francis Crick, who was brilliant by the way. And I thought the clouse trim was involved in the consciousness, which I think is a great idea. It's a skewer structure that no one's really studied. People are now trying to study it. So I think Francis was brilliant and wonderful, but there, It, you know, there were books written about it. It makes for great television stuff and thought around the table or after a couple of glasses of wine or whatever. It's an important problem nonetheless. And so I think I do think the consciousness, the issue is it's not operationally defined, right? The psychologists are much smarter than a lot of hard scientists for the following reason. They put operational definitions. They know that psychology, if we're talking about motivation, for instance, they know they need to put operational definitions on that so that two laboratories can know they're studying the same thing. The problem with consciousness is no one can agree on what that is. And this was a problem for attention when I was coming up. So in the early 2000s people would argue, what is the tension is it spatial attention auditory attention is it? And finally people were like, you know what, we agree with they agreed on that one. So I remember sort of remembering people screaming a lot of attention. Right. They couldn't even agree on attention. So I was coming up as a young graduate student. I'm thinking like, I'm definitely not going to work on attention. And I'm definitely not going to work on consciousness. And I wanted something that I could solve or figure out. I want to be able to see the circuit or the neurons. I want to be able to hear it on the audio. I want to record from it. And then I want to do gain of function and loss of function. Take it away. See something change. Put it back. See something change has systematic way. And that takes you down into the depths of some stuff that's pretty plug-in chug, you know, but, you know, I'll borrow from something in the military because I've fortunate to do some work with, you know, it's from special operations and they have beautiful language around things because their world is not abstract. And they talk about three meter targets, 10 meter targets and 100 meter targets. And it's not an issue of picking the 100 meter target because it's more beautiful or because it's more interesting. If you don't take down the three meter targets and the 10 meter targets first, you're dead. So that's a, I think scientists could pay to, you know, adopt a more kind of military thinking in that in that sense. The other thing that is really important is that just because somebody conceived of something and can talk about it beautifully and can glean a lot of resources for it doesn't mean that it's led anywhere. So this isn't just true of the consciousness issue and I don't want to sound cynical, but I could pull up some names of molecules that occupied hundreds of articles in the very premier journals that then we're later discovered to be totally moot for that process. And biotic companies fold it, everyone in the lab pivots and starts doing something different with that molecule. And nobody talks about it. Because as long as you're in the game, we have this thing called anonymous peer review. You can't afford to piss off anybody too much unless you have some other funding stream. And I have avoided battles most of my career, but I pay attention to all of it. and I've watched this and I don't think it's ego driven. I think it's that people fall in love with an idea. I don't think there's any, there's not enough money in science for people to sit back there rubbing their hands together. You know, the beauty of what neural link and Elon and team, because obviously he's very impressive, but the team as a whole is really what gives me great confidence in their mission is that he's already got enough money so I can't be about that. He doesn't seem to need it at a level of, uh, I don't know him, but it doesn't, he doesn't seem to need it at a kind of an ego level or something. I think it's driven by genuine curiosity and the team that he's assembled include people that are very kind of abstract neuro, neo cortex space time coding people. There are people like Matt who's a neurosurgeon. You can't I mean, you know, you can't be as neurosurgery. Failures in neurosurgery are not tolerated. So you have to be very good to exceptional to even get through the gate and he's exceptional. And then they've got people like Dan Adams, who is at UCSF for a long time as it could could front end and known in for years, who is very concrete studied the vasculature in the eye and how it maps to the vasculature and cortex. When you get a team like that together, You're going to have dissenters. You're going to have people that are high level thinkers, people that are coders. When you get a team like that, it no longer looks like an academic laboratory or even a field in science. And so I think they're going to solve some really hard problems. And again, I'm not here. They don't, you know, I have nothing at stake with them. But I think that's the solution. You need a bunch of people who don't need first author papers. who don't need to complete their PhD, who aren't relying on outside funding, who have a clear mission, and you have a bunch of people who are basically will adapt to solve the problem.

Well, if someone can simplify the problem, that will be wonderful. I mean, the reason we can talk about something as abstract as face representations and fusiform face area is because Nancy Kenwisher had the brilliance to tie it to the kind of lower level statistics of visual scenes. It wasn't because she was like, oh, I bet it's there. That wouldn't have been interesting. So people like her understand how to bridge that gap and they put a tractable definition. So I just, that's what I'm begging for in science. Yeah, tractable definition.

Absolutely. And I think what I really appreciate about what you're saying is that everybody whether or not they're working on a kind of low level synapse that's like a reflex in the musculature or something very high level abstract can benefit from looking at those who prefer three you know everyone's going after a three meter ten meter and hundred meter targets in some sense but to be able to tolerate the discomfort of being in a conversation where there are real answers, where the zeros and ones are known, zeros and ones, and the equivalent of them in the nervous system, and also, as you said, for the people that are very much like, oh, I can only trust what I can see in touch, those people need to put themselves into the discomfort of the high level conversation, because what's missing is conversation and conceptualization of things at multiple levels. I think one of the, this is, I don't gripe about my lives. Unfortunately, we've been funded from the start and we've been happy in that regard and lucky and we're grateful for that, but I think one of the challenges of research being so expensive. is that there isn't a lot of time, especially nowadays, for people to just convene around a topic because there's so much emphasis on productivity. And so there are actually, believe or not, there aren't that many concepts, formal concepts in neuroscience right now. The last 10 years has been this huge influx of tools. And so people in neural circuits and probing around and connect homes and it's been wonderful. But you know, 10, 20 years ago, when the consciousness stuff was more prominent, the C-word, as you said, um, what was good about that time is that people would go to meetings and actually discuss ideas and models. Now it sort of like, It's sort of like demonstration day at the school science fair where everyone's got their thing and you some stuff is cooler than others. But I think we're going to see a shift. I'm grateful that we have so many computer scientists and theoreticians and or theorists, I think they call themselves. Somebody tell me what the difference is someday. And, you know, psychology and even dare I say philosophy, you know, these things are starting to converge. We, you know, neuroscience that the name neuroscience, there wasn't even such a thing when I started graduate schoolers at postdoc. It was neurophysiology or you were a neuroanatomist or what now. It's sort of everybody's invited. And that's beautiful. That means that something's useful is going to come along with us. And there's also tremendous work of course happening on it for the treatment of disease. And we shouldn't overlook that. That's where, you know, ending eliminating, reducing suffering is also a huge initiative in neuroscience. So there's a lot of beauty in the field. But the consciousness thing continues to be a It's like an exotic bird. It's like no one really quite knows how to handle it and it dies very easily.

Well, and I have to confess ignorance when it comes to most things about coding, and I have some quantity of ability, but I don't have strong quantitative leanings. I know my limitations too, and so I think the next generation coming up, you know, a lot of the students at Stanford are really interested in quantitative models and theory and AI. And I remember when I was coming up, a lot of the people who were doing work ahead of me, I kind of rolled my eyes at some of the stuff they were doing. including some of their personalities, although I have many great senior colleagues over the world. So the way of the world. So nobody knows what it's like to be a young graduate student in 2020, except the young graduate student. So I know what I know there are a lot of things I don't know. And in addition to why I do a lot of public education, increase scientific literacy and neuroscientific thinking, et cetera, a big goal of mine is to try and at least pave the way so that these really brilliant and forward thinking younger scientists can make the biggest possible dent and make what will eventually be all us old guys and gals look stupid. I mean, that's what we were all trying to do. That's what we were trying to do. So yeah.

I don't know if it's low level.

Well, I mean, I think we can tack it to what we were just saying in a meaningful way, which is whatever goes on in that abstraction part of the brain. He's figured, you know, he's figured out how to Dig down in whatever the limbic friction. Yeah. He's figured out how to grab a hold of that. Scruff it and send it in the direction that he's decided it needs to go. And what's wild is that he's what we're talking about is him doing that to himself, right? He's it's like he's scruffing himself and directing himself in a particular direction. And sending himself down that trajectory. And what's beautiful is that he acknowledges that that process is not pretty. It doesn't feel good. It's kind of horrible at every level, but he's created this rewarding element to it. And I think that's what's so admirable and it's what so many people crave, which is regulation of the self at that level.

It's principled suffering.

I don't know. Wonderful for that. I'm not asking him. No, no. We've only communicated with her by text about some stuff. I was asking David, but yeah, they clearly formed a powerful team. Yeah. And it's a beautiful thing to see people working in that kind of synergy.

You made a call out on social media. Actually, I think that was the point. I knew of you before, but that's where I started tracking some of what you were doing with these physical challenges and the house wrong with that guy. Well, no, I think I actually, I don't often comment on people's stuff, but I think I commented something like, uh, neural plasticy loves a non-negotiable rule. No, I said non-negotiable contract because at the point where, yeah, neural plasticy really loves a non-negotiable contract because and I've said this before, so forgive me, but the brain is doing analysis of duration path and outcome, and that's a lot of work for the brain, and the more that it can pass off duration path and outcome to just reflex, the more energy and it can allocate to other things. So if you decide There's no negotiation about how many push-ups, how far I'm going to run, how many days, how many pull-ups, et cetera. You actually have more energy for push-ups running in pull-ups.

That's right. I mean, so much of what we do is reflexive at the level of just core circuitry breathing, heart rate, all that, that boring stuff, digestion. But then there's a lot of reflexes stuff like how you drink out of a mug of coffee, that's reflexive too, but that you had to learn at some point in your life earlier when you were very little analyzing duration path. And I'll come in that involved a lot of top-down processing with the prefrontal cortex. But through plasticity mechanisms, you now do it. So when you take on a challenge, provided that you understand the core mechanics of how to run push-ups and pull-ups and whatever else you decided to do, once you set the number and the duration and all that, Then you all you have to do is just go. But people get caught in that tide pool of just, well, do I really have to do it? How do I not do that? What if I get injured? What if I, you know, can I sneak it like this? So that, you know, and that's work. And to some extent, I look, I not David Goggins obviously, nor nor do I claim to understand his process. partially, you know, but maybe a little bit, which is that it's clear that by making the decision, there's more resources to devote to the effort of the actual execution.

Well, it's how you do it. Again, I don't want to speculate too much about, but occasionally David has said this publicly where people will be like, don't you sleep or something? Yeah. And his process used to just be that he was just blocked. You know, like gone. But it's actually, It's a super interesting topic and because self-control and directing our actions and the role of emotion and quitting, these are vital to the human experience and they're vital to performing well at anything and obviously at a super high level, being able to understand this about the self is crucial. So I have a friend who was also in the team's, his name is Pat Dossett, he did nine years in the SEAL teams, And in a similar way, there's a lore about him among team guys because of a kind of funny challenge he gave himself, which was, so he and I swim together, although he swims further up front than I do, and he's very patient. But, you know, he was on a, he was assigned when he was in the teams to a position that gave him a little more time behind a desk than he wanted and has not as much time out and deployments, although he did deployments. So he didn't know what to do at that time, but he thought about it and he asked himself, what is he hate the most? And it turns out the thing that he hated doing the most was bear crawls, you know, walking in your hands and he's, so he decided to bear crawl for a mile for time. So he was bear crawling a mile a day, right? And I thought those are an interesting example they gave because, you know, like, why pick the thing you hate the most? And I think it maps right back to limbic friction. It's the thing that creates the most limbic friction. And so if you can overcome that, then there's carryover. And I think that notion of carryover has been talked about psychologically and in kind of in the self-help space. Like, oh, if you run a marathon, it's going to help you in other areas of life. But will it really? Will it? Well, I think it depends on whether or not there's a lot of limbic friction, because if there is, what you're exercising is not a circuit for bear crawls or a circuit for pull ups. What you're doing is you're exercising a circuit for top-down control and that circuit was not designed to be for bear crawls or pull ups or coding Or waking up in the middle of the night to do something hard that circuit was designed to override limbic friction and so neural circuits were designed to generalize right the stress response to an incoming threat that's a physical threat was designed to feel the same way. and be the same response internally as the threat to an impending exam or divorce or marriage or whatever it is that's stressing somebody out. And so neural circuits are not designed to be for one particular action or purpose. So if you couldn't, as you did, if you can train up top-down control under conditions of the highest limbic friction that when the desire to quit is at its utmost, either because of fatigue or hyper arousal being too stressed or too tired you're you're learning how to engage a circuit and that circuit is forever with you and if you don't engage it you, it sits there, but it's atrophied. It's like a plant that doesn't get any water. And a lot of this has been discussed in self-help and growth mindset and all these kinds of ideas that circle the internet and social media. But when you start to think about how they map to neural circuits, I think there's some utility because what it means is that the limbic friction that you'll experience in, I don't know, maybe some future relationship to something or someone, It will, it's a category of neural processing that should immediately click in the place. It's just like the limbic friction you experienced trying to engage in the God knows how many push-ups pull-ups and running, you know, runs you were doing 25,000. Who's counting? So folks, if Lex does this again, more comments, more likes. Well, this is probably when you're getting more followers as you're getting more. Actually, I should say that's the benefit. I don't know, maybe it's not politically correct for me to ask, but like, there's this scary type about Russians being, you know, like, like, like being a really, you know, durable. And you know, I started going to that Russian Bonia that way back before COVID. And they could tolerate a lot of heat, you know, and they would sit very stoic, you know, and no one was going on. It's hot in here. They were just kind of like easing to it. So maybe there's something there.

Limbic friction tells you.

So there's a, we can put something very concrete to that. So there's a paper published in cell, you know, super top zero journal, two years ago. looking at effort. And this was in a visual environment of trying to swim forward toward a target and a reward. And it was a really cool experiment because they manipulated virtually the visual environment. So the same amount of effort was being expanded every time, but sometimes the perception was you're making forward progress and sometimes the perception was making no progress because Stuff wasn't drifting by meant no progress. So you can be swimming and swimming and making progress and it turns out that with each bout of effort there's a epinephrine and nor epinephrine is being released in the brain stem. And glia, what traditionally were thought of as support cells for the neurons, but they do a lot of things actively too, are measuring the amount of epinephrine and nor epinephrine in that circuit. And when it exceeds a certain threshold, the glia send inhibitory signals that shut down top-down control. They literally, it's the quit stop. There's no more, it's you quit enduring. It can be rescued, endurance can be rescued with dopamine. So that's where the subjective part really comes into play. So you quit because you've learned how to turn that off or you've learned how to wrote. Some people will reward the pain process so much that friction becomes the reward. And when you talk about people like Goggins and other people I know from special operations and people have gone through cancer treatments, three times, you hear about, you know, just when you hear about people, the Victor Frankl stories, I mean, you hear about Nelson Mandel. You hear about these stories. I'm sure the same process is involved. Again, this speaks to the generalizability of these processes as opposed to a neural circuit for a particular action or cognitive function. So I think you have to learn to subjectively self-reward in a way that replenishes you. It's Goggins talks about eating souls. It's a very traumatic example. In his mind, apparently that's a form of reward, but it's not just a form of reward where you're it's like a you're picking up a trophy or something. It's it's actually it gives the energy. It's a reward that gives more neural energy and I'm defining that as more dopamine just to press the nor adrenaline adrenaline circuits in the brainstem.

Well, now you have, you certainly have a form of formidable adversary in this one.

Well, let's hope you both both survive this one.

Yeah, talking about it, taking yourself out of running for, yeah.

Well, I think the key is to dynamically control your output. And that can be done by reducing effort, which doesn't work throughout, but also by restoring through these subjective reward processes. And we don't want to go down the rabbit hole of why this all works, but these are ancient pathways that we're designed to bring resources to an animal or to a person through foraging for hunting or mates or water or all these things. And they work so well because they're down in those circuits where we know the zeros and ones. And that's great because it can be subjective at the level of, oh, I reach this one a milestone, this one horizon, this one three meter target, but if you don't reward it, it's just effort. If you do self-reward it, it's effort minus one in terms of the adrenaline output.

Well, first of all, thanks for the the kind words, especially coming from you. I think Stanford is an amazing place as is MIT and it's such a MIT is better by the way.

There are many friends at MIT. Yeah, you know, high and smarter friends. Yeah, Ed Boydon is is is is best, you know, among the best in class. Yeah, there's some people not me that can hold hold a candle tune, but not many, maybe one or two. I think the great benefit of being in a place like MIT or Stanford. is that when you look around, the average is very high. You have many best in class among the one or two or three best in the world at what they do. It's a wonderful privilege to be there. One thing that I think also makes them and other universities like them very special is that there's an emphasis on what gets exported out of the university, you know, not keeping it ivory tower and really trying to keep an eye on what's needed in the world and trying to do something useful. And I think the proximity to industry and Silicon Valley and in the Boston area in Cambridge also lends itself well to that. And there are other institutions of course. So the reason I got involved in educating social media was actually because of a pat dosit the bear mile bear call guy. I was at the turn of 2018 to 2019 we had formed a a good friendship and we were, he talked to me in the doing these early morning cold water swims. I was learning a lot about pain and suffering, but also the beauty of cold water swims. And we were talking one morning and he said, so what are you going to do to serve the world in 2019? That's the way that like a Texan former seal talks. We're just, literally, what are you going to do to serve the world in 2019? Like, well, run my lab. It's like, no, no, no, what are you going to do that's new? And he wasn't forceful in it, but I was like, no, it's interesting question. I said, well, Um, fight my way. I would just, you know, teach people everyone about the brain because I think it's amazing. It goes, we'll do it. All right, you know, shake on it. So we did it. You know, and so I started putting out these posts and it's grown into, um, to include a variety of things, but you asked about a governing philosophy. So I want to increase interest in the brain and in the nervous system and in biology generally. That's one major goal. I'd like to increase scientific literacy, which can't be rammed down people's throats of talking about how to look at a graph and statistics and you know z scores and p values and genetics has to be done gradually in my opinion. I want to put valuable tools into the world mainly tools that map to things that we're doing in our lab. So these will be tools centered around how to understand a direct one states of mind and body. So reduce stress, raise one stress threshold. So it's not always just about being calm. Sometimes it's about learning how to tolerate not being not calm. raise awareness for mental health. I mean, there's a ton of micro missions in this, but it all really maps back to, you know, like the eight and ten year old version of me, which is I used to spend my weekends when I was a kid reading about weird animals and I had this obsession with like medieval weapons and stuff like catapults and and then I used to come into school on Monday and I would ask if I could talk about it to the class and teach and I just it's really I I promise and some people might not believe me, but it's really, I don't really like being the point of focus. I just get so excited about these gems that I find in the world in books and in experiments and in discussions with colleagues and discussions with people like you and around the universe and I can't just compulsively, I gotta tell people about it. So I try and package it into a form that people can access. Yeah, I think the reception has been really wonderful. Stanford has been very supportive. Thankfully, I've given some podcasts even with them and they've reposted some stuff on social media. That's a precarious place to put yourself out there as a research academic. I think some of my colleagues both locally and elsewhere probably wonder if I'm still serious about research, which I absolutely am. And I also acknowledge that, you know, their research and the research coming out of the field needs to be talked about and not all scientists are good at translating that into a language that people can access. And I don't like the phrase dumb it down. What I like to do is take a concept that I think people will find interesting and useful and offer it sort of like a you would offer food to somebody visiting your home you're not going to cram frog raw in their face you're going to say like do you want a cracker like and they say yeah and like do you want something on that cracker like do you like cheese like yeah like do you want Swiss cheese or you want that really like stinky like French I don't like cheese much of a bit um or do you want frog rot like what's that like so you're trying the best information prompts more questions of interest not questions of confusion but questions of interest and so I feel like one door opens and another door opens and another door opens and pretty soon the image of my mind is you create a bunch of neuroscientists who are thinking about themselves neuroscientifically and I don't begin to think that I have all the answers at all I cast a neuroscience sometimes a little bit of a psychology lens onto what I think are interesting topics and you know I You know, someday I'm going to go into the ground or the ocean or wherever it is I end up and I'm very comfortable with the fact that not everyone's going to be happy with how I deliver the information, but I would hope that people would feel like some of it was useful and meaningful and got them to think a little bit harder.

One of the great challenges in assigning good, you know, giving a good answer to the question like what's the meaning of life is, I think illustrated best by the Victor Franklin example, although the other examples too, which is that our sense of meaning is very elastic. in time and space. And we talked a little bit about this earlier, but it's amazing to me that somebody locked in a cell or a concentration camp can bring the horizon in close enough that they can then micro slice their environment so that they can find rewards and meaning and power and beauty even in a little square box or a horrible situation. And I think this is really speaks to one of the most important features of the human mind, which is we could do, let's take two opposite extremes. One would be, let's say the alarm went off right now in this building and the building started shaking. Our vision, our hearing, everything would be tuned to this space-time bubble for those moments. And everything that we were processed, all that would matter, the only meaning would be, get out of here, say, figure out what's going on, contact loved ones, et cetera. If we were to sit back totally relaxed, we could do the, you know what I think it's called pale blue dot thing or whatever where we could imagine ourselves in this room and then there were in the United States and this continent and the earth and then peering down us. And all of a sudden you get back, it can seem so big that all of a sudden it's meaningless, right? If you see yourself as just one brief glimmer in all of time in all of space, you go to, I don't matter. And if you go to, Oh, every little thing that happens in this text thread or this, you know, comment section on YouTube or Instagram, your space time bubble is tiny. Then everything seems inflated and the brain will contract and dilate its space time. Vision and time, but also sense of meaning. And that's beautiful. And it's what allows us to be so dynamic in different environments. And we can pull from the past and the present future. It's why examples like Nelson Mandela and Victor Franco had to include. It makes sense that it wasn't just about grinding it out. They had to find those dopamine rewards even in those little boxes they were forced into. So I'm not trying to dodge an answer, but for me personally and I think about this a lot because I have this complicated history in science where my undergraduate graduate advisor and postdoctoral advisor all died young. So, you know, and they were wonderful people and had immense importance in my life. But what I realized is that because we can get so fixated on the thing that we're experiencing, how holding tremendous meaning, but it only holds that meaning for as long as we're in that space-time regime. And this is important because what really gives meaning is the understanding that you can move between these different space-time dimensionalities. And I'm not trying to sound like a theoretical physicist or anyone that thinks about the cosmos and saying that It's really the fact that sometimes we'd say and do and think things and it feels so important and the two days later, like, what happened? Well, you had a different brain processing algorithm entirely. You were in a completely different state. And so what I want to do in this lifetime is I want to engage in as many different levels of contraction and dilation of meaning as possible. I want to go to the micro. I sometimes think about this. I'm like if I just pulled over the side of the road, I bet you there's an ant hill there and they're whole world is fascinating. You can't stay there. And you also can't stay staring up at the clouds and just think about how we're just these little beams and it doesn't matter. The key is the journey back and forth up and down that staircase, back and forth and back and forth. And my goal is to get as many trips up and down that staircase as I can before the reaper comes for me.

That's my goal anyway, and I've watched people die. I watched my postdoc advisor die with her away. My graduate vibe. It was tragic, but they found beauty in these closing moments because their bubble was their kids in one case or like one of them was a Giants fan and got to see a Giants game in her last moments. And you just realize it's a Giants game, but not in that moment because time is closing, and so those time bins feel huge, because she's slicing things so differently. So I think learning how to do that better and more fluidly, recognizing where one is, and not getting too tacked to the idea that there's one correct answer. That's what brings meaning. That's my goal anyway.

Thank you. I really appreciate the invitation to be here and people might think that I'm saying it just because I'm here, but I'm a huge fan of yours. I sent your podcasts to my colleagues and other people and I think what you're doing is isn't just amazing. It's important and so thank you.