Andrew Huberman

a weight that is much too heavy for you, meaning you could not do it without injuring yourself.

There are a number of reasons why you might not be able to lift it, but let's say you start to get it a little bit off the ground, or you start to get some force generated that would allow it to move.

but the force that you're generating could potentially rip your muscles or your tendons off of the bone, right?

That it could disrupt the joints and it could tear ligaments.

Well, you have a safety mechanism in place.

It's these Golgi tendon organs, these GTOs as they're called, that get activated and shut down the motor neurons and make it impossible for those muscles to contract.

There are also mechanisms that arrive to the neuromuscular system from higher up in the nervous system, from the brain.

And those mechanisms involve a couple of different facets that are really interesting, and I think that we should all know about.

In fact, today I'm going to teach you about a set of neurons that I'm guessing 99.9% of you have never heard of, including all you neuroscientists out there, if you're out there, and I know you're out there, that seem uniquely enriched in humans and probably perform essential roles in our ability to regulate our physiology and our emotional state.

So within the brain, we have the ability to sense things in the external world, something we call exteroception.

And we have the ability to sense things in our internal world, within our body called interoception.

Interoception can be the volume of food in your gut, whether or not you're experiencing any

organ pain or discomfort, whether or not you feel good in your gut and in your organs.

The main brain area that's associated with interpreting what's going on in our body is called the insula, I-N-S-U-L-A.

It's a very interesting brain region.

It's got two major parts.

The front of it is mainly concerned with things like smell and to some extent vision.

Like if you smell something good to approach it, or if you smell something bad to avoid it.

The posterior insula, the back of the insula that is,

has a very interesting and distinct set of functions.