Dr. Michael Kilgard

You can wait for the hypoxia to set in or you can do it quicker.

This is a much faster signal.

And when we trigger a brief burst, just half a second long, that makes three out of four of those neurotransmitters

Norepinephrine, acetylcholine, and serotonin are all released.

Interestingly, dopamine is not even activated.

Rats don't like it or avoid it.

Humans don't like it or avoid it.

It just doesn't matter because it's all subconscious.

Knowing what your guts are doing, your heart and lungs, who cares?

So that one is not connected to...

a rewarding pathway.

We're not aware of it.

But the combination of releasing those three neurotransmitters activates the appropriate chemistry.

It's the signal that the neuron is looking for.

And no, it's not any one signal.

It's a cocktail, as most things in the immune system are, or bone formation, or even regulating your hunger.

There's not one factor for anything.

There's ten factors for everything.

Now that we're learning that and embracing it, we can send this signal in.

And at first, it was just a dumb experiment repeating the one we had done with deep brain stimulation, showing we could quadruple the number of neurons that produced a response to a given tone.