In this Huberman Lab Essentials episode, I explore how the auditory and vestibular (balance) systems are essential for enhancing learning and improving focus. I explain how the auditory system captures sound waves and how the brain interprets these signals to make sense of the environment. I also discuss the use of white noise and binaural beats to support brain states conducive to learning, focus and relaxation. Additionally, I explain how the vestibular system helps maintain balance and examine practical tools to enhance auditory learning, cognitive performance and mood. Read the episode show notes at hubermanlab.com. Huberman Lab Essentials are short episodes focused on essential science and protocol takeaways from past full-length Huberman Lab episodes. Watch or listen to the full-length episode at hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/huberman Function: https://functionhealth.com/huberman Timestamps 00:00:00 Huberman Lab Essentials; Hearing & Balance 00:00:55 Sponsor: AG1 00:02:55 Ears, Sound Waves, Cochlea 00:06:42 Sound & Direction, Ventriloquism Effect, Cupping Ears 00:10:09 Sponsor: Eight Sleep 00:11:45 Binaural Beats, Alertness, Calmness, Learning, Anxiety 00:16:03 Tool: White Noise & Learning 00:19:31 White Noise, Hearing Loss & Child Development 00:22:38 Sponsor: Function 00:25:26 Auditory Learning, Cocktail Party Effect, Tool: Remember New Names 00:29:31 Balance, Ears, Vestibular System 00:34:42 Improve Dynamic Balance, Tool: Improve Mood & Learning, Tilted Exercise 00:37:35 Recap & Key Takeaways Disclaimer & Disclosures Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What are the core functions of the auditory and vestibular systems?
Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.
Today, we're going to talk all about hearing and balance and how you can use your ability to hear specific things and your balance system in order to learn anything faster. The auditory system, meaning the hearing system, and your balance system, which is called the vestibular system,
interact with all the other systems of the brain and body and used properly can allow you to learn information more quickly, remember that information longer and with more ease, and you can also improve the way you can hear. You can improve your balance. We're going to talk about tools for all of that. As many of you know, I've been taking AG1 daily for more than 13 years.
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Chapter 2: How do our ears capture and interpret sound waves?
Okay, well, if you can hear me, that's amazing because what it means is that my voice is causing little tiny changes in the airwaves wherever you happen to be and that your ears and whatever's contained in those ears and in your brain can take those sound waves and make sense of them. And that is an absolutely fantastic and staggering feat of biology.
And yet we understand a lot about how that process works. So what we call ears have a technical name. That technical name is auricles, but more often they're called pinna, the pinnas, P-I-N-N-A, pinna. And the pinnas of your ears, this outer part that is made of cartilage and stuff, is arranged such that it can capture sound in the best way for your head size.
So the shape of these ears that we have is such that it amplifies high-frequency sounds. High-frequency sounds, as the name suggests, is the squeakier stuff. So we have low-frequency sounds and high-frequency sounds and everything in between. And those sound waves, for those of you that don't maybe fully conceptualize sound waves, are literally just
fluctuations or shifts in the way that air is moving toward your ear and through space. In the same way that water can have waves, air can have waves, okay? So it's reverberation of air. Those come in through your ears and you have what's called your eardrum. And on the inside of your eardrum, there's a little bony thing that's shaped like a little hammer.
So attached to that eardrum, which can move back and forth like a drum, it's like a little membrane, you've got this hammer attached to it. And that hammer has three parts. For those of you that want to know, those three parts are called malleus, incus, and stapes. But basically you can just think about it as a hammer. So you've got this eardrum and then a hammer.
and then that hammer has to hammer on something. And what it does is it hammers on a little coiled piece of tissue that we call the cochlea. So this snail-shaped structure in your inner ear is where sound gets converted into electrical signals that the brain can understand. Now, the cochlea, at one end is more rigid than the other.
So one part can move really easily and the other part doesn't move very easily. And that turns out to be very important for decoding or separating sounds that are low frequency and sounds that are of high frequency. like a shriek or a shrill. And that's because within that little coiled thing we call the cochlea, you have all these tiny little, what are called hair cells.
Now they look like hairs, but they're not at all related to the hairs on your head or elsewhere on your body. They're just shaped like hair, so we call them hair cells. those hair cells, if they move, send signals into the brain that a particular sound is in our environment. Now, this should stagger your mind. If it doesn't already, it should, because
What this means is that everything that's happening around us, whether or not it's music or voices, all of that is being broken down into its component parts. And then your brain is making sense of what it means. Your cochlea essentially acts as a prism. It takes all the sound in your environment and it splits up those sounds into different frequencies.
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Chapter 3: What role do binaural beats play in enhancing focus and relaxation?
And the rationale is that those intermediate frequencies place the brain into a state that is better for learning. And when I say better for learning, I want to be precise about what I mean. That could mean more focus for encoding or bringing the information in. As you may have heard me say before, we have to be alert and focused in order to learn. So can binaural beats make us more focused?
Can binaural beats allow us to relax more if we're anxious? So what are the scientific data say about binaural beats? The science on binaural beats is actually quite extensive and very precise. So sound waves are measured typically in Hertz or kilohertz.
I know many of you aren't familiar with thinking about things in Hertz or kilohertz, but again, just remember those waves on a pond, those ripples on a pond, If they're close together, then they are of high frequency. And if they're far apart, then they are low frequency. So if it's many more kilohertz, then it's much higher frequency than if it's fewer hertz or kilohertz.
And so you may have heard of these things as delta waves or theta waves or alpha waves or beta waves, et cetera. Delta waves would be big, slow waves, so low frequency. And indeed, there is quality evidence from peer reviewed studies that tell us that Delta waves like one to four Hertz, so very low frequency sounds can help in the transition to sleep and for staying asleep.
And that Theta rhythms, which are more like four to eight Hertz can bring the brain into a state of or meditation. So deeply relaxed, but not fully asleep. And you'll find evidence that alpha waves, eight to 13 Hertz can increase alertness to a moderate level. That's a great state for the brain to be in for recall of existing information.
And that beta waves, 15 to 20 Hertz are great for bringing the brain into focus states for sustained thought or for incorporating new information and especially gamma waves, the highest frequency, the most frequent ripples of sound. so to speak 32 to a hundred Hertz for learning and problem solving.
Here we're talking about the use of binaural beats in order to increase our level of alertness or our level of calmness. Now that's important to underscore because it's not that there's something fundamentally important about the binaural beats. They are yet another way of bringing the brain into states of deep relaxation through low frequency sound or
highly alert states for focused learning with more high frequency sound. They're effective, but it's not that they're uniquely special for learning. It's just that they can help some people bring their brain into the state that allows them to learn better. There's very good evidence for anxiety reduction from the use of binaural beats.
And what's interesting is the anxiety reduction seems to be most effective when the binaural beats are bringing the brain into delta, so those slow big waves like sleep, theta and alpha states. There's good evidence that binaural beats can be used to treat pain, chronic pain, but the real boost from binaural beats appears to be for anxiety reduction and pain reduction.
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Chapter 4: Can white noise improve learning and cognitive performance?
And what it essentially illustrates is that white noise, provided that white noise is of low enough intensity, meaning not super loud, it actually could enhance learning to a significant degree. And this has been shown now for a huge number of different types of learning. I was very relieved to find, or I should say excited to find this study published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.
This is a 2014 paper. White noise improves learning by modulating activity in dopaminergic midbrain regions and the right superior temporal sulcus. I don't expect you to know what the dopamine midbrain region is, but if you're like me, you probably took highlighted notice of the word dopaminergic.
Dopamine is a neuromodulator, meaning it's a chemical that's released in our brain and body, but mostly in our brain that modulates, meaning controls the likelihood that certain brain areas will be active and other brain areas won't be active. And dopamine is associated with motivation. Dopamine is associated with craving.
But what's so interesting to me is that it appears that white noise itself can raise what we call the basal, the baseline levels of dopamine that are being released from this area, the substantia nigra. So now we're starting to get a more full picture of how particular sounds in our environment can increase learning.
And that's in part, I believe, through the release of dopamine from substantia nigra. So I'm not trying to shift you away from binaural beats, if that's your thing, but it does appear that turning on white noise at a low level, but not too loud can allow you to learn better because of the ways that it's modulating your brain chemistry. So what about white noise and hearing loss in development?
I know a lot of people with children have these kind of noise machines, like sound waves and things like that, that help the kids sleep. And look, I think kids getting good sleep and parents getting good sleep is vital to physical and mental health and family health. So I certainly sympathize with those needs.
However, there are data that indicate that white noise during development can be detrimental to the auditory system. I don't want to frighten any parents. If you played white noise to your kids, this doesn't mean that their auditory system or their speech patterns are going to be disrupted. or that their interpretation of speech is going to be disrupted forever.
There are data published in the Journal of Science some years ago showing that when they exposed very young animals to this white noise, it actually disrupted the maps of the auditory world within the brain.
So auditory information goes up into our cortex, into essentially the outside portion of our brain that's responsible for all of our higher level cognition, our planning, our decision-making, et cetera, creativity.
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