In this Huberman Lab Essentials episode, I explain how making mistakes and perceived frustration drive learning and how movement enhances the brain’s adaptability. I explain how making errors triggers the release of neurotransmitters, such as dopamine, which are essential for learning. I also discuss the differences between how neuroplasticity occurs in children and adults, focusing on the varying requirements and effort needed for learning. I discuss science-supported learning strategies for adults, including small practice bouts, leveraging frustration, regulating your autonomic state, and using movement to maximize focus and neuroplasticity. Huberman Lab Essentials are short episodes (approximately 30 minutes) focused on essential science and protocol takeaways from past Huberman Lab episodes. Essentials will be released every Thursday, and our full-length episodes will still be released every Monday. Read the full show notes at hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman David: https://davidprotein.com/huberman BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/huberman Timestamps 00:00:00 Huberman Lab Essentials; Learning 00:01:29 Representational Plasticity, Performance Errors 00:03:16 Neuroplasticity, Neurotransmitters 00:05:03 Sponsor: AG1 00:06:11 Visual Adaptation, Children vs. Adults 00:10:23 Errors, Frustration & Neuroplasticity, Adult Learning 00:14:13 Adults, Incremental Shifts vs. High Contingency; Tool: Small Learning Bouts 00:18:43 Sponsor: David 00:20:00 Tool: Ultradian Cycles, Focus, Errors & Frustration 00:22:08 Dopamine, Errors & Subjective Beliefs; Peak Focus; Tool: Frustration 00:25:56 Sponsor: BetterHelp 00:27:02 Limbic Friction; Tool: Behaviors to Increase Alert or Calm 00:30:43 Balance, Errors & Neurotransmitters 00:33:28 Tool: Enhance Neuroplasticity; Movement Disclaimer & Disclosures Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Full Episode
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. My name is Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, we're going to talk about how to change your nervous system for the better.
As you recall, your nervous system includes your brain and your spinal cord, but also all the connections that your brain and spinal cord make with the organs of your body and all the connections that the organs of your body make with your brain and spinal cord. Now, this thing that we call the nervous system is responsible for everything we know,
all our behavior, all our emotions, everything we feel about ourselves and the outside world, everything we think and believe, it's really at the center of our entire experience of life and who we are. Fortunately, in humans, unlike in other species, we can change our nervous system by taking some very specific and deliberate actions.
And today we're really going to focus on the actions, the motor commands and the aspects of movement and balance that allow us to change our nervous system. It turns out that movement and balance actually provide windows or portals into our ability to change our nervous system the way we want, even if those changes are not about learning new movements or learning how to balance.
And soon you'll understand why. So let's talk about the different kinds of plasticity that are available to us. because those will point directly towards the type of protocols that we should engage in to change ourselves for the better. there is something called representational plasticity. Representational plasticity is just your internal representation of the outside world.
We know that, for instance, if I want to reach out and grab the pen in front of me, that I need to generate a certain amount of force, so I rarely overshoot. I rarely miss the pen, okay? So our maps of the motor world and our maps of the sensory world are merged. The way to create plasticity is to create mismatches or errors in how we perform things.
And this I think is an amazing and important feature of neuroplasticity that is highly underappreciated. The way to create plasticity is to send signals to the brain that something is wrong, something is different, and something isn't being achieved, errors.
and making errors out of sync with what we would like to do is how our nervous system is cued through very distinct biological mechanisms that something isn't going right and therefore certain neurochemicals are deployed that'll signal the neural circuits that they have to change.
So let's talk about errors and making errors and why and how that triggers the release of chemicals that then allow us to not just learn the thing that we're doing in the motor sense, play the piano, dance, et cetera, but it also creates an environment, a milieu within the brain that allows us to then go learn how to couple or uncouple a particular emotion to an experience or better language learning or better mathematical learning.
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