This is the first episode of Huberman Lab Essentials — short episodes (approximately 30 minutes) focused on essential science and protocol takeaways from past Huberman Lab episodes. This Essentials episode introduces how the nervous system creates sensations, perceptions, emotions, thoughts, and behaviors, as well as how we can change our nervous system — a phenomenon known as neuroplasticity. Essentials will be released every Thursday, and our full-length episodes will still be released every Monday. Access the show notes for this episode at hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman David: https://davidprotein.com/huberman Timestamps 00:00:00 Introduction to Huberman Lab Essentials & the Nervous System 00:02:23 Understanding Sensation & Perception 00:04:56 Emotions & Neuromodulators 00:07:42 Thoughts & Deliberate Actions 00:08:22 Sponsor: AG1 00:09:54 Deliberate Processing & Neuroplasticity 00:15:59 The Mechanisms of Neuroplasticity 00:20:56 Sponsor: David 00:22:13 The Importance of Sleep & Rest 00:27:12 Understanding the Autonomic Nervous System 00:36:49 Leveraging Ultradian Rhythms Disclaimer & Disclosures Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this 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. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. For today's podcast, we're going to talk about the parts list of the nervous system.
Now, that might sound boring, but these are the bits and pieces that together make up everything about your experience of life, from what you think about to what you feel, what you imagine, and what you accomplish from the day you're born until the day you die. By the end of this podcast, I promise you're going to understand a lot more about how you work and how to apply that knowledge.
Chapter 2: How does sensation influence our experiences?
So let's talk about the nervous system. The reason I say your nervous system and not your brain is because your brain is actually just one piece of this larger, more important thing, frankly, that we call the nervous system. The nervous system includes your brain and your spinal cord, but also all the connections between your brain and your spinal cord and the organs of your body.
It also includes, very importantly, all the connections between your organs back to your spinal cord and brain.
Chapter 3: What role do emotions and neuromodulators play?
So the way to think about how you function at every level from the moment you're born until the day you die, everything you think and remember and feel and imagine is that your nervous system is this continuous loop of communication between the brain, spinal cord, and body, and body, spinal cord, and brain. In fact, we really can't even separate them. It's one continuous loop.
The way to think about how the nervous system works is that our experiences, our memories, everything is sort of like the keys on a piano being played in a particular order, right? If I play the keys on a piano in a particular order and with a particular intensity, that's a given song. We can make that analogous to a given experience. Our brain is really a map of our experience.
Chapter 4: How do thoughts and actions affect our behavior?
We come into the world and our brain has a kind of bias towards learning particular kinds of things. It's ready to receive information and learn that information, but the brain is really a map of experience. So let's talk about what experience really is. What does it mean for your brain to work? Well, I think it's fair to say that the nervous system really does five things, maybe six.
The first one is sensation. Sensation is a non-negotiable element of your nervous system. You have neurons in your eye that perceive certain colors of light and certain directions of movement. You have neurons in your skin that perceive particular kinds of touch, like light touch or firm touch or painful touch. You have neurons in your ears that perceive certain sounds.
Your entire experience of life is filtered by these, what we call sensory receptors, if you want to know what the name is. Perception is our ability to take what we're sensing and focus on it and make sense of it, to explore it, to remember it. So really perceptions are just whichever sensations we happen to be paying attention to at any moment. Perception is under the control of your attention.
Chapter 5: What is neuroplasticity and how does it work?
And the way to think about attention is it's like a spotlight. except it's not one spotlight, you actually have two attentional spotlights. Anyone that tells you you can't multitask, tell them they're wrong. And if they disagree with you, tell them to contact me. Because in old world primates of which humans are, we are able to do what's called covert attention.
We can place a spotlight of attention on something. For instance, something we're reading or looking at or someone that we're listening to. And we can place a second spotlight of attention on something we're eating and how it tastes. or our child running around in the room or my dog.
You can split your attention into two locations, but of course you can also bring your attention that is your perception to one particular location. You can dilate your attention, kind of like making a spotlight more diffuse, or you can make it more concentrated. This is very important to understand if you're going to think about tools to improve your nervous system.
Attention is something that is absolutely under your control. The nervous system can be reflexive in its action, or it can be deliberate. Deliberate thoughts are top down. They require some effort and some focus, but that's the point. You can decide to focus your behavior in any way you want, but it will always feel like it requires some effort and some strain.
Whereas when you're in reflexive mode, just walking and talking and eating and doing your thing, it's going to feel very easy. And that's because your nervous system basically wired up to be able to do most things easily without much metabolic demand, without consuming much energy. But the moment you try and do something very specific, you're going to feel a sort of mental friction.
It's going to be challenging. So we've got sensations, perceptions. And then we've got things that we call feelings slash emotions. And these get a little complicated because almost all of us, I would hope all of us are familiar with things like happiness and sadness or boredom or frustration. Certainly emotions and feelings are the product of the nervous system.
they involve the activity of neurons. But as I mentioned earlier, neurons are electrically active, but they also release chemicals. And there's a certain category of chemicals that has a very profound influence on our emotional states. They're called neuromodulators.
And those neuromodulators have names that probably you've heard of before, things like dopamine and serotonin and acetylcholine, epinephrine. Neuromodulators are really interesting because they bias which neurons are likely to be active and which ones are likely to be inactive.
A simple way to think about neuromodulators is they are sort of like playlists that you would have on any kind of device where you're going to play particular categories of music. So for instance, dopamine, which is often discussed as the molecule of reward or joy, is involved in reward, and it does tend to create a sort of upbeat mood when released in appropriate amounts in the brain.
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Chapter 6: Why is sleep important for our nervous system?
I want to emphasize also that emotions are something that we generally feel are not under our control. We feel like they kind of geyser up within us and they just kind of happen to us. And that's because they are somewhat reflexive. We don't really set out with a deliberate thought to be happy or deliberate thought to be sad. We tend to experience them in kind of a passive reflexive way.
And that brings us to the next thing, which are thoughts. Thoughts are really interesting because in many ways they're like perceptions, except that they draw on not just what's happening in the present, but also things we remember from the past and things that we anticipate about the future.
The other thing about thoughts that's really interesting is that thoughts can be both reflexive, they can just be occurring all the time, sort of like pop-up windows on a poorly filtered web browser, or they can be deliberate. We can decide to have a thought.
And a lot of people don't understand or at least appreciate that the thought patterns and the neural circuits that underlie thoughts can actually be controlled in this deliberate way. I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor, AG1. AG1 is an all-in-one vitamin, mineral, probiotic drink with adaptogens.
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Chapter 7: How can we leverage our autonomic nervous system?
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Actions or behaviors are perhaps the most important aspect to our nervous system. Because first of all, our behaviors are actually the only thing that are going to create any fossil record of our existence.
You know, after we die, the nervous system deteriorates, our skeleton will remain, but it's, you know, in the moment of experiencing something very joyful or something very sad, it can feel so all encompassing that we actually think that it has some meaning beyond that moment. But actually for humans, and I think for all species,
the sensations, the perceptions and the thoughts and the feelings that we have in our lifespan, none of that is actually carried forward except the ones that we take and we convert into actions such as writing, actions such as words, actions such as engineering new things. And so the fossil record of our species and of each one of us is really through action. And
And that in part is why so much of our nervous system is devoted to converting sensation, perceptions, feelings, and thoughts into actions.
The other way to think about it is that one of the reasons that our central nervous system, our brain and spinal cord include this stuff in our skull, but also connects so heavily to the body is because most everything that we experience, including our thoughts and feelings was really designed to either impact our behavior or not.
And the fact that thoughts allow us to reach into the past and anticipate the future and not just experience what's happening in the moment gave rise to an incredible capacity for us to engage in behaviors that are not just for the moment. They're based on things that we know from the past and that we would like to see in the future.
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Chapter 8: What are ultradian rhythms and why do they matter?
And this aspect to our nervous system of creating movement occurs through some very simple pathways. The reflexive pathway basically includes areas of the brainstem we call central pattern generators. When you walk, provided you already know how to walk,
you are basically walking because you have these central pattern generators, groups of neurons that generate right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot kind of movement. However, when you decide to move in a particular deliberate way that requires a little more attention, you start to engage areas of your brain for top-down processing where your forebrain
works from the top down to control those central pattern generators so that maybe it's right foot, right foot, left foot, right foot, right foot, left foot, if maybe you're hiking along some rocks or something and you have to engage in that kind of movement. So movement is just like thoughts, can be either reflexive or deliberate.
And when we talk about deliberate, I want to be very specific about how your brain works in the deliberate way, because it gives rise to a very important feature of the nervous system that we're going to talk about next, which is your ability to change your nervous system.
And what I'd like to center on for a second is this notion of what does it mean for the nervous system to do something deliberately? Well, when you do something deliberately, you pay attention, you are bringing your perception to an analysis of three things. Duration, how long something is going to take or should be done. Path, what you should be doing.
And outcome, if you do something for a given length of time, what's going to happen? Now, when you're walking down the street or you're eating or you're just talking reflexively, you're not doing this, what I call DPO, duration path outcome type of deliberate function in your brain and nervous system. Let's give an example where perhaps somebody says something that's triggering to you.
You don't like it. And you know you shouldn't respond. You feel like, oh, I shouldn't respond. I shouldn't respond. I shouldn't respond. You're actively suppressing your behavior through top-down behavior. Your forebrain is actually preventing you from saying the thing that you know you shouldn't say, or that maybe you should wait to say or say in a different form.
This feels like agitation and stress because you're actually suppressing a circuit. We actually can see examples of what happens when you're not doing this well. Some of the examples come from children. If you look at young children, they don't have the forebrain circuitry to engage in this top-down processing until they reach age 22, even 25.
But in young children, you see this in a really robust way. A kid sees a piece of candy that it wants and will just reach out and grab it, whereas an adult probably would ask if they could have a piece or wait until they were offered a piece in most cases. people that have damage to the certain areas of the frontal lobes don't have this kind of restriction. They'll just blurt things out.
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