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
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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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