#1513 - Andrew Huberman

Joe Rogan (0:00)

And Andrew, how are you? What's happening, man?

Andrew Huberman (0:02)

Doing great.

Joe Rogan (0:03)

Nice to meet you. Really excited to talk to you about this.

Just sort of, for an introduction, tell people what you do.

Andrew Huberman (0:09)

So I'm a neuroscientist, I'm meaning I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology, Stanford School of Medicine. So I run a laboratory. I teach a little bit. I teach neuroanatomy to medical students. But mainly my lab does research. So I've got students and post-docs, and we're trying to figure out the answers to two problems.

The first problem is how to regenerate the damaged nervous system, in particular the connections between the eye and the brain, to restore vision to the blind. So that's a big mission of ours. And to prevent vision loss in people that are losing their vision.

And the other thing that we're doing is we're focusing a lot on stress and other states of mind. So I'm obsessed with the idea that all our states of mind come from the brain and the body. And we're trying to figure out what happens in the brain and body when we're stressed and how to control it. What happens in the brain and body when we are creative and how to control it?

And essentially for all states of mind. But rather than try and tackle the really high level stuff like flow and states of awe, we're really focused on these states of stress and things like focus and the ability to think clearly and do certain things athletically or cognitively. Because first of all, there's a lot of suffering. There are a lot of people out there that are suffering from an inability to control their states of mind. And also there's great potential for people who aren't suffering to be able to create and perform and do better things once we can understand how those states come about.

Joe Rogan (1:30)

That's an interesting way of putting it, suffering because they can't control their states of mind. That is the case, but that's not like a politically correct way of describing it.

Andrew Huberman (1:43)

I guess I never thought about that.

Joe Rogan (1:44)

Would that be accurate?

Andrew Huberman (1:44)

Well, I think it's fair to say that all our states of mind and body, and I say mind and body because the nervous system, which is the brain, the spinal cord and all that stuff, it connects to our body, and our body connects to our brain. So we can't really separate those. But states of mind, which include the stuff in our skull and the body, those essentially dictate our whole life experience, right? So whether or not we're feeling calm when we want to be calm, whether or not we're feeling stressed when we'd rather be calm, whether or not we are feeling focused when we need to do work, or whether or not we're feeling creative when we want to be creative, all of that stems from the nervous system. The other organs of the body are involved, but the nervous system, the brain and those connections, it's really what it's about. So if you see somebody who's in a state of depression, or you see somebody who's in a state of flow and creativity, you can be pretty sure that that's reflecting the activity of neurons in the brain.

Joe Rogan (2:32)

It's the idea that the body and the brain are inseparable.

Most people who are physically active accept that and appreciate that, and they know that this is probably true. But there's a lot of people that kind of want to deny that and concentrate only on the brain. And particularly, there's psychiatrists that will prescribe medication before they'll prescribe exercise. And this is, it's a controversial subject. That's what I meant by saying that you are unable to control aspects of your brain, or aspects of the way you're viewing things or the way you feel about things.

Andrew Huberman (3:13)

Yeah, so I think, if we take a step back and we just kind of think about what the brain and nervous system does. And again, nervous system includes all of it. We can say the brain is special, right? This brain, there is something fundamentally important about the brain part. Because somebody who, let's say, has a limb amputated, it doesn't fundamentally change who they are. It can change what they can do. And there will be aspects of their personality and temperament that might shift. But who they are hasn't changed. Whereas if someone has a brain lesion or their brain is degenerating, that person is fundamentally different. So there is something special about the real estate in our skulls.