Enhance Your Learning Speed & Health Using Neuroscience Based Protocols | Dr. Poppy Crum

**Andrew Huberman** (0:00)
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.
I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Poppy Crum. Dr. Poppy Crum is a neuroscientist, a professor at Stanford, and the former chief scientist at Dolby Laboratories. Her work focuses on how technology can accelerate neuroplasticity in learning and generally enrich our life experience. You've no doubt heard about and perhaps use wearables and sleep technologies that can monitor your sleep, tell you how much slow wave sleep you're getting, how much REM sleep and technologies that can control the temperature of your sleep environment and your room environment. Well, you can soon expect wearables and hearable technologies to be part of your life. Hearable technologies are, as the name suggests, technologies that can hear your voice and the voice of other people and deduce what is going to be best for your immediate health and your states of mind. Believe it or not, these technologies will understand your brain states, your goals, and it will make changes to your home and working and other environments so that you can focus better, relax more thoroughly and connect with other people on a deeper level. As Poppy explains, all of this might seem kind of space age and maybe even a little aversive or scary now, but she explains how it will vastly improve life for both kids and adults and indeed increase human-human empathy. During today's episode, you'll realize that Poppy is a true out-of-the-box thinker and scientist. She has a really unique story. She discovered she has perfect pitch at a young age. She explains what that is and how that shaped her worldview and her work. Poppy also graciously built a zero-cost step-by-step protocol for all of you. It allows you to build a custom AI tool to improve at any skill you want and to build better health protocols and routines. I should point out that you don't need to know how to program in order to use this tool that she's built. Anyone can use it. And as you'll see, it's extremely useful. We provide a link to it in the show note captions. Today's conversation is unlike any that we previously had on the podcast. It's a true glimpse into the future, and it also points you to new tools that you can use now to improve your life. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my conversation with Dr. Poppy Crum. Dr. Poppy Crum, welcome.

**Poppy Crum** (2:24)
Thanks, Andy. It's great to be here.

**Andrew Huberman** (2:26)
Great to see you again. We should let people know now. We were graduate students together, but that's not why you're here. You're here because you do incredibly original work. You've worked in so many different domains of technology, neuroscience, et cetera. Today I want to talk about a lot of things, but I want to start off by talking about neuroplasticity, this incredible ability of our nervous systems to change in response to experience. I know how I think about neuroplasticity, but I want to know how you think about neuroplasticity. In particular, I want to know, do you think our brains are much more plastic than most of us believe? Can we change much more than we think and we just haven't accessed the ways to do that? Or do you think that our brains are pretty fixed and in order to make progress as a species, we're going to have to create robots or something to do the work that we're not able to do because our brains are fixed? Let's start off by just getting your take on what neuroplasticity is and what you think the limits on it are.

**Poppy Crum** (3:23)
I do think we're much more plastic than we talk about or we realize in our daily lives. Just to your point about creating robots, the more we create robots, there's neuroplasticity that comes with using robots as humans when we use them in partnerships or as tools to accelerate our capabilities. So neuroplasticity, where I resonate with it a lot is trying to understand, and this is what I've done a lot of in my career, is thinking about building and developing technologies, but with an understanding of how they shape our brain. Everything we engage with in our daily lives, whether it's the statistics of our environments and our context, or the technologies we use on a daily basis, are shaping our brains in ways through neuroplasticity. Some more than others, some we know as we age are very dependent on how attentive and engaged we are, as opposed to passively just consuming and changing. But we are in a place where everyone, I believe, needs to be thinking more about how the technologies they're using, especially in the age of AI and immersive technologies, how they are shaping or architecting our brains as we move forward. You go to any Neuroscience 101 medical school textbook, and there's something, you'll see a few pages on something called the homunculus. Now, what is the homunculus? It's a data representation, but it'll be this sort of funny looking creature when you see it. But that picture of this sort of distorted human that you're looking at is really just data representation of how many cells in your brain are helping, are coding and representing information for your sense of touch, right? And that image, though, and this is where things get kind of funny. That image comes from Wilder Penfield back in the 40s. He recorded the somatosensory cells of patients just before they were to have surgery for epilepsy and such. And since we don't have pain receptors in our cortex, he could have this awake human and be able to touch different parts of their brain and ask them to report what sensation they felt on their bodies. And so, he mapped that part of their cortex, and then that's how we ended up with the homunculus. And you'll see, you know, it'll have bigger lips, it'll have smaller parts of your back in the areas where you just don't have the same sensitivities. Well, fast forward to today. When you look at that homunculus, one of the things I always will ask people to think about is, you know, what's wrong with this image? You know, this is an image from 1940 that is still in every textbook. And, you know, any Stanford student will look at it and they'll immediately say, well, the thumb should be bigger, because we do this all day long. And I've got more sensitivity in my fingers, because I'm always typing on my mobile device, which is absolutely true. Or maybe they'll say something like, well, the ankles are the same size, and we drive cars now a lot more than we did in the 40s. Or maybe if I live a different part of the world, I drive on one side versus the other. And in a few years, you know, we probably won't be driving. And those resources get optimized elsewhere. So what the homunculus is, is it's a representation of how our brain has allocated resources to help us be successful. And those resources are the limited cells we have that support whatever we need to flourish in our world. And the beauty of that is when you develop expertise, you develop more support, more resources, go to helping you do that thing.