Essentials: How to Learn Faster by Using Failures, Movement & Balance

**Andrew Huberman** (0:00)
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. 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, not 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 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 to mill you 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. Last episode, we discussed some of the basic principles of neuroplasticity. If you didn't hear that episode, no problem. I'll just review it quickly, which is that it's a falsehood that everything that we do in experience changes our brain. The brain changes when certain neurochemicals, namely acetylcholine, epinephrine and dopamine, are released in ways and in the specific times that allow for neural circuits to be marked for change and then the change occurs later during sleep. Basically, you need a certain cocktail of chemicals released in the brain in order for a particular behavior to reshape the way that our brain works. So the question really is, what allows those neurochemicals to be released? And last episode, it talked all about focus. If you haven't seen or heard that episode, you might want to check it out about some specific tools and practices that can allow you to build up your capacity for focus and release certain chemicals in that cocktail. But today, we're going to talk about the other chemicals in the cocktail, in particular dopamine. And we're really going to center our discussion around this issue of making errors and why making errors is actually the signal that tells the brain, okay, it's time to change, or more generally, it's time to pay attention to things so that you change. And I really want to distinguish this point really clearly, which is that I'm going to talk today a lot about motor and vestibular, meaning balance programs, but not just for learning motor commands and balance, but also for setting a stage or a kind of condition in your brain where you can go learn other things as well. So let's talk about some classic experiments that really nail down what's most important in this discussion about plasticity. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. By now, many of you have heard me say that if I could take just one supplement, that supplement would be AG1. The reason for that is AG1 is the highest quality and most complete of the foundational nutritional supplements available. What that means is that it contains not just vitamins and minerals, but also probiotics, prebiotics, and adaptogens to cover any gaps you may have in your diet and provide support for a demanding life. 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So I mentioned last episode, and I'll just tell you right now, again, the brain is incredibly plastic from about birth until about age 25, and then somewhere about 25, it's not like the day after your 26th birthday, plasticity closes, there's a kind of tapering off of plasticity, and you need different mechanisms to engage plasticity as an adult. Knowing how to tap into these plasticity mechanisms is very powerful. The simplest example is if I hear something off to my right, I look to my right. If I hear it on the left, I look to my left. If I hear it right in front of me, I keep looking right in front of me, and that's because our maps of visual space and our maps of auditory space and our maps of motor space are aligned to one another in perfect register. It's an incredible feature of our nervous system. It takes place in a structure called the superior colliculus, although you don't need to know that name. Superior colliculus has layers, literally stacks of neurons like in a sandwich where the zero point right in front of me, or maybe 10 or 15 degrees off to my right, or 10 or 15 degrees off to my left, are aligned so that the auditory neurons, the ones that care about sounds at 15 degrees to my right, sit directly below the neurons that look at 15 degrees to my right in my visual system. And when I reach over to this direction, there's a signal that's sent down through those layers that says 15 degrees off to the right is the direction to look, it's the direction to listen, and it's the direction to move if I need to move. So there's an alignment. And this is really powerful, and this is what allows us to move through space and function in our lives in a really fluid way. It's set up during development, but there have been some important experiments that have revealed that these maps are plastic, meaning they can shift, they're subject to neuroplasticity, and there are specific rules that allow us to shift them. So here's the key experiment. The key experiment was done by a colleague of mine, who's now retired, but whose work is absolutely fundamental in the field of neuroplasticity, Eric Knudsen. The Knudsen Lab and many of the Knudsen Lab scientific offspring showed that if one is to wear prism glasses that shift the visual field, that eventually there'll be a shift in the representation of the auditory and motor maps too. Now, what they initially did is they looked at young subjects and what they did is they moved the visual world by making them wear prism glasses. So that for instance, if my pen is out in front of me at five degrees off center, so just a little bit off center, if you're listening to this, this would be like just a little bit to my right. But in these prism glasses, I actually see that pen way over far on my right. So it's actually here, but I see it over there because I'm wearing prisms on my eyes. What happens is in the first day or so you ask people or you ask animal subjects or whatever to reach for this object and they reach to the wrong place because they're seeing it where it isn't. But what you find is that in young individuals within a day or two, they start adjusting their motor behavior in exactly the right way so that they always reach to the correct location. So they hear a sound at one location. They see the object that ought to make that sound at a different location. And they somehow are able to adjust their motor behavior to reach to the correct location. It's incredible. And what it tells us is that these maps that are aligned to one another can move and shift, and it happens best in young individuals. If you do this in older individuals, in most cases, it takes a very long time for the maps to shift. And in some cases, they never shift. So this is a very experimental scenario, but it's an important one to understand because it really tamps down the fact that we have the capacity to create dramatic shifts in our representation of the outside world.