Essentials: Optimize Your Learning & Creativity With Science-Based Tools

**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. Let's talk about neuroplasticity. More specifically, let's talk about how we can optimize our brains. Neuroplasticity is this incredible feature of our nervous system that allows it to change itself, even in ways that we consciously decide. Now, that's an incredible property. Our liver can't decide to just change itself. Our spleen can't decide to just change itself through conscious thought or through feedback from another person. The cells in those tissues can make changes, sure, but it's our nervous system that harbors this incredible ability to direct its own changes in ways that we believe or we're told will serve us better. Today's podcast is really directed toward answering your most common questions and the bigger theme of how does one go about optimizing their brain or even think about optimizing the brain? What is this thing that we're calling optimizing the brain? In doing so, I'm also going to share some of my typical routines and tools. I share them because many of you have asked for very concrete examples of what I do and when. And so I want to open up the discussion today by emphasizing something that's fundamentally important, which is that plasticity is not the goal. The goal is to figure out how to access plasticity and then to direct that plasticity toward particular goals or changes that you would like to achieve. Let's start by talking about the different systems within the nervous system that are available for plasticity. And in doing so, I'll frame them in the context of what I do on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, and on a yearly basis. First of all, there are several forms of plasticity. The best way to think about it is in terms of short term, medium term and long term plasticity. Short term plasticity is any kind of shift that you want to achieve in the moment or in the day, but that you don't necessarily want to hold on to forever. And so what kinds of things are those? Well, for instance, short term plasticity might be you wake up earlier than you would like to catch a flight. You're not feeling particularly alert and you want to use a protocol or you decide to use a protocol which could be coffee or it could be a certain form of breathing or it could be some other tool to become more alert at a time of day when normally you aren't that alert. But your expectation is that when you return home, you will discard with the need to do that at 5:30 a.m. because you'll be asleep at 5:30 a.m. So there's short term plasticity, behavioral plasticity. Then there's medium term plasticity. For instance, if you go on vacation to Costa Rica and you don't know your way around Costa Rica, you want to learn the different town and the routes there, but you don't have any intention of going back. It's just medium term. You want to just program it in for sake of your time there and then you want to discard it. Most of the time when we think about or talk about optimizing the brain, we're talking about long-term plasticity. We're talking about the kinds of changes that people want to make so that their brain reflexively works differently. Long-term plasticity is almost always the big goal. It's I want to know how to speak that language. I want to be able to do that skill. I want to be able to feel this way. I'm going to frame all this in the context of the daily life, the weekly life and the yearly life.
And that's because neural plasticity and optimizing your brain rides on a deeper foundation of this thing that governs plasticity, and in fact governs all our life, called autonomic arousal, which is that we're asleep for part of the 24-hour cycle and we are awake almost always. I've said it before, but I'll say it again. The trigger for plasticity and learning occurs during high focus, high alertness states, not while you're asleep. And the focus and alertness are both key because of the neurochemicals associated with those states. But the actual rewiring and the reconfiguration of the brain connections happens during non-sleep, deep rest and deep sleep. So you trigger the change and in sleep you get the change. So some of the things that we'll talk about today about optimizing the brain are centered around not sleep, but around the autonomic arousal system. We have this system of neurons in our brain and body that's just incredible that wake us up and make us alert. And when we're not accessing that system well, we cannot access plasticity, we cannot optimize our brain. Likewise, if we cannot sleep well and we can't rest well, we will not access plasticity and rewire our brain because that's when the actual configuration between the connections occurs. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor AG1. AG1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also includes prebiotics and adaptogens. As somebody who's been involved in research science for almost three decades and in health and fitness for equally as long, I'm constantly looking for the best tools to improve my mental health, physical health and performance. I discovered AG1 way back in 2012, long before I ever had a podcast or even knew what a podcast was. And I've been taking it every day since. I find that AG1 greatly improves all aspects of my health. I simply feel much better when I take it. AG1 uses the highest quality ingredients in the right combinations, and they're constantly improving their formulas without increasing the cost. In fact, AG1 just launched their latest formula upgrade. This new formula is based on exciting new research on the effects of probiotics on the gut microbiome and now includes several clinically studied probiotic strains shown to support both digestive health and immune system health, as well as to improve bowel regularity and to reduce bloating. Whenever I'm asked if I could take just one supplement, what would that supplement be? I always say AG1. If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.com/huberman to claim a special offer. For this month only, January 2025, AG1 is giving away 10 free travel packs and a year supply of vitamin D3 K2. Again, go to drinkag1.com/huberman to claim the 10 free travel packs and a year supply of vitamin D3 K2. So to set this in context, I wake up each day and I'll be totally honest, I usually don't feel like bouncing right out of bed. I wake up generally more tired and groggy than I would like because I tend to go to sleep too late. What it means is that I'm not really matching my hardwired needs of going to bed probably at 8.3 or nine and waking up at 4 a.m. So neural plasticity will allow me to optimize my wakefulness, but I have to do something in order to access that. And some of you may already be anticipating what I'm about to say, which is, oh no, he's going to tell us to get sunlight in our eyes in the first 30 minutes of the day. I am going to tell you to do that, but I'm going to also tell you two things that I have not discussed before, which relate to the plasticity between the melanopsin cells, these sunlight detecting, bright light detecting cells in our eye and the circadian clock. I've never said this before in this podcast, but it turns out that the connections between these melanopsin cells and the circadian clock are plastic throughout the lifespan. So there's an opportunity for short-term plasticity. So that's why I view sunlight first thing in the day. It helps me wake up. The other thing that I do is that there's a circuit that exists between the circadian clock and our adrenals that I've talked about before that triggers the release of cortisol first thing in the morning that wakes us up, especially when we view light. So if you're groggy in the morning, that's why viewing light is helpful. The other thing that I do is I delay my intake of caffeine for the first two hours that I'm awake. Earlier, we talked about the adenosine system and how the accumulation of adenosine makes us sleepy and caffeine suppresses adenosine, it makes us feel alert. And so by delaying caffeine until about two hours after waking, I'm able to capture and reinforce to potentiate the neural circuit that exists between the circadian clock and the cortisol release in the adrenals, as well as leave those adenosine receptors unoccupied so that I can then use the caffeine to get a natural lift in alertness and focus two hours later, as opposed to using it just to wake myself up out of sleepiness. I also make sure I hydrate first thing in the morning. There are plenty of data now showing that even a slight increase in dehydration, meaning just when you're lacking water, can make people have headaches. It can provide some additional photophobia for those of you that are migraine prone. Bright light can trigger migraines. That's no surprise to those of you that get headaches and migraines. But dehydration can compound the vulnerability to migraine and headaches. So I drink water, I drink black coffee, or I drink mate, which is just, because I have Argentine lineage, which is just a high caffeine drink first thing in the morning. But I delay it until two hours after I wake up. And that's because I want the circuits between my eye and my circadian clock and my adrenals to be functioning in a particular way so that then later the caffeine is an addition, it adds more alertness. Now this is a discussion about how to optimize your brain. Many people who wake up quickly and just naturally feel like bouncing out of bed, I envy these people, they will do just fine by going into a learning bout or taking care of whatever it is that they need to take care of. Sometimes that's kind of more mundane tasks like email or and whatnot. Here's a more or less a rule about how the brain functions vis-a-vis focus, learning and creativity. Generally states of high alertness, when we're very, very alert are great for strategy implementation, the sort of thing that we are very good at when we're well rested and we're focused and our autonomic arousal or our alertness rather as it is at a high level. If you are somebody who is hitting that alertness phase of your day very early, right after you wake up, that's a great time to move right into things that at least the research says, you already know have the strategy and you just want to implement the strategy. But for me, for instance, I get up, I'm not terribly alert first thing. And so I try and just get my brain and my thoughts organized. It's not a time for me to be responding in a very linear fashion to emails or carrying out calculations. That comes about two hours later. I think many people out there will relate, mid morning is when we tend to, when many people tend to achieve their peak in alertness and focus. Now, many times I get the question, and this is what I'm about to say is directly related to the hundreds of questions I got about this. Should I use background music in order to learn? So as a rule of thumb, if you're feeling too keyed up, then silence and quiet is going to be helpful. In fact, if you're very keyed up, a particular circuit related to the basal ganglia starts getting triggered more easily. It's called the go-no-go circuit. We have circuits that connect our forebrain to a structure in our brain called the basal ganglia, which is actually a collection of structures. And the forebrain, which is involved in rational thought and thinking and planning and action, is always trying to plan what should I do and then implement that action. And the basal ganglia are intimately involved in that discussion. There's a reciprocal loop of communication between basal ganglia and cortex. The basal ganglia has one set of connections to the cortex and the cortex back to the basal ganglia that facilitates go. It facilitates action.