How Smell, Taste & Pheromone-Like Chemicals Control You

**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. 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, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Athletic Greens. Athletic Greens is an all-in-one vitamin mineral probiotic drink. I've been taking Athletic Greens since 2012, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast. The reason I started taking Athletic Greens and the reason I still take Athletic Greens once or twice a day is that it helps me cover all of my basic nutritional needs. It makes up for any deficiencies that I might have. In addition, it has probiotics, which are vital for microbiome health. I've done a couple of episodes now on the so-called gut microbiome and the ways in which the microbiome interacts with your immune system, with your brain to regulate mood, and essentially with every biological system relevant to health throughout your brain and body. With Athletic Greens, I get the vitamins I need, the minerals I need and the probiotics to support my microbiome. If you'd like to try Athletic Greens, you can go to athleticgreens.com/huberman and claim a special offer. They'll give you five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3K2. There are a ton of data now showing that vitamin D3 is essential for various aspects of our brain and body health. Even if we're getting a lot of sunshine, many of us are still deficient in vitamin D3. And K2 is also important because it regulates things like cardiovascular function, calcium in the body and so on. Again, go to athleticgreens.com/huberman to claim the special offer of the five free travel packs and the year supply of vitamin D3K2. Today's episode is also brought to us by Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the exact ratios of electrolytes are an element and those are sodium, magnesium and potassium, but it has no sugar. I've talked many times before on this podcast about the key role of hydration and electrolytes for nerve cell function, neuron function, as well as the function of all the cells and all the tissues and organ systems of the body. If we have sodium, magnesium and potassium present in the proper ratios, all of those cells function properly and all our bodily systems can be optimized. If the electrolytes are not present and if hydration is low, we simply can't think as well as we would otherwise. Our mood is off, hormone systems go off, our ability to get into physical action, to engage in endurance and strength and all sorts of other things is diminished. So with element, you can make sure that you're staying on top of your hydration and that you're getting the proper ratios of electrolytes. If you'd like to try element, you can go to drink element, that's lmnt.com/huberman, and you'll get a free element sample pack with your purchase. They're all delicious. So again, if you want to try element, you can go to elementlmnt.com/huberman.
Today's episode is also brought to us by thesis. thesis makes what are called nootropics, which means smart drugs. Now, to be honest, I am not a fan of the term nootropics. I don't believe in smart drugs in the sense that I don't believe that there's any one substance or collection of substances that can make us smarter. I do believe based on science, however, that there are particular neural circuits and brain functions that allow us to be more focused, more alert, access creativity, be more motivated, et cetera. That's just the way that the brain works, different neural circuits for different brain states. thesis understands this. And as far as I know, they're the first nootropics company to create targeted nootropics for specific outcomes. I've been using thesis for more than six months now, and I can confidently say that the nootropics have been a total game changer. My go-to formula is the Clarity formula, or sometimes I'll use their Energy formula before training. To get your own personalized nootropic starter kit, go online to takethesis.com/huberman.
Take a three-minute quiz, and thesis will send you four different formulas to try in your first month. That's takethesis.com/huberman, and use the code Huberman at checkout for 10% off your first order. This month, we've been talking about the senses, how we detect things in our environment. The last episode was all about vision, how we take light and convert that information into things that we can perceive, like colors and faces and motion, things of that sort, as well as how we use light to change our biology in ways that are subconscious that we don't realize, things like mood and metabolism and levels of alertness. Today, we're going to talk about chemical sensing. We're going to talk about the sense of smell, our ability to detect odors in our environment. We're also going to talk about taste, our ability to detect chemicals and make sense of chemicals that are put in our mouth and into our digestive tract. And we are going to talk about chemicals that are made by other human beings that powerfully modulate the way that we feel our hormones and our health. Now, that last category are sometimes called pheromones. However, whether or not pheromones exist in humans is rather controversial. There actually hasn't been a clear example of a true human pheromonal effect. But what is absolutely clear, what is undeniable is that there are chemicals that human beings make and release in things like tears onto our skin and sweat and even breath that powerfully modulate or control the biology of other individuals. In fact, right now, even if you're completely alone, your chemical environment internally is being controlled by external chemicals. Your nervous system and your hormones and your metabolism are being modified by things in your environment. So we're going to talk about those. It's an absolutely fascinating aspect to our biology. It's one of our most primordial, meaning primitive aspects of our biology, but it's still very active in all of us today. This episode, believe it or not, will have a lot of tools, a lot of protocols. Even though I'm guessing most of you can probably smell your environment just fine, that you know what you like to eat and what tastes good and what doesn't taste good to you, today's episode is going to talk about tools that will allow you to actually leverage these chemical sensing mechanisms, including how you smell, not how you smell in the qualitative sense, but how you smell in the verb sense, the action of sniffing and smelling to enhance your sense of smell and to enhance your sense of taste as well, believe it or not, to enhance your cognition, your ability to learn and remember things. Everything we're going to talk about, as always, is grounded in quality, peer-reviewed studies from some excellent laboratories. I'll provide some resources along the way, so that means tools and protocols, and also basic information. You're going to learn a ton of neuroscience and a lot of biology in general. And I think what you'll come to realize by the end is that while we are clearly different from the other animals, there are aspects to our biology that are very similar to that of other animals in very interesting ways. Before we dive into chemical sensing, I want to just briefly touch on a few things from the vision episode. One is a summary of a protocol. So I covered 13 protocols last episode. If you haven't seen that episode, check it out. Those protocols will allow you to be more alert and to see better over time if you follow them. All of them are zero cost. You can find any and all of them at hubermanlab.com. There's a link to those videos and tools and protocols. Everything is time stamped. The two protocols that I just want to remind everybody of are the protocol of near far viewing that all of us, regardless of age, should probably spend about five minutes, three times a week, doing some near far viewing exercises. So that would be bringing a pen or pencil up close to the point where you're about to cross your eyes, but you don't cross your eyes. And then out at some distance, and then look beyond that pen or other object that you're using off as far as you can into the distance. It would be great if you could do this on a balcony or deck and then look way off in the distance and then bring it back in. This is going to exercise that accommodation reflex, the change in the shape of the lens can help offset a number of things, including myopia, nearsightedness. The other one is this incredible study that showed that two hours a day outside, even if you're doing other things while you're outside, can help offset myopia, nearsightedness. So try and get outside. It's really the sunlight and the blue light, right? Everyone's been demonizing blue light out there, but blue light is great, provided it's not super, super bright and really close to your eyes. Blue light is terrific if it comes from sunlight. Two hours a day outside is going to help offset myopia, nearsightedness. Now that's a lot of time. I think most of us are not getting that time, but since you can do other things like gardening or reading or walking or running, if you can get that two hours outside, your visual system and your brain will benefit. I also would like to make one brief correction to something that I said incorrectly in the previous episode. At the end of the episode, I talked about lutein and how lutein may help offset some moderate to severe age-related macular degeneration. As well, I talked about how some people are supplementing with lutein, even though they don't have age-related macular degeneration, with the idea in mind that it might help offset some vision loss as they get older. I said lutein and lutein was the correct thing to say, but once or twice when I started speaking fast, I said leucine and not lutein. I want to emphasize that leucine and amino acid, very interesting, important for muscle building, covered in previous episodes, but lutein, L-U-T-E-I-N is the molecule and compound that I was referring to in terms of supplementing for sake of vision. So I apologize, please forgive me, I misspoke. A couple of you caught that right away in listening to the episode after it went up, I realized that I had misspoken. So lutein for vision, leucine for muscles and muscle growth and strength, et cetera. Before we dive into the content of today's episode, I want to just briefly touch on color vision. Many of you asked questions about color vision and color perception. And indeed color perception is a fascinating aspect of the human visual system. It's one of the things that makes us unique. There are certainly other animals out there that can detect all the colors of the rainbow. Some can even detect into the infrared, into the far red that we can't see. But nonetheless, human color vision, provided that somebody isn't colorblind, is really remarkable. And if you're interested in color vision or you want to answer questions about art, or about, for instance, why that dress that showed up online a few years ago looks blue to you and yellow to somebody else, all the answers to that are in this terrific book, which is What is Color? 15 questions and answers on the science of color. I did not write this book. I wish I had. The book is by Ariel and Joan Eckstut. That's E-C-K-S-T-U-T.