How to Focus to Change Your Brain

**Andrew Huberman** (0:00)
Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.
My name is 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 want to thank the first sponsor 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's supply of vitamin D3 K2. 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's supply of vitamin D3 K2. 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 element, lmnt.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. Today, we're talking about neural plasticity, which is this incredible feature of our nervous systems that allows it to change in response to experience. Neural plasticity is arguably one of the most important aspects of our biology. It holds the promise for each and all of us to think differently, to learn new things, to forget painful experiences, and to essentially adapt to anything that life brings us by becoming better. Now, neural plasticity has a long and important history, and we're not going to review all of it in detail, but today what we are going to do is discuss what is neural plasticity, as well as the different forms of neural plasticity. We're going to talk about how to access neural plasticity, depending on how old you are, and depending on the specific types of changes that you're trying to create. This is a topic for which there are lots of tools, as well as lots of biological principles that we can discuss. So let's get started. Most people are familiar with the word neural plasticity. It's sometimes also called neuroplasticity. Those are the same thing. So if I say neural plasticity or neuroplasticity, I'm referring to the same process, which is the brain and nervous system's ability to change itself. And there are a lot of reasons why the nervous system would do this. It could do it in response to some traumatic event. It could, for instance, create a sense of fear around a particular place or a fear of automobiles or planes. It could also occur when something positive happens, like the birth of our first child or when our puppy does something amusing or we see an incredible feat of performance in athleticism. The word neural plasticity means so many things to so many different people that I thought it would be important to just first put a little bit of organizational logic around what it is and how it happens. Because nowadays, if you were to go online and Google the word neuroplasticity, you would find hundreds of thousands of references, scientific references, as well as a lot of falsehoods about what neuroplasticity is and how to access it. As I mentioned before, we're going to talk about the science of it, and we're going to talk about the tools that allow you to engage this incredible feature of your nervous system. And that's the first point, which is that all of us were born with a nervous system that isn't just capable of change, but was designed to change. When we enter the world, our nervous system is primed for learning. The brain and nervous system of a baby is wired very crudely. The connections are not precise, and we can see evidence of that in the fact that babies are kind of flopping there, like a kind of a little potato bug with limbs. They can't really do much in terms of coordinated movement. They certainly can't speak, and they can't really do anything with precision. And that's because we come into this world overconnected. We have essentially wires. Those wires have names like axons and dendrites. Those are the different parts of the neurons discussed in episode one, but those little parts and those wires and connections are everywhere. Imagine a bunch of roads that are all connected to one another in kind of a mess, but there are no highways. They're all just small roads. That's essentially what the young nervous system is like. And then as we mature, as we go from day one of life to 10 years old, 20 years old, 30 years old, what happens is particular connections get reinforced and stronger and other connections are lost. So that's the first important principle that I want everyone to understand, which is that developmental plasticity, the neuroplasticity that occurs from the time we're born until about age 25 is mainly a process of removing connections that don't serve our goals well. Now, of course, certain events happen during that birth to 25 period in which positive events and negative events are really stamped down into our nervous system in a very dramatic fashion by what we call one trial learning. We experience something once and then our nervous system is forever changed by that experience, unless of course we go through some work to undo that experience. So I want you to imagine in your mind that when you were brought into this world, you were essentially a widely connected web of connections that was really poor at doing any one thing. And that through your experience, what you were exposed to by your parents or other caretakers, through your social interactions, through your thoughts, through the languages that you learned, through the places you traveled or didn't travel, your nervous system became customized to your unique experience. Now, that's true for certain parts of your brain that are involved in what we call representations of the outside world. A lot of your brain is designed to represent the visual world or represent the auditory world or represent the gallery of smells that are possible in the world. However, there are aspects of your nervous system that were designed not to be plastic. They were wired so that plasticity or changes in those circuits is very unlikely. Those circuits include things like the ones that control your heartbeat, the ones that control your breathing, the ones that control your digestion. And thank goodness that those circuits were set up that way because you want those circuits to be extremely reliable. You never want to have to think about whether or not your heart will beat or whether or not you will continue breathing or whether or not you'll be able to digest your food. So many nervous system features like digestion and breathing and heart rate are hard to change. Other aspects of our nervous system are actually quite easy to change. And one of the great gifts of childhood, adolescence and young adulthood is that we can learn through almost passive experience. We don't have to focus that hard in order to learn new things. In fact, children go from being able to speak no language whatsoever to being able to speak many, many words and comprise sentences, including words they've never heard before, which is remarkable. It means that the portions of the brain involved in speech and language are actually primed to learn and create new combinations.