LIVE EVENT Q&A: Dr. Andrew Huberman at the Chicago Theatre

Andrew D. Huberman (0:00)

Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

Recently, the Huberman Lab hosted a live event at the Chicago Theatre in Chicago, Illinois. The event consisted of a lecture entitled The Brain Body Contract, followed by a question and answer session. We wanted to make sure that the question and answer session was available to everybody, regardless of who could attend in person. I also want to make sure to thank the sponsors at that event, which were AG1 and 8 Sleep. 8 Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating and sleep tracking capacity. One of the key things to getting a great night's sleep is to make sure that the temperature of your sleeping environment is correct. And that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature actually has to drop by about one to three degrees. And in order to wake up feeling refreshed and energized, your body temperature actually has to increase by about one to three degrees. With 8 Sleep, you can program the temperature of your sleeping environment in the beginning, middle and end of your night. It has a number of other features like tracking the amount of rapid eye movement and slow wave sleep that you get. Things that are essential to really dialing in the perfect night's sleep for you. I've been sleeping on an 8 Sleep mattress cover for well over two years now. And it has greatly improved my sleep. I fall asleep far more quickly. I wake up far less often in the middle of the night. And I wake up feeling far more refreshed than I ever did prior to using an 8 Sleep mattress cover. If you'd like to try 8 Sleep, you can go to 8sleep.com/huberman to save $150 off their Pod 3 cover. 8 Sleep currently ships to the USA, Canada, UK, select countries in the EU and Australia. Again, that's 8sleep.com/huberman. AG1 is an all-in-one vitamin mineral probiotic drink. I've been taking AG1 since 2012, so I'm delighted that they sponsored the live event. The reason I started taking AG1 and the reason I still drink AG1 once or twice a day is that it provides all of my foundational nutritional needs. That is, it provides insurance that I get the proper amounts of those vitamins, minerals, probiotics and fiber to ensure optimal mental health, physical health and performance. If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.com/huberman to claim a special offer. They're giving away five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3K2. Again, that's drinkag1.com/huberman to claim that special offer. And now without further ado, the question and answer session from our live event at the Chicago Theatre in Chicago, Illinois.

I turned 70 soon, what is your best advice to keep my brain healthy in old age? Terrific question. The advice I would give to you as somebody about to reach 70 is the same advice I give to anybody, which is that essentially all of the things that improve cardiovascular health and perfusion of your bodily tissues are going to improve functionality of the brain, because of course the brain as a rich consumer of fuel requires very good portals to deliver those fuels and that capillaries, microcapillaries and arteries and so forth need to be clean and clear. That's the big one. This is why I think the prescription now is generally accepted and here I'm borrowing from my friend Peter Atiyah, but about 150 or maybe as much as 200 minutes of so-called zone two cardio per week movement that you can just barely carry out a conversation is going to be very useful. One thing that's often not discussed is that load bearing exercise of some sort is going to be better provided your body can tolerate it, but you should do something that you can do consistently over those long durations without injuring yourself. But there's a very interesting literature about how load bearing movements actually generate the release of hormones, yes, hormones from bone, that actually cross the blood-brain barrier and may influence health of neurons in brain areas such as the hippocampus. There I'm extending from preclinical data in animals to humans, but there's some human data starting to emerge that that's true. It's also true, and there's a wonderful paper out just today or yesterday from Dr. Andy Galpin's lab and collaborators talking about how if you look at cognitive health, it's highly correlated with things that relate to strength. And that is not to say that you should just do strength training exercise, but we know that all people, truly all people, should be doing some sort of resistance training two or three times per week. And we know that grip strength and increasing asymmetry in grip strength between the two hands is one of the indicators of deficits in control from the brain out to the periphery and it's correlated with cognitive decline. There's also some interesting data about how when the feet become floppy and kind of flaccid or the lack of ability to extend one's toes, I'm still working, I've been wearing this toe spreader thing. Has anyone tried those? Those hurt, those hurt. I broke this foot a bunch of times, but I'll tell you, when you get better at spreading your toes, it's really exciting. And it's really exciting for several reasons. It's really exciting because there's more stability in your feet. You can run and move and do things better without pain. But in addition to that, believe it or not, just as one of the first things that they're going to do when you come into this world is scrape the bottom of your foot and look for the Babinski reflex, which is a neural transmission reflex, as all reflexes are. But it's testing essentially the health of the nervous system that over time, again, there are many correlates of dementia, many, many correlates of dementia, but an inability to finally control the extremities is certainly one of them. So strength training, cardiovascular training, these are kind of stereotyped answers for your question, and yet those are really the prime movers against cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease. And then of course, there's, I'd be remiss if I didn't throw in something that was a little bit more edgy because that's what I do. You know, there are interesting data about the use of drugs to increase acetylcholine transmission, right? I mean, I was visiting a Nobel Prize winner at Columbia to learn about his incredible work some years ago and saw that he chewed no fewer than five pieces of Nicorette gum, something I don't recommend during this short meeting. And I said, what is this all about? And he said, well, you know, I don't smoke anymore because I don't want lung cancer. But, you know, he said nicotine is protective against Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. I was like, how can that be? And he said, well, you know, it decreases in neuromodulation and dopamine, acetylcholine correlated with cognitive decline, keeping your brain sharp and so on and so forth. So I'm not encouraging people to take nicotine. It increases blood pressure, vasoconstriction. But it's an interesting consideration. You know, some of the emerging cholinergic and dopaminergic drugs or ways to increase acetylcholine and dopamine are certainly intriguing. And I won't tell you who that person is, but his name is Richard Axel. Next question. Yeah. How can I optimize sleep while working 24-hour shifts as a firefighter, 24 hours on, 48 hours off? Okay. And this probably also pertains to new parents. And it probably also pertains to anyone that's going through a particularly stressful time where you're micro waking throughout the night, so not just firefighters. So what do we know? We know based on really good data that shift work is bad for us. It's just bad. We're a diurnal species. We're not nocturnal. But thank you, thank you, thank you, shift workers, because you essentially keep us all safe and make the world go around. And so we need you and we want you healthy. So one of the main things is that you can make sure that you stay on the same sleep wake schedule for at least two weeks. It's the swing shift that's really the worst. You can tell your boss, I said that. And if they won't agree and you're doing this 24 hour on, 24 hour off, there are a couple of things that are really important. First of all, the main way to wake up your nervous system, even though it might not feel like a triple espresso, is going to be that light exposure to the eyes. And if you can't get it from sunlight, it's going to be from any bright artificial light. I'm not a huge proponent of the daylight simulators. They're very expensive. You can simply buy a 900 lux LED far more inexpensively. I don't have any relationship to any company that sells these, but you can find them on Amazon or wherever you happen to prefer to purchase things. Or you can just get really close to a bright light. Anytime you're trying to wake up, even if you don't feel that it helps you wake up very much, mostly for the melatonin suppression, because bright light will very acutely suppress melatonin. And then the real question from shift workers always seems to be, should I catch up on sleep? Or is that going to be problematic? Should I just stay up into the next cycle? And the answer there is a little bit nuanced, but the best answer I can give across the board is, if this is a pattern that you're going to be in regularly over say months or years, then get whatever sleep you can. Get whatever sleep you can. If it's something that you're doing somewhat acutely, like you're traveling to Europe and you're just gonna force yourselves to stay up a day and a half, then in that case I would say, no need to get the maximum amount of sleep, just try and stay with the local schedule. We have an entire episode about shift work that somehow maybe didn't get as much recognition as it should have for shift workers, and we'll try and get it out in better form. We don't always succeed in top carding things in a way that gets them out to the most people. One thing I will say is an opportunity to announce that our website, hubermanlab.com, is completely revamped, so it's highly searchable. It will take you to exact timestamps, and now you can segregate out timestamps from newsletters, from all this stuff, so thanks to a lot of effort by my amazing team, you can now navigate that site with real precision. So if you want to say ADHD, Adderall, kids, yes, no, for instance, it will take you to precise timestamps that will address those issues. Next question, please. How does hypnosis therapy work? Well, this is a very interesting topic to me because my colleague, Associate Chair of Psychiatry at Stanford, David Spiegel, is a world expert in hypnosis and its neural underpinnings and its use for clinical applications. His father was a hypnotist, also a psychiatrist. And when people hear hypnotism, they think of stage hypnotism and being up on stage and doing things you don't want to in front of other people. But really, when we're talking about clinical applications or wellness applications of hypnosis, we're talking about self-directed hypnosis. I really wish there was a better name, because I don't think hypnosis is going to advance very far as a field, frankly, because everyone thinks hypnosis. And it would be like if psychedelics were just called drugs, right? We were taught in the 80s that drugs are bad and that your brain on drugs looks like an omelet and that's bad. And if you like omelets, they're still bad. And drugs of abuse are bad. And actually, I hope we can talk briefly about psychedelics at some point, because I do think there's a little bit of a runaway train around the topic of psychedelics now. I think we need to be very careful how we approach that entire landscape. But hypnosis essentially works by allowing someone to place their own brain into this very unique state. Earlier, we were talking about neuroplasticity, and we talked about the fact that neuroplasticity involves intense focus followed by deep rest in the form of deep sleep or non-sleep deep rest, maybe even Rick Rubin-ing it and just kind of like laying there. Hypnosis is different because hypnosis is in a state in which your focus is very narrow, the context is very narrow, but you're very, very relaxed. So maybe the Rubin example of being brain active and body very still is a bit more like hypnosis to be fair. Why would it be the case that David Spiegel and his dad have literally a tool that is approved by the major American Psychiatric Association where they can figure out how hypnotizable you are by having you look up and try and close your eyelids while continuing to look up the so-called Spiegel Eye Roll Test. Sounds pretty wacky, right? This is like TikTok level wacky. Well, the reason is you have cranial nerves, so they sit more or less near your neck, that allow you to direct your focus, your eyes upward, and then you have cranial nerves that have your eyes go down, and the ones that the cranial nerves that drive your eyes up are associated with alertness and eyes open, no surprise, and the cranial nerves that are associated with pointing your eyes down and closing your eyelids are associated with what? With drowsiness, sleep, and lack of alertness. They're sort of a push-pull in the autonomic nervous system. And Spiegel, Spiegel's daddy and him, figured out, because they're geniuses, that if somebody can maintain upward gaze while closing their eyelids, two things happen. One, you'll see the whites of their eyes, and it's pretty creepy. Two, that means they're highly hypnotizable, because that is a reflection of the probability that they can enter a brain state in which they are both very awake and very relaxed. Pretty cool. Now, if that sounds kind of wacky, because you're just looking at the periphery, keep in mind that one of the primary entry points for diagnosing concussion is to shine a light in one eye and have that pupil constrict, and then see whether or not the other pupil constricts, the so-called consensual pupillary reflex. Although technically, and I've been bothered by this from day one, it should be called the non-consensual pupil reflex, because the other eye doesn't have a choice if everything's working.