LIVE EVENT Q&A: Dr. Andrew Huberman at The Wiltern in Los Angeles

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 podcast hosted a live event at the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles. It was entitled The Brain Body Contract. The first part of the evening was a lecture about science and science-based tools for mental health, physical health and performance. The second half was a question and answer period in which the audience asked me questions from the podcast or related to their own interests or things that they've gleaned from social media or just general questions about mental health, physical health and performance. And I answered those questions for them. We wanted to make the recorded version of that question and answer session available to everybody, regardless of who could attend. So what follows is the question and answer period from the Wiltern Theater Brain Body Contract live Huberman Lab event. I want to be sure to thank the sponsors from that event. They were Eight Sleep, which makes smart mattress covers with heating and cooling capacity. I started sleeping on an Eight Sleep mattress cover about eight months ago, and it has completely transformed my sleep. I sleep so much deeper. I wake up far less during the middle of the night, if at all, and I wake up feeling far better than I ever have, even after the same amount of sleep. In fact, I love my Eight Sleep so much that when I travel, I'm quite bothered that Airbnbs and hotels don't have Eight Sleep mattress covers on them, and I've even shipped my Eight Sleep mattress cover out to meet me in the location that I arrived to so that I get the best possible sleep. If you want to try Eight Sleep, you can go to eightsleep.com/huberman to save up to $400 off their Sleep Fit Holiday Bundle, which includes their new Pod 3 cover. Eight Sleep currently ships in the USA, Canada, United Kingdom, select countries in the EU and Australia. Again, that's eightsleep.com/huberman. I'd like to also thank our supplement partner, Momentous. They make the very highest quality supplements. They ship internationally and they've formulated supplements as single ingredient formulations that match what is discussed on the Huberman Lab podcast. If you're interested in any of those supplements, please go to livemomentous.com/huberman. And now without further ado, the question and answer period from the Huberman Lab live event in Los Angeles.

What occurs in the mind body when you have ADHD? Are there ways to address it without medication? Thank you for this question. So, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder used to be called ADD. The hyperactivity part is a little misleading, and again, I'm not a clinician here. Here's what we know works for some people, and yet there are always going to be side effects of any kind of chemical manipulation, which is that we know that people, kids and adults with ADHD, actually have a tremendous capacity to focus if they like what they're focusing on. You take a kid with ADHD who can't focus, and you give them their favorite video game, and they are a laser. The threshold to access the dopamine system is higher, and dopamine has this incredible ability to focus the brain and other aspects of the nervous system. Certainly, if people require medication, I'm not going to tell you to stop taking that medication. But the focus training exercises that have been explored mainly in China, but they're starting to be explored over here as well, do seem to be of benefit. These are, as they sound, they use them in schools in China now, which are literally visual focus exercises. Your mental focus, that is your ability to focus on things cognitively, follows your visual focus. And of course, your stress will anchor your, essentially put you in a soda straw view of the world. So yes, there are non-medication based treatments. By medication, I'm assuming you mean prescription medication. There are of course, supplement based medications that will increase dopamine, mainly L-tyrosine. Again, this is something to think carefully about before you start tampering with your dopamine system, but it is the L-tyrosine is the precursor to dopamine. So it will raise your dopamine levels, but I believe, and you'll hear me say this as many times as necessary, that one should, if you can, rely on behavioral tools first, then of course, sleep and nutrition are prerequisite, again, for all mental health, physical health performance. You simply can't neglect those. And then, and only then, if those, all of that isn't working, to rely on supplement-based tools or on prescription medication. So it's clear that Vyvanse, Adderall, Ritalin, et cetera, work for ADHD, but some people choose to rely on more subtle forms of pharmacologic manipulation like L-tyrosine. And this focusing exercise essentially consists of spending one to three minutes trying to maintain visual focus. And yes, you are allowed to blink. I don't know why we tend to stare at something we don't blink, but don't let your eyes dry out. And that can increase your ability to focus cognitively, and it works. And keep in mind that focusing always involves refocusing. We covered a beautiful data set, not collected by my lab, but by Wendy Suzuki's lab at NYU, that at roughly 10 minute, it's actually 13 minute a day meditation of the sort where you just focus on your breathing has been shown to improve focus significantly. Why don't we hear about this more? Well, she's now Dean of Arts and Sciences at NYU and all the students are hearing about it. Hopefully, they're doing it, but it takes a little bit of discipline. For some reason, 10 minute a day type meditation is something that very few people follow consistently. But if you're looking for non-medication based treatments for ADHD, or you're somebody who just struggles with focus, the focusing exercise or the meditation I just described can be very useful. So say the data. Yeah, thanks for bringing up space-time bridging. Are people familiar with what space-time bridging is? I haven't talked a lot about it. Okay, thanks for bringing that up. We actually have an episode on meditation coming up soon where I cover it. I talked about it long ago, and then I abandoned it because, well, we wanted more data and it's a pretty interesting technique. If you think about the nervous system and vision in particular, but if you're not a sighted person, you're low vision or no vision, you could do this with your hearing. But I'm going to assume most people here are sighted. If not, just translate this to the auditory system. You have this incredible ability to close your eyes and focus, for instance, on people talk about the third eye center, focusing right behind your forehead. Do you know why people do that when they meditate? The reason is that you actually have no sensation in your brain. It's the one place to focus your attention for which you abandon sensation. If I think about any portion of my body or my breathing, I'm going to sense what's happening. I'm going to perceive my inner landscape, so-called interoception, or my outer, if I look out into the world, it's exteroception. When you focus your attention with your eyes closed, you do have to close your eyes just behind your forehead, you are focusing on your thinking. It's obvious, but at least to me, it never been stated that clearly. Again, one of the problems with some of the more traditional practices, but also the problem with science is that there's a shrouding of everything in very complex language, which sucks. Why does it suck? Because it's a separator. You eliminate the number of people that could be brought to potentially useful practices. I don't like it when people, including myself, overuse mechanism and descriptions of fancy phrases to mask basic principles. Simplest language, I think, tends to unify people around the practices. When you focus on this so-called third eye center, or a spot right behind your forehead or on your breath, it's a little tricky with the breath. But when you focus on your frontal cortex, there's nothing to sense because there's no sensory neurons there. There's no touch, there's no pain, nothing. That's why in these gory movies, you can take the skull off. Or in neurosurgeries, they're poking around in there, the person's playing a violin. No anesthetic. No anesthetic. It doesn't require anesthetic. There's no sensory neurons. You can't sense anything there. Spacetime bridging involves, it's essentially a meditation, but it's really a perceptual exercise. I think that's where we're going with this. It starts by closing your eyes and focusing on that location for which there's no sensation. There's only thought. Then opening your eyes and focusing on a location, maybe about the distance of your hand, and you focus also on your breathing. So you imagine a tether between that. You can split your attention to these two locations. You're thinking about your body and you're thinking about a location outside of you. Then you, while continuing to think about your body, so-called interoception, focus on your breathing, you focus further out and then further out and then further out. Then ultimately, you know that little cartoon or meme where they're like, we're just a little blue dot floating in a big universe, and it's supposed to make all your problems go away? It works because what you've done is you've expanded your perception and you go, oh yeah, the stuff that's happening in here is really important when I'm focused on what's happening in here. But when I'm focused on what's going on and the vastness of all this, and we're just a little pale blue dot and all that, it changes your perception, not just your visual perception, obviously. Changing your visual perception changes your cognitive perception, which changes your emotional experience. So the space-time bridging is a perceptual exercise where you step from focusing internally to focusing externally at a short distance, then a further distance, further distance, further distance, and then trying to imagine yourself in this larger landscape. Sounds very mystical, but it's actually very neurobiological, and it captures something really amazing. Why is the T in there? The time, space-time bridging, because this is space, but time is in there because when you focus in close, your slicing of time is finer. You notice the subtle fluctuations in your breathing and things that are happening up close. Whereas when you focus further out, your perception of time actually changes, which is why in panoramic vision we are calm. When you think about, we're just a pale blue dot, and we mostly only live to about 85 or maybe 100 years old, and then like what's happening right now, my boss being a jerk and all that doesn't really matter, because like the earth is spinning and all that kind of stuff, which is all true and is the stuff of philosophy and mindfulness and I think is beautiful. What you're really doing is you're changing your time perception by changing your space perception. So space-time bridging is very useful because most people get locked at one step, one of these stations, especially under conditions of stress, and people who have trouble focusing, I'm glad you brought this up in this context of ADHD, people who have a hard time focusing whether or not they have ADHD or not, tend to skip back and forth between different space-time domains, as we call them in science. So this is a simple exercise that you can do, focusing internally, then stepping out externally, then stepping back in, all the while paying attention to your inner landscape just simply by focusing on your breathing. It's a tool that we're still collecting data on in terms of its utility, but people are already using it and I don't think of it as a meditation, I think of it as a perceptual exercise. Thanks for asking that. As a teenager, what are five things you would recommend to physically feel my best? I'm a 15-year-old surfer who attends high school and plays soccer. It sounds like you're doing a lot of things right.