The Science of Hearing, Balance & Accelerated Learning

**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. Today, we're going to talk all about hearing and balance, and how you can use your ability to hear specific things and your balance system in order to learn anything faster. The auditory system, meaning the hearing system, and your balance system, which is called the vestibular system, interact with all the other systems of the brain and body, and used properly can allow you to learn information more quickly, remember that information longer and with more ease. And you can also improve the way you can hear. You can improve your balance. We're going to talk about tools for all of that. This is one area of science where we understand a lot about the cells and the mechanisms in the ear and in the brain and so forth. So we're going to talk about that a little bit, and then we're going to get directly into protocols, meaning tools. We're also going to talk about ways in which the auditory and balance systems suffer. We're going to talk about tinnitus, which is this ringing of the ears that unfortunately for people that suffer from it, they really suffer. It's very intrusive for them. We're going to talk about some treatments that can work in some circumstances, and some of the more recent emerging treatments that I think many people aren't aware of. We're also going to talk about this, what seems like kind of a weird fact, which is that 70% of people, all people, make what are called autoacoustic emissions. Their ears actually make noises. Chances are your ears are making noises right now, but you can't perceive them. And yet those can have an influence on other people and animals in your environment. It's a fascinating aspect to your biology. You're going to learn a lot about how your biology and brain and ears and the so-called inner ear that's associated with balance. You're going to learn a lot about how all those work. You're going to learn a lot of neuroscience. I'll even tell you what type of music to listen to. And if you listen to me, you can leverage that in order to learn faster. Before we begin talking about the science of hearing imbalance and tools that leverage hearing imbalance for learning faster, I want to provide some information about another way to learn much faster. There's a paper that was published recently. This is a paper that was published in Cell Reports, an excellent journal. It's a peer-reviewed paper from a really excellent group looking at skill learning. Now, previously I've talked about how in the attempt to learn skills, the vital thing to do is to get lots of repetitions. You've heard of the 10,000 hours thing. You've heard of, you know, lots of different strategies for learning faster, 80-20 rule and all that. The bottom line is you need to generate many, many repetitions of something that you're trying to learn. And the errors that you generate are also very important for learning. It also turns out that taking rest within the learning episode is very important. I want to be really clear what I'm referring to here. In earlier episodes, I've discussed how, when you're trying to learn something, it's beneficial. It's been shown in scientific studies that if you take a 20-minute shallow nap or you simply do nothing after a period of learning, that it enhances the rates of learning and the depth of learning, your ability to learn and remember that information. What I'm about to describe are new data that say that you actually should be should be injecting rest within the learning episode. I'm not talking about going to sleep while learning. This is the way that the study was done. The study involved having people learn sequences of numbers or keys on a piano. So let's use the keys on a piano example. I'm not a musician, but I think I'll get this correct.
They asked people to practice a sequence of keys, G-D-F-E-G, G-D-F-E-G, G-D-F-E-G. And they would practice that either continually for a given amount of time, or they would just do that for 10 seconds. They would play G-D-F-E-G, G-D-F-E-G, G-D-F-E-G for 10 seconds. And then they would take a 10 second pause, a rest. They would just space, take a space or a period of time where they do nothing for 10 seconds. Then they would go back to G-D-F-E-G, G-D-F-E-G. So the two conditions essentially were to have people practice continually, lots of repetitions, or to inject or insert these periods of 10 seconds idle time where they're not doing anything. They're not looking at their phone. They're not focusing on anything. They're just laying their mind drift wherever it wants to go. And they are not touching the keys on the keyboard. What they found was that the rates of learning, the skill acquisition and the retention of the skills was significantly faster when they injected these short periods of rest, these 10 second rest periods. And the rates of learning were, when I say significantly faster, were much, much faster. I'll reveal what that was in just a moment. But you might ask, why would this work? Why would it be that injecting these 10 second rest periods would enhance rates of learning? What they called them was micro-offline gains because they're sort of taking their brain offline from the learning task for a moment. Well, it turns out the brain isn't going offline at all. You've probably heard of the hippocampus, the area of the brain involved in memory, and the neocortex, the area of the brain that's involved in processing sensory information. Well, it turns out that during these brief periods of rest, these 10 second rest periods, the hippocampus and the cortex are active in ways such that you get a 20 times repeat of the GDFEG. It's a temporal compression, as they say. So basically the rehearsal continues while you rest, but at 20 times the speed. So if you were normally getting just, let's just say five repetitions of GDFEG, GDFEG, GDFEG per 10 seconds, now you multiply that times 20 In the rest periods, you've practiced it 100 times. Your brain has practiced it. We know this because they were doing brain imaging, functional imaging of these people with brain scanners while they were doing this. This is an absolutely staggering effect. And it's one that, believe it or not, has been hypothesized or thought to exist for a very long time. This effect is called the spacing effect. And it was actually first proposed by Ebbington in 1885 And since then, it's been demonstrated for a huge number of different what they call domains, in the cognitive domain, so for learning languages, in the physical domain, so for learning skills that involve a motor sequence. It's been demonstrated for a huge number of different categories of learning. If you want to learn all about the spacing effect and the categories of learning that it can impact, there's a wonderful review article. I'll provide a link to it. The title of the review article is Parallels Between Spacing Effects During Behavioral and Cellular Learning. What that review really does is it ties the behavioral learning and the improvement of skill to the underlying changes in neurons that can explain that learning. I should mention that the paper that I'm referring to, the more recent paper that injects these 10 second little micro offline gains rest periods, is the work of the laboratory of Leonard Cohen, not the musician Leonard Cohen. He passed away. He was not a neuroscientist, a wonderful poet and musician, but not a neuroscientist. Again, the paper was published in Cell Reports and we will provide a link to the full paper as well. So the takeaway is, if you're trying to learn something, you need to get those reps in, but one way that you can get 20 times the number of reps in is by injecting these little 10 second periods of doing nothing. Again, during those rest periods, you really don't want to attend to anything else as much as possible. You could close your eyes if you want, or you can just simply wait and then get right back into generating repetitions. I find these papers that sell reports and other journals have been publishing recently to be fascinating because they're really helping us understand what are the best protocols for learning anything. And they really leverage the fact that the brain is willing to generate repetitions for us provided that we give it the rest that it needs. So inject rest throughout the learning period. And if you can, based on the scientific data, you would also want to take a 20-minute nap or a 20-minute decompressed period where you're not doing anything after a period of learning. I think those could both synergize in order to enhance learning even further, although that hasn't been looked at yet. Before we begin talking about hearing and balance, I just want to mention that 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 sponsors of today's podcast and make it clear that we only work with sponsors whose products we absolutely love and that we think you will benefit from as well. 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. 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