Using Play to Rewire & Improve Your Brain

**Andrew D. 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 are going to talk about the biology, psychology and utility of play. Play is something that normally we associate with children's games, and indeed with being a child. Much of our childhood development centers around play, whether or not it's organized play or spontaneous play. But as adults, we also need to play. And today I'm going to talk about what I like to refer to as the power of play. The power of play resides in play's ability to change our nervous system for the better so that we can perform many activities, not just play activities, better. Play can also function as a way to explore new ways of being in different scenarios, in work, in relationships, in settings of all kinds, and indeed also in the relationship to oneself. In fact, we are going to explore how assuming different identities during the same game of play or the same forms of play has been shown to be immensely powerful for allowing people to engage in more creative thinking and dynamic thinking and indeed to become better leaders and more effective workers and students and learners and happier people. I'm also going to cover some data that shows that learning to play properly can enhance one's ability to focus and is an active area of research for treatment of things like ADHD, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Just as a little sneak preview of where that's headed, children who do not access enough play during certain stages of childhood are more prone to develop ADHD. The good news is all of us, regardless of whether or not we have a DHD or not, whether or not we had ample access to play during childhood or not, can engage and grow the neural circuits that allow for this incredible power of play. And this can be done again at any stage of life. Today, we're going to talk about the protocols, the science. We will review all of that. And I promise you'll come away with a lot of knowledge, whether or not you're a parent, whether or not you're a child, whether or not you're a person of any age, you're going to have tools and knowledge that will benefit you. Before we begin, I want to share with you the results of what I think to be an extremely exciting and certainly an actionable study that was just published in the journal Scientific Reports. This is an excellent journal, nature press journal, peer reviewed, et cetera. And the findings center around what sorts of devices we happen to be reading on and accessing information on and how that's impacting our physiology and our capacity to learn. One of the more frequent questions I get is, what are all these devices, phones, tablets, computers, video games, et cetera, doing to our brains? And finally, there's some good peer reviewed data to look at that and to address it directly. This study, first author Honma, H-O-N-M-A, Honma et al. Is entitled Reading on a Smartphone Affects Psi Generation. That's S-I-G-H, Psi Generation, brain Activity and Comprehension. And to just summarize what they found, they ran a study on 34 healthy individuals and had them either read material on a smartphone or on regular printed paper or a book. And what they found is that comprehension on devices, in particular smartphones, is much poorer, much worse than it is when one reads on actual paper. Now, some of you may experience this yourselves. Now, they compared smartphones with paper and what they found was that when they looked at people's breathing, the normal patterns of breathing that people were engaging in did not differ between people reading on a smartphone or reading from paper. However, one particular feature of breathing did differ. And that particular feature is what we call physiological size. I've talked a lot about physiological size on this podcast and on social media. We had a terrific guest, Professor Jack Feldman from University of California, Los Angeles, who's a world expert in breathing and respiration and its impacts on the brain and how brain controls breathing and respiration. And what you can learn from that episode, or I'll just tell you again right now, is that every five minutes or so, whether or not we are asleep or awake, we do what's called a physiological sigh, which is a big deep inhale, often a double inhale followed by a long exhale. It goes something like this.
Now, you might think, oh, I never breathe like that, but you do. Unless there's something severely wrong with your brainstem, every five minutes or so, you do one of these physiological sighs, which reopens all the little hundreds of millions of sacks in your lungs called the aviola that bring in more oxygen as a consequence of that big deep double inhale. And then you are able to exhale carbon dioxide, offload carbon dioxide through that long exhale. I've also encouraged people to use the physiological sigh deliberately, not just spontaneously, as a way to reduce their stress quickly. And indeed my lab works on physiological sighs and has been exploring this. And they're quite effective in reducing our stress very fast. Reading on a smartphone seems to suppress physiological sighing. People aren't aware that it's happening, but it's happening. Some people have talked about so-called email apnea, which is the fact that people hold their breath while they email or while they text. And indeed many people do that. This is distinct from email or texting apnea. What's happening here is people are reading on the phone and for whatever reason, and I'll talk about what the likely reason is, but for whatever reason, they're suppressing their sighing. And as a consequence, the brain is not getting enough oxygen and is not offloading enough carbon dioxide. And another finding in this study was that the prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain that's involved in focus and attention and learning, becomes hyperactive in a kind of desperate attempt to focus. All of this can be summarized by saying, if you happen to read on a device, whether or not it's a tablet, a standard computer screen of any kind, but in particular on a smartphone, regardless of how small or large that smartphone screen is, you want to remind yourself to engage in these physiological size fairly regularly. And it might even be better to just read the most or at least the key issues and things that you're trying to learn about the key information from paper, or either books or printed out material of some other sort. What's the underlying mechanism here? Well, one of the reasons I like this study so much is that it brings together two of my laboratories and my particular interests in neuroscience, which is how does our visual system and the aperture, meaning the size of our visual window, relate to our so-called autonomic function or our internal state? And basically what's happening here is as any of us bring our visual window in more narrowly, as we contract our visual window, which is exactly what happens when we're looking at a little smartphone in front of us, it seems to suppress the breathing apparatus because we know that physiological size are controlled by a specific set of neurons in the brainstem called the parafacial nucleus discovered by Dr. Jack Feldman. And so there must be a mechanism whereby when we tighten our visual window, we somehow, and we don't know yet how this happens, but somehow suppress the activity of these neurons in the parafacial nucleus that generate this physiological size. So again, you have two choices, or I suppose you have many choices, but two main choices to contend with this new information. One is that you remind yourself to engage in deep breathing and in particular physiological size every five minutes or so while reading anything or texting on your smartphone. The other would be, again, if there's material that you really need to learn for sake of regurgitation later or for something particularly important, try and read that from either a larger screen or even better would be from printed materials or books. Another reason I bring all that up is that it relates to a larger theme, which is that I get many, many questions about ADHD and about people's challenges with focus. And much of what we're told these days is that we are challenged with focus because of the hundreds of videos that we can see streaming by us in any moment on our phone, which probably is true. The fact that the information that we're reading on the internet and on our phones is emotionally disturbing or distressing in some way. And that probably is true as well in many cases. This study really points to the fact that independent of the information that we are looking at or consuming, independent whether or not it's movies or texts or anything of that sort, the mere size of the window, the aperture, the screen that we're looking at is also strongly impacting our ability to learn and remember information. So broaden that visual window, print things out, look at a book. I didn't design the system. I always say, however our visual system and respiratory system happened to evolve, I wasn't consulted at the design phase. This is just simply how your brain circuits work. So if you want to learn things, widen that visual window and even better print things out, pick up a book or read on a tablet even, but try and make that tablet larger than a smartphone screen size. Before we begin our discussion about the power of play, I'd like to emphasize 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'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 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 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. 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