Andrew Huberman

Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance.

I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

Today, we're talking all about goals and the science of goal setting and achieving your goals.

So when we think about goal seeking and the pursuit of goals of any kind in the brain, it doesn't matter what the goal is.

It involves a common set of neural circuits.

One of the brain areas is the so-called amygdala.

The amygdala is most often associated with fear.

So you might say, wow, how is that involved in goal-directed behavior?

Well, a lot of our goal-directed behavior is to avoid punishments, including things like embarrassment or financial ruin or things of that sort.

And so the amygdala and some sense of anxiety or fear is actually built in to the circuits that generate goal-seeking and our motivation to pursue goals.

The other areas are the so-called eventual striatum,

The striatum is part of what's called the basal ganglia.

The basal ganglia is a neural circuit that can very simply be described as a neural circuit that helps us generate go, meaning the initiation of action and no go, the prevention of action type scenarios.

Let me make that even simpler.

The ventral striatum is part of this thing called the basal ganglia.

The basal ganglia has sort of two circuits within it.

One circuit is involved in getting us to do things like I'm going to get up tomorrow and I'm going to run five miles first thing in the morning.

I don't know if I'm actually going to do that, but I'm just using that as an example.

Another circuit within the basal ganglia is a no-go circuit.

It's the one that says, no, I'm not going to go for the second cookie or the third cookie.