Dr. Allan Schore
Appearances
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
For example, the physiology of the stress response, the physiology of the sympathetic nervous system, which is energy expending, and the parasympathetic nervous system, which is energy conserving. So the mother is a regulator of And the way that she's a regulator of that baby is that she's tracking that baby's arousal levels.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
She's tracking that baby's emotions as they change in time, moment to moment. And then she's synchronizing with that, and that allows her now to be able to regulate it. So we're going from recognizing that baby's emotions synchronizing with those emotions, and then being an affect regulator. So the mother who is securely attached now is a good affect regulator of that baby.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
She not only is an affect regulator of the negative states of the baby, because negative states and negative affects are adaptive, By definition.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
You bet. And that's a signal she's sending there literally. And the mother then intuitively knows, intuitively knows. She's not using her left brain to figure out what to do with that baby. She's doing it intuitively. And intuition is a right brain function. And she's regulating that baby implicitly. Now- let's go back over implicit to explicit, okay?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
You're seeing a lot now about the shift from explicit to implicit. Something that is implicit goes on at levels beneath awareness. So when she is intuitively knowing what to do, that right now this baby is down-regulating too much and she wants to bring that baby up, she'll now use her tone of voice literally to raise that baby up into a more excited state. Or if the baby is dysregulated,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
sympathetic hyperarousal, she knows how to downregulate that. And she'll downregulate that by her facial expression, by the tone of her voice. Now her tone of her voice is now trying to soften and to quiet down. So essentially what attachment is, is the regulator of arousal, of emotional arousal. And that emotional arousal also includes the autonomic nervous system.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
So what we have here is the regulation of attachment of the limbic system, the emotion processing limbic system, positive and negative, and the autonomic nervous system. So they are limbic autonomic circuits, and those circuits are in the right brain. Now, on this matter, as it turns out, the right brain has a control system of attachment.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Now, since the right brain is there first before the left because there's no speech at two years, she's regulating this baby at two months, six months, 12 months, all of it is occurring nonverbal. She's doing this implicitly, not explicitly. The left hemisphere processes explicit stimuli, conscious stimuli, rational stimuli. That's not there.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Everything is being done implicitly beneath levels of awareness. And again, that allows it to be the regulation. So attachment theory, my attachment theory, regulation theory is essentially attachment is interactive regulation. Stay with me now. Ultimately, what we have are two forms of regulation. What we're doing is we're regulating the self, right? I mean, it's the subjective self.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
which is in the right hemisphere. The left is objective self. The left is verbal, conscious. She's regulating the right hemisphere, and she's doing that, again, by tracking the baby's emotional states, as I said. But again, what the child learns now from that is that her right brain is becoming more and more complex from the first year to the second year.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
And it's going to turn out some of these functions that are more complex are being also stimulated by the mother. And ultimately, by the end of the second year, that baby can regulate its emotional states by itself in its right brain. But we have two forms of regulation. You can regulate your states by auto-regulation by yourself.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
In other words, you're not with other human beings at this point in time. You have an efficient right brain, which can regulate. And incidentally, what we're talking about here is the regulation. of the amygdala by the right orbital frontal cortex. The right orbital frontal cortex is the highest level of the right hemisphere.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
It also has the most sophisticated and the latest evolving parts of the brain are in the right frontal cortex, not the left, the right orbital frontal. not the left thoracolateral cortex is the key to this. So what we learn from attachment here, again, is how to, both in a severe attachment, how to auto-regulate your emotions when you're apart from people.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
In other words, when you go to a quiet place at this point in time, you're regulating yourself down, so to speak, and you're getting a nice regulation of the amygdala by the right orbital frontal cortex, or interactive regulation, which is now you go to another human being, We go to another human being under times of stress in an optimal situation.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
We also go to another human being to share joy states. And remember I said that the mother is up-regulating joy states and down-regulating negative states. So in a secure attachment, you have somebody now who can do both. In certain forms of insecure attachment, that's not gonna happen. The avoidant attachment, is always auto-regulating his states.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Yeah, what I'm saying is it's a secure attachment. And let me back up a step on that. The key to attachment is psychobiological attunement. You know the phrase. Notice psychobiological attunement. That the mother is regulating not only the psychological aspect, but literally is regulating the physiological aspect of that, which means that she's regulating the autonomic nervous system.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Think about Porges social engagement system. What we have here is the capacity by insecure attachment who have, and then the second part of the attachment is repair. Now, let me go back. Psychobiological attunement. Sometimes she misattunes. Sometimes she misreads the baby's states for one reason or another.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
What happens in a good enough caregiving is that the mother who was misattuned now reattunes to that baby. now re-synchronizes with that baby, now reconnects right brains to right brains with that baby. And that repair is a key here. So you have misattunement and repair. So the key to a secure attachment is not only psychobiological attunement, but it's also the repair of the misattunement.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
And that allows the baby now to expand that situation and being able to use that now to order a case. That's a secure. But if she misattunes, for example, and doesn't repair, let's say, or she's not that good at psychobiologically attuning, let's say, as an avoidant mother, because avoidant personalities are uncomfortable with real closeness.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Another term for an avoidant personality is a dismissive personality. And what they are dismissing is the need for interactive regulation. So they're always auto-regulating it.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Or you have another time in which you have another form of attachment, an insecure anxious attachment, where that person is always interactively regulating or is always going to others to help them regulate, but can't auto-regulate.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
All of this is happening in the right brain. And incidentally, attachment relationship is retained as an autobiographical memory in the first two years of life, even before there's a left hemisphere. And that under later stress situation occurs. That will be the key there. Incidentally, the attachment, whether it's secure or insecure, is also the key to positive and negative transferences.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
That's where it's communicated. Let me go back and say a little bit more about one other form of attachment, and that you mentioned the type D attachment.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Yeah, these are disorganized babies. So you have secure. You have two types of organized insecures. Okay, the avoidant and the anxious. And then you have a disorganized, disoriented one. Now, ultimately, that person under stress is not able to auto-regulate or to interact and regulate.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
So what they will do at that point now, I'm now thinking about, let's say, PTSD or various borderline personality disorders. That person now literally can't go to the other for autoregulation or interactive regulation, that person now will use a defense, literally, to shut down the attachment system. And that's exactly what dissociation is. Dissociation just shuts down the attachment.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
So in the anxious attachment, you have a continual activation of the attachment system, which means a continual activation of the right hemisphere all of the time. And in the insecure attachment, A dismissive attachment, you have a deactivation of the attachment system, which would be a deactivation of the right brain.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
So in the end, a secure attachment is an efficient one, but it's an efficient one that can switch back and forth between them. Not only that, it also, at a later point in time when the left comes online, it can also communicate much better with the left hemisphere than without that.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Regulation theory is essentially a theory of the development of the self in an optimal situation, but it also talks about the psychopathogenesis of the self, the early origins of psychiatric disorders and personality disorders. I'm thinking about not only schizophrenia and depression, but I'm now thinking about narcissistic personality disorders, borderline personality disorders.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Maybe we'll come back to more on that. And then ultimately, the repair of the self. So regulation theory is about the development of the self, the psychopathogenesis of the self, and then the repair of the self. Because these attachment situations are now going to play out under all periods of stress. The right hemisphere is dominant for the stress response.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
The right hemisphere is dominant for the sympathetic nervous system, the energy expending, and the right hemisphere is dominant for the parasympathetic nervous system. So again, all of that will play out at later points under stress, and when those systems break down, that's when the patient will form symptomatologies and come into therapy. And in therapy, the therapist now, the key,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
I'm jumping here. No, this is great. Because there's a right brain to right brain interaction between the mother and the infant. There's also a right brain to right brain interaction between the therapist and the patient. And the key to both of them is regulation. A person is coming in in a dysregulated state. The key to that is regulation.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
And the key to any form of therapy, whatever the form of it is, again, is interactive regulation, and it's a therapeutic relationship. The thing which is the best indicator of whether somebody will do well out of therapy and whether a clinician will do well out of therapy is how well they can deal with the therapeutic relationship.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
And a really good therapist literally knows how to bring back those attachment things there because now the person is starting to feel safety and trusted and, incidentally, Attachment is about safety and trust, which is very much autonomic. But again here, the key to therapy is being able to form a therapeutic relationship with the patient.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
So the key here is, can the therapist form, co-create a therapeutic relationship with an avoidant patient, with a secure patient? with anxious patient, with a borderline patient. As you can imagine, the toughest thing is going to be able to do with the borderline patient or the schizophrenic patient. So what you have here is that the attachment dynamics are being laid out.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
So in the very first session, what's happening? The therapist is listening to the verbalizations of the patient in order to diagnose and understand the symptomatology. But the therapist is also listening beneath the words.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
And the patient is tracking the attachment relationship underneath it, tracking the arousal and the arousal dysregulation underneath that, tracking it in his own body, so to speak, et cetera. And again, that is a different type of listening. Again, the therapist is listening to a left brain, but more or less the therapist is listening to the right brain.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
And the question is, how does the therapist do that And in order, just for the record, for the therapist to be able to get to the attachment dynamics, which are right lateralized, the therapist has got to switch out of the left into the right. And there's a term for that. The term for that is surrender. Surrender. You cannot consciously, purposely put yourself into the right. You've got to let go.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
All right. What I'm suggesting here is that essentially the therapist is listening left brain to left brain, but the therapist also is always listening beneath the words, et cetera, and he's listening to the right brain to right brain communications. And the patient now who is depressed is coming out with right brain communications that There's sadness in the voice.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
The face is clearly dysregulated. And essentially, as the therapist is tracking that, the emotional arousal, whether it's into hypoarousal and depression or hyperarousal into anxiety, the first thing there is to synchronize with that patient so that my physiology is syncing with their physiology. And now, through the right insula,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Interceptively, I now literally am feeling in my body what the patient is feeling in their body. I now understand that patient from the inside out. And incidentally, what I'm picking up in my body about the dysregulation of that patient may be very different than the verbal report that that patient is giving at that time. But the key here, literally, just like the mother,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
is synchronizing with that baby's crescendos and the decrescendos of that autonomic state, of those emotional state. I'm picking up those points where they are shifting into and out of an emotional state. I'm synchronizing with that. And then ultimately, when I'm in sync with that kind of thing, then at that point, purely implicitly,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
I'm now starting to slow the tone of my voice if I want to reduce that arousal down, or I'm up-regulating the voice. At that point in time, I am now interactively regulating, and we are now synchronized together. So essentially what's going to happen is that as we synchronize, as they're going to dysregulation, we're now synchronizing together as we're going down into regulation.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
And you'll see it on my face. Face, voice, gesture. You'll see it on my face. You'll see it in the tone of my voice. You'll see it in my gestures. Those three sensory modalities are now going back and forth between us.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
So the key of the first session, literally, is not only to diagnose, really it's to start to begin to synchronize with that patient and to form a therapeutic alliance with that patient. And at the end of the first session, the patient may say, I don't know why, but I'm feeling better, and I have some idea that you can understand, but it's got to be more than that, what I am feeling, literally.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Essentially here, what you have is over time, partly because of this synchrony. First of all, let me spell synchrony with a capital S. What I mean by that is in the last five years, a huge amount of information has come out about this idea about interpersonal synchrony. The term synchrony comes from the Greek, synk meaning the same, chrony, time, same time.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
So that literally two people literally are synchronized. We are feeling something in the same moment, and we are feeling it spontaneously between ourselves. We are feeling that kind of situation. So again here, the key to the mother really even more than the order regulation, the key is interactive regulation, number one. Number two, it's occurring at an implicit level.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
The mother literally is doing this without any conscious awareness. She's doing this intuitively. The right hemisphere is intuitive and it's imagistic. It's not rational and logical. The key to any disorder, whatever it is, is the regulation of a particular state. The regulation of rage, the regulation of loss, the dysregulation of shame and disgust. So essentially what you have is...
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
the regulation of all of these emotions, but that regulation I want to point out is all implicit. And here's where the skill of being with patients over long periods of time is the key here. Because the key to making changes in the patient is not what you say to the patient or what you do to the patient, It's how to be with the patient.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
You understand the difference, how to be with that patient, especially while that person's being is in a dysregulated state. Now, by definition, when they're coming in on the first session, they are in a dysregulated state. So again, it's implicit, it's not explicit. If explicit regulation is an intellectual understanding of my symptoms,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Implicit is an unconscious understanding at a physiological level, at a psychobiological level of that. And incidentally, synchrony is the mechanism underneath empathy. Now, we know empathy literally has to be there. But empathy is a right brain function. And there is a difference. I said there's a difference in the hemispheres.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
There's a difference between emotional empathy, where I am feeling what you are feeling, and we are sharing the same feeling. And I don't have to think about that literally. I know at that point in time we are in the same place. There's a difference between emotional empathy on the right and cognitive empathy on the left. Cognitive empathy is an understanding. It makes no changes.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Because essentially what we're attempting to do is make the changes in the right. Now the changes in the right are going to be in the right axis. They're going to be the orbital frontal cortex, which is the executive regulator of the right brain. The dorsolateral cortex is the executive regulator of the left brain.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
The orbital frontal cortex now starts to form new connections with the cingulate, the insula, and the amygdala. And that's where you're now going to see the changes. But again, the changes are due to the regulation. So you'll see the personnel starting to come into more regulated states. And the key is synchrony. So what's happening here, there's a strong therapeutic alliance, safety and trust.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
And in that situation now, The more synchrony that is there between the two, the more interactive regulation there is between the two. And first there will be synchrony between the patient and the therapist. Then there will be synchrony and interactive regulation between that person and maybe other people, maybe a wife, a partner. And ultimately in the symptomatology will change.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Because remember the symptomatology is dysregulation. And the whole key is to change it to regulation.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
All right. Here's what I'm suggesting. First of all, there has been some conflict on this, but after 30 years on this, I believe that there is a primary attachment figure. And the primary attachment figure is the person who is the interactive regulator of that baby when that baby is under stress.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Yeah. Or let me say it even another way. The primary attachment figure is the person who provides the right brain for that baby when that baby's right brain is dysregulated.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Yes, it's true. Women are better at reading nonverbal cues than men are, but it could be. And incidentally, we now have some evidence that's showing... that men do have right brains.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
All right, now that being the case, what's happening here is that in the first year or two, the mother's right brain, the person who is the right brain in... which in most cultures is a woman, but does not have to be.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
It could be a stay-at-home dad who literally has a good right brain, and maybe a couple are figuring out that literally he'd be better in that position, but it needs that right brain. But other than that, what happens here, when it goes now into the second year, toward the end of the second year, and the father comes online, got me?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
At that point in time, the father now becomes a primary attachment figure also. But he has some differences the way that he's dealing with that baby. He's usually more arousing with that baby and that the play is more arousing with that baby.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Exactly. You're dealing with more upregulation and being able to tolerate more hyper-aroused states. Because in the second year, one of the things that the father will do with the infant is with toddler, infant, first year, toddler, second year. Rough and tumble play, for example. Rough and tumble play. So the father is that.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
So the father literally is now teaching the child literally how to take risks. But the father is now moving more towards autonomy and independence. The mother was there at the beginning about interactive regulation. So the father is playing that role.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
And I've also suggested that just as the mother is shaping that baby's right brain in the first year, the father is now shaping that baby's left brain towards the end of the first year, second, and into the third year. that he's shaping that baby's, his left brain to that baby's left brain. That being the case, he may also earlier on have had good experiences with that baby early on in life.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
And a good example of that would be a father who was tender, tender, yet at the same time is instrumental and is teaching things about the world. So one brain is shaped by the mother figure, the brother by the father figure.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
You know, I think what's happening in that kind of situation is the person is initially providing the right brain and then that person is now providing the left brain.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
So let's say a single woman with a child, her right brain is there on the get, but then in the second year, and incidentally there may be father figures or family members who also can step into that, but essentially her left brain is there also. Remember, we both have right brains and left brains.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
But again, that's a different kinds of skill in a left brain, which would be the more autonomous situation.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Yeah, yeah. Remember, it's the relationship in the end that is the key there. I'm also somewhat aware of that literature. And you used the word empathogen, which is not quite it. straight out empathic, but mimicking those kinds of situations there.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
My thought is that that might be more efficacious if it were specifically involving right brain dynamics with a person who knew how to work with those right brain. What you're getting there are very early forms of the behaviors which are subcortical. The attachment is also regulating the subcortical areas, and those are the key ones.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
And incidentally, we are paying too much attention to the cortical area. We literally have to shift, because the subcortical areas are the foundations of the human, and everything is built on top of that. I'll come back to in utero in a second if I don't get on that.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
In fact, I have some people who have worked with me, have also been using right brain type psychotherapy with those patients, and I think that that will be... really interesting possibilities of seeing changes where you have the relationship, you know, in addition to that.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
And also some understanding about how the right brain works, because one of the problems that you have where there is still some resistance to the idea that the right brain is just a simpler version of the complex left hemisphere, but that's not the case. This right brain is working completely differently. So I'm thinking that in that case, a better situation.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Before I forget this, I want to just throw one other piece in. I said that the right brain is in a growth spurt from the last trimester. In the last five years, 10 years, there has been a real interest in utero development and evidence to show that you're even seeing lateralization in the fetus.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
And there's even evidence now, scientific evidence, to show that the early memories in utero are stored in the right amygdala. So they're down there, so to speak. So we're now paying more and more attention to what is happening there. Because at birth, literally, what you have here is the deeper parts of the right brain are evolving in utero, the insula.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
and the right amygdala, the central amygdala. And that's setting up. And you also have synchronization across the placenta, whereby they are regulating each other's autonomic nervous systems.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Well, first of all, most of the studies have been on cortisol. And high levels of cortisol, they're going to cross it.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
So if you have, let's say the amygdala, which is in a critical period of growth, the right amygdala, and the cortisol levels are very high, that's really going to not be an optimal situation for that amygdala to evolve because you're going to have a continuous stress response there. And essentially what that means also that if the mother is in a very stressed state during a utero,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Some of that literally now is going to impact the lower areas of the brain. So as far as adrenaline goes, I'm not sure on that. I don't see why not. Although hormones certainly cross, you know, we're looking at not only changes in neuromodulators, especially, incidentally, the key here that we're trying to regulate are the neuromodulators. Excuse me. Dopamine, reward, noradrenaline.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
It's those which also early in life literally form neuroplastic, so they will form circuits. That's what we're attempting to regulate here, to down-regulate very high levels of neuroadrenaline and up-regulate dopamine, etc., etc.,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Yes, yes. The key here is emotion regulation again, and again, it's implicit emotion regulation. One of the central tenets of my ideas here is that, first of all, there has been too much of an emphasis on the downregulation of negative states. Remember the original attachment theory, the secure base, the baby would come back in a stressed state, she would downregulate the negative states.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
But really, attachment is about the down-regulation of negative states and the up-regulation of positive states. Still, at this point in time, the importance of positive states in the human experience are overlooked. Positive emotions, joy, enthusiasm, excitement. Positive states literally are the key, and there are hormonal aspects to that, as you just point out.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
For example, dopamine, etc., etc., And this goes for therapy also. In therapy, it's not only just the down regulation and the sharing the down regulation, but it's also sharing the up regulation of positive states because that's a critical piece of it also. But there still is that bias to look one way.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Now, in the Right Brain book, I'm also talking about two types of love, quiet love and excited love. This was the famous psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, who was a pediatrician, who was one of the great psychoanalysts of the 20th century. And he made the distinction between quiet love, which would again be the downregulation of noradrenaline, and excited, which is into a parasympathetic state.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
You understand that I was trained in psychoanalysis and I'm a psychodynamic psychotherapist in addition to a scientist, neuroscientist. So the unconscious has been something that I have been aware of and have been writing about and it's a central part of what I'm writing about to this day. Essentially, as we're going to see, I'm suggesting that the right brain is the unconscious mind.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
So you're going from a hypersympathetic state into a parasympathetic state, quiet love. And then excited love. which would be also passionate love, which is the high arousal state out of it, so to speak. And they are both important, and ultimately they both need to be integrated. And you may have a situation whereby one can do one, but ultimately they have to come together.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Let me make this important point. In the end, we have negative emotions for adaptive reasons. It's there. Let's take shame. Shame is meant to dose down very high levels of arousal. And if one can't do that, very high levels of arousal, let's say in narcissistic personality disorders, you need to be able to... So we need to have access to both positive and negative emotion.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
But the real key to a secure attachment is the ability to integrate both positive and negative emotions. So with a really good securely attached mother, when that baby is in a down state, literally, she can literally ride down with that baby and synchronize. And when it's an up state, she can really ride up with that state.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
In the case of narcissistic personality disorders, let's say, for example, and I'm jumping here, we've got an insecure attachment. It can be an avoidant attachment or the other one, depends on what kind. There are two different types of narcissistic personality disorders.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
No, no, but you can have two different types of narcissistic personality disorders, a vulnerable attachment and an egotistical attachment.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Yes, sound familiar, but also egotistical attachment. But my point out of that essentially here is the stresses in life are there and that the negative stresses are there, but we can learn from those negative stresses also, etc. And ultimately what we need to do is to be able to know how to integrate. If we can't integrate the positive and the negative, will end up with splitting.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
So when you ask how much of things really are conscious and how much are unconscious, I'm also looking at that neurobiologically in terms of how much of activity is going on in the right brain. The right brain is always processing information, always, especially emotional information at levels beneath conscious awareness, especially when you're in an emotional interaction.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Yeah, yeah. So essentially the splitting goes out externally, right? That person is all bad. I am all good. So now you have that splitting. You can't see anything of a goodness in that person at this point in time.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
It could also be that, all good. But you also have internally splitting. You have an internal split between a good self and a bad self. And internally, there's an internal object relationship that we all have as we internalize these external relationships so that there's a good self and a bad self, literally, and that they cannot be integrated, so to speak.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
And that that part of me, I hate that part of me versus I love that part of me. Or in terms of borderline, usually what you see at the very beginning is that there's an over-idealization of the positive values of that therapist. And then there are some then stressors and misattunements and ruptures that are repair. And now all of a sudden what was totally good now becomes totally bad.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
And so that could be, if there was not a strong therapeutic alliance, the point at which the person will drop out.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
I think it's a way of seeing the world. And the way of seeing the world essentially is very different from the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere. The right hemisphere sees the world through emotional relationships. So that can become a trait that can be really a hard and fast trait. Let me put it another way. In the case of narcissistic personality disorder, the baby is all good.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
The caregiver... primary caregiver is always thinking very positive about that infant. But when that infant now all of a sudden becomes depressed, the interactive regulation stops at that point in time.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
So at that point in time... Now, everything is unconscious. If you and I are together... And there is a misattunement between us. What possibility, let's say in a dismissive attachment, is all of a sudden I will disengage. We got too close. And at that point in time, maybe I'm acting out my early attachment dynamics because what the baby is doing is expecting what the mother will do next.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
And at that point in time, there's a misattunement like that. And so in the case of a dismissive personality, that person will emotionally disengage, okay? Become very abstract at that point in time. And at that point in time, I can't feel you. I hear what you're saying. And so... At all points in time, you have this situation of coming closer and moving apart, coming closer and moving apart.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
And this will be acted out in the therapeutic relationship also. And so that every time the person is, the anxious person is stressed, they'll come in closer to you now. Now they're more demanding about what they need from you. Look at the tone of my voice. while the insular avoidant now is now going to deactivate it. And at that point in time, my voice will now get flat.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
So how much really are things conscious? I would say that when it comes to the basic motivations of why we do what we do, 95 to 90% of that is unconscious. And there has been data to show that that is the case. At most, although we think that our conscious mind literally is making all of these decisions, underneath that, at all points in time, the unconscious is operating.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
You can't even hear the affective tone of my voice. So I'm telling you that we always pick up, at the level of our own physiology, how emotionally close or distant that person is at this point in time, especially at points of stress. whether I'm coming in or I'm moving out. Let me go back to this.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
All of this is occurring at an implicit level, which is why you said something about reparenting, et cetera. Too much is on a conscious level there. If you really want to make these changes in a personality, they have to be changes in the right brain. And that's why all therapy now is looking into emotion. All therapy.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
No matter what form of therapy, it's laying on top of the therapeutic relationship and emotion per se.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
No, it's not impossible. No, it's not impossible. We all do grow, and, incidentally, our right brains do grow. But, again, the key here, I'm suggesting, the whole idea about interpersonal neurobiology. I was the editor of the Northern Serial Interpersonal, which is the two-person situation.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
There has been too much of an emphasis on order regulation and not enough emphasis on interactive regulation. The real key to changing a right brain is finding people you can be close with, finding people you can be open with, finding people you can be vulnerable with, That literally you can show your shortcomings and opening yourself up to those people as they open up to you.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
It's literally to form that right brain to right brain communication system with someone else.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
You know, remember, part of the problem is being able to take in, to take these things in here. But the key to emotion, incidentally, let me throw out an important, another important term in terms of, let's say, a therapy situation. I've said essentially therapy is about literally reworking emotion. And the key to mental health and physical health is also a right brain emotional situation here.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
It used to be thought that the unconscious only comes forth in dreams at night. Well, we now know that this right brain is reading unconscious communications between us. Communications, is it safe to be with you? Do you understand what I'm saying? Really the critical ones, always operating and much more important than we had thought itself.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
The key here is that There are heightened affective moments in a therapy session. I'm going to go therapy, then I'm going to come back to your question. We've now formed the therapeutic alliance. The stronger the therapeutic alliances between us, more empathy between us, so to speak, the more we can share.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
I'm now going to start to drop some of my defenses because the defenses are there to block affect, negative affect. and begin now to take a chance now to open myself up, you know, to somebody else. But in a therapy session, somewhere around the middle of that session, the person comes in,
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Out of the world, in a left brain state, somewhere in the middle of the session, they start moving into affect. And now the person is starting to talk in a more affective level. And now talking about a memory or some sad situation or something that just happened in a relationship with a couple. Now you even start hearing my voices now. The voice tone change.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
And these moments, which only may last, believe it or not, 50, 60 seconds are heightened affective moments. These are moments when all of a sudden we are both in the right and we are both synchronized. And the affective now is out there, so to speak. And that's the possibility now to get this change in these heightened affective moments.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
So to be in an interpersonal relationship with someone and to co-create with that person a heightened affective moment in both of us, which we are sharing at that point in time, by taking the risk to be open at that point in time also. These are the moments in life that you really go into your autobiographical memory. I remember my occasion
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
With that person, I can bring back the whole context because remember the right brain acts with images, images. So I can bring back that image now and I can remember the closeness that I felt at that point in time, et cetera. These are put into right brain. So we are always putting into our autobiographical memory these heightened affective moments.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
So to have those shared affective moments with other people, These are really whereby you're making changes in the right. And these are much more important, I want to suggest, than intellectually. Now, there have been certain fMRI... I'm now going to move into a little bit of a different place here. What I'm suggesting is that these right-brain-to-right-brain communications are always going on.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
But... certain people literally can't read them as well as other people can.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Yeah, that's a colossal shift. You can shift from the left into the right about 100 milliseconds. So essentially, you have to be in one hemisphere or the other.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Good feet, good feet. Now watch where I go here.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
The right hemisphere is dominant for attention. Okay? I mean, this baby and this mother, literally, she's focusing our attention on that baby's face, tone, voice. But there are two different types of attentions. strong neuroscience to show this. The left brain operates by narrow attention, narrowly focused attention.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
The best example of narrowly focused attention is you are following my words one after the other. But there's another type of attention which is used by the right brain, which is called wide-ranging attention, which comes right out of Freud. which he also called, maybe you'll remember this, evenly suspended attention.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
It's the same thing, which is much wider than that. And that form of attention is the form of attention that the right brain has. Because the attention at that point in time is not only of... what's coming from the outside, but also attention to what's happening in the inside, my own inside, the changes in my own physiology at that point in time also.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
So yes, there are these two different forms of attention. And essentially, the only way someone who was just narrow all the time, let's take a personality who just lives in the left hemisphere.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Exactly. Hyperlogical, hyperrational, cannot really see the big picture, but literally that kind of a situation. So essentially, that kind of a person is always looking at the narrow aspects of it and cannot see the broader context. the broader context, because there's a context that's being set up.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Right now, between you and I, there's also a context that's being set up, and that context also has to it a kind of a feeling of safety and trust as we literally just go off wherever our thoughts are with some idea that literally you'll be able to follow that and you'll come back with me at the same time.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
So the context, the emotional atmosphere between us changes when you go left into the right like that. The point here is that it used to be thought that the only way you could understand the brain... was by looking more intra-psychically into one brain. If you understood how one brain worked and everything was intra-psychic. But then there's the interpersonal part of it.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
The answer to that is pretty clear at this point in time. And incidentally, some of these questions about the unconscious are provided by neurobiology. But essentially, here's what we know. There was discoveries that were being made in the 80s and the 90s about the human brain growth spurt.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
And so essentially what we're moving now from a one-person intra-psychic psychology to a two-person interpersonal psychology. You see what I mean by two-person? I got the mother here, got the baby there. I got the patient here, I got the therapist there. And between them literally are going back and forth at all periods of time right brain to right brain communications underneath the conversation.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
So neuroimaging, hyperscanning. Neuroimaging, you're familiar with hyperscanning. another paradigm shifting thing that is occurring now in neuroimaging. For the first time, we can now scan two people, NIRS, EEG, whatever you want, while they are in the middle of a basic interpersonal interaction, a numberable interaction between the two of them. These studies have now been done.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
And what they did was that they found is that the two brains especially when they are into emotional states and when they are looking at each other face to face and they're concentrating literally on how to empathically be with that person, et cetera, emotions, so to speak, they find that the right brain of one will synchronize with the right brain of the other.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
And the part of the right brain that synchronizes with the other is the right temporal parietal junction. A lot of evidence now on the right temporal parietal junction. I said right brain to right brain. So now the eyes are coming. I remember the eyes are, I mean, direct eye connection really is the most powerful form of communication.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Well, you know, the eyes are being controlled by the autonomic nervous system. So you got the – you have an autonomic nervous system with autonomic nervous system synchrony here, so to speak. But – but essentially what's occurring at this point in time, face, voice, gesture. The face is processed in the posterior parts of the right hemisphere, the face processing.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Right hemisphere, face processing. The posterior parts of the right hemisphere, the sensory areas of the right hemisphere process the voice, the melody of the voice, the tone of the voice. That's different than the semantics of the voice.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Right, right. And the posterior parts of the right hemisphere also will process gesture and tactile. Okay? All of that comes together, is integrated together in the right temporal parietal junction. So when two people literally are empathically synchronizing with each other when we are sharing the same emotional state. The third patient says at this point in time, my God, it's rage.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
I never realized it was anger. And at that point in time, the empathic therapist who's synchronizing, we are both literally now in that right temporal parietal junction. But the right temporal parietal junction is what sends the communications and receives the communications. Got me here?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
The human brain growth spurt occurs from the last trimester of pregnancy through the second until the third year of life. All of that time is a period of right hemisphere dominance. And actually, there have been six major studies in neuroscience laboratories around the world that have shown that the right hemisphere is dominant during that period of time.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
So essentially that's where our linkage is and we are now literally in a right brain to right brain communication. And what they found was during a real psychotherapy situation where the patient comes in and they're there because they have interpersonal relationships problems and emotional problems and they're face to face and they're eye to eye
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
and they're tracking each other like that, you'll find that synchronization. So the synchronization between my right temporal parietal and your right temporal parietal is a right brain to right brain communication. That right brain to right brain communication is always occurring in that kind of a context. And therefore, the most important new change in psychoanalysis
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
is that the unconscious is more than just happening at dreams. It's happening at all points because the unconscious we now know is a relational unconscious. It communicates with another relational unconscious, right brain to right brain. And this has really changed so much now in our understanding about what psychotherapy is about also. And certainly I want to point out the major,
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Change mechanism in psychotherapy now is not insight. It's not cognitive insight. It's more the ability to have an emotionally laden conversation with another human being. and to make emotional connections with another human being, which is why the therapeutic relationship really is the vector of the change.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
And that's very different than the old days was your unconscious is here, the analyst is there, I'm now going to interpret what you're doing as you are sinking down into the right, but I'm going to stay up left and interpret it. That's why there was a real limitation to that. And that's why psychoanalysis really changed now also to a face-to-face contact, not just the couch also.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
In fact, there's a recent study in Mexico where they looked at two to three months, six to eight months, nine to 12 months. At each point in time, they noticed that the right hemisphere was accelerating its growth, the left was not. So the right is dominant very early. In fact, there's evidence to show that even in utero, there is a right lateralization.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Well, I think that it's, first of all, the right temporal parietal junction is the posterior and the right orbital frontal is the cortex. So the whole right brain there, so to speak.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Yeah, the orbital frontal is the regulation part of it. the temporal parietal junction is the communication part of it. So the whole key is the communication of emotion and the regulation of emotion.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
The surrender is the colossal switch out of the left into the right.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Yes. And clearly one of the, first of all, there has been a lot of neuroscience done on music. And incidentally, most of that is right brain, showing right brain activation in music. The key here, even more than that, It's particular music to me. It has a particular meaning to me, subjectivity. And a lot shows that music is essentially a mechanism of affect regulation.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
But I want to suggest to you that pets are also a mechanism of affect regulation.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Absolutely. And maybe by the same things, I want to suggest, I think that the communication between dogs, and I've had four dogs myself... is that literally it's tactile, it's the touch of that animal, it's the prosody of the voice because literally that dog understands the prosody of the voice and also to some extent I think they can read our faces.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
But more than that, there's one other sense which I haven't brought up which is part of human relationship and that's smell. Okay, and this is overlooked in human relationship. But in real intimate contacts between human beings, the smell is really a key there. You know, think about sexual arousal. So dogs are really very strong on our smell, et cetera.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
But if attachment is a reunion after a separation,
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
come home there's that dog sitting there literally and immediately you're down regulating the day you have now taken off the whole left hemisphere and our whole stresses of all of that and you're now shifting left into right and we use the mechanisms that are available to do that and music is one of the ways to do that so in some sense music is an auto regulation although music can be live music and then it's more than that so that's the case
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Now remember, the lateralization is part of all systems. And what is lateralized is not only the cortical areas, but the subcortical areas, et cetera. So if you take, let's say, the amygdala, there's a difference between the right amygdala and the left amygdala. And again, the right hemisphere. So the answer to that is very clearly now.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
There have been studies to show that during a performance performance, there is a synchrony, there are synchronized states between the performer and the audience. And it's certainly, they're all, you can have thousands of people literally in that same synchronized state at that point in time.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
The right brain is more connected into the body than the left brain.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
There has been ongoing dialogue between us for some time. But Ian talks about that the right brain literally is much more connected into the body and incidentally is also more dominant for will. Unconscious will is more important than conscious will. which you kind of, at the very beginning, we were talking about the left versus the right.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
There's a classical work by an analyst by the name of Manuel Hammer, and he was talking about how to reach the affect. And what he suggested is that there are certain moments in the session when literally my body, in order to pick up the communications of the patient, I lean back. I'm not leaning forward. I lean back and let the atmosphere literally come over me, so to speak.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
The left hemisphere does not come into a growth spurt until the end of the second year and into the third year, up until that point. Which means everything about attachment, is about right brain dynamics.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
But notice here, what I'm talking about, what the therapist is attempting to do is to make an emotional connection, an empathic connection. And in order to make an empathic connection, You're leaning back. You're leaning back. And literally, as you lean back, all of a sudden, you're able to pick up things and hear things that you didn't see before, so to speak.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
And frequently what happens when you're in an emotional connection like that, images will come to your mind. Images which really represent the emotional experience that the other is having. And at that point in time also, what you'll find is that just as you're picking up that person's image, he's picking up your person image.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
And what Hammer says is that what we have here is something that's alike an affective wireless between the two, because it's going back and forth between the two of us, just like a right brain to right brain communication, affective by. Freud said, The human unconscious acts like a receptor and it picks up the communications of the unconscious of another human being.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Freud said literally human beings can pick up the unconscious without it going through the conscious mind. So again, in that kind of a context, you know, that all makes sense. The other thing I want to say about all of these behaviors that are going on now when there is an emotional communication. The key is spontaneous behaviors. Spontaneous. Not thought-out behaviors. Spontaneous behaviors.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
When there's spontaneous behaviors, there's more trust in them being, you know, in the first place. But there's not a mind that is attempting to present anything. And when you have two people revealing their spontaneous behaviors to each other, even if they're not sure how they're going to be affected. That also is a matter for synchrony.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
In order for there to be synchrony, there has to be spontaneous two-way communications, turn-taking communications. And incidentally, as we talk about this conversation, what is set up in the attachment between the mother and the infant, the infant makes a cry, the mother responds, is that they are now taking turns. There's turn-taking behavior.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
And in a good relationship, what you find is more or less smooth turn-taking behaviors. And incidentally, you and I, who have never met before, are not doing too badly in these spontaneous turn-taking behaviors between us.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Yes, absolutely. And it's occurring during that brain growth spurt while the right hemisphere. So essentially what you have now is that in the baby's brain, that baby's brain is now in a right brain growth spurt. And the mother now is shaping that baby's right brain through the attachment mechanism, through her regulation of that brain. So she's helped shaping that brain for better or for worse.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
I agree. I agree. First of all, let me mention that one of Ian's ideas is that essentially the left hemisphere is becoming more and more dominant today, not only in this country. And he sees that as really as a huge problem because the title of his book is The Master and His Emissary. And the emissary, which is the left brain, betrays the master.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
So he sees that one of the problems we're dealing with right now is that the left hemisphere is there and that these right hemispheres, even metaphors are problematic.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
In terms of literally... point of the letter and the attempt of the letter literally was to make a connection.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
I can remember in my childhood going away to camp and we would write letters back and forth and the words that were being used there were literally about making a connection and filling you in, which also meant that I had to reflect about myself and what was happening with me and how I felt about that and I was sharing all of that you know, with another person.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
That has really gone into the background. And things have become much more impersonal. But I want to point out that for a certain type of personality, texting fits perfectly.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
And incidentally, that means also not only secure attachments, but also the matter, because it's for better or worse, it's also the early evolution of insecure attachments. And we'll talk about what those insecure attachments are. All of those really are being shaped by the right.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
People, you know, living in the left. Living in the left, that's right. I just want to point out there are other ways, literally, of feeding the right brain of what it needs. And one of the other ways also is going out into the world, is traveling, is being in nature, sharing those kinds of things. Those are also in addition to the in-person situations here. Yeah, we're seeing changes here.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
We're seeing changes here, and I'm not so sure too many of these are good. Let me throw out, I made a little list of the areas which are now being studied, which are showing that clearly this is right brain dominance in these activities.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Stop me at any point. Essentially, the argument that I'm making in this new book on human nature is that the highest levels of human nature are in the right brain. So essentially, intuition, Now remember, intuition is there for all kinds of professions. One of the things that a fireman gains over time is literally how to read a fire.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
So intuition, purely right brain, and intuition literally is drawing on body sensations also, et cetera. Imagery. Creativity. Lot of evidence showing creativity, the ability to processing something novel and something new. Metaphors. Imagination. Studies. Humor. Music. Poetry. Art. morality, compassion, spirituality, and the best for last, love.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Get to development of the unconscious mind also.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
What's more, there's evidence to show that it goes right hemisphere, then it goes left hemisphere, and then it goes back into left and back and right along the lifespan. So although you have... A tremendous growth spurt more than any other time in the first two and a half, three years of life. Think now about adolescence where you have another growth spurt.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Yeah, yeah. Two points here. First of all, on therapy, I think there's been too much of an emphasis on technique in therapy. And really what the right brain research is showing is that it's the right brain process that's the key here more than the technique.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
And so that being the case, due to my own training, psychotherapy has shown to be more effective in making long-term changes and even changes after the treatment is over than other forms of therapy like CBT. So I think there's been too much on that. On the matter of other experiences, The right brain is also dominant for processing novel information.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Anytime something new comes up, the right picks it up first and you get a burst of noradrenaline out of that also. So the pursuit of continuing to have a curious mind and an open mind
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
um i think is part of that and seeking new experiences in different parts of the world if i mean there's there's an economic piece of that also but with new challenges bring up new challenges that we have and to essentially if possible feed curiosity curiosity um Einstein even said something essentially that – along those lines there.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
So new experiences with new people, new challenges, new places to see, you know, travel I think is, you know – one of those and it turned out to be one of the great fortunate gifts that came from all of this. You know, I was a therapist only for about 45 years and I came into this late. I wrote this book late and literally it's led me into all New relationships and new friends.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Who starts making friends at 45 and 50 years old? But again, novelties and sharing that, you know, I think is also another way of doing that. Plus, you said this, I'll repeat it, exercise. Exercise is a key here. I happen to be interested in energy and in mitochondria. And there's a scientist, Navio, at San Diego, who has written on this, and he's talking about the healing process.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Is adolescence marked by a right brain growth spurt? It's marked by the initially right and then it goes left. So essentially with puberty and with the onset of testosterone and androgens and estrogens, it shifts now into another growth spurt at that point in time.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
And part of the healing process literally is exercise. That's fundamental to healing of whatever, physical and mental, and also restorative sleep. So taking care of our body, One of the things that we learn early in our experiences, mostly taught through the body, is literally how to take care of our bodies. And as you're well aware of, you don't see that in certain pathologies.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
And you also have certain, and I'm talking about more than just self-destructive, like cutting the butt. Ultimately, the ability to be able to look inward, and to be able to reflect back upon the self and to be able to see even what we wanna see and don't wanna see.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Now, I want to just make a quick reference to defenses because defenses can be adaptive and maladaptive, and they're important, and they're there. For example, we have defenses against overwhelming affect. Dissociation is defense against overwhelming affect. But we also have defense like repression. which is part of all human beings.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
And repression can be normal and adaptive, or it can be maladaptive. And it's maladaptive literally when the repression is very strong, essentially. What you have there is that the left hemisphere is just shutting out anything coming over from the right. That's what repression is. The left hemisphere is just shutting that all out.
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Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
So part of this is becoming more aware of those defenses that we have also. And I want to make this point also. There are certain parts of ourselves which we cannot see. We can only see them when we're getting feedback from somebody who knows us and can see those things in us. And even if at the time they're uncomfortable,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
But we need that feedback from somebody we trust to be able to see, which is why this ability literally to completely change one's psychology is highly problematic. Because remember, what you're attempting to do is to change the right brain, which is why intimate relationships, close relationships with whom we can share things is really a key there also. Everybody has blind spots.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
And the way out of that, again, is trusting enough to take in negative feedback, you know, at times also. My own feeling is that when something hits me, let's say a disappointment hits me, and one of the things I learned early about my own emotion, because in order to study emotion, you have to study your own emotion, etc.,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
which means, just for the record, now the attachment relationship, which is essentially going to be about how we regulate our emotion, because I'll be talking about attachment as about the communication of emotions, right brain to right brain, in the first two years of life, and about the regulation of emotions in that same period of time, etc.,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
That for me, literally, when something comes, I just let it come and move wherever it's going to go. And feel it just at all of its intensity and strength. And even after sharing it, literally... letting it penetrate down, so to speak. And ultimately, at some point, it'll come back into another shape and a form. But our emotions are adaptive.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
And again, I want to point out one of the major fallacies is that negative emotions are bad and positive emotions are good. Positive emotions are good, manic emotions, etc. Negative emotions are bad, loss, you know.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
We are wired for all of these emotions because they have adaptive value, and we need to be able to be familiar with all of those different types of emotions that come our way in our lives.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Yeah, it does. Essentially, it's creativity, which again is the ability to see something novel in a new way, to look at the same thing but through new eyes. So I think those are ways of literally, artists know literally how to surrender out of the left and get into the right, and you're seeing these mechanisms of surrender.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
But let me share into something else more autobiographical about what you're saying. When I decided to, I knew that I was going to write something, you know, at a certain point in time. And so for 10 years I went into a period of self-study. And literally, I went to a library, Cal State Library near me, and I just went through the stacks. Do you remember what it was like to go through the stacks?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
And I started to move into psychology, into neurology, into chemistry. But then I found myself doing something else. I went back to the piano. I took piano as a teenager. It led nowhere. But as an adult, I went back to the piano. We have a piano in the house. It came from my in-laws. Because I wanted to know something in my fingers. I didn't want to know something in my logic.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
I knew that the way that I usually would understand things would be rationally and logically. But I wanted to be able to play and be able to play again logically. purely so that it was in my fingers. And I also wanted to be able to visualize.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
So I got to a point now where I started to be able to now, to be able to see a cell and I could visualize mitochondrial moving now up into the dendrites at the cell membrane. So that visualization capacity, as well as the musical capacity, was my intuitive way of starting now more and more to get me to lean into the right to be able to learn how to be in the right.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
But ultimately, that leads to the strategies that we have for affect regulation. An attachment is essentially affect regulation, affect communication and affect regulation. So now what you're looking at is you have a mother and an infant. They are communicating with each other, right brain to right brain. And how are they doing it? by face, voice, and gesture.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
For me, that was exploration. It was exploration. Got it. It was all new information. And I found that I could master more than the field that I was trained in. Let me give you one other experience that has a lot of evidence to show. The aha experience is right brain also. So there are times when literally insights will come quickly and suddenly and they'll seem to come out of nowhere.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
And all of a sudden the muse is there. So that was an aha experience. And when I thought about it, it just made all kinds of sense. I mean, there was a purpose to it because, again, I needed to get past it. doing that. Let me tell you something else that I decided to do very early on as I was setting off into this 10-year period. I decided never to memorize anything.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
It's a lot of effort that gets nowhere. Literally what I wanted to do is I wanted to understand it in the way that I could understand it. So there's a lot of wasted time in memorization and that being the case, As you can imagine, I have a rather enormous memory. I know where things are. I know where they are. I know how to get them. I know what's important.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
And I know how to put it into a place where I can get. I know where that article is. And incidentally, when I'm working, originally, I would write everything down. And the writing had an effect of putting that more into my memory. Even now, when I'm studying, I'll take papers I'll Xerox them and I'll read them at my desk. I will not read and study right off the computer.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
In other words, I was learning my own technique of learning.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Yeah. But there's a process of introspection there about literally how do I learn and how can I literally absorb the information so that it goes in deep. The left hemisphere essentially is a surface hemisphere. The right hemisphere is the one of depth, so to speak.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
And what goes into the right, for example, if you have an experience, an emotional experience that's really important, that goes deep into your autobiographical memory. That's much deeper than you're attempting to memorize something at any point in time.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
The mother is now reading the expressions of the baby's face, the visual, the auditory, the prosody of the voice, and then the tactile. So she's picking up these kinds of communications that are coming out of that baby. Tactile, gestural, visual. And she's now picking up those communications now. She's resonating with those communications. And then she is going to regulate those communications.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Yeah. I don't think that this culture compared to other cultures really provides for that kind of time. I think that people are stressed. because of that. And now I'm going to talk about maternal leave and paternal leave in other rich countries. The paternal leave is three months and maternal leave is six months or more in Scandinavia.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
So these other countries have figured out this time of life is critical. That if you really want to affect a personality, and help shape that personality to be a moral person or, you know, to have values, etc. The time, literally, that they put in is the earliest years. That's when it's there, so to speak.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
And without that kind of leave policy, in this country, most people go back to work at six weeks. Six weeks is at the beginning of the critical period of the right brain. The autonomic nervous system is in a critical period at six to eight weeks. The amygdala is coming into a critical period. The basolateral amygdala, the insula, and the cingulate are in a critical period at that point in time.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
This is before the child has formed an attachment. Or the separation. So I see this as literally, and as I'm well aware of, there's now talking about this more and more. In fact, the recent debate, there was discussion of this also about this problem. The London School of Economics had a study about what is the best predictor, the best childhood predictor of adult satisfaction in life.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
And the best predictor was emotion. And the second was the child's conduct. And the third and last was the child's IQ. We have things upside down here. We are focusing too much on executive functions that come online at the third year. And again, what I'm suggesting to you is that the whole foundations of our personality are starting in utero.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
through the second and the third year, and then with the father, et cetera. That's where we literally should be putting the money, and the money should be there so that it provides the time. Every other culture has figured this out. The UNICEF took a poll in 2021 of 36 countries, rich countries, we came in last in emotional well-being, childhood well-being. Shame. Shame.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
And that's essentially what it's about. In the end, what we have is strategies of affect regulation. How we regulate affect for the rest of our lives depends upon the attachment relationship of the first two years, which is a right brain to right brain connection. Now, there have been hundreds, thousands of studies on attachment, as you're well aware of at this point in time.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
But the key to it, literally, I began this in 1994 with my first book, Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self, The Neurobiology of Emotional Development. Okay? Okay. Remember, Bowlby was studying attachment in the 60s. But the problem of emotion really was not picked up. And early on when they were looking at attachment, they were looking at behaviors and they were looking at cognition.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
So if you know the attachment literature, remember the strange situation?
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
I think it's developmental milestones there. You know, I'm thinking that, remember Eric Erickson talking about different stages of life and how you have a hierarchy here, literally, because the attachment is a hierarchy. It starts subcortical and then it goes subcortical. So what he said was that there are changes along the line and that it fits with that. So
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
The attachment relationship is there at later points in time. And really what it does, it guides us through our relationships with other people. It certainly guides us through strategies of what to do with stress. And that way that we deal with that stress is now going to depend upon how the mother is regulating that baby's stress during a critical period.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Now, the term critical period is an important one here, too, because, again, at At the first two years of life, it's the right brain is in that critical period there. But that leads to strategies of affect regulation of how we deal with stress, but also how we deal with novel situations. And again, all of it has to do with emotion.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
Now, I jumped there because I talked about there was attachment models moved from behavior to cognition to emotion. And essentially, the first book that I wrote was on the neurobiology of emotional development. And in 1994, when I came out with that book, that was about the same time that Antonio Damasio came out with his book,
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
And really, it was not until the mid-'90s, partly because of the neuroimaging, which was coming during, you remember, the decade of the brain, that emotion really now became a matter that science was looking at for the first time. The point that I'm making here is that attachment is not psychological. It's psychobiological.
Huberman Lab
Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain
And there was always this rift between the psychological and the biological. But when you're talking about emotions, you're not only talking about psychological events, you're talking about physiological events that are associated with those events.