Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Nice to be here.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Yeah.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I mean, I don't love the word.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Plastic makes it seem like something artificial and uninteresting.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But the idea that the brain can change is a new idea.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We used to think everything was hardwired and you are the way they are and nothing can change.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Now we know that you're making new connections every day, every time you learn something new.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And that change in our way of thinking about things has implications up and down the aisle on how we interact and everything we do.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The science of it, oh, it's so exciting.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The types of experiments that have been done, the ways that you can literally see these new connections.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Our forefathers, 100 years ago, could only look at dead tissue and imagine all the changes and excitement that was going on, Ramonica Hall and others.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But now we can real time watch these new connections and imagine that there's not
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There's hundreds of them.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There's not thousands of them.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There's not millions of them.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There's not billions.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But there's trillions of new connections every second of your day are trying to decide, should I strengthen this one?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Should I weaken this one?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Or should I leave them the same?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And that idea that your brain is as active as you feel
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
is so different than what we were told.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We were told you've got this brain, it's very dangerous, you should wear a helmet, you should not mess with it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And the fact that it's alive and moving to me is just much more consistent with my experience with my own inner life and interact with other people.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So the fact that the science matches the everyday experience I think is one of the most enlightening parts of those experiments.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I mean, they always tell you don't sweat the small stuff, and then you learn that every little thing matters, and you start sweating the small stuff.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You start realizing that the kinds of mobile you got matters, that it's interesting.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We had a mobile, and the mobile would go around in a circle, and it was just boring.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I thought it was uninteresting.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And I'd move it so it would bump into something and do something a little more interesting from time to time.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
My kids spent a lot of time looking out into the natural world.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So there were birds flying and coming and going and not predictable kinds of patterns and, again, tried to avoid some TV.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But the idea that we're kind of in a hurry.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You've got to hook up all these neurons.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Being an adult is going to happen fast.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You've got trillions of connections to make.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Every experience is contributing to that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So bedtime stories and songs and walks in the park are all making those changes.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's surprising.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's surprising that all that stuff matters.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But it does.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And so from my point of view, the fact that –
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The young brain is a sponge and that every little background sound, little clicking sound, road noise, all those things have a potential to impact the way the brain is wired is a cautionary tale.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It makes you worried about having the wrong sounds in the wrong place.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But of course you don't really know exactly what the best sounds are going to be, the best sights, the best friendships and all the rest.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So neuroplasticity is a gift to all of us, and it makes the point that the details matter, but it also makes the point that there's lots of details, lots and lots of experiences.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
No one formative experience is going to ruin some kid's life, and I think that's a little bit relieving as well.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Absolutely.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
No, I mean, I think we worry about doors slamming shut.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We worry about every little sight being the thing that's going to define a child for the rest of their lives.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And that's just not the case, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Lots and lots of hours.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We always talk about 10,000 hours to be good at anything.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And you realize you get a lot of 10,000 hours.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I mean, you really do.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Not just your language abilities.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Each person has 100,000 words.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Imagine, you don't have to sit and teach the kids every little word.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They're going to pick them up.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They're just in an environment.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
to imagine knowing their definitions, knowing their meanings and all the rest.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And the same thing of finger movements, again, whether they're going to be a violin player or a soccer player, all the dexterous movements that have to go with that, we as coaches and parents try to train that, but really the kid is training themselves.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They're figuring out how to do all that by practicing, seeing what works and what doesn't work.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We can just set an environment where that's possible and where they can succeed and not quit.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
that's really one of the big challenges.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Like I said, a kid gets exposed to food, then gets sick, and now their brain has figured out that food might be poison.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But it might be wrong, and they might end up with a plastic event in their brain that turns off a pathway for a long period of time, and it can really be hard to undo that kind of work.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
My kids know that it would depend upon whether I viewed in my judgmental nature the experience as a real experience, an adventure, something that's happening, or an artificial or a fake one.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
My concerns about video games and other things like that are these can be really detrimental because they don't have the statistics of the natural world.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If you're engaged, as my daughter was, with people and you just want to hear people talking, she was infinitely fascinated by what are they talking about?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
What are they thinking about?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And there was no end to her interest in people.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
People are interesting.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
People are complicated.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
On the flip side, if you're talking about a video game, I won't name any particular one, where it's an artificial currency where you're sort of constrained to be interested in it, similar to what would happen in Vegas where you'd say, I'm going to let you win it first so that you can get hooked on it, and then I'm going to adjust it where you're being manipulated actively.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Most experiences kids are interested in, they're not being manipulated.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's a game.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
50% of the time you win, 50% of the time you lose if you're playing football or soccer.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But there are some experiences where someone is actively messing with you
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
in a way that can be negative.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So we would always distinguish between that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Kids would share, had this great experience on a video game or a great video they saw.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And I would just point out that wasn't an experience you actually had.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That was an experience you watched online or something else, or that was a video.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And we just kept emphasizing that there's something different about real experiences.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And for me, that's about the statistics.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's about the pattern, the natural world.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Your work in the visual system, there's spatial frequencies, there's distributions, there's peripheral vision in the auditory system, there's reverberations, there's all these things that you can remove if you want to and simplify the world down.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But we evolved in an environment where there were risks, there were opportunities, there were ways for us to explore our smell, our touch, our taste, and they were all integrated together when they all get separated.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
and the touch doesn't have anything to do with the sound, and the sound doesn't have anything to do with the sight or the smell, there's a potential for them all to sort of drift off on their own and not be integrated in a way that I think is most helpful.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So for me, it was just, is it real?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Would my grandparents recognize this as a good way to spend a day?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And if it wasn't, I'd at least take some time to think about whether or not there might be some negative consequences of that artificial environment.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Yeah.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So I didn't like video games.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
My daughter did not.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It did not become a significant problem, but it was certainly an interesting agility.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Still, I grew up playing video games as well.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
One joystick, one button.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Now it's much more complicated and elaborate.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And I appreciate the beauty of it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I appreciate the finesse, the dexterity, the complexity.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I think it's fantastic.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
All the things they can do to be
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
running through a complex environment, navigating a map, looking in a certain direction, walking out, watching out for low contrast threats and prizes.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So there's a richness to it that is undeniable.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's really rewarding and satisfying.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The question is just how well does that generalize to other skills you might need in your life?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
How well prepared are you?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And are you able to turn that off at the end of the day and go on to study for your tests, do the dishes, mow the lawn, whatever else needs to be done?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And I think there are certain situations where it's really helpful and there are certain situations where it's overblown.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And the same is true of reading.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I mean I think my grandfather was a head librarian at Arizona State University and it seemed like reading – there's no end to reading.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Couldn't we just all do more reading?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And reading is great, but there's also restrictions from reading.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of my heroes and he says, you know, books well used are among the best of things and poorly used among the worst.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And the idea is if you could be coming up with your own ideas, maybe you shouldn't need to be following someone else's story and their own adventure.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Maybe you should go out and do your own a little bit.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And the question of proportions is a challenging one.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
When it's raining and you can't go outside, maybe that's a good time for reading.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
When it's a nice day outside, you could be going outside.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Maybe that's a better time to go find friends and work on dexterity and skills and get some sunlight.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
He did, yeah.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
No, it really is.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And I love that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's what I mentioned about sort of our grandfathers, the wisdom that people knew from a long time ago.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
He had an intuition about how we follow into habits.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
He would find out that as I walk, I make paths.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And as you just see, I keep doing the same way.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And he would look at that and kind of intuited that that's a habit that I'm forming.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It may be helpful, but maybe I should try to take a different way the next day.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Talked about the idea that consistency is overrated.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
He had this line from the American Scholar.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, that you feel like whatever I said, I have to keep saying it, keep being right.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And the real world will teach you, no, if you're wrong, the world will teach you.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If you think you're right about something, all your friends will teach you you're not.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If you think this is the best way to kick the ball, you'll find that someone else has a different way of doing it or play the instrument or whatever it is.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So I think that idea that there's some humility about there is no optimal, there's no perfect way, there's always some new way of learning is something that
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I appreciate it in reading books, and it's awkward that here's someone writing a book telling you not to listen to people in books.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Go out and live the real world.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And I think a lot of us are coming around to that, that we need to have our own real experiences.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And there's value to that, not just reading about someone else's.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Let's talk about what the brain does.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So we know these different areas which you've talked about, locus coeruleus releasing norepinephrine in the brain.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
When something new and exciting happens, someone claps their hands or pokes your ear, a bug flies in your face, the neurons fire.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They're surprised that that happened.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If it keeps happening, then the neurons stop firing.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So one of the things that's most surprising to me and interesting to me is your experiments by Richardson, DeLong, and others.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
recording from these areas, nucleus basalis releasing acetylcholine, locus coeruleus, even dorsal raphe releasing serotonin, is that they're excited the first time and then they quickly get used to it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And so they're always waiting for what the new thing is.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
What's the thing that's going to be informative?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
What's the thing that's going to have the most rewards?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
What's the thing that's going to have the most risk?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And the problem is we don't know what the long-term consequences are of having over and over and over activation of that pathway.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We know that if you take a child and just sit them in orphanages for years upon years, they don't come out well.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's pretty clear with animals or humans that deprivation is not good.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But what happens on the flip side when you stimulate and then you overstimulate?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We don't really know.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I don't know of any clear-cut, well-designed experiments.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The suggestion, as you know, is maybe.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
it increases depression and anxiety among adolescents.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That appears to be what's happening, but there's no causal link because everyone is doing this experiment together.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
My children watched lots of videos exposed to lots of things.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's very difficult to get rid of it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's sort of in the water.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's in the culture, having a phone and having that restricted view.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
On the flip side, this generation is great.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They've got a million things they know about because they were able to time travel and look at things in the distant past, look at things in the future, look at things in other countries.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Their awareness of people who are different from them is so exciting.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So it's hard to balance those two.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But in general, the concern for me would be if you max out that neuromodulator release, if you do things all the time, including illicit drugs, that push that up, it's intuitive to me that that would then push down all your other experiences.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So I've had the great pleasure of taking my face from the desert world of the Sinai Peninsula and putting it down into the water of the Red Sea.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's miraculous.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I mean the level of colors and movement and textures.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And you pull your head back up and you're recalibrated like this is the moon.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There's all this rock.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Put your face back down.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That contrast to me is real and very exciting.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Others have told me that they have taken a list of drugs and had very similar experiences.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And I'm not going to say that my experience of real colors and real life forms and real waves and patterns is superior.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's just my preference.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And I think we know people for thousands of years have had these kinds of experiences, looking at mountains and streams and groups of people.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
What we don't know is what happens when you take a lot of fentanyl, a lot of methamphetamine, a lot of...
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
or even nicotine at high levels?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We don't know.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But the worry is, Ben Franklin, it's all things in moderation.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Probably better to take it slow and make sure you didn't overdo this one.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But I don't know what the negative consequences are going to be other than the potential increase in depression and anxiety.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Yeah.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Well, and how you interact with it, what the ways you interact with it, or if the only way to interact with it is flipping the screen, that's pretty limited.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The human body does a lot of amazing things.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The way we can navigate, whether it's
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
skateboards or paragliding or whatever.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
People can do fantastic things with their bodies, but if you're not required to do it, we know this principle of use it or lose it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If you don't have that exposure to the sounds of Swedish vowels, when we were born, we could hear all the Swedish vowels, and then we weren't raised in a culture that used them, and they just disappeared.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And the worry is that that ability, the natural predisposition of our brains to handle those kinds of inputs, that over time when we don't use it, we'll say, I guess you don't need this.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I guess swimming is not something that you're going to need to do.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I guess – and a lot of people don't swim, which is fine.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But how many of those experiences get turned off, especially at a young age where they're easier to pick up?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's one of the big questions.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I don't know.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But it makes sense that the kinds of training, the inputs in, junk in, junk out –
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We used to think, again, that bodies just grew.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Babies just got bigger.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's all that happened.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And then we started realizing the things that they saw mattered.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
At first we thought, well, let's find what they like.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
What do they like the most?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You remember these old experiments where they found that if you give a baby a face and then you give it a cartoon face, it'll look more strongly at the cartoon face, the exaggerated black and white face.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And some babies had trouble disengaging from it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The attention mechanisms were so cued to two black circles and a mouth.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And people sold baby mobiles that were these very engaging things that the babies couldn't get their eyes off of.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Now when you go to the Babies R Us or whatever store, you don't see those anymore.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You see much more naturalistic kinds of things.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But there was a moment when we thought, well, if the babies like it, give it to them.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And then we sort of thought maybe just because they like it is not sufficient.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Maybe we should try to do a longer-term read, not that short-term immediate gratification, but the longer term.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
What does it do that the face I've seen is an extreme face, an exaggerated face?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And again, we think back to individual neurons, whether retinoganglion cells or cells in fusiform face area.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
These are parts of the brain that are involved in visual processing.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If those areas are wired –
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Normally, appropriately, then we pay attention to the right cues.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's typical when I'm looking at you when you're talking to look at your eyes, not look at your mouth.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But there are a number of people who will be more interested in the movement of the mouth because it's larger than the eye movements.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And that's a less effective way to look, is to look at the mouth instead of looking at the eyes.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
These are very subtle things, but some of the microaggressions, microgestures that are critical.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
not just in our culture but in monkeys where gritting your teeth might mean one thing and winking or looking away might mean another thing.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We want our children to pick those things up and know about how to interact with humans.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
On the flip side, social media and online culture is part of our culture now too.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And so depriving them of that and having them be –
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
blocked, deprived of what their culture now is.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
This also seemed harmful.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So for me and my wife, thinking about, I don't want them to know nothing about the internet, but I don't want them to jump in with both feet and have all of their experiences.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So what proportion is that?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You know, 20% of your day on the internet?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That seems reasonable, maybe.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Many people are at 80, 90% sometimes.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I think it might be better to be at 5% only when you're needing it to reach out or do things.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But I don't know the answer to that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We're doing this big experiment.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But we've done these experiments before.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We did these experiments, like you said, with television, 200 channels.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We did this experiment with the radio.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We did this experiment with the printing press when suddenly you could go into a library and just – there were books everywhere.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
What would that do to people?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And I'm generally an optimist.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You probably already tell.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Humanity's done pretty good so far.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The last hundred technologies didn't end things, whether it was machine guns or nuclear war or weapons.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So I'm cautiously optimistic, but I think we will rebalance, and it won't necessarily be someone telling us.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It'll be people figuring out
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I don't feel good when I use this.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So both my son and daughter routinely mention to me when they turn off apps, remove, pick your social media, they just need a break.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And I think that's, again, a sign that people individually have enough autonomy to figure out for themselves what's working and what's not.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But it would be good to have a body of knowledge to reinforce that and make it feel okay.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You're not missing out.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You're not punished because you turned this off for a few days or weeks.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But there are consequences.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Yeah, yeah.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I mean, there's a bunch of things that brings to mind.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
One is...
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
How studying the brain informs how we should use our brains.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
One idea, as you mentioned, was early language development.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Alison Gopnik and other people have looked into – there's contrasts in sounds that we can't hear.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And so my kids were young.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We said, oh, we should expose them to all those sounds.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There's a company called Baby Einstein and they play Spanish or French.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But we don't really know.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
How much of these languages should they be exposed to?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
What is the right mix to make them better world citizens, better learners, smarter, more resistant to neurodegenerative disorders or whatever?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We don't know the answer to that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So we're just running the natural experiment.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I tell everybody that being a neuroscientist is way easier than being a parent.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There's just too many choices.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There's no control group.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There's no way to run it again until you find out the actual answer.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
What's interesting was that it turns out exposing people passively, babies passively to the sounds from other languages really doesn't change very much at all because there's no interaction.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So the Chinese tones or the Swedish vowels, these different sounds, um,
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
When they're not really interacting with you, when they're just on the screen, you don't pick them up, which is really fascinating that your brain already knows that's a TV.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And how does it know that?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It knows it because your interactions with it are so limited.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I took Spanish as a kid, and they said you should watch telenovelas and learn Spanish, and you'll learn the culture, and you'll pick it all up.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You'll get the humor and the jokes.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I didn't learn that much from it because no one was talking to me.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I was watching passively.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And so we now know that when you're actively engaged, you're going to have better neuroplasticity,
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
better generalization.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You're going to better connect it than when you just sit back and watch.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Here, swiping is not exactly no interaction.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You have some, but it's pretty impoverished, pretty limited.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So I suspect a lot of it isn't that bad.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Just kind of comes in one ear, goes out the other.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But that also means those hours aren't spent doing something else.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Playing in the mud, getting your immune system developed, interacting with children, hitting things with a ball.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
you may aren't taking as many risks.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Maybe that's a good thing.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Maybe you're not getting as many head injuries as we used to get.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Maybe that's a good thing.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So I think we've got to take the good with the bad.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But in general, the idea that neuroscience is accessible and that we learn that our experiences really matter, I think that's the exciting part.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Why is chat GPT so smart?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We train it on every word we ever wrote, the whole species.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And then that went into these billions of connections, and those billions of connections produce something that's
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Relatively sophisticated.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The same thing for a child.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Here's a child.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The experiences they have matter.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
All the kids are going to learn to walk, almost all of them, by a year.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But a lot of things happen during that year.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
A lot of falls, a lot of tumbles, a lot of what's, a lot of stares.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And so I think for me, having those, a large fraction of experiences be what I call real, having the statistics of the natural world, things that our grandparents would have recognized and been familiar, that's likely to be something that's good for your brain, both as a youth,
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
as well as a full-grown adult.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Then you ask the question, how about at the end of life?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
At the end of life, is it now okay?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
My brain's already done.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Can I swipe to my heart's consent?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Can I watch Wheel of Fortune or whatever I want all day long?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The evidence suggests it also causes depression and anxiety.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If your day doesn't involve other people communicating, if there aren't surprises, someone knocks on the door.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
When I was a kid, people knocked on the door a lot.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It was a big surprise.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's not a surprise children have that much anymore, someone just randomly knocking, because they would have texted.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And so the surprises are now coming from the donk, I got a text.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Oh, Bill wants to come over.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
As the population ages, many people are likely to find out that having too many experiences that are disconnected from reality, that are just a show that's made to be engaging and interesting, isn't as good as getting on a boat and driving someplace, visiting some location, getting on a bus, driving, flying, wherever it is.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So travel gives you different experiences.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You smell different smells, you hear different things, and those engage, again, those neuromodulators.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Those neuromodulators then help
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
make changes because the vast majority of inputs we take in, we just throw away.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We're not memorizing every place I ever was, every place I ever set my keys, every word everyone had ever said to me.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
None of us are tape recorders.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We're picking which moments are the moments that are useful.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And that's hard to know because we don't know what the future looks like, but we're making guesses based on what the past looks like.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And so when the past is abnormal, robotic, uh,
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
exaggerated in its novelty.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We make changes assuming the future is going to look like that, and the future may not be.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The future may be a job, and it may not be this exciting, and it may be hard to stay focused for eight hours a day.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If you're used to something exciting happening every two and a half seconds, and I now have to do a job, for me it's writing, where I have to sit and stay focused for hours at a time, trying to put a handful of ideas together in a way that other people understand, or try to develop a new treatment for someone who's suffering from a serious neurological or psychiatric disorder,
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It just takes hours and hours of focus.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And for me, fishing was helpful for that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Sit there with your dad and just fish for hours.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And you go, what are you doing?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We're not catching.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It just means we have the line in the water.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And it might be a fish.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There might not be.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And it may only be 1% of the time you're catching a fish.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It might be one-tenth of a percent of the time you're catching a fish.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But that's enough because the time spent in anticipation and waiting and preparation, those were meaningful times as well.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So I think there's a little bit of a shift toward what are the key parts.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Is it the dopamine hit, the exciting, the novelty part, or is it all that other stuff?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And we're now learning from the training of these networks, all of it matters.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
All of those inputs, all those syllables, all the junk words matter.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And so I think that shift toward thinking we know what's important, the stuff we think of as important, that may not be all of it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
All the rest probably plays an important role too.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Yeah.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I mean, to start on the part you ended on, I mean, I really think reflection on these topics – this is another one that was a big surprise – is that –
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Thinking about it later also rewires your brain, not just the sleeping part when you're clearly thinking about it and turning over your mind.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But as you're on the way home from the game, as you're planning to drive to the game or the date or the business appointment or whatever it might be.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That idea that it's not this, all the learning doesn't happen at this one moment, but there was some preparation that went into it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There was the actual event, which often has the friction you're describing, where there's some engagement and decisions are being made, where there's information being transmitted and information being gained.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And then this period of reflection where you're wondering about it, you're thinking about, for me, often looking back over my pictures, either of
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Having a child or going on vacation is helpful in reorganizing it and reframing it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
For me, those are helpful things to do.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But the idea that this is all happening at one snapshot, that's how we used to think of it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We used to think of it as light bulbs went off, you memorize the picture, and you're done.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But that's not how any of the ideas, it's not how math is viewed, it's not how language is organized in our brain.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's a series of these memorization events.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We're trying to make use of it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And what's going to be useful is hard to anticipate, hard to predict.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So I like to think of it sort of from an information point of view.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
How many bits of information?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So a bit of information is just a yes or a no.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And we now live in a world where a floppy drive doesn't have a kilobit.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Yeah, you could get gigabits.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You can get terabits.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So we're talking about billions, trillions of bits.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And you wonder how much did you learn when you were going up to the plate and you were going to hit the ball?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Well, this pitcher makes a particular look when he's going to give a slider.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
This person gives a particular glint in their eye when they're about to say something mean.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Each way you watch that person is giving information about what's happening in the future.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But you have to be there and you have to see that person having that experience.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Now, as the ball is traveling down...
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
to you or as the person is about to, you know, pull the ball away from you in the Charlie Brown analogy or whatever the experience is, having that sequence of events, you have a prediction.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's pretty low reliability that this is going to be a slider.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Then I start to see, hey, it looks like a slider.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Then I swing at it and I miss and I say, that was a slider.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I missed that one.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Then I think about it at the end of the day and I go back and for many of us, you dream about it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
What is all that about?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
My original interest in neuroplasticity actually came because something happened to me, not something I chose to happen.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I worked in a lab in college squeezing the salivary glands of Drosophila, so the little maggots in the fruit flies.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If you squeeze them, they have these banded patterns.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
which is where all their DNA and their chromatin, their organization of the DNA is organized.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And my job was to look and find – it looked like barcodes.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So it would be a thick line, thick line, thin line, thin line, thick line, thick line.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
In the saliva?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's actually in the cells.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They're –
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's a syncytion, so about 900 cells all fused together to make one cell.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
All the DNA then aligns when you stain it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
This is in Ron Davis' lab at Baylor College of Medicine.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But when I closed my eyes, I didn't see what I normally saw.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
What I saw were these bands because I'd been staring every day at these patterns.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And that happened to me several more times when I spent a lot of time with that focus and that friction you're talking about.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Suddenly you start thinking about it differently.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I had a conversation with a young man a few days ago.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
His native language is Spanish, but he told me, I think my native language is English because I only think in English.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And when I talk to my mom, I have to translate.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And they told me when I took Spanish, you'd eventually dream in Spanish.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And I did a few times, but I never quite got good enough.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So that idea that when you have a really significant experience, you can close your eyes and see it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I believe that baseball pitchers are seeing it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Balls being thrown, the signs being given.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I believe that someone who's playing violin really well or a neuroscientist who's doing surgery, they see those things.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And that's a repetition.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We now know from Olympic skiers that if you do all your time skiing, you're going to wreck your knees.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So they spend a lot of time in visualization.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You spend a lot of time imagining what's going on, stepping through the motions because it's too dangerous to go down the hill at that speed too many times.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You'll eventually wreck your knees or break your back.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But practicing it can be done offline.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And that practicing, the neurons don't know.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So long as you're engaged, so long as you're modified by it, that's sufficient.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The problem is you're not learning anything new if you're just visualizing it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Where's the feedback from the world?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There's not, but you get the repetitions.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And so that idea that we can combine, and again, many, many traditions for thousands of years have had these kinds of notions.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You should go back and repeat these aspects to us.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We need that extra benefit.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Certainly that we should sleep.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There are no cultures that say don't sleep.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
These are well-received good ideas.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We're now learning how does that work
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And I'm personally excited about the idea that it's about the connections.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We had this idea from thousands of years ago.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There were four or five things that could be in balance or out of balance.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They were famously blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And they could be in different levels, and the levels were all that were needed.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And that made a lot of categories.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Because with four things at several different levels, you can make lots of categories.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The Myers-Briggs personality test, you take a few dimensions, and you can kind of explain anything.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But whether that's really how we work, where we really are too much blood, too much bile, too much phlegm, or even too much serotonin, too much norepinephrine, too much dopamine, maybe there's more to us.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Well, what could it be besides that?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And the answer is, I think the experiments from our forefathers, Ramon y Cajal, Emilio Golgi, said it's the connections.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And we went, what do you mean connections?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
What would the connections do?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And now we know from some beautiful studies that have come out recently, it's 150 trillion of these things inside my brain, inside your brain, inside each of our listeners' brains.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And how do they get to be the way they are?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Did the genes make them?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The genes?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There's only 3 billion base pairs in the genes.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Not nearly enough.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We only have 20,000 proteins.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
How could 20,000 make $150 trillion?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They couldn't.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Genes are critical.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They set us up to learn.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But they're not enough to tell us how we work.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And I think that's true.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But the genes are interacting with our experiences.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
As we listen, as we hear, our brain is being rewired.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Whether it's for Japanese or English or Swedish, whatever it might be, our brains can learn anything.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We can fly the space shuttle.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You and I can fly the space shuttle.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We can do brain surgery.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
All of us can.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It just takes practice.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's the miraculous nature of the way our neurons work.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Surprising to me is I think we're close to figuring it out.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
How do the neurons work?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
1949, this guy Donald Hebb said, fire together, wire together.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
A lot of us went, does that make any sense?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If all the neurons who fired all wired together, wouldn't everything just fire together and everything just wire together and you'd have a seizure?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And the answer is that's exactly what happens.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So his intuition, though, partly right that the covariance, the co-occurring of these events is an important aspect of learning.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's not so simple.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
we found out that the neuron that fires a little late, they both fire together, but the neuron that fires a little bit late, instead of long-term potentiation, strengthening the connection, we get long-term depression, weakening.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We've been working on the brain 100 years, but we really only figured this out about 25 years ago.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And then the fact that none of that happens, no firing together, wiring together, no out-of-sync fail-to-link, none of that happens if the neuromodulators don't arrive.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And the neuromodulators arrive a couple seconds later.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So the timing, whether to strengthen or weaken, is a millisecond, a thousandth of a second.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It says strong or weak.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Which way should I go with it?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And then I've got this two-second window that says sometime within a couple seconds, did it work?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Was that a win or a loss?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And if nothing happens, if it just wasn't important at all, then it all just gets flushed.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
In one ear, out the other, you just forget it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But when something exciting happens, you get release of acetylcholine, norepinephrine.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
These things go into the brain.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They bind to receptors.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They change what's happening inside the cell.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And that computation is really sophisticated.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And we don't have 100 billion things making that computation.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We have 1,000 trillion running that computation.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And that computation is much more sophisticated than the computation that's happening when you train a large language network.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Most of your listeners will have heard of artificial intelligence, machine learning, have some basic idea.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But we know how that works because we built it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And it doesn't work how you and I work.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's a big, giant, global learning signal.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And we just keep running around feeding it back in.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And everybody learns this is the right answer.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And it threads through the entire network.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Right and wrong is told to every single neuron in the network.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's something called gradient descent.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And that process...
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
of improving the network, making it better and better and better at predicting has led to the revolution we've seen in artificial intelligence.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
What's cool is that our network is cooler.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's way bigger.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
ChatGPT is 540 billion weights.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We're 150 trillion.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So that makes us 500 times, each of us, 500 times bigger in scale.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And instead of requiring huge amounts of energy, a light bulb is all it takes.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Eat a hamburger a day, eat plenty of food, you can learn all day long with that amount of energy.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There's not that much energy in a hamburger.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And that's miraculous.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And so I think there's a lot of worry that when we learn about the brain, it will devalue humanity.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We'll be less impressive.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We'll be less exciting.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I've just seen the opposite my whole career.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If we were just genes.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Then you'd have eugenics.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You'd have all these problems.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You'd have people are valued based on whether their genes are right or wrong.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Turns out the 20,000 genes doesn't explain us.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The hundreds of cell types don't explain us.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's the synapses.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I think for a long time, we were hoping there'd be an easy fix.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If someone had a problem, it'd be nice.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If they just had too much blood, we can give them some leeches, drain the blood out.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They'd be back to good, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Saw George Washington died.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But now we're learning most people don't have four or five things that are right or wrong.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They've got billions.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But they're all changeable at any stage in life.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They get really hard.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Don't disagree to lose an accident, for example, or to get over a traumatic event.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It could be really difficult.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But the fact is the brain is plastic until the very day you die.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And that ability now to get our head around –
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
What do billions of connections mean?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
What is all this information for?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's informing me, not just to make us better to beat someone else on a test or anything else like that, but it's just part of who I am.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
When I look at a cloud, I've never seen that cloud before.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
When I hear a baby coo or a pet a cat, all those experiences are really information rich.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Different cats feel different.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Different clouds look different.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Different babies make different sounds.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And the fact that I get my unique experience, you get your unique experience, is what our great, great, great, great grandfathers told us, that we were unique and special.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And then a lot of people looked at the clockwork universe and said, no, no, no, it's all very deterministic.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's all very fixed.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's all very rigid.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You're just a machine that does what it's told.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It doesn't really seem right.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The math guys now tell us as soon as you put three things together in a nonlinear way, it's hard to predict what it's going to do.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And the computer scientists in the world, my brothers, one of them, have finally admitted, we don't fully understand what it's doing.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We don't even know how you could understand it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's so rich and complicated.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And we're now okay with that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That kind of humility about what computers are doing and how they're working can reflect back on our own bodies where I don't know exactly why I make every decision.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I say lots of things I regret.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
No, I shouldn't have said that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
All of us do.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But the idea that I can change it and I can make amends for that, I can say that wasn't what I meant to say.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I apologize for that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's really exciting that there's a biological basis for it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And it's this four-factor learning rule.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
where there's some proteins, receptors that are having binding of glutamate, serotonin, and norepinephrine, all these words you've talked about before, but they add up to something.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They don't eliminate me.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They add up to me.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I think that's something we can really be proud of.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And I think you're getting this information out to audiences is really exciting because people have the right to know this.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Taxpayer money paid for all this knowledge.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We've learned all this stuff.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And it has real implications, whether it's for how we treat people with disability, how we treat our elders, how we treat people who've committed crimes, all these things.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
have implications, and I'm not saying everyone needs to become a neuroscientist by any means, but it's not just a curiosity.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's not just a laboratory trick we wanted to work out.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
This understanding has implications, and we've been building, as our forefathers did in other fields, physics and all the rest.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They've built all the way where their model of physics is pretty good.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Our model of the brain is not there yet.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We're not at that level of understanding everything, but moving in that direction toward eventually being able to find some child or some older person who's got a real problem
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They just can't do it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We can switch from a mode of just labeling them, diagnose and adios, to a new mode of how can we assist you?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And it might be changing lifestyles, changing diet, changing experiences, changing rhythms, changing friendships.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But it might also be, in some cases, there's a real problem.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Dopamine cells in the substantia nigra have died.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We're going to need to make this change.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We need to put a stimulating electrode in.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Or if the hair cells in your ears all die, you can't hear.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We now know why that is.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They're not punished by God.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They can't hear because the little vibrations in the air that we can't see aren't getting into their brain.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So we take a cochlear implant.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We take a microphone.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We record the vibrations.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We put it into the brain in the right way.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And now many people can hear.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That was a miracle not too long ago.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Now it's a technology you can just go buy.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And moving that progress of neuroscientists, some things like schizophrenia, we've made very little progress.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's very hard to figure out what we would do.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But at least we understand the nature of the disease.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's not that they've got a germ or a bacteria or a virus.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's not that their one gene is big and bad and broken.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's not contagious.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But there's some wiring challenges.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And at most days, someone with schizophrenia is perfectly normal.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Most people with neurological and psychiatric disorders spend large periods of time normal between periods of migraines or depression.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They are acting totally reasonable.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And we want to spend more time, push them more toward those times of health and satisfaction and reward and away from those times of disability, engagement, limitations.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And I think we're moving in that direction instead of labeling and putting people off in homes, more to engaging, understanding, and then eventually intervening.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
No, I think that's exactly right.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I mean if you know you're not going to need it, biology would have said you don't need this.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's a leaf that's wiggling in the air.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I don't need to know where that leaf is.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But this is the thing that cues me to where I'm going to find my next meal.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's going to be something I'm going to be interested in.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If this is going to help me get a mate, I'm going to learn that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If this is going to be an irrelevant fact about a cloud, I'm not going to.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And I think children have a lot of trouble with that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There's a stage in childhood where they'll see a plane up there and they'll say, oh, my God, there's a little plane up there.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That plane has no interaction with you at all.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But they're fascinated by it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They're cued into it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They're interested in it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We all the time have to figure out, what are the things we're going to be tested on?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
What are the things you're going to need to know?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And one of the ways you do that as educators, we both do, is you give them a test.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And a lot of people say, I can't wait to have the last test.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Really?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You want to have no more time when someone judges and determines, how'd you do?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
What is your evaluation?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I think a lot of times, many of us become lifelong learners, and we're comfortable knowing that someone else knows more than me.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I'm not going to win.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But that I'll be able to find out, how much did I do?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That I know what's possible.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And testing is good for us.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Educators do it not just to assign and rank and distribute and give Bs and Cs and Ds, but someone says, you could do better than that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If you got a D, you could have done better.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I'm not saying you're flawed.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I'm saying you didn't put in whatever was needed.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And maybe that person does need to put more work in to get the B or even the A.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But it's not my opinion that they can't get it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's that they didn't get it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Explaining what's real.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
What percent did you know?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
What did you actually learn?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
How good are you at throwing the tomahawk, at shooting the arrow, at doing rock climbing?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The visualization I'm thinking about is like from Free Solo when he's imagining doing this.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
He's already done it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But he's now going through imagining it again.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
All of us do that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
My children did martial arts.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They're both black belts in Taekwondo.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And they would practice these forms.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I took it at Berkeley when I was a student there.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I just really enjoyed it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Is it useful?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I don't – I've never been in a street fight.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I've never needed to apply these skills.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But there was a beauty to it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There was a usefulness to it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And someone came and tested me.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I made it a yellow belt, full disclosure.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But I was going to need to know it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And so I knew I would stand in front of other people and admit –
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I didn't learn it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I wanted to learn it, but I didn't learn it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Knowing that someone, a mentor you respect, a peer you value, a spouse who cares about you, whatever it is, is going to look and see, how'd you do?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I don't think that's harmful, judgmental, negative.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's not part of the culture of exceptionalism and meritocracy.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's just, give me some feedback.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
How am I doing?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And a lot of times we can do extraordinary things when people do raise the bar on us a little bit.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And that can be very self-fulfilling.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Certainly an over-test-focused culture.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
My mom was a master primary education educator.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
She didn't really care very much for all of the testing-focused stuff.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
She thought, I've got to get this kid to learn how to interact well with others and put away his crayons.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I don't need to worry about these particular flashcard-based skills.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But we go back and forth.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But the times table, is that really important?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Memorizing how multiplication works?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Or should you spend your time with all the states, 50 states and all their state capitals?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I don't have an answer.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I'm not here to tell you that I know what the right thing to do is.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I don't know all the state capitals.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
My children do.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Is that useful?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I don't know whether that's going to come out valuable.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And that's one of the exciting things about life.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You don't know what's going to be helpful.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Maybe playing a lot of video games is going to turn out to be really helpful.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I can't have to have enough humility.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I think certainly one of the things I know you've experienced as a scientist is just the incredible humility that comes from recognizing this thing is way more complicated than how I'm thinking about it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It just is.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We start there.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We know that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And we're okay with that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We make our best model, our best explanation we've got, the explanation that fits the data we have now, that's as simple as possible.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And the reason we choose the simplest one is it's the easiest to prove wrong when it's inevitably wrong.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And we just make the incremental progress.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Life's a lot like that too.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Certainly parenting is a lot like that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I think this is going to be good for the kid.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And then, no, this is not good for the kid.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I think this is going to be bad for the kid.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Oh, that turned out to be a really good learning experience.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
when they're in tears and there's some big crisis.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So understanding that we don't know it all, that things are typically neither as bad as they seem or as good as they seem, and that maximizing something, that's kind of one of the key concepts I worry about a little bit.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Men maximize...
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Minimizing all the bad things, maximizing all the good things assumes you know which things are bad and should be minimized, which things are good and should be maximized.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And a lot of times we come to recognize later in life, oh, many of those things that I really worked hard not to have happen.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Those are really valuable experiences because they taught me either how to interact with other people who've had those experiences or taught me some skill that I didn't know I would need to do, how to change a tire or whatever else it is you don't want.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You're tired to go flat, but then you learn how to change a tire.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Now you learn how a scissor jack works or whatever thing that later comes in handy.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So to me, it's more the diversity of experiences than the better experiences.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And I think right now we're a little bit at a time where there's enough judgment about which experiences should you be having.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I just returned from Yellowstone National Park and there's a little platform you can look down on Grand Prismatic Spring.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And there's people who are just like, you are looking at a 700 foot across hot spring on top of a super volcano with rings of different colors of thermophilic bacteria and algae.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And you go, take my picture and go.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And it's just difficult to say, stop.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Look at how big this is.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It will take more time.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So I assume that the time you put into it, this is back to your friction idea, the time you put into it is probably proportional to the impact, lasting impact it's going to have on your life.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And so when you're checking boxes, looking for things, it's probably not going to have much impact.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
When you're playing violin for the 100th hour, not a violin player, but...
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There's a point where you eventually have changed who you are.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You're now a violinist.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I'm a neuroscientist.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I don't think it's something that's hard to do.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Anyone can do it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Just spend all day doing experiments.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And that's what's neat about reading books or being a skier or being a parent.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Everybody can get good at it, but you only have so many hours.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And so I always think about the pie chart.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You only get 100%.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Coaches always say 110%.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There's no 110%.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's only 100%.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
How are you going to spend your time?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Here I'm talking about the waking hours because I'm not going to cut corners on the sleeping hours.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And so you just look.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
How am I going to spend it?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Some time spent working, paying the bills, getting the job done, some time in leisure and recreation, some time with spiritual activities and trying to make that balance.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I find it looks a lot like it looked for my grandparents.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But the proportions of that pie chart do not look like I just want to disengage and spend all my time streaming on social media, just me personally.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
People who have done that –
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Look a lot like you'd think someone who's addicted would look.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They eventually realized it's just not doing it for me anymore.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I don't get much satisfaction.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Gilbert at Harvard did this great experiment looking at what made people happy.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Had these little things pop up.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You may know about this experiment and ask, how are you feeling?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And like people were happy when they were getting eggs.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It was just like, I'm at the store.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
My wife said, get eggs.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I'm getting eggs.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
How are you doing?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I'm pretty good.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I got eggs.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That idea that you're happiest when you're accomplishing some simple goal, not some Olympic-level impossible goal, but just some simple thing that needs to be done.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
What was surprising from that study was that when people were daydreaming, which for years we thought the pursuit of happiness, our forefathers thought if you could just sit and contemplate your navel and have the examined life, you'd be most happy.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Not so.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Not so.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Oftentimes, contemplating our own life leads us to find someone who's got a better version of it, leads us to realize we're not accomplishing every goal.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And so maybe humans evolved, were created so that they would be actively engaged in doing something.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That appears to be the case.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And when we disengage, it appears that things happen that are not good.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
What are those?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Typically, in psychiatry, they're called anxiety and depression.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They're different things.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But they may be very similar sides of a coin where this is not working for me.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And I think we can work back to how about we go to the laundry?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
How about we go to the grocery store and find out that that is, in fact, a satisfying activity, even though it's pedestrian.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's not something you're going to put an Instagram post on, you know, making a good pancakes.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I'm pretty good at making pancakes.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I flip it over.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's just brown all along.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's a good pancake.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Some people are not as good at me.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I take a little pride in that, but I'm not beating them.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I'm not better at pancake making.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I flip it over.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's a pancake.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I serve it to the kid.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The kid goes, good pancake, Dad.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You're sort of done.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I think we devalue that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
by thinking I could just go to International House of Pancakes and make a better pancake.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I did it myself.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
A lot of people during COVID found out, make it yourself.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I never made a bagel in my life, and suddenly we're locked down for two whole weeks, and it's like, let's go make bagels, kids.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And I went and made a bagel.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It wasn't a good bagel.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I can get a better bagel anyplace.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But I made that bagel.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I learned a little bit about it and I appreciate better those people who master that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And now when I taste a bagel, I go, now I see why your bagel is better than my bagel.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And so I think those experiences are all coming into my brain.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I still remember.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Obviously, I wouldn't have mentioned it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
This thing six years ago when I'm sitting in my kitchen with my kids and a pot of water and some flour trying to figure out what I'm going to do with myself.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I didn't want the whole world shut down.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But I got that gift from it that I have that better appreciation now of bagels.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And I just think that's a worldview that we really could have gone down a path where studying the brain made us unimportant.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It made computers good and humans bad.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I've not seen that at all.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I'm super proud of all my friends.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I wouldn't rather hang out with a chat bot than with my friends.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And I think that's going to continue to happen.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I don't expect there's going to be a major revolution in that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And that's a surprise.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's a surprise that discovery keeps leading to good things, not bad things.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There are a lot of dangerous things I mentioned, machine guns and nuclear weapons, but we mostly haven't used those things.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We've met all this good stuff.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So you can see I'm an optimist, and it partly comes from studying the brain.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I get to study the brain while it's alive and listen to neurons while they're actually firing.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Other people looked at it while it was in dead tissue under a microscope, but they were both able to see this thing is alive, and that was reflective of how I feel as a live person, not as a machine, not as a pawn, not as a –
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
one vote in a democracy, but as a real person.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And neuroscience is supporting that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And that's been the history of science.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We didn't ruin things when we found out that the sun's not revolving around us.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It made it better when we found out we're revolving around the sun.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We're not the only galaxy.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
All those things were good for us.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But at first, people were really nervous about having the answer.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I've just been surprised that finding the answer keeps being the good thing.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You'd rather have the answer.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There are no answers we don't want.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's really surprising to me.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Because it could have turned out we're all bad and there's nothing here and all the nihilist philosophies and all the rest would be right.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But that doesn't appear to be the case.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And all that comes from this sort of friction, this reflection, all these issues, learning about how the brain works, all the way down to the biological level, all the way up to societies and groups of people who continue to be mostly pro-social.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
mostly taking care of each other, mostly not destroying the earth, figuring things out, making adjustments.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The ozone layer had a hole in it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We made some changes.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That seems very reasonable.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We may not be fast about it all the time, but we tend to make the right path, both in science as well as in our species.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And I think that's because they're both using the same mechanism.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We get feedback from the world.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
When we make the wrong choices, we see it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's true as a parent, true as a scientist.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
When things don't work, you're going to find out.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And I like that feedback from the world.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Yeah.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I mean they remind me of the sort of four fundamental forces of nature and then we're looking for the grand unified theory, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So in physics, you've got electromagnetism, gravity, strong nuclear force and weak nuclear force.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We're trying to put them all together.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We know they all exist but what do they all do individually?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
How do they all work together?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They make tables.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I mean that's what all this stuff does.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
For me, those four neurotransmitters began as a simple experiment searching for an explanation.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
My story of this is easy in the beginning.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I heard about one experiment done by Greg Reckinson in the early 90s, and a monkey is reaching out and having a vibration on the tip of his finger, and if he pays attention to it enough, he can double the number of neurons in his brain or triple or sometimes five times more neurons that respond to a touch of the finger.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's amazing.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That monkey was also listening to a sound that happened just as often, but his auditory cortex did not change.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
because he wasn't listening to the tone.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
What was useful to him was the touch.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
He'd pull his hand away and get a pellet reward based on the touch.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And the other, the sound, was a distraction.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So his brain learned touch, not sound.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
One of the other monkeys was randomized to be in the other group.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That monkey was also getting his finger vibrated, but that vibration was a distraction.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And now the sounds mattered.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
When the sound made a tiny change, he had to pull his hand away, not because of the vibration, but because of the sound.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And that monkey had no change in the way his brain processed the sense of touch on his finger, but quadrupled the number of neurons in his brain that responded to that particular pitch because that particular pitch had information.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
At the time, I was a biochemistry major, and I thought, wait, I know the cellular basis of life.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There's all these cells.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
This is kind of a big idea from the last century.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Life is made of cells.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Why?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Who knows?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But that's a core idea, and it's true.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
DNA is one of the other core ideas, how proteins work.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But how does a cell, one 100 billionth of me, how does it know, which I'm paying attention to?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It can't know everything.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
With chat GPT, it does know everything.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We send a signal to every cell.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We have a broadcast system.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Every cell knows everything.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's how it's built.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But with us, a cell, I didn't know of a way, there was no biology then or now, where one cell could know what is happening about everything.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The closest thing that was available was release of
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Acetylcholine.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We knew that if you took a drug for 100 years we've known that blocks all the acetylcholine, you won't remember anything.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Nothing you're hearing on this podcast will be remembered if you took a drug that blocked acetylcholine.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You just won't remember anything.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's an amnestic.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
People used to give it to patients when they'd have surgery so they wouldn't remember all the horrible pain.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
What is the drug?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The drugs, anticholinergics like scopolamine, atropine.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
These are drugs that block acetylcholine just by preventing the neurotransmitter from binding the receptor.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
These are now date rape drugs, these kinds of things.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They're really bad because they block our memories and we need our memories.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And we knew acetylcholine was responsible, but that doesn't really explain how it works.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The fact that you need it doesn't say what it's doing.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So the hypothesis was maybe the animals paying attention doesn't matter.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Maybe it's simpler than that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And maybe what's really happening is each time the animal tries, pays attention, focuses with that friction, with that attention, that at that moment, there's a burst of acetylcholine being released.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So I mentioned male on to long, recorded from those neurons, and sure enough, when an animal's doing this task, those neurons fire.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So the question was, if I flipped it around and said, let me put an electrode in those neurons, now there is no task.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I'm going to activate just those neurons.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
While a tone happens, can I also quadruple the number of neurons that respond to that tone?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And it doesn't mean anything to the animal at all.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Like I know it doesn't mean anything because there is no reward.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The animal is not hungry.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Nothing is happening.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So that was the work I did with Mike Merzenach.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And the answer is it worked, which was just incredible.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The brain, the proportion of neurons that respond to your finger or to a particular smell or to a particular orientation of light, all those can be changed.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
based on the relative timing of the release of neurotransmitters, including acetylcholine, and the activity in your brain, which is a very rich data source, lots of information about sights and sounds and smells.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It has to happen a lot of times.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
How many?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Hundreds of times per day for many, many days.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's what happened to me when I was squashing those flies.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Every day I'd go in and look at the same pattern and I'd close my eyes and I'd see it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It didn't happen once.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It required that spaced repetition we know from psychology and neuroscience.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's required to change the brain.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And so, okay, I can change the brain with this one thing.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Others came along and said, what if instead of doing acetylcholine, I stimulated, instead of nucleus basalis releasing acetylcholine, I stimulated locus coeruleus releasing norepinephrine?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Same thing happens.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Wait a minute, it's a totally different brain area.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It doesn't matter.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I release these neurotransmitters.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I also can quadruple it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
All right, what if I did dopamine?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You also get an increase.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So the idea is I'm just labeling these things.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
All these events, I'm a wash in information.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Everything I look, every leaf that wiggles, every breath of air, wind against my face, every bit of my shirt, most that I ignore because it doesn't matter.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But I'm learning what matters and what doesn't matter.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And a baby is doing it by fumbling around with their fingers and hitting themselves and trying to get the bottle.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We're doing it by trying to figure out what gets us social cues, what gets us reward or prestige or mating opportunities or safety or security.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And the way the neurons know, the tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of me
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
is this little release.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And this release is very transient.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's not about how much there is.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's about the timing of it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And the psychologist knew this.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You ring a bell, you feed the dog, the dog starts to salivate.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So these classic experiments by Ivan Pavlov simply show that the brain can change.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Why does the salivation change?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Because of a ringing bell.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Because that's the thing that leads to this event being useful.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's useful to the dog to prepare for this activity.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And so you condition this particular synapse to be strengthened.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Where normally bells just ring.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Dogs don't care about bells.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Bells don't matter.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's just a church.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's just the end of the hour.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Ignore it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But if over time you repeatedly teach, then you make this change.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
When we teach undergraduates what does acetylcholine do, we will sometimes say it's the memory neurotransmitter.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And when we say what does norepinephrine do, we'll sometimes say it's the attention one.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And we say what does dopamine do, we'll sometimes say it's the reward one.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And we say what does serotonin do, we'll sometimes say it's the mood one.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And there's reasons for that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And they have a lot to learn.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And making it simple is a good idea.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But the chance that any given word in English
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
has a biological basis, one molecule, one cell type, one rhythm, is zero.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There's an infinite number of words we could have made.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There's a lot of complex biology.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There isn't likely, in my opinion, this is a rare opinion, there isn't likely to be an attention thing.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's just a word we made up to describe a series of phenomenon.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There doesn't have to be a gene for that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We think there does.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There's a gene for everything.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There's lots of genes for everything.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So the way it works to bring this all together, these forces all coming together, is called the synaptic eligibility trace.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
This is Alfredo Kirkwood's work and many others.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
He's at Johns Hopkins.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But many people have contributed to this.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The neuron has learned, the synapse has learned, I need to strengthen long-term potentiation because there's a presynaptic input, releasing typically glutamate, onto the postsynaptic cell.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The cell is receiving it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Because the order was right, release glutamate and then respond, I should strengthen.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But 99.99999 times out of 100, I don't do it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I just let it go.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I was going to strengthen it, but then that wasn't important.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I just let it go.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
A handful of seconds each hour matter, and we're trying to pick which ones matter.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Maybe it's 100, but it's not every second matters, some small fraction.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And what we discovered is by triggering this release,
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We're using the same way biology always works.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's how you learn to play violin.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I made a squeaky note.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I go, oh, something there was wrong.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I need to make an adjustment.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And what's weird is it's the same cocktail when it's a good thing or a bad thing.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Cetylcholine, norepinephrine, serotonin.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Dopamine, of course, changes negatively when it's bad and positively when it's good.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But all of these things dump onto the cell.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That postsynaptic cell spine is trying to figure out, should I strengthen or weaken?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And they all work together in a very bizarre way to create that spike timing-dependent plasticity.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And so it's a four-factor learning rule.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Relative timing, pre-post, thousandth of a millisecond is two of them.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
then arrival on two G-protein coupled receptors.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's just the name they were given.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's not a good name, I don't think.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There's not an H-protein coupled receptor that I know of.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But these G-protein coupled receptors are running this computation, super sophisticated computation, way better than what AI's got.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And that computation means I can play pool or I can learn to swim or I can learn to walk or I can speak French if I wanted to.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And the fact that these neurotransmitters are working together in consort is a surprise.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It seemed like they would likely do different things.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And my understanding of why we keep thinking that is because when I look inside my car, everything in the car has a different purpose.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The brakes have nothing to do with the transmission.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The transmission has nothing to do with power steering.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Power steering has nothing to do with the muffler.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's because a human designed it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And the way we think about things is to make one thing that does one job, one thing that does another job, one thing that does another job.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Biology, evolution is a tinkerer.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And it just makes up live and die.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Sometimes the wolf lives, sometimes the wolf doesn't live.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And we end up with this very messy thing
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
where all these pieces work together really well.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But when we try to give them labels, what is the thing that's causing Alzheimer's?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
What's the thing that's causing schizophrenia?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
What's the thing that's causing stroke?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Sometimes it's easy.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
For stroke, it's a blood clot.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It causes damage to the brain.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But for the vast majority of things, it's a whole bunch of nature-nurture mumbo-jumbo where a bunch of experiences, stress, anxiety, plus a bunch of genes interact it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But the part we have control over are these synapses.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The brain, as you know, is mostly not going to get very many new neurons.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You get some new neurons, but not very many.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Most of your neurons you've got now you're going to die with.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But all those spines are turning over all the time, just like all the cells in your face are turning over every few weeks.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Those spines are turning over and changing and reprocessing your memories.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And by understanding now how this works, we think we can help people who are stuck.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So there's a large number of people in our society, maybe because of social media, but maybe that happened before social media, who are really broken, have really bad traumatic events, fear of death, and they just can't get over it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They're stuck in a way that's not helpful.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's called post-traumatic stress disorder.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And we're now switching this from the exciting knowledge, learning in the lab how fruit flies and worms and sea slugs work,
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And finding out there's a lot of similarity to how the mouse works and a lot of similarity to how the monkey works and a lot of similarity to how we work.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Mostly the same, the genes.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Certainly the ones we've been talking about so far, all the identical genes in all these species.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Can we then make use of it?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And it's kind of scary because you think, I don't want someone coming around and changing my brain.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But if I asked you and I said I was stuck, just like if I said my bone is broken, of course I want a doctor to put those two bones together, put that cast on and help the healing process.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Most ways we get injured, we don't need a doctor.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Scratch a wound, get a cold, doctor's not going to help you.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But for many of them, you need someone to set that bone, put it right.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And we're just now moving to this stage where first psychologists and lately now neuroscientists are learning how to reset those.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Many people have a great fear of heights, which is a smart thing to have.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You don't want to fall off a cliff.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's super bad.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You could die.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But for some people, they can't work at a building they need to work at because their fear is so great.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
My psychologist friends who have been mastering this arcane art of cognitive behavioral therapy now claim a 100% cure rate for severe fear of heights.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
People are really – it's debilitating.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Not just afraid of height.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Everyone is afraid of height.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You should be.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's a smart thing.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's adaptive.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But for maladaptive, which is produced by some bad experiences typically –
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They think, that's not my field, after decades of research doing it slightly differently, it can make it worse, which you don't want to do, but they've now found a path to rewire the brain and restore people.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
People can now go on an airplane safely if you go get a therapist.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It costs some money to work with a therapist, but you can change your brain back.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And if you don't do it right, you'll have that fear for the rest of your life.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That'll be part of your personality.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Now we learn you can make that change.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
For people with post-traumatic stress disorder, a similar therapy, cognitive processing therapy or prolonged exposure therapy, will cure about 40% of people.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's fantastic.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Sexual assault, a war, go get therapy.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You got a good chance of being cured and never having this problem again.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's fantastic.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That didn't used to be the case.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It used to be 20%.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They made some changes and bumped it up to 40%.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
For military, it's about 20% chance.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's a little bit worse.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It works less well in military populations for a reason we don't really understand yet.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But the idea that a cure is possible, that's amazing.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If we could have a cure, that's what people want.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They want cures.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They don't want to be a little better.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They want a cure.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And so for some of the mental health conditions –
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
not the ones we chose necessarily, but some of the ones we stumbled upon, we found that that rewiring of the brain is so possible that you can take symptoms and push them all the way to zero.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But what happens if you're in that group where you're in the 60%?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You go to the therapy, you relive, you work with the therapist, you go through all the stuff, you do all the work, and you still have intrusive nightmares.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You still have great fear of this.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You still have a pounding heart, hypervigilance, avoidant behavior, all the hallmark signs of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
What do you do there?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And you can't blame the psychologist.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You can't blame the patient.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They've done what they can do.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We now come to neuroscience and say, well, what are the new avenues?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
What do you guys understand?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
How could it get stuck?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
How could it be broken?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And we used to think it was demons.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Then we thought it was humors that are wrong, high or low.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Now we think it's wires.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And the answer is those wires are hard to change.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The neuronal wires, the synaptic connections.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's hard to find the right one.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
How is that?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There's 150 trillion of them.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Which ones are that sexual assault?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Which ones are that IED attack?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I don't know.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You don't know.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But can we go through and develop a process to help work through?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And that's what we've been doing, developing the tools where we use what we've learned in the lab, not with a deep brain stimulating electrode as I did before, but now switching and saying, is there any other way we can trigger a brief burst, not of one neurotransmitter, but of a bunch of neurotransmitters,
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And one way we came upon is this way of using an electrode placed on the vagus nerve to trick the brain into thinking you're having a heart attack.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We only activate a few cells.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's a very tiny current.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But normally your brain receives a signal saying, my heart beat, my heart beat, my heart beat, my heart beat, my lungs expanded, my lungs expanded, my lungs expanded.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And we say, oh, they didn't do that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Turns out that sends a powerful subconscious, you're not aware of it when it happens, but a very transient brief,
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
arousal signal.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If you've got sleep apnea, it'll wake you up.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If you're not breathing, someone says, hey, wait, you're not breathing.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We should wake you up.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You can wait for the hypoxia to set in or you can do it quicker.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
This is a much faster signal.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And when we trigger a brief burst, just half a second long, that makes three out of four of those neurotransmitters
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Norepinephrine, acetylcholine, and serotonin are all released.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Interestingly, dopamine is not even activated.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Rats don't like it or avoid it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Humans don't like it or avoid it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It just doesn't matter because it's all subconscious.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Knowing what your guts are doing, your heart and lungs, who cares?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So that one is not connected to...
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
a rewarding pathway.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We're not aware of it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But the combination of releasing those three neurotransmitters activates the appropriate chemistry.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's the signal that the neuron is looking for.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And no, it's not any one signal.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's a cocktail, as most things in the immune system are, or bone formation, or even regulating your hunger.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There's not one factor for anything.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There's ten factors for everything.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Now that we're learning that and embracing it, we can send this signal in.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And at first, it was just a dumb experiment repeating the one we had done with deep brain stimulation, showing we could quadruple the number of neurons that produced a response to a given tone.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's a neat laboratory curiosity, but what's it useful for?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Well, let's take our time.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Can we make neurons have more neurons for a low tone or a high tone?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Yes, we can.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Can we make neurons get faster or slower?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Yes, we can.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We even played speech sounds to rats.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Rats don't care about English.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It doesn't matter to them.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's not relevant to them.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But if you repeatedly pair the word dad...
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
or the word sad, the neurons will shift to favor responding to a human saying dad or a human saying sad.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It just makes sense.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's the statistical probability.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It matters to them.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
My dog understands some English, not all of it, but the ones that are walk and treat and dinner and bed, all those are sit.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Those are all things that she knows.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We saw the neurons making those same changes.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And this began to get us more and more optimistic that you could use it to treat some condition.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We've now shown in humans that you can use physical therapy, occupational therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, and sensory therapy, all of which activate neurons.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But they don't make enough change to get people to lose their diagnosis.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We're still not there yet, but we've now gone all the way through animal studies showing that animals with stroke benefit from physical therapy, but they don't make a complete recovery.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
When we add this brief burst, they make recoveries they couldn't otherwise make.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We did it with hemorrhagic stroke.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We did it with ischemic stroke.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We did it with peripheral nerve injury.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We did it with spinal cord injury.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And we finally said, this is working so well, we should go try this in humans, fully expecting it not to work.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Why would it not work?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Because it usually doesn't work.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Lots of things work under careful laboratory conditions, and you show up in the real world, and you're stymied.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You can't figure this out.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And one reason for that is because in the lab, we can adjust the condition to be just bad enough, and the treatment can be very powerful, and there's no side effects and all that stuff.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Doctors get patients who show up.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They get the car accident.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They get what they get.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They don't get to make it and adjust it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So it was very humbling.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
To try to ask the first participants, the first ones actually had tinnitus or tinnitus, the ringing of the ears.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Later participants had stroke, now spinal cord injury and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
In each case, it's super scary because we start off with a 99% chance of failure.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's the chance a given new idea in neuroscience works.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Don't worry.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We've got lots of ideas.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So we keep testing them.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And luckily the public has been very supportive of us.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Just keep trying.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Keep trying.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That amyloid thing is not working so good for you.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Keep trying.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Don't give up.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
My grandmother died of Alzheimer's.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So don't give up just because something is not working.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Maybe it's going to work tomorrow.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
These are really hard problems.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And now we're at a point.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
with FDA approval three years ago of vagus nerve stimulation for the treatment of ischemic stroke, that people can make gains they couldn't have otherwise made.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They can try all they want, and they just can't get those fingers to work.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Now they make gains.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Are they cured?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
No.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You can still tell they've got a stroke.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But what's interesting is the gains they made in a double-blinded placebo-controlled trial published in Lancet is only in 18 days.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
18 days.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You can't play violin very well in 18 days.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You can't bowl very well in 18 days.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
In 18 days, they're restoring their function of their hand.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And now we send them home and we enable them to activate their own vagus nerve while they're doing gardening activities or fishing activities or doing the dishes.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And what we're seeing now is although it's slower, they're continuing to make progress day on, day on by activating this network and telling the brain this is really important.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The answer is it's not really important.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's just gardening.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But we have to kind of lie to the brain a little bit and say, look, you're never going to get over this because the brain is very conservative.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It does not want to forget all of your memories.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It doesn't want to forget your childhood.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It doesn't want to forget your language.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It doesn't want to forget all your skills.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So it's very conservative what it changes.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And after injury, in this case a stroke, there's a hole in your head.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Neurons are dead.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There's a problem.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I've got to make big changes.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But I wasn't expecting this because in evolution, if you get a hole in your head, you just die.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There's no ICU.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
No one is coming to save you.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You just die.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And so we never had the chance to practice getting good at recovering.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We now know we could make better gains.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And the paper you mentioned in Nature, same thing happened with spinal cord injuries.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
People have had years ago spinal cord injuries.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They just – they could barely move it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We only picked people who have some movement.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If there's no movement, we have nothing to reward, nothing to condition, nothing to strengthen.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So we chose people who had incomplete injuries.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I mean they still have some function, but they're obviously impaired.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Then we repeatedly paired with the physical therapists.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They're the real experts.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They said this is the right muscle you should be practicing with.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There's different muscles in your hand that do different things.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They measure what you can't do.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But you can kind of do it, and we practiced that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And then we, the neuroscientists, come in with an engineering approach.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Rob Reneker built the tiny vagus nerve stimulator.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And then we found physicians and clinicians who were like mine and said, let's give this a shot.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And we didn't think it would work.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It happens to have worked and now there's a vagus nerve stimulator.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Full disclosure, I'm an inventor of and shareholder and my university requires me to disclose that, so I'll disclose that now in a company called Microtransplant, a little spin-off from my university, University of Texas at Dallas.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And now you can go to your doctor and he can write a prescription for you to get an implant to help your physical therapist do their job.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's not like the physical therapist wasn't trying, they were working hard.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's not like the person didn't want to get better.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But the idea that you could just practice your way out of something
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Sometimes true.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Many people make a complete recovery from injuries, but many people don't.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And we now have this little boost, this little tool.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I think of it like a screwdriver.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If you're trying to fix your car, you don't have a screwdriver.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
All the knowledge in the world won't do any good.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It doesn't do the fixing, but it gives you a new tool in the toolbox.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So now physical therapists and occupational therapists can give that extra boost because physical therapy is fundamentally kind of boring.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Move your fingers, move your fingers, move your fingers.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's not really life or death.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We're adding this boost so that the neurons don't give up on it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's going to take thousands of repeats, and it needs to feel important.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And when you're learning to ski, if you don't do it right, you're going to go tumble down the mountain.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
When you're a baby and you're trying to walk, you're going to hit your face.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We're doing therapy safely, so no one's actually in any danger.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But by tricking the system, hacking the vagus nerve, just these small number of stretch receptors from the heart and lungs, activating those, which people don't typically feel, by activating those, we send the signal, release this cocktail of these three neurotransmitters,
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And now the synaptic eligibility trace, instead of letting that potential strengthening go away, it just keeps building and building and building.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And we're now seeing even years later, after people have been implanted, they're still making continual gains.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And that's surprising.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It seemed like they had a sentence, no more progress, you're an adult, no more plasticity.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But that's inconsistent with what we know.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I can learn new things any time.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Sure.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But why couldn't you get better from stroke?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The hole in your head was too great.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Evolution didn't prepare you for that kind of injury.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Now we're finding we can make progress even with stroke, spinal cord injury, tinnitus, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I mean, all of the drugs of abuse will increase.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Nicotine.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
All of the drugs of abuse will increase acetylcholine as well as increasing dopamine.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
My background was in biochemistry.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
My degree from Berkeley is in biochemistry.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I just thought, let's get the biochemistry right and people will get better.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And then I had to learn about the brain.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And the brain says it's the timing.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The psychologists have told us from the very beginning, timing, timing, timing, timing, timing.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Just back to Pavlov, you can ring the bell, you can feed the dog, but they have to happen at the same time.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And if you just reward everything, that's similar to rewarding nothing.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So the real issue, and I actually spent more than five years of my life trying to do this without a device.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So I had success using the deep brain stimulator.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I said, I don't want to put deep brain stimulators.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I can't imagine putting hundreds of thousands of people with deep brain stimulators.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It seemed like too much to be true.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Many neurosurgeons say it's safe, no problem.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But I just thought there's got to be an easier way.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And so I did exactly what you said.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I said, what are the ways to increase acetylcholine, norepinephrine, serotonin?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Microdialysis made it clear which things do it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Amphetamine, of course, nicotine, all these things.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's very easy.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Cocaine, all these things do it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And I did experiment after experiment after experiment after experiment.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I still feel bad for the graduate students who did all of those experiments.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Did Adderall.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Did all of them paired with a tone.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And it just didn't change anything.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And that's because the tone only comes on once in a while.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And they're just ongoing activity.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Neurons are firing.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If you record neurons, they're firing all the time.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Only one action potential is the tone exponential.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The neurons firing at 4 or 5 hertz, sometimes 20 hertz, just pop it along all the time.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And then you get one more spike when you record these neurons, when a drifting gradient goes by or a scene or whatever.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's not much more.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We should just clarify that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Yeah, thank you.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And so how does the brain know which thing?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There's 150 trillion connections.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Which one am I asking for more of?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You've got to tell me which.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Everything.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Make more of everything.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That doesn't help the network work very well.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So my understanding of the world that I live in is sort of a post...
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Aristotle, four humors, idea.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's not that there's too little or too much of these things.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's the timing that matters.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And when I watch a really good coach, they're really into that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They're going, that was it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That thing right there.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's what I want you to pay attention to.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And back to the reflection thing, let's think back.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That was the part where you were at ease there or whatever it was.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There were these moments of learning.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And, of course, there's an hour of reflection.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
heavy working out, you know, whatever it is, on Spanish verbs or on rock climbing.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But there's these moments where you're figuring out that was the connection.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We sometimes call them aha moments.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And we think maybe the neuromodules are being released at that aha moment.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They are.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I can tell you a lot of experiments have been done.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
When you're having a, oh, my God, something just happened, those neurons are having exposure to those neurotransmitters.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So then the question is why doesn't it work that the brain rewires for that particular tone?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And it does.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's not that it doesn't work at all.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And as you said, some conditions are so bad that you can do very non-selective things.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And the classic example would be if you have major depressive disorder and you do electroconvulsive therapy, we're not pushing your brain toward any particular goal.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We're triggering a seizure in the brain.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's going to change the brain, but we're not telling it which way to go.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And somehow people tend to
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
recover from that in a better state than they went into it because it was so bad to begin with.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So we don't know the answer to that because the randomized control trials were not done at that time.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
My colleagues who are psychiatrists say it's the most effective thing we have for people who are treatment-resistant to all the other treatments.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So I don't have an answer for you.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Normally, we do a sham control test.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And these people are anesthetized when it happens, so they would never know which one happened.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The study is easy to do.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's just you can't do it in rats because rats don't have depression.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And right now, no one is signing up.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If you sign up for actual therapy or a 50% chance of getting a therapy, people tend not to sign up.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So the answer is not known.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If we did, we'd get a responder rate.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
In both groups, we'd say, let's say it's 60% or 50% response rate where they're better, and we get a sham response rate.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Let's say it's 25% and get better even when we don't do it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You'd subtract those two, which is 25%, take the inverse of that, and you'd get a number needed to treat a four.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's how we now work on these medications.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We think about what's the difference in the percent that you're going to get better with a double-blinded placebo control.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That data is not available.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But the general idea is the symptoms are clear.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The day before that happens, all those memories are gone.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You'll have no memories whatsoever.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So if people do this 20 times as they typically do, they'll lose 20 days of their life, which they never get back.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Many people will do it on a regular basis.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Oh, I thought they'd just go in once.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Typically sessions of three is my understanding.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Again, I'm not a practicing psychiatrist, so take this, talk with your own physician.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Typically you do a sequence of them.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
People, as you know, major depression have sort of a cycling pattern as most neurological disorders and psychiatric disorders do.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So they'll go in during a time when they're bad.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Now, if you do nothing, they'll tend to be better later because you went in when they were worse.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But the evidence experience from colleagues I trust is this is really working.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We've tried everything else.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And I don't know because the studies have not been done.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We don't have the answer what the exact probabilities are unlike the other studies.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We've done lots of randomized control trials with cognitive behavioral therapy.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But the idea is you get a benefit.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But it's just suggestive.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
This is still a pretty crude technology and practitioners of it, they're more than happy to acknowledge that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They want the seizure to not be too bad because it's too bad.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So they have ways to start the seizure and then stop the seizure.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They've optimized it so it's more effective now than it was in the Jack Nicholson days.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's not painful anymore because people are anesthetized when it happens.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You don't need to be awake.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You don't need to experience it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That wasn't an active ingredient.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
What was an active ingredient is the seizure, which is a storm of brain, sometimes called a brain attack, where neurons are firing synchronously all over the brain and releasing massive amounts of neurotransmitters at the same time.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's generally something you don't want.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If you had a choice of a seizure or not to have a seizure, you would choose not to have a seizure.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If you had a child, you'd rather not have a seizure.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But if someone is really stuck in a severe state and they're at risk harming themselves, it's been determined by powers that be that it's better to try this.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And many people voluntarily do it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
lose a few days, get better for months, and then come back and cycle and do it again.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So that idea is not a ringing endorsement.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The fact that you have to do it again, it's not a cure.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It wasn't pushing toward any particular thing.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I've got a number of things in my house that work kind of well, and if you give them a good whack across the top of it, it'll start up, a motor that kind of sticks.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You give it a kind of whack, but I'm not really fixing it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I need to grease some bearing or something.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But whacking it will also work.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So I think of this as, again, date me, the Gilligan's Island thing, a coconut would fall on your head and you'd suddenly be better.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's the level of sophistication.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But the proof of concept is it's the plasticity that's making them better.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We used to think that selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors worked by increasing serotonin.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Therefore, we concluded people's serotonin was low with depression.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And yet, behold, they don't have low depression.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So in any case – And reprocessing later.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We're talking about that reflection.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I think many people after one of these experiences, they're now thinking about it in a way they weren't.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They're putting it away and we're not talking about that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So for PTSD in particular, avoidance is a defining hallmark.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's a criteria you have to have in the manual that defines what this is.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So avoiding it is a problem and now you've freed people from that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The work, though, being done, the rewiring is probably really work they're doing.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's now they're reentering that environment, they're reengaging that relationship, they're not avoiding it, in part because they believe that they can do it and that it isn't harmful.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's true.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It isn't harmful.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
These are pathological avoidances that people are doing.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The question is can we come up with something better?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
What are the active ingredients?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The experiment that's not yet been done is to appropriately blind people.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So there are many drugs that make people have a trip.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's possible to enroll people who've never had a psychedelic before, and then they won't know.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You can give them a lot of caffeine.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They might think, I guess that's what peyote is like.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They wouldn't know.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But that's not yet been done.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I think it can be done.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Usually when people say experiments can't be done properly, I get nervous.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We're just too smart for that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We made it to the moon and back.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We can do an experiment.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So finding out, we'll know the answer.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
On stroke, which we talked about before, enhancing plasticity, you mentioned Prozac.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Fluoxetine is the name of the agent.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor increases serotonin and has effects on brain-derived neurotrophic factor and all the rest.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It looked really promising in animals.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Many, many published studies did the same thing we did, which is why we didn't think our thing was going to work.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We took the therapy, which we know is helpful, practice using your paw that's injured, and then add the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, and the animals made progress.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And we did it again and again.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We did it in monkeys.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We did it in cats.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We did it in rats.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And then we did it in people.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And lo and behold, the people got better.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And then we did a large-scale randomized trial, and they didn't do anything.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So it was 1,500 people with stroke.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We gave them Prozac.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And you will not be surprised that the new onset of depression was slightly lower in the group who had active antidepressant.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That makes sense.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You may or may not be surprised that the group who got the Prozac also had more hip fractures because, of course, serotonin is critically involved in laying down bone.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And so this is really bad if you're an old person to have a hip fracture.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So taking Prozac has off-target effects.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Yeah, yeah.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So serotonin is really important.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The chondrocytes are the cells in the body that make bone.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And when you mess with serotonin, you mess with those.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
This is a newly discovered thing for me I didn't know about is that ritalin has effects on growth, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So most people now are aware if you take ritalin, you'll end up being about an inch shorter.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
This is just an off-target effect.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Many, many positive benefits, but there are some negative, and you have to weigh the pros and cons.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So in this case, we saw all the things we knew the Prozac did, meaning they took the drug.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But their functional ability, their ability to move their hand, wasn't any different.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And why is that?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's because the range of problems people have is so diverse.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
People have all kinds of other insults.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The rats are all perfectly situated in the cage.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They've got exactly the lesion and all the rest.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Why do the first few trials work?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Because they were small, randomized trials with some confirmation bias or some other things implicit to them.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The Food and Drug Administration is serious.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Will this really work when no one knows?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
None of the investigators get to see the data.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
No one gets to look at anything.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
When you run a phase three pivotal trial, it's no joke.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And we usually fail.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And that's sad for us because we want it to work.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But it's the truth.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And we just accept it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Sometimes we go back through and say, maybe it worked for a subset.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And we're still doing that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Maybe some people did get a benefit.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But if that's true, that means some subset might have gotten worse.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Good.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Let's select these people.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So I think there's a lot of failed trials we can go back to and try to figure out.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Maybe we didn't pick the right people.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Drug companies hope that the market is as large as possible.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But what we find in our animal studies is there's a narrow range.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You've done some beautiful experiments looking at how to get retinal ganglion cells to regrow.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And the conditions need to be just right, not too much crush, not too little crush.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You've got to get it just right.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I think there are a lot of things we've found really do work.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's just we hope they worked as a panacea, and they don't.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They might work for 10%.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The only other therapy for stroke is called constraint-induced motor training, say MT.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And the idea is you just put a glove over the good hand and you force someone to use their bad hand.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Yeah, I love the human weasel experiment.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I think things in neuroscience are only useful if they're counterintuitive.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If they're obvious, why do we need neuroscience?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And the idea that a kid gets a big scrape over his eye, and he's three years old, and he's got a patch on his eye for three weeks.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And after the patch comes off and the eye is fine, you need to tell his mom, hey, mom, what I want you to do is put a patch on the other eye.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
She will doubtless say, but that's not the eye that was hurt.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And you'll say, I know, but I have to reverse patch that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
to rebalance the eyes.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's counterintuitive.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
These guys did experiments in cats and monkeys, figured out what it was, and they now saved untold number of people's vision, at least in one of their eyes.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But it was counterintuitive to do that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Now we don't reverse patch anymore.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We give some drops.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The eye drops make it a little bit blurry.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You don't have to block the eye entirely.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You can just do a drop that slightly blurs the eye by opening the pupil up.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And now the eye that was sort of behind catches up.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That is super practical, super cost-effective.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Atropine costs pennies.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's super safe.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's just an eye drop.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Just full disclosure, I had my own amblyopia experience as a kid.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
When I was a very young person, I sat and tried Popsicle sticks.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I had lazy eyes, strabismus, and then that ended up causing me double vision and trouble reading when I was a very young child.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
My eyes are now well aligned.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It was many, many – from an ophthalmologist, ophthalmology department's point of view –
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
This is a little bit telling too much about me, but it's mostly about my mother.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It was originally believed that only adults would go through this much therapy.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There's actually a paper written, I'm told, on me as someone who would go through this therapy and completely resolve the symptoms.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It just takes a lot of time following popsicle sticks.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I had little lenses at, I don't know, I guess I was six years old.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Put little lenses in.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It would make it harder.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It was like eye building for the eye.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The doctor told me, you don't have to do all this.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We can just take your eye out and we'll stretch one muscle and we'll strengthen another one and we'll pop it back in.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And I went, I was six.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I went, I don't think so.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Still within the critical period early enough because of those experiments, those handful of animals made the ultimate sacrifice so that we now know how to treat things.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So now getting back to these counterintuitive ideas, how are you going to intervene?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We've got a kid with Down syndrome or someone with Alzheimer's and they're slipping into dementia.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
What are you supposed to do?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We don't know.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If psilocybin is the answer, let's use it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's certainly counterintuitive.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But it may or may not be, we've got to run the experiments and find out.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So for fluoxetine it looked really promising.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There was a big initiative on stem cells, stem cells looked incredibly promising.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
For stroke?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
For stroke, that's right.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's a 1300 person set as a meta-analysis.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It just didn't help or hurt, it just didn't do anything.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We wanted it to work, I wanted it to work, I'm a molecular biologist, I want the cells to go in there and do the good stuff, release the good juices.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But it's a practical matter and that's what I love about working with patients is they're just very practical.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They don't have a dog in the race.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
This, that, or the other thing, what is the pro and con?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And we're now getting to the point where we can, partly because of your work, have people really understand how they work.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Don't take an antidepressant because it's antidepressant.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's just what we called it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It doesn't mean that that's what it evolved for.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's a label.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You can say anti-PTSD and say this must be anti-PTSD because it's called anti-PTSD.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We have to be careful about these labels.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Antidepressants typically are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, but some selective norepinephrine.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Reuptake inhibitors.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Some are both.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Some have kind of complex off-target effects.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But they're all lumped because of what they do.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And as you said, whether it's in pathogens or psychedelics, these are given names because of the things we see.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And the things we see are real.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
People see them, and this is the effect that they have on mood, on whatever.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They all happen.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The question is a practical one.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
What will the long-term outcome be?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And we often don't know that for many, many years.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We think things that are very valuable happen.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
initially turn out not to be so valuable.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I always think of the Pope with a flask of God knows what, but I think it was cocaine, or Sigmund Freud, or whatever else.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Taking these substances, just fully convinced I found the right thing.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It is my understanding, again, this is one of the things I learned in Catholic school, but yeah, there were many people who thought many of these elixirs were really, really powerful agents that were going to be useful.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And later, people just said, it's not working for me.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Most people learn, yeah, you can drink your way out of a bad relationship, but it's not really going to solve the problem.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I've got to do other real work.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So there's a lot of short-term solutions is my point, and the question now is how is it going to work long-term?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If we're getting through a crisis where someone is immediately suicidal, we've got to get them to that point, and we will do whatever it takes to get them to that point.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Now we're in the intermediate phase, but a year later, how are we doing?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It remains to be seen.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We're not yet years post trying these agents.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We're only now trying them because they're listed as Schedule 1.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They cannot possibly be used because we tried them in the 50s.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We have done a bunch of those experiments.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Much of this work is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And they're looking for ways to enhance learning.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It was called the TNT program.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They like it to sound exciting.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It was targeted neuroplasticity training.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And so under some circumstances, you can improve learning.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But under the majority of conditions, you're already so smart.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The rats we studied are already so smart, they just didn't help, didn't help or hurt.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Didn't help focus more, didn't make it worse, didn't make it better.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Now, you can always wonder, maybe we didn't do the conditions right.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We did hundreds and hundreds of experiments.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So it's possible, though I don't know this for sure, it's possible this is one of the few technologies that helps those who are least capable among us and does not help those who are most capable.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And the idea is the way we're activating this is still pretty crude.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I'm blasting this whole thing.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
This used to be called the reticular activating system, this arousal network that releases all these neurotransmitters.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It was viewed as one system back in the day.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We later found molecular biology and divided it into these different neurotransmitters.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But they all kind of get activated a lot.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They're highly covariant when they fire in relation to these arousing signals.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But the way we're doing it is still pretty crude, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I'm not activating individual fibers.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I'm activating the whole kit and kaboom.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Where does it get inserted?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The left vagus nerve on the cervical branch, just right here, find a little crease in your skin, open that up, put it in, close it up.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If you feel your jugular, your carotid artery, it's running right there.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You're anesthetized for 35 minutes.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So from open to close, that part of it is half an hour.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Typically people, you know how it is.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Shorter than a haircut.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Yeah, is the actual part where you're open.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Right.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But the actual showing up and getting checked in and checked out, it does take two hours or whatever it is.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I don't actually know.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's a good question.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You do it once and you're done.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And when it's off, it's off.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Like the medications are maybe lingering in your body, having effects.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You're talking about specificity, which I want to get back to.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The specificity, it doesn't activate any other nerves than the one that it's on.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's a tiny bit of current.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So we put a band around your neck.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It looks like Bose headphones or Beats headphones around it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That has got a coil.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There's a coil in that device.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The two coils are aligned just like your phone.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You put your phone on it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You don't plug it in.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The coils align.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That now turns it on because the device has no battery.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The next generation, the experimental device, the device that's FDA approved does have a battery and that's how it's powered.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Our new device is much smaller because we're giving it the power and we're also signaling now.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The way we do that is we measure the forces someone's making with their fingers.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
or their hand will make a handle.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We'll measure the forces.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Every person is different.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You've got to meet them where they are.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Every educator knows this.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Where is this kid?
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Let's get them into their best zone.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So if we're taking a person, this is all they can turn.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's all the rotation they've got of their wrist, five degrees.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's fine.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I can easily measure five degrees.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You can do 90 degrees, 100 degrees, right?
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But they can only do five.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
When they're doing five, sometimes they do six, just for whatever reason.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I don't know why.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's when I hit the stimulator.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The computer does it itself.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's closed loop, just like your air conditioning unit.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
When the temperature goes up, it automatically turns it off.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's right.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The nature paper was done in a clinic supervised, but really the therapy is being delivered by the computer, measuring their performance, tracking each individual person, looking back for the last few minutes of their activities, seeing what they can produce, and looking to see what's in their top 10%.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Most people say tinnitus.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Okay.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Emphasizing the itis, the inflammatory part of it.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There's actually nothing inflamed.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Okay.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I like tinnitus.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Tinnitus.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Most often called tinnitus.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So how common is it?
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Very common.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I mean, hearing loss is common.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's, of course, highly correlated with growing old, which is a good thing.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
No, they're not the same thing.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
A lot of things accumulate to cause damage to the hair cells in your ear, taking on antibiotics, having a viral infection, traumatic insults, all those things.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But the number one is just growing old.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So if you grow old enough, things start falling apart.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And one of the things that falls apart are these hair cells.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
These are incredibly precise.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The vibration these things are doing are the width of one atom.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Like that's how tiny, the smallest vibration you could detect.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The hair cell is only moving back and forth by an atom.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I mean, it's incredibly precise.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And so they get damaged.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They're just super sensitive.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
When they get damaged, it's typically the high frequencies that get damaged, whether you're going to rock concerts or shooting a gun or playing your horn loud.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's the high frequencies where things vibrate the fastest that get most injured.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And people start noticing they can't hear as well in a crowded restaurant or whatever else.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You go and get an audiogram with an audiologist, and they'll tell you, yes, above 8 kilohertz or above 4 kilohertz, you now need 20 times more sound pressure to hear it.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Okay, you can still hear, it's just not as good.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The thing is the brain is plastic, as we've been saying, is such a good thing.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But the brain being plastic means if nobody high frequency ever happens and low frequency things keep happening, your brain is going to shift from the high frequencies to the mid frequencies.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And you're now going to end up with too many neurons in the mid frequencies.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Right at the edge of where you can hear, you get too many neurons.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The same thing happens after an amputation.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So you end up with too many neurons responding to the stump because the hand's not there anymore.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So if the hand's not there anymore, I'm not going to keep doing that.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The neurons find something else to do, just like smart little neurons that they are.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The problem is if you exceed some threshold, if I take this microphone and put it next to a speaker, you'll get feedback.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And because the number one input to neurons in the cortex are other neurons in the cortex,
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Not the outside world.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Neurons in the brain mostly talk to themselves, not the world.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There's very few neurons in the eye.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You know this, but most people are surprised.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You don't have megapixels of resolution.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You've got kind of a smallish number.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But you're moving around and you're using and sampling.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Here we have a situation where...
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The way the brain is processing is over-focused, and you start to get oscillations.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The neurons start to fire together.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They start to wire together.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Then you start to pay attention to it.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Most of us have heard it.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
My advice for everyone is try to ignore it.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Because when you're paying attention to it, you're listening to it, you're fretting about it, you're worrying about it.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The tinnitus.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You're releasing neurotransmitters, yes.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And the more anxious they are about it, because they think, I'm dying, I need to go to the doctor, which is smart.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You should look out for new symptoms.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Totally true.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They think they're dying?
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They think they've got a brain tumor.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And people are relieved...
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
After four months of worrying about it to realize, get a brain scan, you don't have a brain tumor.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Some people do, but that's pretty rare.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The vast majority don't.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But that worrying is the food to this particular cancer.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Oh, wow.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That worrying in the same way that avoiding going back to the site of an assault is the thing that produces PTSD.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Avoiding peanuts can create a severe allergy, a dangerous allergy to peanuts.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We need the exposure.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We need the diversity.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We need that context.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That information is useful to us.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
When we shield ourselves, as we did from peanuts, many people got peanut allergies.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Now that we've gone back to exposing children, you don't have that problem nearly as bad.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I work with Boy Scouts, and so we have a big giant peanut allergy warning thing.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Right, right, right.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's right.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Or it just pops up randomly.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So for PTSD, cognitive behavioral therapists do five different things because people say, you're going to expose me to this.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I'm going to get better.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It doesn't make any sense.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I'm already exposed.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I think about it all the time, but they're not thinking about it enough.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They're thinking about it where they're losing control.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So control, as you know from some classic neuroscience experiments, is really important.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Getting shocked is not bad for you.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's getting shocked in an uncontrollable way where you're not in charge of it.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If you can influence it, have some agency over it, then I can make a story about it.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
When I can reflect on it, I know, hey, bad things happen, but I have a role to play in it.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
When I'm living in an abusive home and just random stuff happens, there's no agency.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There's no control.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's just random.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That is what is most damaging to people, their neurons and their psyches.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So here we're having a similar situation, whether it's post-traumatic stress disorder, which is not tinnitus, right?
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They're totally different things.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But there's a similarity.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There's a commonality to them.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
that your thing that you think is making you better is making you worse.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And there are many ways.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We call this the prevent defense in football.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I'm from Texas, so we play a lot of that.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We're ahead of the game.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Let's change everything.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Wait a minute.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Bad idea.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Let's just keep playing the game that was working.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Oftentimes teams will lose because they'll change their strategy.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Here, if you've got pain in your finger, we'll now switch to analogy to chronic pain, and I'll get back to your question about pain.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
exactly how we're treating it, what the treatment is.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If your finger hurts, you want to do something about it.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Your mom taught you.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Find things.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Pay attention.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Doctors tell you, pay attention.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Let me know what the symptoms are.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But sometimes that paying attention can become part of the cycle where you're feeding that.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Got it.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And that is then this positive feedback loop where it gets worse and worse and all the rest.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I'm not blaming people for paying attention to it.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It is damn near impossible to not pay attention to pain.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's damn near impossible not to pay attention to ringing sounds.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They don't all sound like sounds.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
One woman told me she heard
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The sounds of a bird chirping in a cave.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's just a very specific thing that her brain is producing, the pattern of activity.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And it's just super annoying.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Who wouldn't be it?
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Easy to say, oh, just ignore it.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I understand how hard that is because our attention goes to that.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We need to make tools to help someone like that.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Some of the people can reach levels.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The commonality is like 10%, 20% of people are going to have tenderness.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Almost everyone.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's a huge number.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's one of the most common.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's the number one military disability.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So you get a 10% payment for the rest of your life.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So it's a billion dollars per year we pay for people with tinnitus.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You can't measure it objectively just like chronic pain.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You can't see it.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They don't want it.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But you develop it if you're in an aircraft carrier launching planes or you're blowing doors.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Playing headphones too loud.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
These things are really a problem.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Those cells will get damaged.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The brain doesn't know.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If you're deaf in the natural world, you just die.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We didn't evolve to get used to loud sounds.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That didn't exist for thousands and thousands of years.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That all came on with the Industrial Revolution.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
A thunderclap was like a loud sound.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Nowadays, you can go to a concert and be at 120 decibels, 130 decibels for hours at a time.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Most people, interestingly, don't get tinnitus.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We see the same thing in the rats.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
When we produce noise trauma, I can make everybody deaf.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's easy.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But only half of them show signs of tinnitus.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So the way the brain rewires itself depends upon the specifics of creating that positive feedback loop inside the brain.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Similar things happen.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Charlie Gilbert did these beautiful experiments with the retina.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We make dual lesions in the retina, and all the neurons will go jump over to some crazy place.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We now have computational models where we understand the neurons have no inputs.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They will tend to do dumb things.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They don't tend to do smart things because you didn't tend to have simultaneously paired retinal lesions.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So trusting the network to do the right thing is a good idea.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Brains are smart.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But in the case of pathology, by definition, it's not doing the right thing or it would have fixed it.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So the same thing is happening with cancer.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We get cancers all the time, and we fix them.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
What's unique about cancers that cause problems, the two-hit hypothesis, is multiple things have gone wrong, and the normal tools that eliminate cancer don't work.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Same thing with epilepsy.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Normally, you have a little epileptic circle, fire together, wire together, and then you go, oh, let's get rid of this one.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We make little epileptic foci and get rid of them.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We make little neuroses.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We make little obsessive-compulsive all the time.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And then we eliminate them, right?
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Just like my daughter saying I need to remove TikTok or whatever it is.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We find it to be a problem.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We find a solution.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Sometimes we're aware of it, make a conscious decision.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But more often, our neurons are just doing it.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Our cells are doing it on our behalf behind the scenes.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
When you have flagrant cancer, it's going to kill the person.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's typically because multiple checkpoint inhibitors have been blocked.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There's a lot of problems.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We think the same thing is true of brain diseases, whether it's mental health problems or neurological.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Two things must have gone wrong at least, not just one thing.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Yeah.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So we ask them what their frequency is.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We do an audiogram.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We can tell what their frequency where they've lost are.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We don't know what their brain is required to play in their head.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You first have to teach them about octave confusion.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If you're a music guy, you know I'm not a music guy.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I'm not a music guy.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But if you get the wrong octave, it's easy to confuse one octave higher, and we don't know what tone they're actually hearing.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So it's a little bit.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You have to teach them about some tones sound the same, but they're just double the sound is the point.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But once you can figure out what they're hearing, we then want all the other neurons to be important.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So the idea we've talked about is that set of neurons is too important.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's doing something really important.
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Why?
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How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Because you're paying attention to it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It must be important because you keep paying attention to it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So I want to reward everybody but this set.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So I play a low tone, lower than the thing, a high tone, higher than it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I'm trying to strengthen all the other neurons.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Back in that science paper back in the day, by playing multiple different tones, it narrows receptive fields.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So in this Nature paper from 2011, which we first treated tinnitus in animals, what we saw that was most correlated was actually receptive field size.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The neurons become non-selective.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
which means they now all respond to the same input.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If you're really narrow, you only respond to one little bit of the cochlea.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If you're broad, which happens after damage because you're trying to respond to something, now everybody responds to every wiggle and jiggle in the ear.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
All these neurons are now amplifying that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The brain is a massive amplifier, and you get feedback.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So what we're trying to do is narrow receptive fields and shift the map.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And this idea of diversity is something we didn't know about back in the day, the optimization and specificity idea.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We had a culture of find the thing and get the thing.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Now, mercifully, we're in a much more diverse idea.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We're learning that the training set matters.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Stimuli are likely to be more complicated.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The idea that we wanted specificity and we wanted treatments and neuroscience hasn't provided that, I'll take exception with that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
With phenocutinuria –
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We have every baby born in this country gets a heel stick, and you measure the level of phenylalanine hydroxylase.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And if they don't have it, we put them on a special diet.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So they avoid phenylalanine, and they don't have severe mental retardation.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Problem solved.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And before, we just called everybody retarded.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And now we go, wait, there's many different ways.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Now, the fact that we treated one and it was a diet change doesn't mean we've treated all of them.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There's many other things that cause severe problems.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Fragile X syndrome, FMR1, different gene causes a different set of things.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And you can't change your diet to fix it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's not the nature of it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But the example we used from Hebel and Wiesel where you now reverse suture, I've had lots of children just work with kids and point out to their parents, do you see his eyes don't go right?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I never noticed.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And an ophthalmology professor in neuroscience is going to think, doesn't everybody notice eye movements?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Some people just don't pay attention to that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You point it out and they go get treatment, whatever it might be, and they're better.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
No, no, absolutely.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I have many friends whose kids have had these issues.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's amazing how few experiments were done.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I mean, they didn't do thousands of animals.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They did a handful.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's the smallest number.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It had a very specific question.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It came up with a very specific answer.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So I do think the specificity has worked.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
On the molecular side, most people...
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
and I'm not the one first saying this, many people, we looked for psychiatric disorders to mostly be caused by a single solution.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's the smart thing to do.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If it's something simple, like in your car, it usually is something simple.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
When your car is broken, there's usually one problem.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But in an economic system, there's probably 50 problems.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There's probably not one thing that's the bad thing.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You've got to fix a lot of things.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
In an ecosystem, maybe somebody removed walls, and all you've got to do is put walls back, and it's an easy fix.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But typically, it's some big, messy situation you're trying to better understand.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And I think biologists, we talked about that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I read a book not too long ago on kelp, sea kelp, Macrocystis.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And like, why does kelp live worthless?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's just hundreds of grazers, things adding to it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The story you've heard about sea urchins and otters is way too simple.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But it's okay.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's a way to think about it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But we just come to understand to take care of the natural world, it's complicated.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There's not going to be this one silver bullet.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And that's the same of our brain.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I like that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I'm fine with that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
My health, my diet, my whatever, it's about diversity.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Try to eat a bunch of things.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If someone is just eating potatoes and tater tots and chicken nuggets, that's all they eat, yes, you're going to need to supplement something.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They're going to have problems.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And a lot of people are because their socioeconomic status is the big one that we don't talk too much about.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Like the neuroscience are trying to understand...
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If you're poor, what things are worth it and what things aren't?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's just really hard to make these judgments.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Easy to be a parent when you've got lots of resources.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Really hard when you're facing latchkey kids and expensive food and all the rest.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So that specificity thing, I think we've nailed it on choline.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I think we've nailed it on a lot of these stories.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But does that mean we've got blanket cures for most neurological psychiatric disorders?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
No.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
For tinnitus, we understood.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We had a theory of what it was.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We ran animal studies, we reproduced it in animals, and then we cured it in animals.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And then we did the next step.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And it was not as successful as we wanted to.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So the answer was 50% of people got 50% better.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That is called 75% of the problem is still there, not very good.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
In addition, we had something called sequestration when the federal government shut down and a large military trial we were going to run got canceled.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That was years ago.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We've been doing this a long time.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But there's just hiccups along the way, political or whatever else.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We were going to invest in it because it was the number one disability in the military, so we were going to invest in it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Let's treat it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And then we got sidelined.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Stroke had the advantage that unlike chronic pain and tenderness, we know exactly what causes it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So my team switched to stroke because there's no controversy about stroke.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
No one's faking it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I can measure it very easily.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I can see the hole in the head.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I can see their functions.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
With tinnitus and chronic pain, you can't know.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Spinal cord injury, same thing.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You know what causes spinal cord injury.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They had a fight or a car accident or a fall or a boating accident.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
For PTSD, it's the only mental illness we know what causes it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The diagnostic criterion A, trauma, is what causes you to have that thing by definition.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The other is schizophrenia.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We've got theories.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We've got genes.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We've got factors.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So we chose these first three very intentionally.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And we're now sort of working our way back saying if synaptic plasticity, rewiring of new connections in the brain, if that could be used therapeutically,
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And we know it can.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I mean, that's how rehab works.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's how people get better from drug addiction or cutting or whatever else they're doing.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Someone talks to them.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's just kind of inefficient.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It takes a lot of time, a lot of money.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Can we help the therapist be better?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Therapists love neuroplasticity.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We haven't talked to therapists about neuroplasticity.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They love them some neuroplasticity.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But then they're disappointed because it's like, but I can't make everybody better.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And I can't make anybody all the way better most of the time.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So how can both be true?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's just how it is.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's a hard problem we didn't evolve with.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We don't have a great solution.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But we could do something about it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
This was true of cancer 100 years ago.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We would just say, Grandpa died of old age.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We didn't know there were cells ravishing his body, prostate cancer, colon cancer, cervical cancer.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We didn't know that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We just thought...
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
He got bad.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
His heart stopped.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
He died.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's what happened.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Now we took it apart, but it took decade after decade after decade.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And we first thought there was one cell type.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Now we know it's a whole living ecosystem of cancer cells feeding each other alive, and you can't just attack it one way.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You've got to attack it multiple ways.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's how I'm coming to understand these brain disorders.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They're really tricky bastards.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
When you look at HIV, you go, ooh, that's a good one.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's not just some virus.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's not just some bacteria with some polysaccharide you can attack.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That thing is really, really tricky, which is why we don't have an easy cure for this communicable disease, which we totally understand, HIV.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's just a particularly sneaky one.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But the specificity for...
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
All kinds of viruses, all kinds of bacteria.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We have an amazing armamentarium for the brain.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We've got a couple.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I would say Parkinson's disease.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We know what causes it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And the symptom is you don't have enough output from your motor system, and so you can disinhibit the system with a deep brain stimulating nucleus.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And people, everyone's seen the videos.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If you haven't, go YouTube Parkinson's on and off deep brain stimulator, and you'll see people who are golfing and then can barely walk.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Now, you and I know, as many people do, those final neurons will eventually die and there will eventually be a problem.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You're not changing the death that's happening in a person with Parkinson's, but you're giving them years of new life.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's fantastic for relatively cost-effective tools.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Cochlear implants, same thing.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
People are stone deaf.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They're not lip-reading.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They can pick up the phone just like you and I and have a conversation.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They are fully restored to normal hearing and conversation, but it's a small subset.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The list of things we've cured is small, but those are proof of concepts that if we understand it, we can cure more.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Not just alleviate, not just treat, but cure.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Self-injurious.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I have recently a new explanation because it was frustrating to me being raised by these fathers like we both were who studied neuroplasticity and talked about it and trained about it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It was frustrating to me at first that people didn't get it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I've come around in my way of thinking about this.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It was smarter to hope that it was going to be simple.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It was smarter to hope that drugs would work.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It was smarter to hope that a stem cell could be added, that there was one cell type.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's actually not unreasonable.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If your car is broken, hope it's something simple.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Don't start off with the most complicated one.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's sort of Occam's razor at a societal level.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The question is how long do you keep doing it?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And I think you're making this point.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You've got this one nice paper with adeno-associated virus gene therapy changing things.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
These are all on the table.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
All of them.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Now, some of them are more safe than others, some are more challenging, but the combination therapy, we have a combination problem, and it's a pretty big problem, whether it's obesity problem or degenerative disorders, neurodevelopmental disorders, anxiety disorders, mood disorders.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But we don't need to medicalize everything.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If you're fine, you're fine.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But if you've got a serious problem, these are not subtle conditions.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
These are people who are really, really, really struggling.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They're willing to try anything.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And we have this obligation to sort out what works.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And throwing the kitchen sink at it is not so great.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The FDA is having to wrestle with what do you mean you're going to do four different therapies?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Let's just take a two-combination therapy.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Do I now have to do a four-arm study where I do one group who gets both, one who gets just this, one who gets just that, and one who gets neither?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Statistically, that really increases the cost.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So we say, no, let's do it where you do all the things you think are going to need it and then none of those things.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So even – are we doing science experiments?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
No, we're trying to treat people.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So I think the pieces of the puzzle are there.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And to my mind, the animal literature is clear it's complicated.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I mean I think about the number of genes that had – for ocular dominance, plasticity, the change in the visual system with two eyes.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
How many genes play a role in that?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Many genes.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Many times one says, here's a new gene that plays a role.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There's a new gene that plays a role.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's complicated.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We didn't know that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We really thought it was going to be like our designed world, where there's something simple, where you fix it, this grindstone isn't working because the water's not flowing in right, turning this thing.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And when you're fixing a car, cars are complicated.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Apologies to all my friends who are mechanics.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But by comparison of the brain, where you're talking about 20,000 different genes, you're talking about billions of different inputs coming in every hour, and it's stored in a network of trillions of synapses, it's just really very complicated.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We didn't have enough humility.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But I now think even if we had the humility, it was still smart to spend 50 years trying what we tried.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It just didn't work.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And now the question is what do we do next?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And I think there will be investment.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I think people who are enlightened – and it's interesting.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Patients really like the cochlear implant.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They know how it works.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's not just take a pill.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's these eight or 20 electrodes are on my nerve, which is organized like piano keys, and each one pushes a different button.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
These are highs.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
These are lows.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They kind of get it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They take ownership of it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And you see kids at the pool now.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I mean, they've got bright pink ones.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They're not bothered by it whatsoever.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's how I hear.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And so I think that openness, the stigma is now gone.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Before, we had lots of stigma.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And for me –
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The chemical imbalance thing creates a lot of stigma.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You're broken.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The only person who can fix you is someone who has the ability to prescribe medications.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Doctors don't want that therapy.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They're not looking to be the boss of the world.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They're intimidated, bothered, humbled by it themselves.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But that's the system that we were entertaining.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Now that we have a situation where you're saying, you have a brain.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I'm going to help you with it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Whether you're a coach, a parent, spiritual guidance person, a therapist, let's work to be who you want to be.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I think that's just a much more healthy way.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I think it's much more accurate.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's much more how economies, ecosystems work, these distributed complex networks.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There's not usually a one size fits all.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And what's nice is our lived experiences really matter.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
What you think is working for you really is valuable.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And we're all really different.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You know, the kinds of...
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
fiber supplements someone uses or the kind of sleep regimen someone else needs.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I had someone at UCSF, God, she slept like four hours a night.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I was like, this is impossible.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
She made amazing things happen.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I couldn't do it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
She's still alive.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
She is.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
She's phenomenal.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Yeah, I mean, the key to the brain is information.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The way ChatGPT got so smart is it knows every word we ever wrote to each other and every great book and all that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It just had a lot of information.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And so the question is always, what information is being added to the network?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And so medications tend not to add a huge amount of information.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They may bias.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They may help.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
experiences you have, and you learn to play violin, you did a lot of stuff.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And that richness of information, which we, since the early days of information theory, Claude Shannon, we call it bits.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
How many bits of information is it providing?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If something is always on,
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It can't be providing much information.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So it was a big thing.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It was called transcranial direct current stimulation, TDCS.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There was transcranial magnetic stimulation, TMS.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Each of these things had lots of great advantages.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But the total amount of information they were providing to the neurons was relatively small compared to listening to my voice.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
My voice, if I write this down, you're going to see it's going to be megabytes.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I record...
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
20 minutes worth of me talking, it's going to take megabytes to write down all the vibrations if you want to hear my pitch intonation.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If you just write down the letters, it could be much smaller, but there's still a lot of information.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So I think that's the way I think about it is how much information is being provided is the key unit.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So if the thing is on all the time and not really feeding anything back, it's probably not helping much.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And that's why FDA decides not to regulate it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's not dangerous.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If you want to put a stimulator on that activates your stuff, you want to wear pressure point bands, you want to do copper, these things come, they go.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's totally fine.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We don't.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Just don't make medical claims.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If you're making medical claims, that's crossing a line.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We now have to switch gears and say we're going to have to come down like a ton of bricks on this.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You haven't shown that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And so there have been claims about video games online and companies have had to pay big fines because they made claims that this video game will fix whatever it is.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I have a friend down the street who's got a serious stuttering problem.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
He's constantly asking, what can we do?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We have a model.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We think we understand.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But everybody's different, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
People stutter for different reasons, different times.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But clearly there's something in the brain.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They'll tell you that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You ask them that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They don't think there's too much blood, too much bile, too much phlegm.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's not the problem.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's the wiring that's wrong.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And I'm optimistic about that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That is something you can do something about.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But it is not going to be easy.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So I would say look for things that are closed loop, that connect, that they're providing useful information, that have sensors.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I think that's the sort of easiest way to say it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Electrically activating your skin, providing extra feedback, having a bar.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Let's just take you're trying to learn to drive a standard, and you have a tachometer.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Of course it's going to be easier if you can hear the sound of the engine revving.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's more information.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I know what I'm doing when it stalls.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If I can give someone feedback, how fast was that ball spinning?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I've got a friend who owns a golf shop, and I mean, it's incredible the tools they can give you of what your spin and slice is.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's really useful information.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If it's providing useful information about what you're doing, that just tends to be helpful.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If it's not, it can be greatly distracting.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There are certain circumstances where adding extra stimulations, extra sounds, extra buzzers, extra whatever, whether you're trying to do a running app or anything else, it can make you worse because you're now focused on the running app instead of on the let's just run.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So I think people are trying to figure out when should we instrument it?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
When should we add this extra stuff?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
When do you need the boost and when do you not?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And I'm frankly pretty impressed by the consumer.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They tend to figure it out.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They tend to be pretty skeptical, as they should be.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And they tend to draw conclusions.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If it's working among a lot of my friends, let's try it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And they're pretty smart, too.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There's no harm.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Why not try it?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They can tell what's dangerous and what's not.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If it hurts, I probably shouldn't do that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If it doesn't hurt, I'll try it for a while.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But they tend to end up in the drawer.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But even hearing aids often end up in the drawer because they didn't get a really good one.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So technology has to be really quite good to make it to that level of making a clinically detectable difference.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Yeah, we haven't talked about two things just from evolutionary part.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Why do we get used to everything?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Why if you take morphine, you just need more morphine?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Why are we so good at that?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We live in lots of environments where we're going to expose a lot of things.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Our biology seems to have made us really pretty tough.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We live in all kinds of environments.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
People live in Greenland.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's amazing.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It seems like in evolution we were in lots of environments, and you might have been in an environment where the only thing to eat was poppy flowers.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And so, okay, I'm always surprised how not bad these things are.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I mean, we had the crack epidemic, and it was clear that all these babies were going to be just a bunch of wandering zombies, and then, you know.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They were impacted, but not nearly as bad as the worst doomsday scenario.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So I'm always telling parents, babies are tough.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They're not as fragile as you might think.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Things we do to ourselves, not as fragile.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Because evolution has prepared us for all these pushes and pulls, which is a big shock.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You don't want to get a bunch of traumatic brain injuries.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But exposure to drugs, it's remarkable what we can tolerate and still be fine.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There's an interesting idea that the psychologists first came up with, but we see this in neuroscience as well, the inverted U, where you've got to get it just right, not too much.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So more serotonin or norepinephrine enhances memories, but you give more, and now it degrades impairments.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Why is that?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I've got a pet theory, no evidence for this whatsoever, that because we sometimes take an agent, let's say eat some berries or something like that, that then send us over the moon, we have all these mechanisms that then shut down and say, here are conditions that we don't want to change.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Because rewiring your brain is dangerous, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You might live through the food poisoning, but you might now have a rewired brain that would be bad.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So it seems like there's these mechanisms where you want to get, in our case, it's the alpha receptors, the norepinephrine, low affinity receptors, the ones that are easiest to activate are the alpha receptors.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You want those.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
but you don't want the beta receptors.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And they're not very different.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There's this sweet spot, this Goldilocks zone, and the biology's always pushing us to be right in that, and everybody recognizes that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
People who do meditation, mindfulness, they recognize this, trying to stay in this right sweet spot, which is back to that optimization we've talked a lot about.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Why is that?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's how you're trying to figure out which is the most important thing.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Not the max thing.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That might be something that's just pathological and weird.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Not the minimum thing.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's something you could just ignore.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But this narrow range of things you're trying to pick out.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's like shopping.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You don't want to buy all the things in the grocery store.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I'm only looking for certain things.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I would just mention gene therapy.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I worked on genes and moved them around a long time ago.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
My mom asked me, are you sure we want that gene moved there?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Luckily, we find out genes are moving all the time anyway.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's not something we're doing that's special.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But whether it's Duchenne's muscular dystrophy or Alzheimer's, if we have to do that, we'll do it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I mean, if someone is going to lose all their memories, putting in a virus that's been genetically engineered, if that stops me from losing all my memories and being a burden on society and my wife, I'll do that in a heartbeat.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So the toolbox we've created is just so rich.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I mean, we've got these places like Janelia Farms.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They're just making up new things.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I mean, it's just such a Star Trek world where you can't wait a week and someone had invented some new thing.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But how do you use them all together?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's the problem.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You go look at a mechanics shop.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They don't have five tools.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They have 500 tools.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I got a friend.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There's so many drawers.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I can't even pull open all the drawers to look.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
He's just fixing one car.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
How do they have 500 tools?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And we're thinking we're going to need one or two or three or four.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So I think you're right.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Putting the right combinations, having that reflection, having that societal support, knowing when am I going to go into this, helping people make those decisions.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's complicated and hard.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We're getting better and better at it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I really think we are.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Kids got a dog phobia.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Someone says, here's what we should do.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
First, lock them away.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Never show them a dog again.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Okay, we tried that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Didn't work.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And now your peer group is going to start telling you, if you hide from it, that's not the way to get better from it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
whether it's abstinence, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We had this people in a lot of pain.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
People didn't think that was a good idea.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Doctors at UCSF and other places didn't think it was a good idea for people to be in pain, so they medicated them.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
No one knew there would be unintended consequences.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Certainly some people did, and there's lawsuits and jail time and all the rest for a few people, but most people were just doing the right thing.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
In Catholic school, I also learned that road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We have to own that, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Thalidomide was a drug.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We were going to prevent women from having nausea during first trimester.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We didn't know it was going to cause birth defects, but we learned that lesson.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We processed it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We took the humility from that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You can't just do it the easy way out.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The fact that it helps today doesn't mean you aren't going to later look back and regret it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And so we don't make change fast.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
in our society.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Democracies don't make change fast.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
There are all these built-in ways to change slow.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So we've got time to make sure it works.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And I think it's frustrating to a lot of people who say, my son went to war and needs a treatment.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Give him what they need now.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And there's all these people saying, hey, let's hold on.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Let's wait and see.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I'm comfortable with that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That we're waiting, taking our time.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The process takes loads.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's frustrating to me, I'll be honest, how slow it is to do clinical trials.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We're running a lot of trials, a lot of people I know with a lot of serious injuries.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And I can't move to the next thing because the work on this one is so slow.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But better to be too slow than to take this lightly and think we're just going to do all these things, changing people's brains.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I mean, this is literally who they are.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
This is where their personality resides.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
This is their experiences.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So I've been very pleased that the federal government is doing a great job of just saying, let's try all the things.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Like you said, they're not against gene therapy.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They're not against Big Pharma.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They're not in Big Pharma's pocket.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They're just saying, look, what's going to work?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We'll know when it works.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We'll all know when it works.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And for the things that it has worked, phenylketonuria and cochlear implants, the government paid a ton of money on cochlear implants.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
You just do the next thing, next thing, next thing, next thing.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And now there's multiple companies that sell those and you can have that.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They tried that for the retina.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And so far, correct me if I'm wrong, they're still not an awesome.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
One of my first students is Henry Ford working on the retinal prosthesis.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's still hard.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Yeah.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
They'll get there.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Don't give up because it's hard.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Just because it's hard doesn't mean we give up.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The miniaturization, the wireless coding.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I mean, all the problems that we had back in the day, they're sort of just evaporated.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The chips get smaller and smaller.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
The power is better and better.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So I, too, am optimistic.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If you were blind today, you'd wish it was ready yesterday.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Sure.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But it's going to take investment, and it's a hard problem.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We don't know how long it's going to take, whether it's Alzheimer's or schizophrenia.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We just keep investing, and our country keeps giving it to the entire world for free.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We're sequencing the entire genome.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We just gave it away.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Who does that?
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's just what we do.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So I think that kind of thing, when I see something like that, we can monetize it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We can patent it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We can say you can't use that gene.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I invented that gene.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
No, we're not going to do it that way.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So I just think we've learned some good lessons about how to just innovate and share.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Other countries are learning.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Let's do it together.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It's way better together than alone.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
So I'm optimistic this brings us together.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I'm optimistic the problems are not unsolvable.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And once we understand that they're synapses, they're just connections, and that those things evolve to change.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
We're not making them change.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I'm not Frankensteining it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
I'm not hacking it.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That's how it was built to do.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
If we need gene therapy, drugs, devices, counseling, therapy, if we need five or ten things, that's how my normal life was.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
My childhood was a lot like a lot of factors, diet, nutrition, exercise.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
All those things were shaping who I am.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And we hoped it was simple.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It wasn't simple.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
It would have been nice.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
And a few things were.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
But the vast majority now are complicated, and it seems like that humility and that working with patients and letting them understand what are they doing, no one's trying to control anyone's brain.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
No one is trying to put in chips and make you do things you don't want to do.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
That is not the future of this.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
This is not that scary thing.
Huberman Lab
How to Rewire Your Brain & Learn Faster | Dr. Michael Kilgard
Find serious problems and see if we can help.