In this Huberman Lab Essentials episode, I explain how making mistakes and perceived frustration drive learning and how movement enhances the brain’s adaptability. I explain how making errors triggers the release of neurotransmitters, such as dopamine, which are essential for learning. I also discuss the differences between how neuroplasticity occurs in children and adults, focusing on the varying requirements and effort needed for learning. I discuss science-supported learning strategies for adults, including small practice bouts, leveraging frustration, regulating your autonomic state, and using movement to maximize focus and neuroplasticity. Huberman Lab Essentials are short episodes (approximately 30 minutes) focused on essential science and protocol takeaways from past Huberman Lab episodes. Essentials will be released every Thursday, and our full-length episodes will still be released every Monday. Read the full show notes at hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman David: https://davidprotein.com/huberman BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/huberman Timestamps 00:00:00 Huberman Lab Essentials; Learning 00:01:29 Representational Plasticity, Performance Errors 00:03:16 Neuroplasticity, Neurotransmitters 00:05:03 Sponsor: AG1 00:06:11 Visual Adaptation, Children vs. Adults 00:10:23 Errors, Frustration & Neuroplasticity, Adult Learning 00:14:13 Adults, Incremental Shifts vs. High Contingency; Tool: Small Learning Bouts 00:18:43 Sponsor: David 00:20:00 Tool: Ultradian Cycles, Focus, Errors & Frustration 00:22:08 Dopamine, Errors & Subjective Beliefs; Peak Focus; Tool: Frustration 00:25:56 Sponsor: BetterHelp 00:27:02 Limbic Friction; Tool: Behaviors to Increase Alert or Calm 00:30:43 Balance, Errors & Neurotransmitters 00:33:28 Tool: Enhance Neuroplasticity; Movement Disclaimer & Disclosures Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What are the basics of neuroplasticity?
Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. My name is Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, we're going to talk about how to change your nervous system for the better.
As you recall, your nervous system includes your brain and your spinal cord, but also all the connections that your brain and spinal cord make with the organs of your body and all the connections that the organs of your body make with your brain and spinal cord. Now, this thing that we call the nervous system is responsible for everything we know,
all our behavior, all our emotions, everything we feel about ourselves and the outside world, everything we think and believe, it's really at the center of our entire experience of life and who we are. Fortunately, in humans, unlike in other species, we can change our nervous system by taking some very specific and deliberate actions.
And today we're really going to focus on the actions, the motor commands and the aspects of movement and balance that allow us to change our nervous system. It turns out that movement and balance actually provide windows or portals into our ability to change our nervous system the way we want, even if those changes are not about learning new movements or learning how to balance.
And soon you'll understand why. So let's talk about the different kinds of plasticity that are available to us. because those will point directly towards the type of protocols that we should engage in to change ourselves for the better. there is something called representational plasticity. Representational plasticity is just your internal representation of the outside world.
We know that, for instance, if I want to reach out and grab the pen in front of me, that I need to generate a certain amount of force, so I rarely overshoot. I rarely miss the pen, okay? So our maps of the motor world and our maps of the sensory world are merged. The way to create plasticity is to create mismatches or errors in how we perform things.
And this I think is an amazing and important feature of neuroplasticity that is highly underappreciated. The way to create plasticity is to send signals to the brain that something is wrong, something is different, and something isn't being achieved, errors.
and making errors out of sync with what we would like to do is how our nervous system is cued through very distinct biological mechanisms that something isn't going right and therefore certain neurochemicals are deployed that'll signal the neural circuits that they have to change.
So let's talk about errors and making errors and why and how that triggers the release of chemicals that then allow us to not just learn the thing that we're doing in the motor sense, play the piano, dance, et cetera, but it also creates an environment, a milieu within the brain that allows us to then go learn how to couple or uncouple a particular emotion to an experience or better language learning or better mathematical learning.
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Chapter 2: How do errors drive learning?
are released in ways and in the specific time that allow for neural circuits to be marked for change, and then the change occurs later during sleep. Basically, you need a certain cocktail of chemicals released in the brain in order for a particular behavior to reshape the way that our brain works. So the question really is what allows those neurochemicals to be released?
And last episode, it talked all about focus. If you haven't seen or heard that episode, you might want to check it out about some specific tools and practices that can allow you to build up your capacity for focus and release certain chemicals in that cocktail. But today we're going to talk about the other chemicals in the cocktail, in particular dopamine.
And we're really going to center our discussion around this issue of making errors and why making errors is actually the signal that tells the brain, okay, it's time to change, or more generally, it's time to pay attention to things so that you change.
And I really want to distinguish this point really clearly, which is that I'm going to talk today a lot about motor and vestibular, meaning balance programs, but not just for learning motor commands and balance, but also for setting a stage or a kind of condition in your brain where you can go learn other things as well.
So let's talk about some classic experiments that really nail down what's most important in this discussion about plasticity. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. By now, many of you have heard me say that if I could take just one supplement, that supplement would be AG1.
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So I mentioned last episode and I'll just tell you right now, again, the brain is incredibly plastic from about birth until about age 25 and then somewhere about 25, it's not like the day after your 26th birthday plasticity closes, there's a kind of tapering off of plasticity and you need different mechanisms to engage plasticity as an adult. Knowing how to tap into these plasticity mechanisms
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Chapter 3: What role do neurotransmitters play in learning?
It's an incredible feature of our nervous system. It takes place in a structure called the superior colliculus, although you don't need to know that name. Superior colliculus has layers, literally stacks of neurons, like in a sandwich where the zero point right in front of me, or maybe, you know, 10 or 15 degrees off to my right or 10 or 15 degrees off to my left,
are aligned so that the auditory neurons, the ones that care about sounds at 15 degrees to my right, sit directly below the neurons that look at 15 degrees to my right in my visual system.
And when I reach over to this direction, there's a signal that's sent down through those layers that says 15 degrees off to the right is the direction to look, it's the direction to listen, and it's the direction to move if I need to move. So there's an alignment. And this is really powerful. And this is what allows us to move through space and function in our lives in a really fluid way.
It's set up during development, but there have been some important experiments that have revealed that these maps are plastic, meaning they can shift, they're subject to neuroplasticity, and there are specific rules that allow us to shift them. So here's the key experiment.
The key experiment was done by a colleague of mine who's now retired, but whose work is absolutely fundamental in the field of neuroplasticity, Eric Knudson. The Knudsen lab and many of the Knudsen lab scientific offspring showed that if one is to wear prism glasses that shift the visual field that eventually there'll be a shift in the representation of the auditory and motor maps too.
Now, what they initially did is they looked at young subjects and what they did is they moved the visual world by making them wear prism glasses. So that for instance, if my pen is out in front of me at five degrees off center, so just a little bit off center, if you're listening to this, this would be like just a little bit to my right.
But in these prism glasses, I actually see that pen way over far on my right. So it's actually here, but I see it over there because I'm wearing prisms on my eyes. What happens is in the first day or so you ask people or you ask animal subjects or whatever to reach for this object and they reach to the wrong place because they're seeing it where it isn't.
But what you find is that in young individuals within a day or two, they start adjusting their motor behavior in exactly the right way so that they always reach to the correct location. So they hear a sound at one location, they see the object that ought to make that sound at a different location, and they somehow are able to adjust their motor behavior to reach to the correct location.
It's incredible. And what it tells us is that these maps that are aligned to one another can move and shift, and it happens best in young individuals. If you do this in older individuals, In most cases, it takes a very long time for the maps to shift, and in some cases they never shift.
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Chapter 4: How does movement enhance neuroplasticity?
The signal that generates the plasticity is the making of errors. It's the reaches and failures that signal to the nervous system that this is not working and therefore the shifts start to take place. And this is so fundamentally important because I think most people understandably get frustrated. Like they're trying to learn a piece on the piano and they don't know, they can't do it.
Or they're trying to write a piece of code or they're trying to access some sort of motor behavior and they can't do it. And the frustration drives them crazy and like, I can't do it, I can't do it. When they don't realize that the errors themselves are signaling to the brain and nervous system, something's not working. And of course the brain doesn't understand the words, something isn't working.
the brain doesn't even understand frustration as an emotional state. The brain understands the neurochemicals that are released, namely epinephrine and acetylcholine, but also, and we'll get into this, the molecule dopamine, when we start to approximate the correct behavior just a little bit, and we start getting a little bit right.
So what happens is when we make errors, the nervous system starts releasing neurotransmitters and neuromodulators, that say we better change something in the circuitry. And so errors are the basis for neuroplasticity and for learning. And I wish that this was more prominent out there. I guess this is why I'm saying it. And humans do not like this feeling of frustration and making errors.
The few that do, do exceedingly well in whatever pursuits they happen to be involved in. The ones that don't generally don't do well. They generally don't learn much. And if you think about it, why would your nervous system ever change? Why would it ever change?
Unless there was something to be afraid of, something that made us feel awful will signal that the nervous system needs to change, or there's an error in our performance. So it turns out that the feedback of these errors The reaching to the wrong location starts to release a number of things. And now you've heard about them many times, but this would be epinephrine.
It increases alertness, acetylcholine focus, because if acetylcholine is released, it creates an opportunity to focus on the error margin, the distance between what it is that you're doing and what it is that you would like to do. And then the nervous system, starts to make changes almost immediately in order to try and get the behavior right.
And when you start getting it even a little bit right, that third molecule comes online or is released, which is dopamine, which allows for the plastic changes to occur very fast. Now, this is what all happens very naturally in young brains, but in old brains, it tends to be pretty slow, except for in two conditions. So let me just pause and just say this.
If you are uncomfortable making errors and you get frustrated easily, If you leverage that frustration toward drilling deeper into the endeavor, you are setting yourself up for a terrific set of plasticity mechanisms to engage.
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Chapter 5: What strategies can adults use to learn effectively?
And I'll define exactly what I mean by a little bit is the, the most important thing for adult learning as well as childhood learning, but adult learning in particular. Now the Newton lab did two very important sets of experiments. The first one, which showed that juveniles can make these massive shifts in their map representations. They get a lot of plasticity all at once.
And it happens very fast in the period of just a couple of days. In adults, it tends to be very slow and most individuals never actually accomplish the full map shift. They don't get the plasticity. Then what they did is they started making the increment of change smaller.
So instead of shifting the world a huge amount by putting prisms that shifted the visual world, you know, all the way over to the right, they did this incrementally. So first they put on prisms that shifted it just a little bit, you know, and just like seven degrees, I believe was the exact number. And then it was 14 degrees and then it was 28 degrees.
And so what they found was that the adult nervous system can tolerate smaller and smaller errors over time, but that you can stack those errors so that you can get a lot of plasticity. Put simply, incremental learning as an adult is absolutely essential. You are not going to get massive shifts in your representations of the outside world. So how do you make small errors as opposed to big errors?
Well, the key is, smaller bouts of focused learning for smaller bits of information. It's a mistake to try and learn a lot of information in one learning bout as an adult. Now, there is one way to get a lot of plasticity all at once as an adult. There is that kind of holy grail thing of getting massive plasticity as you would when you were a young person, but as an adult.
And the Knudsen lab revealed this by setting a very serious contingency on the learning. What they did was they had a situation where subjects had to find food that was displaced in their visual world, again, by putting prisms and they had to find the food and the food made a noise. There was a noise set kind of the location of the food through an array of speakers.
Basically in order to eat at all, they needed plasticity. And then what happened was remarkable. What they, is that the plasticity as an adult can be as dramatic, as robust as it is in a young person or in a young animal subject, provided that there's a serious incentive for the plasticity to occur. And this is absolutely important to understand, which is that
how badly we need or want the plasticity determines how fast that plasticity will arrive. This means that the importance of something, how important something is to us actually gates the rate of plasticity and the magnitude of plasticity.
And this is why just passively going through most things, going through the motions, as we say, or just getting our reps in, quote unquote, is not sufficient to get the nervous system to change. if we actually have to accomplish something in order to eat or in order to get our ration of income, we will reshape our nervous system very, very quickly.
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Chapter 6: How do incremental learning bouts work?
that points to the fact that it has to be a neurochemical system. There has to be an underlying mechanism. All the chemicals that we're about to talk about are released from drug stores, if you will, chemical stores that already reside in all of our brains. And the key is how to tap into those stores.
And so we're going to next talk about what are the specific behaviors that liberate particular categories of chemicals that allow us to make the most of incremental learning and that set the stage for plasticity that is similar enough or mimics these high contingency states like the need to get food or really create a sense of internal urgency, chemical urgency, if you will.
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If you would like to try David, you can go to davidprotein.com slash Huberman. Again, the link is davidprotein.com slash Huberman. If you've heard previous episodes of this podcast, you may have heard me talk about ultradian rhythms, which are these 90 minute rhythms that break up our 24 hour day. They help break up our sleep into different cycles of sleep, like REM sleep and non-REM sleep.
And in waking states, they help us or I should say they break up our day in ways that allow us to learn best within 90 minute cycles, et cetera. Today we're really talking about how to tap into plasticity through the completion of a task or working towards something repetitively and making errors.
The ultradian cycle says that for the first five to 10 minutes of doing that, your mind is going to drift and your focus will probably kick in provided that you're visually you're restricting your visual world to just the material in front of you, something we talked about last episode, somewhere around the 10 or 15 minute mark.
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Chapter 7: What is the importance of frustration in learning?
You want to keep making errors for this period of time that I'm saying will last anywhere for about seven to 30 minutes. It is exceedingly frustrating, but that frustration, it liberates the chemical cues that signal that plasticity needs to happen. And it is the case that when we come back a day or two later in a learning bout after a nap or a night or two of deep rest,
then what we find is that we can remember certain things and the motor pathways work and we don't always get it perfectly, but we get a lot of it right, whereas we got it wrong before. So that seven to 30 minute intense learning bout specifically about making errors. I want to really underscore that.
And it's not about, as I mentioned before, coming up with some little hack or trick or something of that sort. It's really about trying to cue the nervous system that something needs to change because otherwise it simply won't change. I think everyone could stand to enhance the rate of learning by doing the following.
to attach dopamine in a subjective way to this process of making errors, because that's really combining two modes of plasticity in ways that together can accelerate the plasticity. In other words, making failures, failing repetitively, provided we're engaged in a very specific set of behaviors when we do it, as well as telling ourselves that those failures are good for learning and good for us,
creates an outsized effect on the rate of plasticity. It accelerates plasticity. Now, some of you might be asking, and I get asked a lot, well, how do I get dopamine to be released? Can I just tell myself that something is good when it's bad? Well, actually, yes, believe it or not, dopamine is one of these incredible molecules that both can be released
according to things that are hardwired in us to release dopamine. Again, things like food, sex, warmth when we're cold, cool environments when we're too warm, it's that kind of pleasure molecule overall, but it's also highly subjective what releases dopamine in one person versus the next.
So everyone releases dopamine in response to those very basic kind of behaviors and activities, but dopamine is also released according to what we subjectively believe is good for us. And that's what's so powerful about it. In fact, a book that I highly recommend if you want to read more about dopamine, it's a book that frankly, I wish I had written. It's such a wonderful book.
It's called The Molecule of More. And it really talks about dopamine, not just as a molecule associated with reward, but a molecule associated with motivation and pursuit and just how subjectively controlled dopamine can be. So make lots of errors, tell yourself that those errors are important and good for your overall learning goals.
So learn to attach dopamine, meaning release dopamine in your brain when you start to make errors. Once you're attaching dopamine to this process of making errors, Then I start getting lots of questions that really are the right questions, which are, you know, how often should I do this? And when should I be doing this? And at what time?
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Chapter 8: How can we leverage high contingencies for better learning?
Last episode was about focus, but chances are that you can't focus as well at 4 p.m. as you can at 10 a.m. It differs for everybody depending on when you're sleeping and your kind of natural chemistry and rhythms. but find the time or times of day when you naturally have the highest mental acuity. And that's really when you want to engage in these learning bouts.
And then get to the point where you're making errors and then keep making errors for seven to 30 minutes. Just keep making those errors and drill through it. and you're almost seeking frustration. And if you can find some pleasure in the frustration, yes, that is a state that exists. You have created the optimal neurochemical milieu for learning that thing. But then here's the beauty of it.
You also have created the optimal milieu for learning other things afterward. at least for an hour or so, I would say, you're going to be in a state of heightened learning. Again, these aren't gimmicks, these tap into these basic mechanisms of plasticity. And the three that I'd like to talk about next are balance, meaning the vestibular system,
as well as the two sides of what I call limbic friction or autonomic arousal. And if none of that makes sense, I'm going to put a fine point on each one of those and what it is and why it works for opening up neuroplasticity. I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor, BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online.
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Now, there are essentially three things that great therapy provides. First of all, it provides a good rapport with somebody that you can trust and talk to about essentially all issues that you want to. Second of all, great therapy provides support in the form of emotional support or simply directed guidance, what to do or what not to do in given areas of your life.
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Again, that's betterhelp.com slash Huberman. Let's talk about limbic friction. Limbic friction, I realize, is not something you're going to find in any of the textbooks, but it is an important principle that captures a lot of information that is in textbooks, both neurobiology and psychology, and it has some really important implications.
Limbic friction is my attempt to give a name to something that is more nuanced and mechanistic than stress. Because typically when we hear about stress, we think of heartbeat going too fast, breathing too fast, sweating, and not being in a state that we want. We're too alert and we want to be more calm.
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