"If you don't know the cell types and the connections, how do you really understand how the machine works?"
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"But to know that the form is in a sense the function, that the architecture of the connectivity is how the computation happens in the brain at some level, gives me great joy."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"Neuroplasticity is the defining feature of the nervous system, which is its ability to change itself in response to experience."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"It just so happened that cardiovascular training done three times per week for an hour at a time at moderate intensity increased the size of the anterior mid cingulate cortex."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"By understanding the neural circuits in the brain and body that release and use dopamine, we can leverage our dopamine to have maximum motivation to overcome sticking points."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"It's fascinating that dopamine is the single molecule that's causing the craving and pursuit and experience of all of these substances and behaviors."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"There is a tremendous amount of interest in the so-called gut-brain axis."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"A brain area called the amygdala, which most people associate with fear and threat detection, is actually involved in reinforcement of behaviors and experiences that are positive and involve reward."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"Repeated gratitude practice changes the way that your brain circuits work."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"If you have a good gratitude practice and you repeat it regularly, you reduce the fear, anxiety circuits, you increase the efficacy of the positive emotion, feel good circuits."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"Research from neuroscience tells us that through effort, our brain can change. It can form new connections that we call synapses."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"Psilocybin increases communication across the brain."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"Dopamine creates a heightened state of focus. It tends to contract our visual world and tends to make us pay attention to things that are outside and beyond the confines of our skin."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"People with ADHD can have a hyper-focus and incredible ability to focus on things that they really enjoy or are intrigued by."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"Your gut is communicating to your brain both directly by way of neurons, nerve cells, and indirectly by changing the chemistry of your body, which permeates up to your brain and impacts various aspects of brain function."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"Bacillus and serratia can create dopamine in our gut that can get into our bloodstream and can generally change our baseline levels of dopamine within the brain and other areas of the body."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"The baseline level of serotonin might set our overall mood, whether or not we wake up feeling pretty good or really lousy if our serotonin levels happen to be very, very low."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"Cold water immersion up to the neck with your feet and hands submerged also is going to be the most effective."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"Deliberate cold exposure has a very powerful effect on the release of dopamine in our brain and body."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"We all have within our brain and body the capacity to release our own opioids."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"Neuroplasticity, or the brain and nervous system's ability to change in response to experience, is an incredibly important feature."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"Dopamine acting in one network directly underlies divergent thinking. Whereas dopamine in another brain network underlies convergent thinking."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"This is really exciting because it's one thing to see a brain network get activated or inactivated, but to observe that the degree of reduction of connection of this circuit scales with the reduction in clinically relevant symptoms, that's a very powerful finding."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"Most all of them are completely zero cost and those tools will allow you to tap into the neurochemistry and the neurocircuits within your brain and body that peer-reviewed science has reliably shown can significantly improve your focus and concentration abilities."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"Those two signals came in at the same time. They may relate to the same object and ah ha, I see you as one unified thing spouting talking."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"I think it's, you can envision depression as activities sort of going around in a circuit."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"Exercise does indeed give you energy. It burns caloric energy, but it gives you neural energy by way of increasing epinephrine transmission."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"Dopamine is a molecule of motivation and anticipation."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"Understanding that dopamine is released in response to anticipation of a reward is the fuel for work."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"Dopamine is a molecule that's associated with novelty expectation, motivation, and reward."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"The currency of pleasure exists in multiple chemical systems but the primary ones are the dopamine system, which is the anticipation of pleasure and the serotonin system which is more closely related to the immediate experience of that pleasure."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"Every time that the pleasure system is kicked in high gear, an absolutely spectacular event, there is a mirror symmetric activation of the pain system."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"Dopamine is this currency. It's like these days you hear a lot about Bitcoin, and Ethereum, and Dogecoin, and US dollars, and Euros and other stuff. But the currency that you use in your body doesn't matter what external currency those are."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"Nowadays there are dozens, if not hundreds of quality peer-reviewed studies on how the mind and how the nervous system can control activation of the immune system."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"The nervous system acts as a set of highways between the different tissues of your body, calling into action the immune system, liberating particular molecules that can reduce inflammation and lead to faster healing."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"There are things that you can do to leverage your nervous system in order to enhance the function of your immune system in very robust ways."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"Thinking about a positive future leads to activation of the so-called mesolimbic reward pathway and could reduce the size of tumors, could accelerate wound healing."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"There's extreme excitement about the use of psychedelics for the treatment of various disorders of the mind."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"Allow neural circuitry in the brain to be shaped and changed, such that people can combat diseases like depression, or trauma, or other disorders of the mind that cause tremendous suffering."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"Plasticity is never the goal, goal directed plasticity is the goal."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"We can change our nervous system by taking some very specific and deliberate actions."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"Dopamine is a molecule that's almost always associated with pleasure and with the accomplishment of a particular goal, but it's really also a molecule of motivation."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"The anterior mid-singulate cortex is an anatomical and neural reflection of willpower and tenacity."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"If you measure heart rate in standard ways that cardiologists measure heart rate and you stimulate over this left dorsolateral, you get a deceleration of the heart rate and it's very time locked to the stimulation."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"It's really that idea that you're laying in that information to the exact right spot. And the signal is a simple signal, but it's a profound one, which is turn on, stay on, remember to stay on."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"You make this complicated neuroscience and kind of brain-body science accessible, you know, in a way that few have a gift to do."
Dr. Andrew Huberman
"If you want to access states of heightened plasticity, let's say you want to learn faster or you want to bring more out of some physical training that you're doing, the key is to apply those principles."
"New memories are not formed immediately; rather, they're in a transient state before they become permanent."
Anonymous
"Those who recover tend to inhibit the fear, a term that Pavlov over a hundred years ago in Russia termed extinction."
Anonymous
"Decades of work by neuroscientists have identified that this exact same set of symptoms in mice and men are the result of the hard-wired fear reflex of the amygdala."
Anonymous
"Fear lives in a part of the brain called the amygdala."
Anonymous
"What's so fascinating about the amygdala and processing of fear is the same brain region is conserved across all mammals."
Anonymous
"There's only one biological currency, and that's dopamine."
"There's actually a part of the brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which has to do with our sense of self and time and place. So when you're in these flow states, it feels as if it's coming through them from some place else because they lose their sense of agency, but they also lose their sense of time."
"When you're creating, the parts of your brain that are normally active when they're clicking off time, are downregulated when you're in that creative flow state. Time doesn't seem to exist, self doesn't seem to exist. It's a very pleasurable state."
"The second half of sleep is when the emotional weight of things starts to become... let's say you put it on the shelf properly. Things that are important emotionally get put in one shelf; things that were like the comment you got on Twitter that was triggering doesn't seem like such a big deal after a good night's sleep."
"There are only two subjects really worth studying, physics and neuroscience."
Demis Hassabis
"Your brain is a zillion of neurons and it's the most miraculous computer that we'll ever see."
Dr. Alan Mandell, D.C.
"It was LSD that catalyzed our understanding of neurotransmitters and receptors."
"The neurons that fire together wire together."
"Mitochondria are primary regulators of neurotransmitter production and release, including key neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin."
"We used to think the brain was separate from the body and the immune system, and that all didn't affect the brain. Turns out that was all wrong."
"Neurogenesis is one of these pretty rare actual game changers in neuroscience. It's really upending many of the conventional views of how we thought about the brain, brain growth, brain development, aging."
"The most exciting thing is somewhere in the interface between cognitive science, neuroscience, AI, computer science, and philosophy of mind."
"Understanding the neuroscience of pleasure and pain makes us realize that we're unhappy because we're constantly surrounded by pleasure and that pleasure is making us miserable as a result."
"So why is it that some memories last our entire lives, whereas other memories, we hear and they're fleeting?"
"You need your neurons to be activated. But as we know from what I've told you so far, that repetition is what drives memory."
"The brain is sort of the last frontier in terms of rapid advances with the body."
"Dopamine... is really about the molecule of motivation."
"We can actually turn on emotions by stimulating specific areas of the brain."
"The point of neuroscience is to study what the brain is for."
"There are 95 brain studies on internet addiction... all 95 showed the same brain changes as seen in drug addicts."
"Even though average world only talked about the motor functions, motor functions of basal ganglia actually is a misnomer."
"It should not be called ganglia because by definition, ganglia is a collection of cell bodies in neuronal cell bodies outside the central nervous system."
"Basal ganglia are actually basal nuclei. Why don't we call them ganglia? Because ganglia are, by definition, collections of cell bodies of neurons outside the central nervous system."
"These are masses of gray matter at the base of cerebral hemispheres."
"This is a C-shaped mass of gray matter because it is embedded deep in the central nervous system. C-shaped nucleus."
"This green-colored structure, this is called not red, what we call it, yes, caudate nucleus."
"This mass of gray matter, which is a cheese piece, this is basically called lentiform nucleus."
"This gray matter deeply buried in sulci, very good, is insula."
"Managing your mind can change your brain, can change your DNA, literally."
"Neurons that fire together wire together, and they fire together because you're doing it; they wire together because you're doing it a lot. That's repetition."
"Mirror neurons... you can actually feel for somebody their pain, and those things are built into us."
"As you think, feel, and choose, this automatically causes a structural change inside of your brain."
"We are all born with a brain that has 86 billion neurons."
"The human brain is the most complex of any animal’s on earth, with 86 billion neurons."
"Neuroscientific evidence... suggests that this kind of training can help you feel less stressed, less pain, and change the way your brain works."
"After all, traditional materialism claims that progress in understanding the brain will lead to progress in understanding consciousness. But that hasn't really happened."
"Consciousness is the brain's user illusion of itself." - Daniel Dennett
"Magnesium holds a pivotal place in the intersection of neuroscience, physical health, and longevity."
"Memory is very distributed. It's not just one particular area. It's actually really distributed."
"We've discovered more about the human brain in the past 20 years than the previous 2,000 years combined."
"When you stimulate [certain dopamine neurons], animals don't like it... please stop it and yet they crave that social interaction that's missing."
"What we know now from looking at brains on the functional MRI, is that if I make an effort to notice what I imagine seeing and hearing and feeling, the part of my brain that processes vision is active."
"Thanks to brain plasticity, we know that the brain can be changed."
"I would say this is also something that neuroscientists talk about: to keep giving yourself questions is a really good way to study."
"Every time you reach out in love and smile and do what it is that you only know how to do, you are changing someone else's brain chemistry."
"Serotonin is involved in so many different functions that impact our daily life."
"The serotonin 2A receptors is one of, again, many different serotonin receptors."
"In fact, you may be surprised to learn that psilocybin basically is serotonin."
"Increasing the activity of the phosphocreatine system in the forebrain can be beneficial... in regulation of mood."
"If you damage the brain, consciousness gets messed up, which suggests it's heavily involved in consciousness."
"We do know that the brain is involved in consciousness, and we don't know of anything else that alters your consciousness like affecting the brain does."
"The astonishing hypothesis is that you, your joys, your sorrows, your memories, your ambitions, your sense of personal identity, and free will are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules."
"The anterior insular and the anterior cingulate cortex are the parts of the brain which activate when experiencing physical pain. They also get activated when experiencing emotional pain, i.e., being wrong."
"Whether or not you believe that blood glucose is the limiting resource for willpower, what we know for sure is that there's a single set of brain circuits indeed there's a single brain area that seems to be able to largely if not entirely explain this phenomenon that we call tenacity and willpower."
"The ability to engage the anterior mid singulate cortex and to build up its volume literally and increase its activity relies on one critical feature, which is that you have to be in some degree of resistance."
"Dr. Kai Tai will tell us about her discovery of so-called loneliness neurons, neurons that give us that sense that we are not being fulfilled from our social interactions."
"The fundamental reason the brain is cool is that it gives rise to the mind."
"The human brain is a network of approximately 100 billion neurons, different experiences create different neural connections, which bring about different emotions."
"About 50% of what is taught about the brain gets it right and accurate and is helpful, but another 50% is just the approximation and oversimplification of what's going on."
"We're all basically working with the same building blocks of neurons and neurochemistry."
"The ability to inhibit distressing emotions from the amygdala is an enabler of cognitive capacity because it leaves full attention available for what you're trying to do."
"The ability to feel connected is neurobiologically how we're wired. It's why we are here."
"It's an ecosystem filled with throbbing 100 billion microscopic jellyfish sparking electricity at each other, trying to approach each other, shaving down, pruning, branching, arborizing."
"There isn't a region in the brain for creativity. There isn't a region in the brain for this. The thing is working as an environment, as an ocean filled with like a kelp forest and jellyfish."
"Neurons in those areas project to areas of the brain like the hypothalamus which sits right above the roof of your mouth and is responsible for a lot of basic functions."
"These little mushroom shaped protrusions...are the sites of new excitatory connections."
"A great way to study the stochastic nature of neural development is with nine-banded armadillos."
"Mind-body communication involves clearly a thousand different neural pathways, not just the vagus nerve."
"Our gut and our brain are connected; there's a whole hard wiring of nervous system in our gut."
"Our brains take out the garbage during deep delta sleep. If we don't get that deep sleep, we can't flush the brain and take the garbage out."
"The attachment circuitry and the molecules of attachment, in this case, oxytocin, to reward pathways and to motivational pathways."
"Dopamine is what's called a neuromodulator which simply refers to the fact that it's a chemical that modulates or changes the electrical activity of other cells."
"The VTA functions in close partnership with a different brain structure called the nucleus accumbens."
"Whoever figures out how to accelerate healing in the human brain will be the first trillionaire of our time."
"One of the most exciting discoveries...has been the discovery of what are loosely termed mirror neurons."
"In future, that means for sure there have to be much stronger links between mathematicians, computer scientists, and neuroscientists."
"With regular bubble baths, what am I doing? I'm growing a big fat, fluffy hippocampus."
"Trauma as something that fundamentally changes the way that our brain and body function in a way that makes other aspects of living more challenging."
"Frontal cortex is what makes us most definedly human."
"The amygdala is centrally involved in fear and anxiety."
"The biggest questions facing the life sciences today is how the brain works and, in particular, the origin of human consciousness."
"We basically have a brain to control our body."
"Anytime you want to talk about what the basic building blocks are of emotion, none of those basic building blocks are specific to emotion."
"There is constant conversation between the brain and the body... if the face is influencing the brain, it's doing so in a way that's not special."
"The brain is modeling your retina and it's modeling your skin and it's modeling the sensory surfaces of the body."
"The brain is trapped in a dark, silent box called your skull."
"Consciousness itself is inexplicable. We have no understanding whatsoever of the relationship between consciousness and neurological functioning."
"Brain imaging studies from drug-addicted individuals show physical changes in areas of the brain that are critical for judgment, decision-making, learning, memory, and behavior control."
"When you celebrate people, your nervous system and your brain recognize it, and you get what he calls a positive drip of dopamine, which either calms your brain and the stress or it amplifies your mood."
"We are pushing the limits of athletic skills, and now we are dipping more and more into the neuroscience and how the brain works to perform more in a tough situations."
"Your visual system does it for you and one of the ways that it does that is through the neuromodulator dopamine."
"Dopamine is released in anticipation of what we want."
"Whether or not you've heard me or others talk about dopamine before, today's episode is really designed to give you the biological and practical knowledge so that you can leverage your dopamine circuitry and your dopamine levels."
"When we feel something, chances are that we're going to release dopamine in the brain, the feel-good neurochemical that activates the reward center of the brain."
"When people began to realize back in the 80s that there was this link between the brain and the immune system that was more profound than we originally thought, now, of course, we know that they’re really one system."
"Dopamine is released. Dopamine just feels really good. That's all you need to know."
"Dopamine is critical for overcoming procrastination, for ensuring ongoing motivation, and indeed for ensuring confidence."
"By high-fiving yourself, your brain activates positive programming. It silences the critic, making it neurologically impossible to think anything but positive thoughts."
"There's a lot of research that came out of Europe and now we're doing it here in the United States where psychedelics can help reset certain brains."
"The brain is not simple; even for the most simple task, areas all over the brain are orchestrated."
"The research indicates that split brain patients are able to engage in very complex bimanual tasks such as playing a Mozart melody on a piano with both hands."
"The brain’s solution to the problem of waste clearance, it was really unexpected, it was ingenious."
"The space between brain cells expands during sleep, allowing toxins that accumulate throughout the day to be cleared."
"Imagine we get to a point where AI already understands you, like straight through your brain."
"The prefrontal cortex is basically an area of the brain that says yes or no, not now to other brain regions in order to suppress action."
"Every time you learn, you make new connections in your brain, and learning is making those connections."
"Certain parts of the brain shrink over time as we age, affecting communication between the cells in our brain."
"Healthy functioning of the mesocortical pathway, however, allows us to toggle or switch back and forth between different types of pursuits."
"Every experience rewires your nervous system... that's a ridiculous, illogical statement."
"Human brain lateralization for language is probably the most distinct feature we've got other than handedness."
"Psilocybin substitutes for serotonin, becomes a better neurotransmitter, activates neurogenesis... it causes new neurons to form, new pathways of knowledge."
"The very first human patient is able to move a mouse around the screen just by thinking."
"What you've done with this podcast is incredible. You've made millions of people who didn't have access to science or Neuroscience be fascinated with neuroscience."
"Real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain."
"Medicine until even today, 95% of it does not take the brain into account in health, which is crazy."
"Understanding how the brain does that, this regulatory role, I think will also revolutionize medicine."
"The complexities of our brain development are significant, and the idea that there could be substantial racial differences in intelligence is unfounded."
"The person that will be there is formed, is created by the plastic processes of this machine within its lifetime."
"The embodied person that you are is a product of brain plasticity within your lifetime."
"A genuine smile hits their mirror neurons, starting a chemical change. You've instantly hit their mirror neurons, you've started a smile in their brain."
"It guides your emotional, motivational, and reward processes, and basically makes you feel all the feels, from pleasure to fear to anger."
"Here’s Michael explaining why Valentine’s Day should be less about hearts and more about your brain."
"Our hearts have very little to do with how we actually feel love."
"Neuroplasticity means that you can create neural pathways in your brain that allow you to get from point A to point B faster... It's a physical thing that makes your brain able to go from point A to point B easier."
"The brain is just a linear receptor of consciousness, but the whole universe is consciousness."
"An octopus has one large brain, but each of its eight tentacles have their own kind of mini brains. This allows the tentacles to operate independently of each other, and yet always in service to the whole."
"I decided to go back to school and do my PhD in neuroscience, and along the way, I had the chance to do a placement in psychology... It was so fascinating to me."
"What if every person that listened to this podcast and thought this is such a great podcast I wish I could do some Neuroscience could do it?"
"Becoming supernatural by Dr. Joe Dispenza teaches a lot about rewiring the neuro pathways in your brain to create your desired reality."
"Psilocybin induces neuroplasticity through the addition of novel connections in those pyramidal neurons of the frontal cortex."
"Human individuality is not something that modern neuroscience or classic neuroscience has really done much of."
"Emerging Neuroscience, psychology, and mind sciences are converging to reveal that every moment of our lives is shaped by how we focus our attention."
"You can't understand pain unless you understand how the brain works."
"This is what we want to do: we want to be able to record from lots of neurons to gain a high fidelity readout of what the intention is."
"The human brain is constantly getting a signal from all the bodily systems, but particularly the heart, the vagus nerve."
"Through thought alone, you can change the physical wiring of your brain, the most complicated thing in the universe."
"Neuroscience reveals you to be a biochemical puppet."
"Damage to certain brain areas can lead to a loss of dreams but preservation of REM sleep, highlighting a distinction between the physiological and experiential aspects of dreaming."
"Freud's suggestion that dreams protect sleep has found support in contemporary neuroscience, indicating a biological function for dreaming."
"The default mode network is largely responsible for your human consciousness."
"The overall communication of neurons within your brain was spectacularly enhanced."
"This kind of technology has revolutionized psychology because prior to this, of course, we couldn't look into the brain to see what was actually going on, and psychology was kind of a soft science."
"What really happens when you stimulate one area, depolarizing current of sodium moves within the axon and next node of Ranvier, it takes the restriction potential up to threshold and this area depolarizes."
"The wave of depolarization followed by wave of repolarization, which is called action potential, is jumping from one node of Ranvier to the next."
"Saltatory conduction...is a clever mechanism used by nature to increase the velocity of electrochemical information transfer within the axon system."
"Nature can increase the velocity of action potentials through the axons by two mechanisms: number one, by increasing the diameter of the axons making the fibers large size, and number two, by putting the myelinations."
"Sensations like pinprick or sharp cut information should go immediately...but there are some sensations which nature enjoys to take them slowly, even neurons enjoy them step by step."
"The limbic system is the paramount area in the central nervous system concerned with emotional activity."