In this episode, I discuss how we can use specific types of behavior
to change our brain, both for sake of learning the movements
themselves and for allowing us to learn non-movement-based information
as well. I describe the key role that errors play in triggering our
brains to change and how the vestibular (balance) system can activate
and amplify neuroplasticity. As always, I cover science, and science-
based practical tools. Thank you in advance for your questions and for
your interest in science!
-- Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast where we discuss science and
science-based tools for everyday life. My name is Andrew Huberman, and
I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School
of Medicine. This podcast is separate from my teaching and research
roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to
bring you zero cost to consumer information about science and science-
related tools. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the
sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Headspace. Headspace
is a meditation app that makes meditation easy. I've been meditating
on and off now for about 30 years, although I confess more off than
on. And that's because I think like, for a lot of people, sticking to
a meditation practice can be pretty challenging. I started using
Headspace a few years ago and I found that it's really allowed me to
stick to a meditation practice on a regular basis. I meditate anywhere
from five to seven times a week. The app includes meditations that are
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easy to start and complete the meditations. I started using these
meditations while I was flying a few years back. On JetBlue flights,
they started offering Headspace meditations. That's where I initially
started. And then I moved over to the app, and I really enjoy it and I
derive great benefit from it. If you'd like to try Headspace, you can
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the meditations that Headspace offers for free for one month. That's
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The probiotics in Athletic Greens are also important to me because
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Other members of the scientific advisory include, for instance, the
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off the program. That's getmadefor.com, put Huberman in at checkout,
and get 20% off the program. 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. 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, today, we're going
to talk a lot about the basic science of neuroplasticity. I promise to
not use excessive nomenclature. There'll be a little bit, but I'll try
and make it as clear as possible. And we're also going to talk a lot
about protocols and tools that the scientific literature points to and
support for changing our nervous system, again, not just for sake of
learning new motor movements or how to balance better, but for how to
feel differently about particular experiences, both past, present, and
future, and as well as how to learn faster. We're not going to discuss
hacks, a word I loath, we're not going to discuss gimmicks, we're
going to discuss mechanism and scientific data and the tools that
those mechanisms and scientific data point to so that you can tailor
your practices around learning to your specific needs and goals. So
let's begin by just examining the big picture question which is, does
the brain control behavior?
And my hope is that everyone is immediately thinking yes. The brain
and nervous system, we really should say, 'cause the brain is just one
component of the nervous system, controls our behavior. How does it do
that? Well, there are a couple different levels that it does that.
First of all, if we're talking about movement, behavior generally
means movement, if we're talking about movement, we have two
categories of neurons that are very important to think about in the
context of neuroplasticity. First of all, we have what are called
lower motor neurons. These are motor neurons that live in our spinal
cord. For the aficionados out there, for those of you that might be
headed to medical school or just want to learn more about the anatomy,
they live in the ventral horn of the spinal cord. But that doesn't
matter if you don't want to know that, just know that you have these
things called lower motor neurons. These are neurons that are in the
spinal cord but they extend a wire that we call an axon out into the
peripheral nervous system, into the body. And those neurons connect
with muscle. They send electrical potentials out there that allow our
muscles to twitch into contract. As a little point of fact, actually,
we don't have muscle memory. There's no such thing as muscle memory.
Muscles are dumb. They don't know anything, they don't have a history,
they don't have a memory, they don't know anything. It is the neurons
that control those muscles and their firing patterns in which all the
information for motor patterns are stored. So your ability to walk is
not muscle memory, it's neural memory. Now, the lower motor neurons,
while smarter than the muscle so to speak, are not the most brilliant
of the motor neurons. They are generally involved in doing what they
are told, and they are told what to do from two sources. We have
circuits in our brainstem, so this would be kind of around your neck
deep in the brain, that are called central pattern generators. These
are sometimes called CPGs. Central pattern generators are what allow
us to generate repetitive patterns of movement. So inhaling and
exhaling, inhaling and exhaling subconsciously is controlled by a
central pattern generator. That just means a collection of neurons. If
you really want to know, they're called the pre-Botzinger neurons
discovered by Jack Feldman and colleagues at UCLA. These neurons in
the brainstem send information down the phrenic nerve and control the
diaphragm. And it goes inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. And you don't
have to think about that. You could think about it and you could
change the durations of inhales and exhales and change that up, but
the motor neurons that control that are just responding to what the
brain is telling it to do. The other central pattern generators
include things like walking. The right limb-left limb, right limb-left
limb pattern that we normally associate with walking was learned
during childhood, and these central pattern generators, sometimes
called CPGs, tell our lower motor neurons, "Fire. Now you fire, now
you fire." So they are literally saying, "Right, left, right left."
They are the marching orders from the brainstem to the lower motor
neurons. So these lower motor neurons do what they are told. They are
obedient little soldiers and they do what they are told, and their job
is to make the muscles contract at specific times. Okay. That's all
simple. But then there are the upper motor neurons. The upper motor
neurons actually reside in our motor cortex, way up on top of the
brain. And they are involved in sending signals for deliberate action.
So they send signals to the lower motor neurons which are the
effectors, the ones that actually control the muscles, but the upper
motor neurons are the ones that send very specific signals. For
instance, the signals that would allow you to make a cup of coffee in
the morning or to deliberately engage in any kind of behavior. Now,
you can probably make a cup of coffee in the morning without having to
think about it too much. It's almost reflexive for you now, which
means that a lot of the information about how to perform that
particular movement has been passed off to circuitry that's now more
or less in the brainstem and below the motor cortex. Now, why am I
giving you all this detail? Well, if you want to change motor
patterns, you have to know where in the circuitry changes are possible
and you ought to know where the changes are most likely to occur. You
also need to know, how do you signal to the brain and nervous system
that a change is necessary? So let's just pause there, return to the
initial question that we started with, which is, does the brain
control behavior? And the answer is yes, and now you know how. It's
upper motor neurons, lower motor neurons, you've got these things
called central pattern generators and some connection with the muscle.
So there you go, you just got, basically, what was the equivalent of
the introduction to a college lecture on motor control and the nervous
system. But the point today is all about plasticity. How can that be
leveraged in order to open up this magical thing that we call
plasticity in order to access changes to our emotional experience, or
to our belief system, or to our ability to remember and use specific
kinds of information for say math, or language, et cetera? Well, what
I'm not going to tell you is that you need to go running or you need
to go biking, or that simply going through motor patterns is going to
open up plasticity because I hate to tell you this, but as beneficial
as exercise is, it does not open plasticity unless you do certain
things.
And I will tell you exactly what those certain things are today. To be
clear, I think exercise is wonderful and healthy, can improve
cardiovascular function, maintain strength, bone density, all that
good stuff. But just working out or doing your exercise of various
kinds will not change your nervous system. It will maintain it, and it
can certainly improve other health metrics, but it is not going to
open up the window for plasticity. The question we need to ask is can
behavior change the brain? We already agree that the brain can change
behavior, but can behavior change the brain? And the answer is yes,
provided that behavior is different enough in specific ways from the
behaviors that you already know how to perform. Let me repeat that.
Can behavior change the brain?
And the answer is yes, provided that behavior is different enough from
the sorts of behaviors that you already know how to perform. And I
should've added the word well. Because you can't obviously perform a
behavior that you don't know how to perform because you don't know how
to do it yet. But there's a key element to accessing neuroplasticity
that frankly I don't see out there in the general discussion about
neuroplasticity. In the general discussion about neuroplasticity and
about learning, I hear all these gimmicks about using different ways
to remember lots of people's names and arranging things into their
first letters and mnemonics and all this kind of stuff, which,
frankly, to me feels really gimmicky.
I think that if you look at super learners, they tend to be people
that have a process of say extreme memory. But people who have extreme
memory, generally, the literature shows us, are pretty poor at other
things. I don't think most of us are interested in walking around
knowing how to remember everything. In fact, there are some
interesting studies looking at humans who over-remember, and they
suffer tremendously because they remember all sorts of things, like
the number at the top of the receipt at the bodega that they bought a
Coca-Cola 10 years ago. This is useless information for most people.
They don't do well in life, really. So the goal isn't to remember
everything, the goal is to be selective about your brain changes. And
when we talk about brain changes, I want to highlight adaptive
changes. There's a whole category of things that we're going to
discuss when we talk about traumatic brain injury and dementia, a
topic for a future episode, about all the things that happen when you
have damaged your nervous system or you're missing neurons. But,
today, I really want to talk about something that I think is very near
and dear to many of your hearts, which is what are the behaviors that
you can engage in to access neuroplasticity so that then you can apply
that plasticity to the specific things that you want to learn or
unlearn. This is very important because I don't want people to get the
impression that we're really talking about learning a bunch of motor
movements.
You may be an athlete, you might not be an athlete. You might want to
learn how to dance, you might not. You might want to learn how to
dance and get better at remembering and learning languages, for
instance, or at unlearning some difficult emotional experience,
meaning you want to remove the emotional load from a particular memory
of an experience. What we're talking about today is using behavior as
a gate to enter states of mind and body that allow you to access
plasticity. 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, the so-called adaptive plasticity.
There is something called representational plasticity.
Representational plasticity is just your internal representation of
the outside world. So you have a map of auditory space, believe it or
not, meaning you have neurons that respond when something over on my
right happens, like I'm [snaps fingers] snapping my fingers over to my
right. I can't snap as well on my left, which is the whole thing unto
itself. [snaps fingers] Yeah, weak over there on the left side. But
when I do that, there are different neurons respond to those. We have
a map of visual space. Certain neurons are seeing things in certain
portions of visual space and not others. We have a map of motor space,
meaning when we move our limbs in particular directions, we know where
those limbs are because even if we can't see them, we have what's
called proprioceptive feedback. So we have knowledge about where our
limbs are. In fact, people that lack certain neurons for
proprioceptive feedback, they are very poor at controlling their motor
behavior. They get injured a lot. It's actually a terrible situation.
So we've got all these representations inside and we have maps of our
motor commands. 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. 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.
I think this will completely reframe the way that most people think
about plasticity. Most of us think about plasticity as, "Okay, we're
going to get into this optimal learning state or flow, and then
suddenly we're going to be able to do all the things that we wish that
we could do." Well, I hate to break it to you, but flow is an
expression of what we already know how to do. It is not a state for
learning. And I'm willing to go to bat with any of the flo-wa-nis-tas
out there that want to challenge me on that one. Flow is an expression
of nervous system capabilities that are already embedded in us. 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 signal the neural circuits that they
have to change. So let's talk about the experiments that support what
I just said. 'Cause I'm about to tell you that making errors over and
over and over again is the route to shaping your nervous system so
that it performs better and better and better. And I'm not going to
tell you that the last rep of a set where you hit failure in the gym
is anything like neuroplasticity. You hear that too that it's pushing
to that point of a cliff where you just can't function anymore, that's
the signal. That's not the signal. That's a distinct neuromuscular
phenomenon that bears zero resemblance to what it takes to get
neuroplasticity. 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. It's a really fundamental
aspect of how we're built. And when you look at it, it's actually very
straightforward. It's a series of logical steps that once you learn
how to open those hatches, it becomes very straightforward to deploy.
Last episode, we discussed some of the basic principles of
neuroplasticity. If you didn't hear that episode, no problem, I'll
just review it quickly, which is that it's a falsehood that everything
that we do and experience changes our brain. The brain changes when
certain neurochemicals, namely acetylcholine, epinephrin, and
dopamine, are released in ways and in the specific times that allow
for neural circuits to be marked for change. And then the change
occurs later during sleep. I'll review that later, but, 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, I talked all about focus. If you haven't
seen it 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, not just for learning new motor skills 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. Let's talk about
some classic experiments that really nail down what's most important
in this discussion about plasticity.
As 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.
Passive experience will shape the brain just because of the way that
the chemicals that are sloshing around in there and the way that the
neurons are arranged and all sorts of things. The brain's job is to
customize itself in response to its experience. 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. We're mostly
going to be talking about adult plasticity today, but I got a lot of
questions about, "Well, what about if I'm younger than 25?" First of
all, that's great. I wish I had a time machine, but I don't. Because
as I've said before, the stinger is when you're young, your brain is
very plastic, but you have less control over your experience. When
you're older, generally, you have more control of your experience, but
your brain is less plastic.
So if you're already asking the question as a 20-year-old or a
15-year-old, "What can I do now that's really going to enhanced my
brain?" I guess the simple answer would be an aside, which would be
get the broadest education you can possible. That means math,
chemistry, physics, literature, music, learn how to play an
instrument. I'm saying that 'cause I wish I had, et cetera. Get a
broad training in a number of things and find the thing that really
captures your passion and excitement, and then put a ton of additional
effort there. That's what I recommend, including emotional
development. Maybe a topic for a future episode. But if you are an
adult, or if you are a young person, knowing how to tap into these
plasticity mechanisms is very powerful. You need these chemicals
deployed in the nervous system in order to mark whatever nerve cells
happen to be firing in the time afterward for change. And people are
obsessed with asking, "What supplements, what drugs, what conditions,
what machines will allow for that?" But there's a natural set of
conditions that allow for that. When we came into this world, we
learned to take our different maps of experience, our motor maps, our
auditory maps, our visual maps.
And to link them, we align those maps. The simplest example is the one
I gave before. If I hear something off to my right, like I click like
that, it could come from my fingers snapping or it could come from
something generated by somebody else or something else to my right, I
look to my right. If I hear it on the left, I look to my left. If I
hear it right in front of me, I keep looking right in front of me. And
if I hear it behind me, I turn around. And that's because our maps of
visual space and our maps of auditory space and our maps of motor
space are aligned to one another in perfect register. 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 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 Knudsen.
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 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. This gets especially complicated when you start
including sounds. When you have a thing off to your right making a
sound, but the thing is actually right here. So you're hearing the
sound at one location and you're seeing the object at another location
because you're wearing these prisms. So your image of the world is
totally distorted. Or, in experiments done by other groups, they wear
glasses, subjects wore glasses that completely invert the visual world
so that everything is upside down, which is an extreme example of
these representational maps being flipped or shifted. 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. It's
absolutely incredible. Or, in the case of the people who would look at
the world upside down, they somehow are able to navigate this upside
down world even though we're completely used to our feet being on the
floor and not on the ceiling and people not walking at us by hanging
off the ceiling like bats. Amazing. And what it tells us is that these
maps that are aligned to one another can move and shift and rotate,
and even flip themselves. 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. So
this is a very experimental scenario, but it's an important one to
understand because it really tamps down the fact that we have the
capacity to create dramatic shifts in our representation of the
outside world. So how can we get plasticity as adults that mimics the
plasticity that we get when we are juveniles? Well, the Knudsen Lab
and other labs have looked at this, and it's really interesting. First
of all, we have to ask, what is the signal for plasticity? Is it just
having prism glasses on? No, because they did that experiment and
ruled that out. Is it just the fact that the visual thing appears to
be far over to my right when in fact it's right in front of me?
No. 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
think, "Oh, well, practice is going to be I have to access beginner's
mind," which is a great concept, actually, it's about approaching
things expecting to make errors, which is great. I think I am a
believer in beginner's mind. But people understandably get frustrated,
like they're trying to learn a piece on the piano and 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, [indistinct] "I can't do it, I can't do
it," when they don't realize that [laughs] 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 kind of, I
don't want to say freaks out because it's a very mechanistic and
controlled situation, but the nervous system starts releasing
neurotransmitters and neuromodulators that say, "We better change
something in the circuitry." And so errors are the basis [laughs] 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
epinephrin. It increases alertness, acetylcholine, focus. And this is
why frustration that leads us to just kind of quit and walk away from
the endeavor is the absolute worst thing. 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. But
if you take that frustration and you walk away from the endeavor, you
are essentially setting up plasticity to rewire you according to what
happens afterwards, which is generally feeling pretty miserable. So
now you can kind of start to appreciate why it is that continuing to
drill into a process to the point of frustration but then staying with
that process for a little bit longer, and I'll define exactly what I
mean by a little bit, is the most important thing for adult learning
as well as childhood learning, but adult learning in particular.
Now, the Knudsen Lab did two very important sets of experiments. The
first one was published in "Nature,' very important study, which
showed that juveniles can make these massive shifts in their map
representations, meaning you can shift the visual world using visual
prisms a huge amount and very quickly. Young individuals can shift
their representations of the world so that they learn to reach to the
correct location. They get a lot of plasticity all at once, and it
happens very fast in a period of just a couple 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. Here we're talking
about map shifts, but this could be learning a new language, this
could be any number of different things that [indistinct] we're
attempting. So what we're saying is what I already said before, which
is that we learn very well as youngsters, but not as adults after 25.
But 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 that the visual world all the way over to the
right, they did this incrementally. So, first, they put on prisms that
shifted it just a little bit, 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 representation to 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 about as an adult. What these papers from the Knudsen Lab
show, and what others have gone on to show, is that the adult nervous
system is fully capable of engaging in a huge amount of plasticity,
but you need to do it in smaller increments per learning epoch or per
learning episode.
So how would you do this? Well, say for instance, I'm terrible at free
throws, so let's say I wanted to learn free throws. I'm 45 years old,
so I'm well past the 25 and under mark. I'm going to make errors. I'm
going to make a lot errors. If I go into learning free throws knowing
that errors are the gate to plasticity, well, then I feel a little bit
better, but I still have to aim for the rim of the basket or the net.
Basically, showing how little I know about basketball. But I think I
know the general themes around basketball, involves a net, a back
board, and a ball, of course. So I go to the free throw line and I'll
throw. How long should I go? Well, until I'm hitting the point of
frustration. And at that point, continuing probably for anywhere from
10 to 100 more trials should be my limit, right? That should be my
limit if I want to improve some specific aspect of the motor behavior.
And so the question then is what should I be paying attention to? What
should I be focusing on? Well, obviously trying to get the ball into
the basket. But the beauty of motor learning is that the circuits for
auditory and visual and motor more or less teach themselves. I don't
necessarily have to be paying attention to exactly the contact of my
fingers with the ball or some random feature like whether or not I'm
bending my knees or not. The key is to try a number of different
parameters until I start to approximate the behavior that I want to
get a little bit better, and then trying to get consistent about that.
Now, many of you involved in sports learning will say, "Okay, well,
that's obvious, it's just incremental learning." But the key thing is
in those errors. By isolating the errors and making a number of errors
in a particular aspect of the motor movement, it signals to the brain
that it's plastic. And if I leave that episode of going and trying to
learn how to shoot free throws, my brain is still plastic. Plasticity
is a state of the brain and nervous system. It's not just geared
toward the specific thing I'm trying to learn. So there are two
aspects to plasticity that I think we really need to highlight. One is
that there's plasticity geared toward the thing that you are trying to
learn specifically. And then there are states of mind and body that
allow us to access plasticity. Now, toward the end of this episode,
I'm going to spell out specific protocols in a little more detail.
That free throw example might not correlate with what you want to
learn. Actually, I don't have a huge desire to learn free throws. I've
more or less given up on basketball, and free throws in particular.
But I think that it's important to understand that motor movements are
the most straightforward way to access states of plasticity. And that
can be for sake of learning the motor movement or for sake of
accessing plasticity more generally. One very important aspect to
getting plasticity as an adult is not just smaller increments, meaning
shorter bouts. So I gave an example of another 100 free throws or
something, but going out there and just getting 10,000 free throws all
at once or packing as much as I can into one episode is not going to
be as efficient for me as shorter bouts of intense learning as an
adult. Because the error signals are not as well-defined to my nervous
system.
It's not going to know what needs to change. And so this is really the
key element of incremental learning, is that you're trying to signal
to the nervous system at least one component that needs to change. The
nervous system needs to know what the error is. Now, when I shoot free
throws, Lord knows there are a lot of different kinds of errors that
happen, probably the way I'm bending my knees, the arc of the ball,
the way I'm organizing my shoulders, probably where my eyes are, lots
of things. So which ones to focus on? And that's what I said before,
the beauty of the motor system is I don't have to worry about all of
that. I just need to get the reps in a number of times, and the
nervous system will figure out how far off my motor commands are, at
the level of these maps that I described earlier, how far those
deviate from the desired behavior, getting the ball into the basket,
and it will start making adjustments. But as I make adjustments, or as
my nervous system makes adjustments for me, the key thing is to not
start adding a variety of new errors because then it gets confused.
And so this is why short learning bouts are absolutely essential. So
let's say it's for learning an instrument as an adult. Probably
anywhere from 7 minutes to 30 minutes, provided that you're fully
attending, you're very focused, is going to be a pretty significant
stimulus to inspire plasticity in the nervous system. 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 to kind of the location of the food through an
array of speakers. Basically, what they found was that if people have
to adjust their visual world in order to get food, the plasticity
would eventually occur, but it was very slow as an adult. It was very,
very slow. Unless they actually had to hunt that food. In order to eat
at all, they needed plasticity. And then what happened was remarkable.
What they observed 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, which is incredible because the brain is just
neurons and soup of chemicals. But 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. This study, a beautiful study,
published in the journal of neuroscience shows that 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. So the nervous system has a capacity to change at a
tremendous rate, to an enormous degree at any stage of life provided
it's important enough that that happen. And I think some of you might
be saying, "Well, duh, that's obvious. If it's really crucial, then,
of course, it's going to change faster." But it didn't have to be that
way. And for most people who are trying to learn how to learn faster
or learn better, they probably, in most cases, they are hitting a
limit because the need to change is not crucial enough. And I think
there are a number of places where this has important relevance in the
people who are battling addiction, for instance. I will be the first
to say that I sympathize with the fact that addictions have a
biological component.
There's clearly cases where people struggle tremendously to change
their behavior and their nervous system, in some cases, is so
disrupted by whatever substance they've been abusing or behavior that
they've been engaging in, that it's that much harder for them to
change. But we've also seen incredible examples where when people have
to change from an internal standpoint, from their own belief and
desire to change, that massive change is possible. And so I think that
the studies that Knudsen did showing the incremental learning can
create a huge degree of plasticity as an adult as well as when the
contingency is very high, meaning we need to eat, or we need to make
an income, or we need to do something that's vitally important for us,
that plasticity can happen in these enormous leaps just like they can
in adolescence and young adulthood. That points to the fact that it
has to be a neurochemical system. There has to be an underlying
mechanism. This wasn't a case of sticking a wire into the brain or
taking a particular drug. All the chemicals that we're about to talk
about are released from drugstores, if you will, [laughs] 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. If
you've heard previous episodes of this podcast, you may have heard me
talk about ultradian rhythm, 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.
They break up our day in ways that allow us to learn best within
90-minute cycles, et cetera. So some of you might be saying, "Wait,
you've been talking about ultradian cycles, and a moment ago you were
talking about 7-minute or 12-minute or 30-minute learning cycles.
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. And so just to frame this in the context of the
ultradian cycle, you might sit down, decide that you're going to learn
conversational French, which would mean that you probably don't
already speak French. So you're going to sit down, you're going to
decide you're going to learn some nouns and some verbs, you might do
some practice set. The ultradian cycle says that for the first 5 to 10
minutes of doing that, your mind is going to drift and your focus will
probably kick in, provided that 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. And then at best
you're probably going to get about an hour of a deliberate kind of
tunnel vision learning in there. Your mind will drift. And then toward
the end of that, what is now an hour and 10 or hour and 20 minute
cycle, your brain will sort of start to flicker in and out, you might
start thinking about what you need to eat or the fact that you have to
use the bathroom or something. And then by 90 minutes, it's probably
time to just stop the learning about and go do something else, maybe
return for a second learning about later, maybe take a nap afterwards
or something to enhance the learning. It's going to happen within
about a 90-minute block. You're going to go through that cycle of
learning. But when I refer to the 7 or 12 or 30 minutes of making
errors, what I mean is when you're really in a mode of repeating
errors, not deliberately, you're trying your best to accomplish
something, and you're failing. You're absolutely failing. You're
trying to remember say the sign language alphabet. I was trying to
teach myself this recently, and then I keep repeating and repeating,
and then get to a certain point where I kept making errors, making
errors, making errors. You want to keep making errors for this period
of time that I'm saying will last anywhere for about 7 to 30 minutes.
It is exceedingly frustrating, but that frustration, it liberates the
chemical cues that signal that plasticity needs to happen and they
also signal the particular neurons that are active. So in the case of
sign language, it might be the ones that control my hand movements as
well as me thinking about what the different letters are. It's
signaling different opponents within the networks between the brain
and body, and it's trying to figure out, "Wait, where are these errors
coming from? Where are the errors coming from? Ah, it's those neurons,
they're making the mistakes. They're making the mistakes, they're
making the mistakes." And it essentially highlights that pathway for
change. And it is the case that when we come back a day or two later
in a learning about 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 7 to 30-minute
intense learning about is within the ultradian cycle, and I want to be
clear about that. And some people can tolerate many of these per day.
Most people can only tolerate one or two, maybe three. This is intense
work. If shooting free throws, you could probably do it all day. But
what I'm talking about is really trying to accelerate plasticity by
having a period of the 7 to 30 minutes per learning about that is
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. Now, there's another aspect to
learning, I think it's only fair to mention, which is that we can all
learn very easily when there's something very bad happens to us. I
don't wish this on anyone, but it is the case that if something really
terrible happens that we will have a lifetime memory for that event.
There are processes that allow us to uncouple the emotional load of
that event. I talked about some of those a few episodes back, the
episode on dreams, trauma, and hallucinations. And we're going to
return to trauma release, PTSD, and some of those other themes in a
future episode. But the reason why negative experiences can be wired
into us so quickly is because our nervous system's main job is to keep
us safe, but at a deeper level, it's because negative experiences cue
us to the fact that whatever's happening that's really bad is very
different than the other things that tend to happen before. Most of
our experience doesn't remap us, but those negative experiences deploy
high levels of norepinephrine, high levels of acetylcholine, and
really make so that whatever it is that we experienced in that bad
episode is essentially queued up, and so we're on the lookout for it.
And this has a number of negative effects in terms of psychological
and emotional effects, but it is really a process designed to keep us
safe. The other ways in which we can learn more quickly besides just
making errors is when something really surprises us. And if we're
positively surprised by something or we are just flooded with this
molecule dopamine, then there's a great opportunity for plasticity.
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. It's a molecule that is released inside of
us when we think we're on the right path. And it does have a capacity
to increase neuroplasticity, motivation, et cetera. It's released in
response to a number of natural behaviors, just that help with the
progression of ours and other species, things like food, sex, in some
sense social connection, although that's more serotonin, and serotonin
doesn't have the same effects on plasticity quite the same. And we'll
talk about a few later. But dopamine is when we think we're on the
right path toward an external goal, a little bit is released and it
tends to give us more motivation toward that goal.
I think everyone could stand to enhance the rate of learning by doing
the following.
Learn 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. So, earlier, I
talked about making errors and having a focus about of learning that
includes making a lot of errors inside of that learning about. That is
going to be frustrating, but the frustration itself is the cue, and
epinephrine will be very high under those conditions. But if you can
just subjectively associate that experience with something good and
that you want to continue down that path as opposed to quitting when
you hit the point of frustration, well then you now start to create a
synergy between the dopamine that's released when we subjectively
think something is good, or tell ourselves something is good, and that
situation of making failures. In other words, making 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 outsize
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? And can I just tell myself that something is
good when it's bad?"
Well, actually yes, believe it or not. The thing about dopamine is
it's highly subjective. What's funny to one person is not necessarily
funny to the next. So it has to have some sense of authenticity for
you. But if you really want to be learning the thing that you're
trying to learn, that should be reason enough to tell yourself, "Well,
I'm frustrated, but the frustration is the source of accelerated
learning." 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. 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, is 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, keep the bouts of learning relatively short
if you're an adult. Younger people can probably engage in more bouts
of learning.
And it's probably one of the reasons why they learn so much faster.
They can just pack so much more information into the brains and
nervous systems compared to adults. It's a little bit like, I'll use
the example of performance-enhancing drugs. Some of those drugs
probably do enhance performance at the level of increasing red blood
cell count, et cetera. But a lot of what those drugs do is they allow
athletes to recover faster so they can just train more. They allow
them to do more work. And so being a child is a little bit like being
in a performance enhanced brain milieu. Their brains are kind of on
natural, healthy neurochemicals that afford them a lot more learning
should they pursue it. So this goes back to my advice for young people
early on. If you're young, what should you do? Learn as much as you
can about as many things as you possibly can. And I suggest
specializing in something. I guess I'm not in a position to give
anyone direct advice, but I would say, hopefully, by about age 30,
hopefully younger, you have some sense of what excites you and try and
get really good at that thing, provided it serves the world for
better.
But that's all I'll say in terms of parenting advice. It's not my
place. But maybe sometime I'll have an episode completely devoted to
sort of youth and learning in youth. But 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, how often
should I do this? And when should I be doing this and at what time?
Well, I've talked a little bit about this in previous episodes, but as
long as we're now kind of into the nitty-gritty of tools and
application, each of us have some natural times throughout the day
when we are going to be much better at tolerating these errors and
much more focused on what it is that we're trying to do. Last episode
was about focus, but chances are that you can't focus as well at 4:00
pm as you can at 10:00 am. 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 7 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.
If you leave that about of, I gave the example of free throws, or
maybe it's playing tennis, or maybe it's some other skill, and you sit
down to read a book, your brain is in a heightened state to learn and
retain the information. Because those chemicals don't get released and
then shut down. You're creating a whole milieu, an environment of
these chemicals. And the tale of how long these chemicals stay
sloshing around in your brain has too many factors for me to put a
hard number on it. It's going to depend on transporters and enzymes
and all sorts of things. But at least for an hour or so I would say,
you're going to be in a state of heightened learning, and the ability
to learn, not just the motor patterns but cognitive information,
language information, maybe you go to therapy right after that and you
work on something in a very deliberate way that you're trying to work
on, maybe you don't go to therapy, maybe you do something else that's
important to you. Again, there are just a variety of examples I could
give. There are a number of things that allow us to powerfully access
these states of error that are kind of surprising but also kind of
fun. 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.
Let's talk about limbic friction. Now, limbic friction is not a term
you're going to find in the textbooks. So if any of my colleagues are
listening, I want to repeat 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 heart rate,
heartbeat going too fast, breathing too fast, sweating, and not being
in a state that we want, we're to alert and we want to be more calm.
And, indeed, that's one condition in which we have limbic friction,
meaning our limbic system is taking control of a number of different
aspects of our autonomic or automatic biology. And we are struggling
to control that through what we call top-down mechanisms. We're trying
to calm down in order to reduce that level of arousal. We're all
familiar with this, it's called the stress response. However, there's
another aspect of stress that's just as important, which is when we're
tired and we're fatigued and we need to engage, we need to be more
alert than we are. And so what I call limbic friction is really
designed to describe the fact that when our autonomic nervous system
isn't where we want it, meaning we're trying to be more alert or we're
trying to be less alert, both of those feel stressful to people. The
other way to put it is that the word stress is not a very good word to
describe what most people experience as stressful because it can
either be being too tired or being too alert. Now, why am I bringing
this up in a discussion about neuroplasticity? This is not a
discussion about stress. At some point, we will talk about stress and
tools to deal with stress. But the reason I'm bringing this up is that
in order to access neuroplasticity, you need these components of
focus, you need the component of attaching subjective reward, you need
to make errors, all this stuff. And a lot of people find it difficult
to just get into the overall state to access those things. So now
there's a series of gates that people are having a hard time
accessing. They're too tired and they can't focus, for instance. Well,
here's the beauty of it. If you are too alert, meaning you're too
anxious, and you want to calm down in order to learn better, there are
things that you can do. The two that I've spoken about previously on
various podcasts, and I'll just review them really quickly, are the
double inhale exhale. So inhaling twice through the nose and exhaling
once through the mouth. This is not some yoga trick or some hack. This
is what's called a physiological sigh. It offloads carbon dioxide from
the lungs, it has a number of different effects. These were described
in textbooks dating back to the 30s and a number of laboratories have
explored the neurocircuitry underlying these so-called physiological
sighs. That will calm you down faster than anything else that I'm
aware of. The other thing is starting to remove your tunnel vision.
When you use tunnel vision, you're very focused, that epinephrine up
is released by dilating your field of gaze, so-called panoramic
vision. Great, so now you can start to sort of move up and down this
level of autonomic arousal. The key is you want to be in a state of
arousal that's ideally matched to the thing that you're trying to
perform or learn. So if I'm really anxious and I can't even pick up
the basketball or I feel like I'm shaking or my muscles are too tight,
I don't have that kind of looseness, when I move like that, it almost
makes it look like I could throw a free throw, but I miss 95% of the
time, unless the basket is very, very low and I place it in directly.
I guess that's not a free throw, is it? [laughs] In any case, the
point being that you want to be in a state of alertness but calm. And
so you need to have ways to calm yourself down when you're too amped
up. But the other side of limbic friction is important too. If you are
too tired and you can't focus, well, then it's going to be impossible
to even get to the starting line, so to speak, for engaging in
neuroplasticity through incremental learning, et cetera. So in that
case, there are other methods that you can do to wake yourself up. The
best thing you should do is get a good night's sleep, but that's not
always possible, or use a NSDR, non-sleep deep rest protocol. But if
you've already done those things or you're simply exhausted for
whatever other reason, then there are other things that I often get
asked about, like sure a cup of coffee or super oxygenation breathing,
which means inhaling more than exhaling on average in a breathing
about. Now we're sort of getting toward the realm of like how you
could trick your nervous system into waking up. And if you bring more
oxygen in by making your inhales deeper and longer, you will become
more alert. You'll start to actually deploy norepinephrine if you
breathe very fast. So there are things that you can do to move up or
down this so-called autonomic arousal arc. And what you want to ask
before you undergo any learning about is how much limbic friction am I
experiencing? Am I too alert and I want to be calmer, or am I too calm
and too sleepy and I want to be more alert?
You're going to need to engage in behaviors that bring you to the
starting line in order to learn. There are other things that you can
do in order to then learn better and faster besides incremental
learning, and those center on the vestibular system. And this may come
as a surprise to some people, but probably not as a surprise to some
of you whose professions or whose recreation involves a lot of motor
activity and sort of what we call high dimensional skill activity, not
just running or cycling or very linear activities like weightlifting,
but things that involve inversions and a lot of lateral movement,
actual sports, jumping, diving, rolling, these kinds of things,
gymnastics type stuff.
Why the vestibular system to access neuroplasticity? Well, we have a
hardwired system for balance, and here's how it works in as simple
terms as I can possibly come up with. As we move through space, or
even if we're stationary, there are really three main planes of
movement. Now, I realize some people are just listening to this, so
I'm going to do this for both the folks that are just listening and
for those of you that are watching on video. So there are three main
modes of movement. And it turns out that your brain doesn't really
know where your body is, except through that proprioceptive feedback.
The main way it knows is through three planes of movement that we call
pitch, which is like nodding. So if I nod like this, that's pitch.
Then there's yaw, which is side to side, which is like shaking my head
no. And then there's roll from side to side like when a puppy looks at
you, like mm-mmm, that kind of thing. So pitch, yaw, and roll. And the
pilots out there will know exactly what I'm talking about. The brain
knows the orientation and position of your body relative to gravity,
depending on whether or not your brain in your head actually is
engaging more in pitch, yaw, or roll, or some combination because if I
lean down like so or like so, it's a combination of pitch, yaw, and
roll. You might say like, "What is going on here?" Well, we have these
little things in our inner ear called the semicircular canals. Just
like our eyes have two main functions, one is to see objects in space
and the other is to set our circadian clocks through subconscious
mechanisms, our ears have two main roles. One is to hear, to perceive
sound waves or take in sound waves for perception, so-called hearing,
and the other is balance or vestibular function. So sitting in our
ears are these semicircular canals, and they're these little tubes
where these little stones, they're actually little bits of calcium,
roll back and forth like little marbles. When we roll this way, they
roll this way, when we pitch. When we go from side to side, there's
some that sit flat like this and they go [makes swishing sound] like
marbles inside of a hula hoop. And then we have roll, there's some
that are kind of at 45 degrees to those and it's kind of pitchy on
roll. Okay, great. That sends signals to the rest of our brain and
body that tell us how to compensate for shifts relative to gravity.
And you say, "Okay, I thought we were talking about plasticity." But
this is where it gets really, really cool. Errors in vestibular motor
sensory experience, meaning when we are off-balance and we have to
compensate by looking at, thinking about, or responding to the world
differently cause an area of our brain called the cerebellum, it
actually means mini brain, it looks like a little mini brain like
tucked below our cortex in the back, cause the cerebellum to signal
some of these deeper brain centers that release dopamine,
norepinephrine, and acetylcholine.
And that's because these circuits in the inner ear, et cetera, and the
cerebellum, they were designed to recalibrate our motor movements when
our relationship to gravity changes. Something fundamental to
survival. We can't afford to be falling down all the time or missing
things that we grab for, or running in the wrong direction when
something is pursuing us. These are hardwired circuits that tap right
into these chemical pathways. And those chemical pathways are the
gates to plasticity. So I really want to spell this out clearly 'cause
I've given a lot of information today. The first thing is, how are you
arriving to the learning about? You need to make sure your level of
autonomic arousal is correct. The ideal state is going to be clear,
calm, and focused, maybe a little bit more on the arousal level, like
heightened arousal. So understand limbic friction, understand that you
can be too tired, in which case you're going to need to get yourself
more alert, or you can be too alert and you're going to need to get
yourself calmer. That gets you to the starting line. When you're at
the starting line, then you're going to go into a learning about, and
that's when you want to start making these errors. But what I'm saying
is there's a layer in between where if you are interested in using
motor patterns as a way to open up plasticity for all kinds of
learning, not just motor learning, disrupting your vestibular motor
relationship, and I'll tell you how to do that in a moment, can deploy
or release neurochemicals in the brain that place you into a state
that makes you much better at learning and makes making errors much
more pleasureful, you're much more willing to do that. Now, some of
you are probably saying, "Flow state, flow state." Okay, I have
friends that work on flow states and who are involved in flow states
and trying to figure out what they are.
I have great respect for those people. I want to tip my hat to them.
Very important work. But, again, flow is an expression of what you
already know how to do. It's not how you learn, it's how you express
what you've already learned. I want to be really clear about that.
It's been kind of presented as this super state or highly desirable
state that we can all reach for. That's the wrong [indistinct] to
reach for until you already know how to do the things that I'm
describing, in my opinion. So the vestibular system, if you can engage
the vestibular system and create some errors within the vestibular
motor operations that you're carrying out, you create a neurochemical
state that then makes you very, very good at learning very quickly
regardless of age. So what would this look like? Does this mean just
doing inversions? Does this mean doing yoga? Maybe. Does this mean
taking corners faster on your road bike? Let's say you always swim
freestyle or breaststroke, does this mean swimming backstroke or
butterfly? It depends. It depends, however, on a very, very easy to
understand parameter, which is how regularly you perform a particular
motor behavior and how novel a behavior is.
So the more novel that a behavior is in terms of your relationship to
gravity, the more it will open up the opportunity for plasticity. Have
you ever seen somebody who just jumped out of a plane for the first
time with a parachute? [laughs] I don't even want to think about what,
if you've just seen somebody who jumped out of a plane for the first
time without a parachute, I just hope the plane was on the ground. But
if you seen somebody after that, they are in this incredible state
because their body and brain are flooded with all these neurochemicals
because it's very novel to them. However, I've got friends from
communities that have done thousands upon thousands, maybe tens of
thousands of jumps, and they're always alert and aware, but it becomes
pretty regular for them. That's the point. And they're not in this
kind of buzzed out, excited state afterwards because it's routine for
them. The key is to bring novelty to the vestibular motor experience,
the vestibular motor commands that you're performing. How do you do
that? Well, it's all about your orientation relative to gravity. Now,
I wouldn't want anyone to place themselves at risk. So if you can't do
handstands, don't try and do them, freestanding and whatever. If
you're good at handstands, guess how much plasticity doing handstands
for half an hour is going to create for you. Zero. Zero. Your body is
fully comfortable walking on your hands. I see these people walking on
your hands, being upside down, being inverted. Your Cirque du Soleil
performers, they're very comfortable there, and there is zero
learning, zero plasticity because the failures and errors and the
relationship to gravity are very typical for that individual. Now,
what this means is that if we're going to use motor practices to open
up plasticity for learning, not just those practices, but maybe some
cognitive skills or other things in the period that follows, we need
to create a sense of novelty relative to gravity. And that means being
either in a new position or slightly unstable. Believe it or not, I
don't want anyone injuring themselves, but the sensation of falling or
close to falling signals the cerebellum to signal the deep brain
centers that release these neurochemicals that something is very
different and we need to correct this error very, very fast. Now,
earlier, I was talking about high contingencies for learning, and you
definitely don't want to make it a kind of like either survive this or
die kind of experience. I confess, I occasionally look at these
parkour videos on YouTube. Believe it or not, a lot of those people
have died, the ones that do these ridiculous things of hanging off of
buildings and things. I am not suggesting you do that. Please don't do
that. What I'm talking about is finding safe ways to explore the
sensory motor vestibular space, as we call it, the relationship
between those things. So that could be through yoga. If you're
terrible at yoga, there's more opportunity for you to learn than
somebody who's very skilled at yoga, for instance, or gymnastics, or
handstands, or on your road bike. This is, unfortunately, what, I
don't want to name brands, but stationary bikes where they give you
the visual experience of moving through space, but you're not actually
moving through physical space, there's no vestibular feedback. It's
all visual. You're stationary on the bike. So unless you're hanging
off the bike in your living room like almost to the point you're
tipping the bike, you're not getting the actual vestibular motor
sensory mismatch. That mismatch is the signal that deploys dopamine,
epinephrin, and these other things. I don't care how excited or how
much fun the ride was or how much music you're playing that you love,
it's not the same situation as being out of your normal relationship
to the gravitational pull.
So the first gate is to arrive at learning at the appropriate level of
autonomic arousal. Clear and focused is best, but don't obsess over
being right there, it's okay. If you're a little anxious or a little
bit tired, then you want to make errors. We talked about that, and
this vestibular motor sensory relationship is absolutely key if you
want to get heightened or accelerated plasticity. And we talked about
another feature, which is setting a contingency. If there's a reason,
an important reason for you to actually learn, even if you're making
failures, the learning will be accelerated. So there's really four
things that you really need to do for plasticity as an adult. And I
would say that these also apply to young people. And there's an
interesting kind of a thought experiment there as well, which is if
you look at children, they are moving a lot in different dimensions.
They are sometimes hanging from trees. My sports were always things
where I tended to get hurt a lot, fall a lot. So it's skateboarding
for me when I was younger, so a lot of falling and rolling and various
things of that sort. But whatever sport the kids are playing, or even
if they don't play a sport, they tend to move in a lot of different
relationships to gravity, more dimensionality to their movements I
should say, than adults. And one of the questions that's always kind
of been in the back of my mind is, as we age we get less good at
engaging in neuroplasticity. Part of that is because as the brain ages
there are certain changes to the way that neurons are structured,
their molecular components, et cetera. But it's kind of a self-
amplifying, or I should say self-degenerating cycle where as we get
older, we tend to get more linear and more regular about specific
kinds of movements. So we'd get on the treadmill, or we take the walk,
or we just always go up the same stairs, et cetera. And there's less
opportunity, typically, for engaging these relationships to the
gravitational pull through the vestibular motor sensory convergence
that we talked about a moment ago. And so you sort of have to wonder
whether or not the lack of plasticity or the reduced plasticity in
older individuals, which includes me, would reflect the fact that
those chemicals aren't being deployed because we're not engaging in
certain behaviors as opposed to we can't engage in the behaviors
because the chemicals aren't being deployed. Now, I have a feeling
it's both. These have a reciprocal relationship. And I certainly,
again, I don't think it would be wise for anyone who doesn't have the
muscle stabilizing skills or the bone density, et cetera, to start
doing inversions and things of that sort. That's not what I'm talking
about here. But it's interesting to think about the sorts of exercise
that we engage in. We all know that getting the heart rate elevated
three to five times a week is really good for us for cardiovascular
health. I think there's a ton of data to support that now. Some load-
bearing exercise is important for increasing bone density and
maintaining muscular strength and proprioceptive feedback. Because,
I'm sure many of you know this, but resistance exercise actually
trains the nerve to muscle connections as much as it does the muscles
themselves. Something I talked about at the beginning of the episode.
But I think most of us could stand to increase the degree to which we
engage this vestibular system in novel ways. And that can be done
quite safely through a number of different mechanisms. I'm not a
surfer, but people who do that sort of thing are very familiar with
orienting their body differently according to the gravitational pull.
They're lying down, then they're standing up, then they're turning,
they're leaning their head. So, again, it's this pitch, yaw, roll
thing. And, again, if you're very skilled at surfing, you're actually
not going to open up plasticity just by surfing. It's in the learning
of these new relationships to gravity that the windows for plasticity
are enhanced. I want to make sure that I underscore the fact that this
vestibular thing that I've been describing is a way to really
accentuate plasticity. It's tapping into an inborn biological
mechanism where the cerebellum has outputs to these deep brain nuclei
associated with dopamine, acetylcholine, and norepinephrine. You don't
want to endanger yourself in the course of pursuing these activities,
but it is a powerful mechanism. That's kind of an amplifier on
plasticity, as is high contingency. If you really need to learn
conversational French to save your relationship, the chances are
you're going to learn it.
There are limits, of course, to the extent to which one can accentuate
or accelerate plasticity. The ceiling on this is not infinite,
although we don't know how high it goes. I think it's reasonable to
say that if someone put a gun to my head and said, "Learn
conversational French in the next 120 seconds," that conversational
French will be limited probably to just one word, probably the word
oui or something like that. Because I can't stuff in all the knowledge
all at once. I think that's the dream of brain-machine interface, that
one will be able to download a chip into their hippocampus or cortex,
or some other brain structure that would allow them to download
conversational French. And someday we may get to that, that capability
may come about. Right now, it does not exist, nor is there a specific
pill or chemical that will allow you to download more information more
quickly. This is the issue around nootropics I've talked about before.
There are things that can increase focus, mainly things that increase
acetylcholine and transmission through the nicotine system, things
that can increase dopamine, things like L-tyrosine. Again, I'm not
recommending these. You need to heed the warnings on those bottles,
but they will increase these neurochemicals. And there are, of course,
things that will increase epinephrin, things like caffeine, or some
people, because of prescription, take Adderall. I'm, again, not
suggesting people take any of these things. In fact, today I focused
almost exclusively on behavioral tools and ways of structuring
learning bouts that will allow you to access more plasticity
regardless of age. And they center around things that I'm sure if you
look around you you'll see evidence for, "Oh, incremental learning is
powerful," or, "Oh, the vestibular system can open up opportunities
for plasticity." I'm sure that the yogis out there all saying, "Wait,
this sounds exactly like yoga. We're supposed to push to an edge and
do these inversions and do all those sorts of things." Well, I want to
be clear, I never said anyone should do inversions. I said that the
vestibular system is a valuable portal into some of these
neurochemical states that favor plasticity. But not so seldom, I hear
from the yoga community, and they will say things like, "Much of what
you're saying about how the brain works or neuroplasticity has already
been described or is embedded in yoga practices." And I just want to
be very clear, I have tremendous respect for the yoga community and
the practices, I've done yoga from time to time, I find it challenging
and valuable. I'm not a regular practitioner. But the problem with
yoga is exactly the same problem with science, which is that yoga has
a lot of practices for which there are very specific names, but no
description or lending of understanding about mechanism.
And science has a lot of mechanisms [laughs] and a lot of publications
and papers for which there's very little, if not no description of
tools and practices. My goal in not just today but in many ways
throughout the course of the podcast is to bridge the gaps between
these various disciplines in ways that are grounded mainly to the
fields of neuroscience and some related fields. So, yes, it's true
that I look at things mainly through the lens of science, but that's
not to say that it exhaustively explains everything about anything,
nor is it to say that it's the only lens through which one could look
at something like neuroplasticity. So I just want to acknowledge that
I have great respect for all these different practices and
communities. And I think that, indeed, there are many cases in which
different communities and practices have been aimed at targeting the
same goals or outcomes. Science and neuroscience, through an
understanding of mechanism, can allow all of us to gain kind of common
understanding about what those practices are and how to access things
like neuroplasticity, sleep, et cetera. And I do believe. as I've said
previously on this podcast, that understanding mechanism affords us a
certain flexibility. And I don't mean physical flexibility. I mean a
flexibility when we can't engage in a particular behavior, maybe we
were injured or maybe we're not in the right situation to do a
particular practice, but by thinking about mechanism, we can adapt our
circumstances. I talked about this with sleep. If you're rigidly
attached to one protocol of always looking at sunlight at one
particular time in the morning and in the evening, that is not as
valuable as understanding the mechanisms of why you might look at
sunlight at one particular time versus another because that affords
you a flexibility, allows you to adapt. And life is very dynamic and
we don't have control over all the external conditions all the time.
And so understanding mechanism through the lens of neuroscience, I do
believe, can be very powerful because, of course, there are multiple
ways to access dopamine, there are multiple ways to adjust limbic
friction.
It's not just through respiration. Of course, there are many ways to
do that. And so my overall goal here in this episode and with this
podcast is to give you some understanding of the mechanisms and the
insights into the underlying biology that allow you to tailor what
these kind of foundational mechanisms are to suit your particular
learning needs. So I really thank you for your time and attention
today. I've covered a lot of material. I very much encourage questions
in the comments section if you're looking at this on YouTube. And if
you're not and you're listening to it, on Apple or Spotify. Please
feel free to visit us over on the YouTube channel and put your
questions in the comments section. I do read them. This entire month
is all about neuroplasticity. There's a lot to cover, but I'm very
excited to delve deeper into this topic as it relates to your
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throughout today's episode, as well as on previous episodes of the
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enhancing sleep, enhancing neuroplasticity, et cetera. And, again, I
want to emphasize that I always think that behavioral practices are
the place to start. I don't think supplements should ever be the first
line of entry for people looking to enhance these aspects of their
nervous system and life. But for those of you that are interested in
supplements and the supplements that I take, I'm pleased to announce
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terms of what's listed on the bottle is actually what you'll find in
the bottle, this is a serious issue for the supplement industry, as
well as just the overall quality of the materials they put into their
supplements. If you'd like to take a look at the supplements that I
take as well as explore any of them for yourself, you can go to
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the different supplements that I take. And if you decide to purchase
any of them, you'll get 20% off your order. So that's Thorne,
thorne.com/u/huberman to see the supplements that I take and to
explore if any of them are right for you. In the next episode of this
podcast, we're going to continue to explore neuroplasticity. This, as
you may recall, is the way that we go about things here the Huberman
Lab Podcast, which is to really drill deeply into a topic for three or
four, or even five episodes so that by the end of those episodes, all
of you have a very firm understanding of how to apply the principles
of neurobiology to the specific practices and endeavors that are most
important to you. So I very much thank you for your time and
attention. I know it's a lot of information and it takes a bit of
focus and attention, and certainly will trigger plasticity to learn
all this information. I want to encourage you and just remind you that
you don't have to grasp it all at once, that it is here archived and
that if you want to return to the information, it will still be here.
And that I, most of all, really appreciate your interest in science.
Thank you so much.
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Timestamps below.
00:00 Introduction
06:20 Nerves and Muscles
12:00 Exercise alone won’t change your brain
12:58 Behavior will change your brain
13:30 Remembering the wrong things
15:00 Behavior as the gate to plasticity
15:45 Types of Plasticity
17:32 Errors Not Flow Trigger Plasticity
21:30 Mechanisms of Plasticity
22:30 What to learn when you are young
23:50 Alignment of your brain maps: neuron sandwiches
26:00 Wearing Prisms On Your Face
29:10 The KEY Trigger Plasticity
32:20 Frustration Is the Feeling to Follow (Further into Learning)
33:10 Incremental Learning
35:30 Huberman Free Throws
38:50 Failure Specificity Triggers Specific Plastic Changes
40:20 Triggering Rapid, Massive Plasticity Made Possible
43:25 Addiction
45:25 An Example of Ultradian-Incremental Learning
49:42 Bad Events
51:55 Surprise!
52:00 Making Dopamine Work For You (Not The Other Way Around)
53:20 HOW to release dopamine
55:00 (Mental) Performance Enhancing Drugs
56:00 Timing Your Learning
57:36 (Chem)Trails of Neuroplasticity
58:57 The Three Key Levers To Accelerate Plasticity
59:15 Limbic Friction: Finding Clear, Calm and Focused
1:04:25 The First Question To Ask Yourself Before Learning
1:05:00 Balance
1:07:45 Cerebellum
1:10:00 Flow States Are Not The Path To Learning
1:11:18 Novelty and Instability Are Key
1:14:55 How to Arrive At Learning
1:15:45 The Other Reason Kids Learn Faster Than Adults
1:19:25 Learning French and Other Things Faster
1:22:00 Yoga versus Science
1:24:15 Closing Remarks
Please note that The Huberman Lab Podcast is distinct from Dr.
Huberman's teaching and research roles at Stanford University School
of Medicine. The information provided in this show is not medical
advice, nor should it be taken or applied as a replacement for medical
advice. The Huberman Lab Podcast, its employees, guests and affiliates
assume no liability for the application of the information discussed.
[Title Card Photo Credit: Mike Blabac https://www.blabacphoto.com/]