Essentials: How Your Nervous System Works & Changes
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Welcome to huberman lab essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science space tools for mental health, physical health and performance. I'm Andrew huberman and i'm a professor of neurobiology. Opened ology at stanford school of medicine for today's podcast.

We're going to talk about the parts list of the nervous system that might sound boring, but these are the bits and pieces that together make up everything about your experience of life, from what you think about to what you feel, what you imagine and what you accomplish from the day you're born until the day you die. By the end of this podcast, I promise you're going to understand a lot more about how you work and how to apply that knowledge. So let's talk about the nervous system.

The reason I say your nervous system and not your brain is because your brain is actually just one piece of this larger, more important thing, Frankly, that we call the nervous system. The nervous system includes your brain and your spinal cord, but also all the connections between your brain and your final cord and the organs of your body. IT also includes, very importantly, all the connections between your organs back to your special cord and brain.

So the way to think about how you function at every level from the moment you're born until the day you die, everything you think and remember and feel and imagine, is that your nervous system is this continuous loop of communication between the brain, spinal cord, body and body, spinal cord, brain. In fact, we really can even separate them. It's one continuous loop.

The way to think about how the error system works is that our experiences, our memories, everything is sort like the keys on a piano being played in a particular order, right? If I played the keys on A P, N, O. In a particular order and with a particular intensity that a given song, we can make the analysis to a given experience, our brain is really a map of our experience are we come into the world, and our brain has a kind of bias towards learning particular kinds of things.

It's ready to receive information and learn that information. But the brain is really a map of experience. So let's talk about what experience really is.

What does that mean for your brain to work? Well, I think it's fair to say that the nervous system really does five things, maybe six. The first one is sensation.

Sensation is a non negotiable element of your nervous system. You have neurons in your eye that perceive certain colors of light and certain directions of movement. You have neurons in your skin that perceive particular kinds of touch, like light touch or firm touch or painful touch.

You have neurons in your ears that perceive certain sounds. Your entire experience of life is so filtered by these, what we call sensory receptors, if you want to know what the name is. Perception is our ability to take what we're sensing and on IT and make sense of IT, to explore IT, to remember IT.

So really, perceptions are just whatever sensations we happen to be paying attention to at any moment. Perception is under the control of your attention. And the way to think about attention is is like a spotlight.

Except it's not one spotlight. You actually have two attentional spotlight. Anyone that tells you you can't multitask, tell them they're wrong. And if they disagree with you, tell them to contact me. Because in old world primates, of which humans are, we are able to do what's called covert attention.

We can place a spotlight of attention on something, for instance, something we're reading or looking at, or someone that we're listening to. And we can place a second spotlight of attention on something we're eating and how IT taste, or our child running around in the room or my dog. You can split your attention into two locations, but of course, you can also bring your attention, that is your perception to one particular location.

You can dilate your attention, kind of like making a spotlight more defuse, or you can make IT more concentrated. This is very important to understand if you're going to think about tools to improve your nervous system. Attention is something that is absolutely under your control.

The nervous system can be reflective in its action, or IT can be deliberate. Deliberate thoughts are top down. They require some effort and some focus.

But that's the point. You can decide to focus your behavior in any way you want, but you will always feel like IT requires some effort and some strain. Whereas when you're reflexive mode, just walking and talking and eating and doing your thing, it's gone to feel very easy.

And that's because your nervous system basically wired up to be able to do most things easily without much meta lic demand, without consuming much energy. But the moment you try and do something very specific, it's going, you're gone to feel a sort of mental friction. It's going to be chAllenging.

So we've got sensations, perceptions, and then we've got things that we call feelings slash emotions. And these get a little complicated because almost all of us, I would hope all of us are familiar with things like happiness and sadness, or boredom or frustration. Certainly, emotions and feelings are the product of the nervous system.

They involve the activity of neurons. But as I mentioned earlier, neurons are electrically active, but they also released chemicals. And there is a certain category of chemicals that has a very profound influence on our emotional states.

They're called neuromodulators. And those neuromodulation have names that probably you've heard of before, things like dopamine and serotonin and a cola. A neuromodulators are really interesting because they bias which neurons are likely to be active in which ones are likely to be inactive.

A simple way to think about neuromodulators is they are sort of like playlist that you would have on any kind of device where you gonna play particular categories of music so far in since dupine, which is often discussed as the molecule of reward or joy, is involved in reward. And IT does tend to create a sort of upbeat mood in, when released, an appropriate amount in the brain. But the reason IT does that is because IT makes certain neurons and our neural circuits, as we call them, more active and others less active.

okay. So serotonin, for instance, is a molecule that, when released, tends to make us feel really good with what we have, our sort of internal landscape and the resources that we have, whether dopa mine, more than being a molecule of reward, is really more a molecule of motivation toward things that are outside us and that we want to pursue. And we can look at healthy conditions or situations like being in pursuit of a goal where every time we accomplish something in root to that goal, a little bit of dopamine iis released, and we feel more motivation that happened.

We can also look at the extreme example of something like mania, where somebody is so, you know, relentlessly in pursuit of external things like money and relationships, that they're sort of in this delusional state of thinking that they have the resources that they need in order to pursue all these things when, in fact, they dot. I want to emphasize also that emotions are something that we generally feel are not under our control. We feel like they have guiza up within us and they just happen to us.

And that's because they are somewhat reflective. We don't really set out with a deliberate thought to be happier, deliberate thought to be sad. We tend to experience them in kind of a passive, reflective way. And that brings us to the next thing, which are thoughts.

Thoughts are really interesting because in many ways, they are like perceptions, except that they draw on not just what's happening in the, but also things we remember from the past and things that we anticipate about the future. Everything about thoughts that's really interesting is that thought can be both reflective. They can just be occurring all the time, sort of like pop up windows on a poorly filtered web browser, or they can be deliberate.

We can decide to have a thought. A lot of people do not understand, at least appreciate that the thought patterns and the newer circuits that underlie thoughts can actually be controlled in this deliberate way. I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor, ag one.

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Actions or behaviors are perhaps the most important aspect, our nervous system. Because, first of all, our behaviors are actually the only thing that are going to create any fossil record of our existence. You know, after we die, the nervous system deteriorate, our skeleton will remain. But it's in the moment of of experiences, something very joyful or something very sad. I can feel so all in compassing that we actually think that IT has some meaning beyond that moment.

But actually for humans, and I think for all species, the sensations, the perceptions and the thoughts and the feelings that we have in our lifespan, none of that is actually Carried forward, except the ones that we take and we convert into actions such as writing, actions such as words, actions such as engineering new things. So the fossil record of our species, and each one of us, is really through action. And that, in part, is why so much of our nervous system is devoted to converting sensation, perception, feelings and thoughts into actions.

The other way to think about IT is that one of the reasons that our central nervous system, our brain and spinal cord, included this stuff in our skull, but also connects so heavily to the body, is because. Most everything that we experience, including our thoughts and feelings, was really designed to either impact our behavior or not in the fact that thoughts allow us to reach into the past and anticipate the future and not just experience what's happening in the moment gave rise to an incredible capacity for us to engage in behaviors that are not just for the moment, they're based on things that we know from the past and that we would like to see in the future. And this aspect, our nervous system of creating movement, occurs through some very simple pathways.

Um the reflexive pathway basically includes areas of the brain stem we call central pattern generators. When you walk, provided you already know how to walk, you are basically walking because you have the central pattern generates groups of neurons that generate right foot foot of movement. However, when you decide to move in a particular deliberate way that requires a little more attention, you start to engage areas of your brain for top down processing, where your four brain works from the top down to control those central pattern generators.

So that maybe it's right foot, right foot, left foot, right foot, foot, left foot, if maybe your hiking along some rocks something. And you have to engage in that kind of movement. So movement is just like thoughts can be either reflective or deliberate.

And when we talk about deliberate, I want to be very specific about how your brain works in the deliberate way, because I give gives rise to a very important feature of the nervous system that we're going to talk about next, which is your ability to change your nervous system. And what i'd like to send on for a second is this notion of, what does that mean for the nervous system to do something deliberately? Well, when you do something deliberately, you pay attention.

You are bringing your perception to an analysis of three things, duration, how long something is gna take or should be done. Path, what you should be doing an outcome if you do something for a given length of time. What's gna happen now when you're walking down the street or you're reading, or you're just talking reflexively, you're not doing this.

What I call d po. Duration, path, outcome, type of deliberate function in your brain and nervous system let's give an example where perhaps somebody says something that's trigger ing to you. You don't like IT and you know you shouldn't respond.

You feel like and respond, and respond and respond. You are actively suppressing your behavior through top down processing. Your forebrain is actually preventing you from saying the thing that you know you shouldn't say or that maybe you should wait to say or saying a different form.

This feels like agitation and stress because you're actually suppressing a circuit. We actually can see examples of what happens when you're not doing this well, uh, some of the examples come from children. If you look at Young children, they don't have the forebrain circuitry to engage in this top down processing until they reach age no twenty two, even twenty five.

But in Young children, you see this in a really robust way. A kid sees a piece of Candy that I wanted him just reach out and grabbed, where as an adult probably would ask if they could have a piece or wait until they were offered a piece. In most cases, people that have damage to the certain areas of the frontal lobes don't have this kind of restriction.

They'll just bought things out. They'll just say things. Impulsivity is a lack of top down control, a lack of top down processing. So a lot of the motor system is designed to just work in a reflective way.

And then when we decide we want to learn something or do something or not do something, we have to engage in this top down restriction. And IT feels like agitation because it's accompany ed by the release of a neuromodulator called north and effort, which in the body we call a gentman and IT actually makes us feel agitated. So for those of you that are trying to learn something new or to learn to suppress your responses or be more deliberate and careful in your responses, that is going to feel chAllenging for a particular reason.

It's can feel chAllenging because the chemicals in your body that are released in association with that effort are designed to make you feel kind of agitated. And so this is really important. Understand, because if you want to understand neural plasticity, you want to understand how to shape your behavior, how to shape your thinking, how to change how you're able to perform in any context.

The most important thing understand is that IT requires top down processing. IT requires this feeling of agitation. In fact, I would say the agitation and strain is the entry point to neural plasticity.

So let's take a look at what neural plasticity is. Neural plasticity is the ability for these connections in the brain, in body, to change in response to experience. And what so incredible about the human nervous system, in particular, is that we can direct our own neural changes.

We can decide that we want to change our brain. In other is our brain can change itself, and nervous system can change itself. For a long time, I was thought that neuroplasticity was the unique gift of Young animals and humans that I could only occur when we're Young.

And in fact, the Young grain is incredibly plastic. Children can learn three languages without an accent reflexively, whereas adults, it's very chAllenging. IT takes a lot more effort and strain a lot more of that duration, path, outcome, kind of thinking in order to achieve those plastic changes.

We now know, however, that the adult brain can change in response to experience. In order understand that process, we really have to understand something that might, at first, seem totally divorced from neuroplasticity, but actually lies at the center of neural plastics. And for any of you that are interested in changing your nervous system so that something that you want can go from being very hard, or seem almost impossible and out of reach to being very reflective, this is especially important to pay attention to.

Plasticity in the adult human nervous system is gated, meaning IT is controlled by neuromodulators. These things that we talked about earlier, dopamine, serotonin, and one in particular called the seat of coin, or what open up plasticity, they literally unveiled plasticity and allow brief periods of time in which whatever information, whatever thing were sensing or perceiving or thinking, or whatever emotions we feel, can literally be mapped in the brain, such that later I will become much easier for us to experience and feel that thing. Now, this has a dark side in a positive side.

The dark side is it's actually very easy to get neural plasticity as an adult through traumatic or terrible or chAllenging experiences. But the important question is to say, why is that? And the reason that the case is because when something very bad happens, there's the release of two sets of near modulators in the brain, epa rin, which tends to make us feel alert, agitated, which is associated with most bad circumstances, and a seto coin, which tends to create a even more intense and focused perceptual spotlight.

Remember earlier we were talking about perception and how it's kind like a spotlight, a seto calling, makes that light particularly bright and particularly restricted to one region of our experience. And IT does that by making certain neurons in our brain and and body active much more than all the rest. So a seat calling the sort like a highlighter marker upon which neural plasticity then comes in later and says weight, which neurons were active in this particularly alerting phase of whatever, day or night, whenever this thing happen to happen.

So the way IT works as this, you can think of epinephrine creating this alertness and this kind of unbelievable level of increased attention compared what you are experiences before. And you can think of A C to Colin as being the molecule that highlights whatever IT happens during that period of heighten alertness. So just to be cleared, its appen phone creates the alertness that's coming from a subset of neurons in the brain stem, if you're interested.

And A C to Colin, coming from an area, the four brain is tagging or marking the neurons that are particularly active during this heighten level of alertness. Now that Marks the cells, the neurons and the synapses is for strengthening, for becoming more likely to be active in the future, even without us thinking about IT. Okay, so in bad circumstances, this all happens without us having to do much when we want something to happen.

However, we want to learn a new language. We want to learn a new skill. We want to become more motivated. What do we know for certain? We know that that process of getting neural plastic so that we have more focus, more motivation, absolutely requires the release of epa.

We have to have alertness in order to have focus, and we have to have focus in order to direct those plastic changes to particular parts of our nervous system. This has immense implications in thinking about the various tools, whether not those are chemical tools or machine tools or just self induced regiments of how long or how intensely you're going to focus in order to get neuroplasticity. But there's another side to IT.

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The link is David protein got com slash huberman. The dirty secret of neural plasticity is that no neural plasticity occurs during the thing you're trying to learn during the terrible event, during the great event, during the thing that you're really trying to shape and learn. Nothing is actually changing between the neurons that is going to last, all the neural plasticity, the strengthening of the synapses, the addition, in some cases, of new nerve cells, or at least connections between nerve cells.

All of that occurs at a very different phase of life, which is when we are in sleep and non sleep deeper arrest. And so neural plasticity, which is the kind of holy grail of human experience of, you know, this is the new year. And everyone thinking, new year's resolutions and right now, perhaps everything organized and people are highly motivated, but what happens in march or April are may well.

That all depends on how much attention in focus one can continually bring to whatever is they are trying to learn so much so that agent and a feeling of strain are actually required for this process of neuroplasticity to get triggered. But the actual rewiring occurs during periods of sleep and non sleep depressed. Was a study publish last year that's particularly relevant here that I want to share was not done by my laboratory that showed that twenty minutes of deep arrest, this is not deep sleep, but essentially doing something very hard and very intense.

And then taking twenty minutes afterward, immediately afterwards, to deliberately turn off the deliberate focused thinking and engagement actually accelerated neural plasticity. There's another study that's just incredible, and we're going to go into this in a future episode of the podcast not too long from now that showed that if people are learning a particular skill, IT could be a language skill or a motor skill. And they hear a tone just playing in the background.

The tone is playing periodical through background, like just a bell in deep sleep. If that bell is played, learning is much faster for the thing that they were learning while they were awake, IT somehow cues the nervous system in sleep, and even to have to be in dreaming that something that happened in our the waking phase was especially important, so much so that that bell is sort of a pavlova. And q it's over a reminder to the sleeping brain.

Oh, you need to remember what IT is that you were learning at that particular time of day and the learning rates and the rates of of retention, meaning how much people can remember from the thing they learned are significantly higher under those conditions. So i'm going to talk about how to apply all this knowledge in a little bit more in this podcast episode, but also in future episodes. But IT really speaks to the really key importance of sleep and focus, these two opposite ends of our attentional state.

When we're in sleep, these D, P, S, duration, path and outcome analysis are impossible. We just can't do that. We are only in relation to what's happening inside of us. So sleep is key. Also key are periods of non sleep deep pressed where we're turning off our analysis of duration, pattern, outcome in particular for the thing that we were just trying to learn. And we're in this kind of um liminal state where our attention is kind of drifting all over IT.

Turns out that's very important for the consolidation for the changes between the nerve cells that will allow what we were trying to learn to go from being deliberate and hard and stressful and a strain too easy and reflective. This also points to how different people, including many modern clinicians, are thinking about how to prevent bad circumstances, traumas from routing their way, entire nervous system permanently. IT says that you might want to interfere with certain aspects of brain states that are away from the bad thing that happened, that have the brain states that happen the next day or the next month or the next year.

And also, I want to be A I want to make sure that I pay attention of the fact that for many of you, you're thinking about neural plasticity, not just in changing your nervous system to add something new, but to also get rid of things that you don't like, right? That you want to forget bad experiences, or at least remove the emotional contingency of a bad relationship, or a bad relationship to something, or some person, or some event, learning to fear certain things less, to eliminate a phobia, to erase a trauma. The memories themselves don't get a raced.

Sorry to say that the memories don't themselves get a raced, but the emotional load of memories can be reduced. And there are number of different ways that, that can happen, but they all require this thing that we're all calling neural plasticity. We're going to have a large number of discussions about neural plasticity in depth.

But the most important thing understand is that IT is indeed a two phase process. What govern the transition between alert and focused and these deep arrest in deep sleep states is a system in our brain body, a certain aspect of the nervous system called the automated ic nervous system. And IT is immensely important to understand how this automobile era system works.

IT has names like the sympathetic nerve system in paris, sympathetic nerve system, which Frankly are complicated names, because they're a little bit misleading. Sympathetic is the one that associate more alertness per sympathetic is the one that associated with more commonness. And IT gets really misleading because the sympathetic nervous system sounds like sympathy and then people think it's relate to calm.

I'm going to call the alertness system and the community system because even though sympathetic and paris sympathetic or sometimes use, people really get confused. So the way to think about the autonomic nervous system and the reason it's important for every aspect of your life, but in particular for neural plastic and engaging in these focus states and then these defocus states, is that IT works sort of like a sea saw every twenty four hours. We're all familiar with the fact that when we wake up in the morning, we might be a little bit groggy, but then generally were more alert.

And then as evening comes around, we tend to become a little more relax and sleeps. Eventually, at some point at night, we go to sleep. So we go from alert to deeply calm.

And as we do that, we go from an ability to engage in these very focused duration, path, outcome type of analysis to states in sleep that are completely divorced from duration, path and outcome in which everything is completely randomly and untethered in terms of our sensations, perceptions and feelings and so forth. So every twenty four hours, we have a phase of our day that is optimal for thinking and focusing in learning a neuroplasticity and doing all sorts of things of energy as well. And in another phase of our day, we're tired and we have no ability to focus.

We have no ability to engage in duration, path, outcome types of analysis. And it's interesting that both phases are important for shaping our nova system in the ways that we want. So we want to engage more plastic, and we want to get the most of out of our nervous system.

We each have master both the transition between waite's lace and sleep, and the transition between sleep and wakefulness. So much has been made of the importance of sleep and IT is critically important for wound healing, for learning, as I just mentioned, for consolidating learning for all aspects of our immune system. IT is the one period of time in which we are not doing these duration, path and outcomes types of analysis.

And IT is critically important to all aspects of our health, including our launch. Much less has been made, however, of how to get Better at sleeping, how to get Better at the process that involves falling asleep, staying asleep and accessing the states of mind embody that involve total paralysis. Most people do not know this.

We actually paralyzed during much of your sleep that you can act out your dreams, presumably, but also where your brain is in a total idle state where it's not controlling anything, it's just left to a free run. And there are certain things that we can all do in order to master that transition, in order to get Better at sleeping. And IT involves much more than just how much we sleep.

We're all being told, of course, that we need to sleep more. But there is also the issue of sleep quality, accessing those deep states of non D P. O thinking, accessing the right timing of sleep. Not a lot has been discuss publicly as far as i'm aware of when to time you're sleep.

I think we all can appreciate that sleeping for half an hour throughout the day so that you get a total of eight hours of sleep every twenty four hour cycle is probably very different and not optimal compared to a solid block of eight hours of sleep. Although there are people that have tried this, I think so, written about in various books, not many people can stick to that schedule instantly. I think it's called the uber man schedule.

Not to be confused with the huberman schedule because, first of all, my schedule doesn't look anything like that. In second, I would never attempt such a sleeping regime. The other thing that is really important understand is that we have not explored as a culture the rythm that occur in our waking states.

So much has been focused on the value of sleep in the importance of sleep, which is great. But I don't think that most people are paying attention to what's happening in their waking states. And when their brain is optimize for focus, when their brain is optimized for these dbs, these duration pat outcome types of engagements for learning and for changing, and when not, their brain is probably Better suit for more reflective thinking and behaviors.

And IT turns out that there is a vast amount of scientific data which points to the existence of what I called all trade, an rythm. We have heard circadian rythm. Circadian means circa about a day, so it's twenty four rhythms because earth spins once every twenty four hours i'll trading.

Rhythms occur throughout the day in and they require less time. They're shorter. The most important trade in rythm for sake of this discussion is the ninety minute rythm that we're going through all the time in our our ability to attend and focus.

And in sleep, we are our sleep is broken up into ninety minute segments early in the night, we have more face one and face to lighter sleep, and then we go into our deeper face story in face for a sleep, and then we return to face one, two, three, four. So all night you're going through these all trading in hythloday stage, one, two, three four, one, two, three, four. It's repeating. Most people perhaps know that maybe they don't.

But when you wake up in the morning, these all trading rythm continue and IT turns out that we are optimized for focus on attention within these ninety minute cycles so that at the beginning of one of these ninety minute cycles, maybe you sit down to learn something new or to engage in some new chAllenging behavior for the first five or ten minutes of one of those cycles is well known that the brain and the neural circuits and the neuromodulators are not gonna be optimates tune to whatever is you're trying to do. But as you drop deeper into that ninety minute cycle, your ability to focus and to engage in this gpo process into direct neuroplasticity to learn is actually much greater. And then.

You eventually pop out of that at the end of the ninety minute cycle. So these cycles are occurring and sleep, and these cycles are occurring in waiter fulness. And all of those are governed by the sea saw alertness to commons that we call the autonomic nervous system.

So if you want to master and control your nervous system regardless of what tool you reach to, whether not a pharmacologic tool or whether not is a behavioral tool, or whether not it's a brain machine interface tool, it's vitally important to understand that your entire existence is occurring in these ninety minute cycles, whether not you're a sleep or awake. And so you really need to learn how to wedge in to those nine minute cycles. And for instance, IT would be completely crazy and counterproductive to try and just learn information while in deep sleep by listening to that information because you're not able to access IT.

IT would be perfectly good, however, to engage in a focus out of learning each day. And now we know how long that focus out of learning should be. IT should be at least one ninety nine cycle, and the expectation should be that the early phase of that cycle is gonna chAllenging.

It's gonna hurt. It's not going to feel natural, it's not going to feel like flow. But that you can learn, and the circuits of your brain that involved in focus on motivation can learn to drop in to a mode of more focus, get more neural plasticity. In other words, by engaging these ultra an cycles at the appropriate times of day. For instance, some people are very good learners early in the day and not so good in the afternoon. So you can start to explore this process, even without any information about the underlying nw chemicals, by simply paying attention, not just to when you go to sleep and when you wake up each morning, how deep or how shallow your sleep felt you subjectively, but also throughout the day when your brain tends to be most anxious, because IT turns out that has a correlated related to perception that we will talk about.

You can ask yourself, when you most focus, when you least anxious, when you feel most motivated, when you feel most least motivated by understanding how the different aspects of your perception, sensation, feeling, thought and actions tend to want to be engaged or not want to be engaged, you develop a very good window into what's going to be required to shift your ability to focus or shift your ability to engage in creative type thinking at different times of day, should you choose. And so that's where we're heading going forward. IT all starts with master ing this sea saw.

That is, the automatic nervous system that at a course level is a transition between wakefulness and sleep, but at a finer level. And just as important are the various cycles, these all trading nine minute cycles that govern life all the time, twenty four hours a day, every day of our life. And so we're going to talk about how you can take control the autonomic nervous system so that you can Better access neuroplasticity, Better access sleep, even take advantage of the phase, that is, the transition between sleep and waking to access things like creativity and so forth.

All based on studies have been published over the last hundred years, mainly within the last ten years, and some that are very, very new. And that point to the use of specific tools that will allow you to get the most out of your nervous system. So today we covered a lot of information.

IT was sort of a world wind tour of everything from neurons and synapses to neural plasticity in the automatic nervous system. We will revisit a lot of these themes going forward. So if all of that didn't sink in in one pass, um please don't worry, we will come back to these teams over and over again.

I wanted to quit you with language that we're all developing a kind of common base set of information going forward. And I hope the information is valuable to you. And you're thinking about what working well for you and is what's working less well and what's been exceedingly chAllenging, what's been easy for you in terms of your pursuit of particular behaviors or emotional states where your chAllenges are, the chAllenges of people that you know might reside. So thank you so much for your time and attention. And above all, thank you for your interest in science.