Huberman: Neuroscience, Focus, and the Body's Levers

Rich Roll introduces Andrew Huberman as a neurobiology professor at Stanford Medical School and a McKnight and Pew Foundation fellow who founded the Huberman Lab. Roll says the lab works on brain function, plasticity and regeneration, and that its work has been published in journals such as Nature and covered by outlets including Time, Scientific American and the BBC.

Roll says the conversation will cover growth mindset, how to focus, and how to navigate stressful times. He then asks Huberman about his origin story, noting that his path to becoming a scientist was unlikely.

Huberman describes a childhood in which science was central at home. His father was a physicist who worked at Xerox PARC and Stanford, and the family spent summers at the Aspen Center for Physics. When his parents separated around age 13 and his father moved to Denmark, Huberman says he stopped paying attention to school, got heavily into skateboarding and punk rock, and found a community of skateboarders in San Francisco's Embarcadero area.

He attended Gunn High School in Palo Alto, which he describes as one of the most academically rigorous schools in the country and as having one of the highest suicide rates of any school in the country. He says he came to school only occasionally and was eventually told he had to start attending or be removed. After he was moved to another high school, he says that also fell apart.

Huberman recalls being brought into a meeting with a school counselor, where a man sat in the corner without introducing himself. He says he realized then that he was going to be taken away, because his mother was not able to control him at that time. He was placed in a facility on the peninsula that was neither a jail nor a hospital, with psychologists, locked doors and about 12 children at any one time.

He says a roommate told him that if he simply complied he would be out in about a month, and that otherwise he could be there a very long time. Huberman says he called a skateboarding sponsor in San Francisco, and that he was eventually permitted to return to school on the condition that he attend therapy.

After returning to school, Huberman says he began strengthening his body, running and lifting weights, and that a football coach at Gunn introduced him to fitness. He says that when his high school girlfriend left for college, he did not know what he would do next, and that he eventually lived in the parking lot of his former school. He ties his later reflections on mindset to these years, saying that at that point fear was the best motivator for him.

He says he worked intensely and that a professor noticed his interest in the subject. That professor, Harry Carlisle, taught him about thermal regulation, how receptors in the skin relate to perception in the mind, and mental disease. Huberman says he had seen depression and anxiety in his family, had a friend who died by suicide, and had friends who became schizophrenic or addicted, so learning that these conditions had a biological basis drew him in.

Huberman describes Carlisle as a favorite teacher of many students who would smoke in the fume hood of the lab. He says Carlisle told him that if he went to graduate school, the school would pay him to do science. Huberman says he had resentment toward his father, and that he decided he would earn a PhD and become a professor.

He says he had to learn how to speak, think and commit to linear, sometimes painful work. He describes setting a timer and not allowing himself to leave his chair until it went off, which produced extreme agitation at first, but that he eventually became able to work long stretches without breaks.

Huberman says his father was very conservative and his mother was more of a free spirit. He says he was taught that anything related to hippie culture was doomed to fail and cause problems, while anything related to conservative culture was destined to advance humanity. He says neither belief turned out to be true.

He says he needed people outside his home to push him toward lifting weights, running, meditating and doing schoolwork, and that he had to go out into the world to find the paternal and maternal figures who were not present at home. He says he now has a good relationship with his parents.

Huberman says he does not distinguish between brain and mind, and that the nervous system is designed to orchestrate processes throughout the body, not only thinking and behavior. He divides its functions into sensation, perception, feelings, thoughts and behaviors. He describes emotions as bodily sensations linked to concepts in the mind, and says animals definitely experience them.

On thoughts, he says they happen spontaneously, like pop-ups in a web browser, but can also be deliberate. He says the nervous system's goal is to merge perceptions of the outside world with perceptions of the inside world, which he calls interoception, so that the organism acts appropriately for its environment. He offers examples such as feeling anxious in a calm room, which he says the nervous system would register as inappropriate, and impatience in a store line, which he links to a mismatch between internal state and external demands.

Huberman says the nervous system can change in response to experience, which he calls neuroplasticity. He says the brain is highly malleable from birth to about age 25, when children can learn several languages without an accent, and that learning a language after age 25 is much more challenging. He argues that the adult brain can still change provided there is an emphasis on some perceptual event during learning.

He explains that intense focus on an action releases acetylcholine from the nucleus basalis, a structure at the base of the brain, at the precise neurons involved in that behavior, marking them for change during sleep or deep rest. He says that focus triggers plasticity, while plasticity occurs during deep sleep and rest, which he presents as the entry point for people who want to change their brains.

He describes focus as the brain engaging circuits that assess duration, path and outcome. He gives the events of early 2020 as an example of why it is exhausting to be alive then, because people had to keep track of how long something would last, what path it would take and what outcome would follow. He says this kind of analysis is hard work and feels agitating because norepinephrine, a stress-system chemical, is released in the brainstem and body when someone decides to focus on something.

Huberman says that the early stages of hard work and focus feel like agitation, stress and confusion, because the norepinephrine and adrenaline system is kicking in. He compares this to a gym warm-up or a performer warming up, and says the brain also needs time to hone in on which circuits will be active. He says it is unreasonable to expect to sit down for an hour and write one's best work immediately, and that people need to accept the period of agitation that accompanies entering a highly concentrated state.

He describes dopamine as released when someone reaches a milestone or believes they are on the right path, and says that when dopamine is linked to a specific pattern of focus, it can push norepinephrine back down and give more room for focused work. He uses a deer that smells water as an example of how dopamine marks progress along a path. He says drugs of abuse and some behavioral addictions are dangerous because they release dopamine in ways that narrow the other behaviors that can produce pleasure, which he defines as a progressive narrowing of the things that bring pleasure.

Huberman says that when norepinephrine, the agitation signal, converges with acetylcholine and dopamine in the duration, path and outcome process, people start to wire in the behaviors that make them good at certain things. In a functional sense, not in addiction, he says success in any endeavor is closely related to how much focus someone can bring to it. He says the reward system is entirely internal, and that no one is putting dopamine into a person from outside.

He relates this to Carol Dweck's growth mindset research, describing children who enjoyed problem sets they could not yet solve because focusing on the problem produced a dopamine release for them. He says those children tended to become good at puzzles and math. He argues that the agitation felt at the beginning of a task is a gate to pass through before reaching focus, and that rewarding the effort process can create joy and low levels of excitement during it.

Huberman says that the lift people feel when they are struggling is not a psychological pump-up but a neurochemical process in which dopamine suppresses norepinephrine and signals that the person is on the right path and can keep going. He says that permission is granted by the person to themselves, and that no one else can grant it. He adds that external rewards cannot propel long paths of high performance, and that internal rewards are the sustainable fuel source.

He recounts advice from a SEAL teammate to give away external rewards. He also cites a Stanford preschool study in which children who liked drawing during recess were given gold stars for their drawings, then stopped drawing when the stars were withdrawn, which Huberman says shows they had attached their good feeling about drawing to the external reward.

Huberman says he has friends from the SEAL teams and has been intrigued by the BUD/S selection process. He says everyone shows up fit, motivated and convinced they will not quit, but only a very small subset make it through. He says those who make it through are gritty and resilient, but that these traits are necessary and not sufficient, since otherwise everyone would finish. He argues that people who finish tap into some internal process, which might be self-reward or self-punishment, to control something inside an environment controlled by instructors.

He says that people are not deselected but decide to quit for themselves, which he calls a real-world experiment, and that he believes they quit because they cannot manage these neurotransmitters. He describes the training's use of cold water and sleep deprivation as methods that pull people away from analysis of duration, path and outcome toward their internal feelings. He says those who got through did not do so through sheer grit alone, but by attaching meaning to the work and slicing the day into meals or milestones they rewarded themselves for reaching.

Huberman describes meeting David Goggins at a consulting event and later having him visit his Stanford lab. The lab, which studies fear, courage and resilience, uses virtual reality to induce autonomic arousal, including a great white shark dive, heights, claustrophobia and spiders for people with arachnophobia. Huberman says the lab identifies pain points partly through covert methods involving AI and other tools.

Goggins said upfront that he did not like sharks and volunteered to go first. Huberman said it would be inappropriate for him to describe Goggins' data, but said that they did not run a full-blown experiment. He said Goggins appears to take the adrenaline pulse he feels and direct it into action.

Huberman contrasted this with most people, who he said try to negotiate sensation, control perception or manage feelings, approaches he described as hard or unlikely to work. In his account, Goggins moves forward into the discomfort instead.

Huberman linked this to neuroplasticity, saying Goggins uses agitation and stress as a way to move into action. He described modifying the brain through discomfort as a central goal of neuroscience, though he was speaking about his interpretation of Goggins' approach.

Huberman says a graduate student in his lab published a 2018 paper in Nature showing that in the face of a physical threat there are three options: freeze, retreat or move forward. He said the moving-forward response triggers activation of a brain connection to the dopamine circuitry, making it more likely that a person will move forward in the future.

He said what interested the lab was that forward action is rewarded at a neurochemical level and that the highest level of agitation and stress was associated with moving forward. He said people often assume that calming themselves enough will allow them to move, but he described the opposite. For people paralyzed by fear or who struggle to start, he suggested that raising stress and agitation may help, citing deadlines and fear as examples.

Huberman said American culture often treats stress as purely harmful, while in his view stress is designed to move people toward action steps. He also said that knowing the need to act is not always enough: many people understand it intellectually but cannot act as if they already do.

He distinguished two groups with motivation problems. Some people are hypoaroused and would benefit from practices such as rapid, super-oxygenated breathing, which he compared to tummo-style breathing and some versions of the Wim Hof technique. He said his lab was running a human study on this, involving 25 or 30 deep breaths through the nose and out through the mouth followed by an exhale and hold. Others are overaroused, with too many competing thoughts, and for them he recommended learning to calm the nervous system, pointing to physiological sighs as one of the fastest ways to lower autonomic arousal.

Huberman described physiological sighs as two inhales followed by an extended exhale, which he said dilates the lung sacs, pulls some carbon dioxide out of the bloodstream and adjusts the carbon dioxide-oxygen ratio. He said this happens regularly during sleep and that a recent study found it is the breathing pattern people default to in claustrophobia to offload carbon dioxide. He mentioned Wim Hof, Brian McKenzie and Patrick McHugh as people doing interesting breathing work.

He said his lab has focused on neural circuits that achieve particular states and capture diaphragm function, and that everyone has a diaphragm, which he called the immediate link to the body. He contrasted this with the vagus nerve, which he said is very slow: its calming is what people feel after a carbohydrate-rich meal or after putting their feet up at the end of a long day, taking minutes to hours to kick in.

By contrast, he said the diaphragm offers real-time control over brain state because the brain reads the body's activation from how fast the diaphragm moves. In his account, rapid breathing of 25 or 30 breaths tells the brain to be alert and raises noradrenaline, while slow breathing lowers it.

Huberman said that only in the last two or three years have his lab and Mark Krasnow's lab at Stanford, along with other labs, identified neurons in the brain linked to breathing and how they relate to one another. He said everyone should have a set of tools to bring themselves down and ramp themselves up.

Huberman said he strongly disagrees with the idea that lost sleep cannot be recovered. He described his lab's approach: after a cognitive task, participants enter deep relaxation through yoga nidra-style scripts, which can be found online, or a hypnosis script. He described these states as neither fully asleep nor fully awake, with a wandering, fairly narrow attention that helps people learn to turn off their focus modes.

He said these practices are especially useful for people who have trouble falling asleep or relaxing, including those who are stressed not because they are overwhelmed but because they do not know how to turn off their brain. For a self-guided approach, he pointed to scripts on YouTube and to the audio hypnosis scripts of Michael Sealey, an Australian, and clarified that these are not stage hypnosis.

Huberman said he collaborates closely with David Spiegel in the Stanford psychiatry department, who has worked on addiction, trauma and pain management through hypnosis. He said that most clinical hypnosis brings a person into deeper relaxation rather than full sleep, then targets a behavioral change, and that his lab is now studying how daily breathing exercises affect sleep and stress.

Huberman said that people who do such practices for about 10 minutes a day often sleep much better within a week or more, though some need other help such as avoiding caffeine late in the day. He said he thinks hypnosis may accelerate plasticity by combining deep relaxation and focus at the same time, a process he said normally occurs during sleep after hard work, and cited published data from Spiegel's lab that he said supports this.

Huberman said self-generated optic flow from walking, running or cycling shifts the brain into a state of relaxation not seen when a person is stationary. He said this is well described in the neuroscience literature but, for some reason, not well described in wellness circles. He said that when a person moves through space, the natural calming of threat-detection brain circuits follows.

He explained EMDR, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, as a therapy in which people move their eyes laterally while recalling trauma. He said that at first he thought it sounded absurd, but that in 2018, 2019 and 2020, five quality manuscripts from groups studying eye movements found that lateralized eye movements quiet activity in the amygdala. He said his clinical colleagues told him EMDR works best for fairly well-defined traumas, such as a single event or repeated trauma of the same sort, rather than complex lifelong histories.

He described Francine Shapiro, the therapist who developed EMDR, as having the idea while walking in the Stanford hills, noticing that she felt less upset when walking. He said she realized that lateral eye movements occur reflexively during optic flow and brought that movement into the clinic while patients recounted trauma.

Huberman connected this to addiction and stress, saying that stress narrows a person's view of the world, while a calmer state allows broader situational awareness. He said addiction treatment clinics made clear that many factors contribute to addiction and relapse, and that improving a person's ability to control anxiety and their experience of peak states helps reinforce the possibility of getting and staying sober, though it does not guarantee it.

Huberman described addiction as a state in which the visual system and the rest of the brain narrow, as if people become near-sighted, and the dopamine system drives them toward the one thing that will get them out of the state they are in. He said people in those states literally do not see other possibilities.

He said some of the work he is starting to get involved in is to inform the addiction treatment and trauma communities that action in the body can help move people out of states of cognitive near-sightedness, and that time perception can be changed so people see other options. He said that when an addict needs a substance, their sense of time fixes on getting it, and only when that sense can be widened do they realize they have other options.

He argued that an addict's decision to use often begins well before the behavior itself, so by the time someone picks up a drink, a breathing technique is unlikely to work. Intervention, he said, has to happen days, hours or weeks earlier, when the state begins shifting in that direction.

He also linked his perspective to his own youth, saying that people he knew who became addicts, and some adults he knows who have become addicts while living seemingly functional lives, show that it is unclear whether they have a real choice in highly myopic states of mind. He said that viewing this as a bad choice oversimplifies the problem, and that addiction is much more complicated than family support or discouragement alone.

Huberman said the societal divide is a huge problem and that neuroscience can offer insight into why it is happening and perhaps what might be done about it. He described a 1960s study in which Robert Heath recorded from the human brain by placing electrodes deep into people's brains, allowing them to stimulate areas and report feelings. He said the study, published in Science, found that people could stimulate pleasure-linked spots and reported feeling drunk, happy or sexually aroused. He said the area people most wanted to stimulate produced frustration and mild anger, and that the finding showed the result was tapped into the dopamine reward system.

Huberman said recent data from another lab found that beliefs and information supporting prior beliefs increase activity in reward systems, so seeing information that confirms what one already thinks releases more dopamine and adrenaline. He said that this changes the way a person views the world, making them see and hear certain things and not others, and that counter-belief information is not rewarded. He called these barriers to empathy and listening.

He said the boat to cross the divide is the ability to control one's internal state, to lower autonomic arousal just enough to open up cognition to the possibility that there may be a kernel of value in what someone else says, even when it is about oneself and unwelcome. He compared this to addiction to entrenched thinking and to the refusal to change, and said the key is to help people tolerate progressively higher levels of stress while maintaining openness to sensation and thought.

Huberman also said mirror neuron data in humans is not that impressive, which he acknowledged would be contested, and argued that circuits controlling emotional contagion are more powerful. In his view, recruiting people into stress is much more powerful than recruiting them into empathy for something good, which he called a well-established neuro-biological fact.

Huberman said there are three gates to a higher level of understanding and discourse, so that people can hear others even when they dislike how it feels. The first is to bring down the internal level of urgency people feel, so that information can come in. He said the collective consciousness is in a frenzy and that people need to learn to turn off their amygdala circuits.

He said he doubted that people would collectively do EMDR or breathing exercises at scale. Instead, he proposed teaching the next generation, especially children, to regulate their nervous systems so that they recognize a pulse of adrenaline as placing them in a compromised position. He said that being able to listen depends on being calm, and that listening is crucial to individual and group advancement.

He argued that previous efforts had been backwards, starting with behavior such as getting along or cancel culture rather than physiology. He said he does not have a master plan but that teaching neuroscience on Instagram is part of this effort, because he thinks people must learn to regulate themselves before the culture can change. He pointed to David Goggins as someone who dealt with his internal turmoil and built something from it.

Huberman described autonomic control as the entry point to addiction, trauma and genuine listening. He said humanity is repeatedly colliding with the same problems every 50 or 100 years, now made more complicated by social media. He also said that focusing on individual control is what he can do, while structural changes to social media platforms and information delivery are beyond his control.

Huberman said most parents fear stressing their kids and he pointed to Gunn High School, saying that in the last 10 years there have been over a dozen train-track suicides there. He said these kids are committing suicide for various reasons, but many feel too much pressure. He argued that children cannot be pressured beyond their capacity to regulate, but also that making all internal states depend on external things is a foolish misstep.

He said the next generation may be rescuable even if his own generation is not, and that it is important to teach concepts such as gratitude and mindfulness, which he presented as mushy-sounding but useful. He said gratitude engages the serotonin system, which buffers against injury, can improve wound repair, and lets people lean back into high-stress regimes. He described learning to toggle the nervous system between intense, focused effort and real relaxation and social connection.

Huberman said that even if not every child learns this, if the information is widely distributed, a subset may grow up to be the leaders the species needs to get through the current filter. He said the widespread presence of smartphone apps like Headspace and Calm, and the spread of mindfulness into mainstream vocabulary, suggest that children are growing up aware of these practices, and that this is happening in households.

He said he toggles between optimism and dystopian despair. He contrasted the open access to self-regulation tools with the endless scrolling of social media, and said that most people, young or old, are content to be passive consumers, spending their dopamine on meaningless activities and consuming things that damage them. He said that the species is divided between those who will try to maximize the gift of neuroplasticity and those who will not.

Huberman called humans the only species with neuroplasticity throughout the lifespan, and said childhood plasticity lasts as long as it does as part of that lifespan. He said some people leverage this gift and take advantage of it, while others do not, and he said society will not reach everyone, so the aim should be to attach financial, socio-economic and other reward systems to the behaviors that produce people capable of leading into the next 100 or 200 years. He said he was not calling for abolishing monetary systems.

He said that once people realize that high-performing military personnel, athletes, academics and business people use practices to regulate themselves, to perform better, sleep better, listen better and enter states of creativity, then more people may adopt them. He said new media has democratized access to this information, and that people like David Goggins now explain these methods in plain terms.

He said he is optimistic because he has to be, and that interest in psychology, the brain, physical fitness and mental fitness has grown. He called 2020 a call to arms and described this moment as the time for his generation and the next to step up. He said that if such teaching is passed on early, a generation will naturally understand that stress and agitation take them off their game, and will make adjustments.

Huberman said he used to find this information in books on his shelf because there was no online access, and that kids today must learn to forage. He said he is doing his part through Instagram videos on neuroscience and wants more scientists to communicate beyond papers read by a small group. He said it is his obligation as a scientist to do so, and that taxpayer money pays for the research.