Neuroscience of Emotions & Tools for Improving Emotion Regulation | Dr. Ralph Adolphs

Defining and regulating emotions

0:00I see somebody come up behind me. They can see. I'm trying to park. They can move over. No. They come right up behind me, go on the horn. And, you know, you immediately feel just an immediate anger response, right? Well, after the ice bath, it's flat. So there was an immediate automatic down regulation of my autonomic emotional response to a psychological stressor, to somebody honking at me, that was trained and generalized from the ice bath. There's an experiment of one. I'm not claiming this as a published study, but so I think there's a direct autonomic training component as well in terms of the strength and the automaticity, the ease with which you can regulate emotions, that they can become kind of automatically regulated.

0:45You don't have to overthink it. It becomes smooth and effortless to some extent, and that's the place where you want to get. Hey, everyone. To celebrate the launch of my new book entitled Protocols, I'm pleased to share that I'll be hosting three live events very soon. The first live event is in New York City at Radio City Music Hall on September 17th. The second event is in Los Angeles at the Dolby Theater on October 8th. And the third live event is in San Francisco at the Masonic on October 28th.

1:15At each of these events, I'll be discussing topics from the book, and my favorite part, taking questions directly from you, the audience. To get tickets, you can go to HubermanLab.com slash events and use the code PROTOCOLS to get early access. Again, that's HubermanLab.com slash events and use the code PROTOCOLS to get early access to tickets.

Introduction of Dr. Ralph Adolphs

1:35Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

1:44I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Ralph Adolphs. Dr. Ralph Adolphs is a professor of psychology, neuroscience, and biology at Caltech University, and a world expert in the neurobiology of emotions. Today, we discuss what emotions are, how they grow and shrink in our brain and body, and why some emotions seem to recruit our behavior and decision-making, and some simply don't. We also discuss where and how emotions are mapped in the body, and we dispel common myths about the brain-body storage of emotions from our past, which is a very commonly discussed topic that, frankly, as you'll learn today, many, if not most people, get wrong.

2:26We also discuss why some people are able to observe, but not react to their emotions, and what tools may assist in helping you build better emotion regulation. As you'll soon realize, Dr. Adolphs is uniquely positioned to explain the real neuroscience and psychology of emotions, and how to put that information to use. Today's conversation, therefore, ought to be valuable for people of every age and profession, and for anyone interested in improving their emotional life and understanding of others. And now for my conversation with Dr. Ralph Adolphs. Dr. Ralph Adolphs, welcome.

2:57Thank you, Andrew. Pleasure to be here. Long-time admirer of your work, because you're one of the few people who has studied these things we call emotions, brain states, cognition, and much more in humans. There have been others in the field of neuroscience, of course, but I would argue few people have combined a real grounding in neural circuits with an interest in what most people think of as a psychological set of issues, in a way that also takes into account the animal data and really the broadest picture of this thing that we call emotions. I'm just going to start with a statement of gratitude.

3:28Thank you for doing that, because it's so easy for people to stimulate a brain area, see an animal or a human behavior, speak in a certain way, and say, oh, this is the brain region for this, and you've long been pushing back on that. It's a tall order, you know, and one impetus for the work that I've been doing in the book that I co-wrote with David Anderson, the book that I have forthcoming with Princeton University Press is precisely to do what you just said, is to kind of integrate and pull together findings and emotion from animal studies, findings from social psychology. Typically, those people in those fields don't talk to one another.

4:00They do very different studies, have very different methodologies, and so trying to integrate across disciplines that are that far apart to really try and get a sense for what are emotions in a sense that would satisfy psychologists and lay people about human emotions, but they would also speak to the mechanisms that you can study in mice, for example, or flies, as David Anderson does.

What emotions actually are

4:22So how do you think about emotions, and how do they relate to brain and bodily states? The basic answer is that I think of emotions as functional states of a particular type. They should be understood by what they do, their function, rather than how they happen to be constituted in the human brain or differently in an octopus nervous system or in an AI, which we should talk about. And so the way to situate them is to think of control of behavior in response to particular types of environmental challenges.

4:55So at the sort of simplest level, you would have reflexes. You know, I put my hand out on a hot stove, or you tap the patellar tendon on my knee, and there's like a very rigid behavior that's adaptive, that's very rigid, but just for that particular circumstance, I withdraw my hand, that's a reflex. At the opposite end, you would have, you know, goal-directed general volition and planning, everything, you know, the stuff we do all the time that's extremely flexible. And so if you have a bear or a tiger, you know, something charging at you,

5:26that challenge requires a control of behavior that's intermediate between those two extremes. I can't have a reflex for a bear if it's far away or if it's close or if it's a rattlesnake or a tiger or all the different kinds of potential threats out there. Instead, I need something that's more flexible, which emotions are. So that's the sort of big picture, that emotions are functional states that have particular features or operating characteristics for dealing with certain types of environmental challenges, like running away from a bear.

5:57I mean, first of all, I think the question, what is an emotion, is a good and a valid question. It's not an ill-posed question. You occasionally run into the view that, well, emotions don't really exist or we don't really, you can't really say anything about them. The question is just ill-posed or meaningless. I don't think that's the case. Paul Griffiths, a philosopher, wrote a book some years ago, I think 97 or so, what emotions really are, where he first kind of made the claim that, well, they don't really exist. And you can see how people come to that conclusion if you survey all the different theories that are out there.

6:32Joe Ledoux or Lisa Feldman Barrett or Paul Ekman, they look pretty different. And so you might come away with the impression, look, even the experts can't agree on what emotions are. The words we have for emotions predate modern science. And so it's just a confused concept. I don't think that's the case. I think, I mean, there's room for revision. But I think everybody kind of knows what emotions are. And I think it deserves a straight answer that science should provide. I think the question is well-posed enough to admit of an answer.

7:04And then how could you start getting to an answer? So let's just start sort of from the simplest case would be to list some examples. So you could say, well, you know, emotions are anger, fear, disgust. You could list specific examples that are uncontentious, I would hope, where pretty much everybody agrees, okay, these are examples of emotions, right? You could do the same if I asked you, what's a car, right? And you would say, well, you know, it's a Mercedes and a Honda and a Toyota, or if I asked you, what's a bird?

7:34And you would say it's a robin and a hummingbird and an eagle. So you could list examples. That's not an answer yet. What you would then want to say is, well, what is it in virtue of which these examples, what makes them all instances of an emotion? What do fear, anger, et cetera, share in common? What features do they have that makes them emotions? Just like what the cars or the bird species have in common, that makes them cars or birds. And so David Anderson and I did that in our book a decade ago or so,

8:06Now the Neuroscience of Emotion, where we listed some features of emotions that helps to answer the question and sort of get a handle on what is it that these all share in common. I elaborate on that and have a longer list and really go into detail on, okay, so what are the features of emotions in my forthcoming book? Maybe I'll just list a couple to go through them quickly. So one feature of emotions is priority, which is that they can take over your behavior. That they share in common with reflexes. If I put my head on a hot stove, I can't help but withdraw it.

8:40And if you're suddenly confronted by the bear, you can't help but run away or curl into a ball or whatever your adaptive behavior is. So they have priority and interrupt your behavior, which is something that the Nobel laureate Herbert Simon already pointed out in a paper back in the 50s or 60s, that they're interrupt mechanisms of a certain kind. If you're just going about your business and normal goal-directed behavior, you always need to be monitoring for the bear or the tiger or the predator that's out there. And if you detect that, emotions have to take over or you're dead.

9:12So priority is sort of one that doesn't distinguish emotions from reflexes or fixed action patterns. They share that. Another one is valence that psychologists ubiquitously mention, which is sort of the simplest dimension along which you can organize emotions in terms of their similarity. So anger, disgust, fear, you might see, are more similar to one another than either of those, as would say, happiness. There's some similarity structure, some emotions clustered together, some are further apart.

9:43And the simplest dimension, which is one that Charles Darwin already mentioned in his book, The Expression of the Emotion in Man and Animals, he called it the principle of antithesis, is valence, which is approach or avoid, pleasant or unpleasant, this basic valence dimension. Are there any neutral emotions? I ask this because your colleague at Caltech, who I respect tremendously, Marcus Meister, once wrote a review where he said, you know, a good way to think about sensory systems and maybe neural systems of all kinds is that they're encoding for yum, yuck, or meh.

10:17And the meh is a very interesting one. Just like an animal, including us, can go forward, backward, or stay put. Now, we can go side to side too. Of course, those are just different versions of forward in this context. And I sometimes wonder, because algorithms are repurposed across different neural systems, if there is indeed a meh emotion, or maybe the emotion is meh. I don't want to take us down a philosophical path, but does that make sense? Because as long as we're talking about valence, anger and happiness, clearly, you know, sad and happy. Okay, opposite ends of the spectrum.

10:49But what was it, apathy? Is there a state of prioritization of doing nothing? It's a really good question. I mean, I think, you know, when you list these features, like priority, valence, I'll get to some others. One question is, which of these are necessary? You know, like a package of all of these features that emotions have. Do you need all of them, or are some of them sufficient? And I think the answer is some of them are sufficient, but there's some that are necessary. I think priority is necessary.

11:19I think valence, maybe not, as you were alluding to. I could imagine there's still valence, but it's at a neutral region of the spectrum. But then there's other ones, which are the ones that David Anderson has studied in particular in the hypothalamus in mice, and I think goes into great detail in the podcast that you had with them, which are scalability and temporal persistence. And so scalability would be that an emotion can scale in intensity. One of the best examples of that is for the case of fear and the bear coming at you.

11:51So typically it would scale from anxiety and monitoring, you know, there's the bear sort of out there, to fear, where you might run away or hide, to panic. So that sort of threat imminence scalability. And that's something where emotions are different now from reflexes, because reflexes are binary. It's all or nothing. I either pull my hand away or nothing. The knee jerks are not. It's not, there's not like some scalable package in there. And then temporal persistence is even more something that's essential to emotions and speaks to their function,

12:23which is you have this internal state, let's say, of aggression or of fear that has to last some time because the bear might be around for some time. So you might be running away or you might be attacking in anger. Those are phasic little bouts, but the actual internal state that is motivating those persists for quite a long time. So temporal persistence is really important and it allows the person or the animal to incorporate lots and lots of information that's coming in and to have a motivational state that would be suited for that kind of environmental challenge.

12:58It's not like a hot plate where if you pull your hand away, you're done. The bear is out there and it might come back. It might still be lurking in the forest. So you better be afraid for some period of time. David Anderson studied this a lot in terms of what neural circuits, what properties of neurotransmitters in the brain could actually implement persistence. We do have really slow neurotransmitters like neuropeptides, for instance, which is what he studied. But my colleagues at the University of Iowa actually did a really cool study in humans that showed the temporal persistence of emotions independent of memory.

13:31So here's a study. They took patients with amnesia. So these were like four or five people who had medial temporal lobe, hippocampal damage. They live in a time window of maybe a minute or so. I used to study these patients when I first started as a postdoc at the University of Iowa with Damasio. And, you know, you can talk to them. They can process information. But if you go to the toilet and you come back five minutes later, they would stand up and shake your hand and introduce themselves to you because they would have no recollection of having met you before.

14:02So just no memory. Very strong anterograde amnesia, as it's called. So they had those and controls. They showed them really sad movie clips in all cases. The patients can understand and watch the movie clip. They get really sad and weepy. Right after watching these sad movie clips, everybody rates how sad do you feel? The amnesic patients feel really sad. The controls feel really sad. You wait five minutes. You then ask the controls, well, how sad do you feel? And they say, yeah, I still feel a little bit of sad. Sadness in me because I remember having seen the movie.

14:35And if you ask them, why do you feel sad? They say, well, because you showed me the sad movie five minutes ago. The amnesic patients, you ask, how do you feel? They say, I feel really sad and I don't know why. I have no idea. And you ask them, do you remember seeing a movie? They say, nope. There's like no declarative memory of the movie, but there's still the temporal persistence of the sadness. It lasts some time. So I thought this was a really cool study because it showed very clearly that there is temporal persistence in emotions. And sadness probably has one of the longest time constants, as we know from personal experience.

15:08But it's separate from just declarative memory. It's not that you're remembering that the bear is there. That's going on too. But independently of that, the emotion state has its own temporal persistence. The state has to last some time. And again, that's something that reflexes don't have. It just goes straight through. There's no temporal persistence. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep makes mattresses and pillows that are customized to your unique sleep needs. Now, I've spoken many times before on this and on other podcasts about the fact that getting a great night's sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health, and performance.

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Animal emotions and conscious experience

18:17It is striking to me that maybe 30 years ago or so, there was discussion about whether animals have emotions. Based on these criteria, priority, valence, scalability, and persistence, is it generally agreed upon that animals have emotions? I believe they do because I love my dog and other animals, and I want to believe that. But as scientists, if we step back, do they meet the criteria for emotions that you're setting up here for us? Absolutely, yes. So, if you have those criteria, those functional criteria, and you would add one or two others, many states in animals,

18:49and certainly the states that we would ordinarily interpret as emotions in our pets, in our dogs, cats. By the way, I loved your dog. Oh, Strummer? Just out in the waiting room there. Yeah, he's just hanging out. They would meet those criteria, and they would have functional emotions. We should talk more about this. There's also the claim now from Anthropic that large language models have functional emotions. That's so wild. We have to return to that because I think it kind of boggles the mind. You know, how could a machine have emotions? Right. But again, these are functionally defined emotions, and I think there's no problem assigning to AI, to some extent,

19:25and certainly to many animals, those functional emotions. Where it gets complicated is that in us, and also by assumption in animals, I have no doubt, they also have conscious experiences of emotions. And most people take the conscious experience of the emotion as the ground truth for the emotion. Emotions without conscious experiences of emotions sound like an oxymoron. It's like you can't have that. The conscious experience is the emotion, which is what William James said, which is what Joe Ledoux says.

19:57And I think it's implicitly there across essentially every psychological theory is the assumption that emotions really are types of conscious experiences, which I think is the intuition. That if I ask you, how do you know? What's the ground truth, right? How do you know you're having an emotion? You would say because it's a certain type of conscious experience because of how it feels. And if I asked you more specifically, how do you know it's sadness versus anger versus fear? You would say because of how they feel. They feel different. And so we take the conscious experience, our own introspective access to the conscious experience, as the ground truth.

20:34That has a lot of problems associated with it, deep philosophical problems. But just practically, it has two big problems that I think science should avoid. One is it gets really problematic to know whether or not animals have emotions because we don't know how to test whether or not they have conscious experiences. I have no doubt that they do. It's just that there's no scientific way to test currently. So we should have different criteria. And the other question is if you tie emotion to the conscious experience of emotion, that is you equate, you conflate emotions with feelings, well, then you're not studying emotions.

21:11You're studying consciousness. We spoke about Christophe Koch earlier. Great respect for people that are studying consciousness, but I don't want to study consciousness. That's too hard. And there's lots and lots of debates and disagreements. So if we can avoid that and study emotions in the absence of needing to study conscious experiences of emotions, we can move forward with the science, which is what every other discipline does. So if you're a vision researcher, right? So you study vision. You study consciousness.

21:41No, you don't need to. I mean, you can. But there's a huge amount of work that people do studying vision and how that works in the brain, studying memory. You know, any other cognitive process without needing to study conscious experiences. They're typically accompanied in humans. And if you talk to the layperson on the street and you say, I'm a vision researcher, they take you to be studying the conscious experience of seeing, perhaps. Or if you say, I'm a memory researcher, they take you to be studying the conscious experience of recollection.

22:11But scientifically, most people working in those fields don't study consciousness. And it's perfectly valid to study vision and memory, you know, in horseshoe crabs or the plesia, where nobody has any claims about consciousness. We should do the same thing with emotion. And then we can have an integrated science across species that can move forward without needing to tackle the difficult problem of consciousness. Again, yes, for sure, we and other animals have conscious experiences of emotions, and that's very important.

22:42But we also have conscious experiences of seeing and memory. As a scientific discipline, we should separate the conscious experience from the process, from the emotion. And that's the way we make progress. That's one of the main arguments that David and I had in our book and that I reiterate in the forthcoming book.

Emotion regulation and ice baths

22:58At risk of taking us in a philosophical direction, I'd like to actually ask a biological, psychological question. Given these criteria, you know, priority, valence, scalability, and persistence, but really focusing mainly on priority, I think all of us have had the experience of an emotion coming on, but not in its kind of overtaking maximal form. Like, okay, we feel ourselves getting annoyed, and we can observe the emotion growing. The arousal state is familiar to us. We understand, let's assume in this example that we understand why it's happening.

23:30Maybe you're in line at the store, and the person ahead of you is taking everybody's time by doing something that's really unnecessary and kind of obnoxious to us in that moment. And so our frustration is rising, and we are observing the emotion, even though the emotion is us, right? It's within us. And then at some point, we might blurt something out, or we might feel compelled that we have to just say, excuse me, like, could this maybe be taken care of something? But you have some control. But you have some control, and there's this almost, like, running together of two consciousnesses. Like, there's, like, two of us in there at the same time, observing self, observing the outside world.

24:04And then at some point, the prioritization gets to the point where, like, we just do something. And sometimes it's a decision, and sometimes it overtakes us. Now, at the opposite extreme, we've all observed. You can just go on X, the social media platform, and for some reason, the algorithm likes to serve up a lot of examples of people, like, on planes losing it, people going unhinged. Like, you know, I like people just, like, completely melting down. And it's very, in our language, hypothalamic, right? And so people are drawn to that. I have an antidote to those people. They should take ice baths.

24:35I can tell you more. Oh, well, listen. I think this helps. Seriously. Yeah, well, ice baths. Yeah, let's definitely talk about ice baths. And ultra, ultra races, because you're training for one. No, but I think what you said is exactly right and extremely important for humans and probably unique to humans as opposed to other animals, which is that we can be conscious of and monitor our own emotions. And by doing so, we can regulate them to some extent. So emotion regulation and control and monitoring emotion, being aware of what emotion you have, those two go hand in hand.

25:07And your Stanford colleague, you know, James Gross, spawned this huge field in the 90s, I guess, when it started, of emotion regulation that is now huge. I just finished my term as co-editor of this journal, Affect of Science. And I would say like a quarter or so or a third of the submissions are about emotion regulation. It is so important in humans. And most of pathologies and difficulties about emotions are not about the emotion per se.

25:37It's about our ability or disability to control them, to regulate them. If you don't mind, because of your understanding of emotions and states and neuroscience, but also your experience as a human in the world, has anything you've learned changed the way that you watch your emotions grow, decide when to step in, when not to step in? You don't seem like an impulsive person. So we're not, most people aren't. We're not talking about pathology here. And I'll cede this question by saying, you know, I have a few friends who were in tier one special operations and, you know, that's high risk, high consequence work.

26:10We've had Alex Honnold on the podcast, high risk, high consequence endeavors. And they all say the same thing, which are that emotions cloud logical judgment. So they're somehow far from emotions or their emotions don't get prioritized. But of course, these are the, all of these people that come to mind have, you know, healthy marriages now, you know, healthy families, they're loving people, they have anger, they have emotions, but they've sort of categorized emotions as cloud judgment in the professional or, you know, peak performance context.

26:41Therefore, they don't allow them to be prioritized. Sounds a little bit robotic, sounds a little bit mechanical, quote unquote, on the spectrum. People like will say these things, right? But in some ways, provided they're allowed to allow themselves to be emotional and let emotions, quote unquote, take over in the right context, that's kind of the ideal circumstance, right? Yeah. So what do you know that allowed, that has impacted the way that you think about emotion regulation that perhaps people could consider, if not benefit from?

27:12Yeah, I think it's, you know, it's a mixture. On the one hand, you absolutely need emotions. If you have no emotions, as we know from Antonio Damasio's original work in his book, Descartes' Error, which he put out just as I was starting as a postdoc in Iowa, 1994, I think, you know, if you have massive frontal lobe lesions that make it the case that you're no longer emotionally responding to stimuli, the consequences are devastating, which is that you cannot make decisions, complex decisions in your life. You can't organize your life, you're not motivated to take the right path through life because you don't feel one way or the other about the different options that are available.

27:49So it's clear that not having emotions is very bad. And certainly if you were out facing the bear, which may not happen to too many people these days, that would be very bad. On the other hand, being able to regulate them and control them is definitely a human skill that's very important and that helps you a lot. The first part is what you were talking about first earlier, which is the ability to monitor your emotions, to identify your emotions. I think Lisa Feldman Barrett actually first did the main work on this. It's a topic called emotional granularity.

28:22It's like at what, how fine a grain can you conceptualize and be aware of your own emotions? And then once you're aware of them, you can bring various emotion regulation strategies, mostly cognitive reappraisal type of strategies to bear on the emotion and thereby, to some extent, control your emotions. How important is it to use language to provide that granularity? I've certainly experienced like feeling a bunch of things around a particular scenario and it, if you can't separate out the elements, it can feel overwhelming.

28:57People always say, if you can name the emotion, but I, I find that a little tricky because sometimes it's not one emotion. It's a bunch of things. It's confusion. It's frustration. Are those the same thing? I don't know. You know, and, and I think many people, myself included, sometimes just like, it just feels like too much, not because the emotion is so big, but because it's such a tangled jungle of, of where there isn't really language to disentangle it. Absolutely. Yeah. I don't think you need to put it into language. And I think people's strategies vary. Some people, you know, some people think in words, some people think in pictures.

29:29Most people are a mixture. And if you look at different languages, you know, if you're French or German speaking like me, bilingual, we have different words for different emotions. But you need some sense of the concept, which I think the concepts for emotions are pretty much universal across languages. So, you know, there, there are all these different examples of emotion words from different languages, like schadenfreude is one that people know now. You know, joy at another person's misfortune from the German.

29:59Giegel, I think, is often trumpeted as another example. I forget what the culture is, but this is the emotion you feel if something is just unbearably cute. There's a great book. Tiffany Watt Smith has a book. I think it's called The Book of Human Emotions, which is basically like a little dictionary, an entry from A to Z of all the different emotion words in different languages. But the fact that we don't have a word for Giegel or for schadenfreude in English, you perfectly well have the concept. I just described it to you.

30:30You have no problem understanding what the emotion is. And so I think as long as you have some kind, some concept, which need not be put into words, some way to think about and differentiate the different emotions that are going on in you, that gives you a purchase on your ability to, to some extent, evaluate them and say, this is an emotion I want, or this is an emotion that I don't want. And then to act on it through various strategies, cognitive reappraisal, for example, or acceptance, depending on what your strategy is.

31:01Yeah, the psychologists seem to disagree here because many people, some have been on this podcast, all of whom are experts, will say, you know, if you don't allow yourself to feel the emotion, then it grows. And other people will say, well, if you focus on something, then it grows. And this is where I think neuroscience can be of great help because probably both things are true and it depends on the context. But yeah, that's exactly right. Maybe this is a good opportunity to talk about sort of dynamic attractor states, which is, and I don't throw out that language to confuse people, but there is this idea in neuroscience, right?

31:32Like if we, if you and I both, you know, talk about this cup and I slide it forward and then we start looking at it and more and more brain circuits are going to be devoted to, we could spend several hours. It's not a very interesting conversation, but we, if we do that about an emotion we feel because of something somebody said to us at work or online, I think we're all familiar with the idea that we can go down these rabbit holes within our own mind. Absolutely. And it's, it's a very dangerous way to live. It is. Just knowing that it exists perhaps can be helpful. Yeah. Because it's almost like if you go far enough down a path, it's like a horror movie.

32:02If you go far enough down a path, it's very hard to extract yourself. No, absolutely. Absolutely. I think, I mean, cognitive reappraisal or any other sort of complex reappraisal strategy for emotions, it is a double-edged sword and it's trainable. It's, as you say, if I really focus on, okay, now, you know, I'm starting to feel sad. I really don't want to feel sad. I really don't want to feel sad. I really don't want to feel sad. Well, the more I think about it, the sadder I get, right? Or same with anxiety, some emotions are probably more prone to going down this rabbit hole than others. But again, it's a trainable skill that there are other ways of dealing with it where you can kind of just stop that process from going down at all.

32:38You want to stop it at the earliest front end. I mean, one quick answer to the question of what's the most successful strategy is the earlier you can stop that process, the better. And so in the first place, don't get yourself into a situation where you're going to be anxious or guilty or sad or whatever emotion you want to avoid. So situational avoidance, just in terms of structuring your environment, would be one strategy. And then once you're in it, I think it's idiosyncratic to a large extent. So you would have to figure out what works for you. But it's definitely trainable. Two parts are trainable.

33:09One is the specific strategy so you can do cognitive reappraisal without overthinking it and going down the rabbit hole and actually feeling the emotion even more. And the other one is just the strength and automaticity of control that you have, which brings me to the ice baths. Shall I briefly talk about the ice baths? Because this is relevant, actually. So I started doing these a while back. One of my former colleagues, Justin Feinstein, who now runs a float clinic on Maui. I forget how it came about, but we were talking about floating ice baths.

33:42And he mentioned you and he mentioned Wim Hof. He said, you know, take a look at these guys. And I saw, you know, Wim swimming in some frozen lake. Look kind of interesting. Anyway, so I started doing ice baths some time ago. They weren't that popular yet back then. And now my wife bought on Amazon like a horse watering trough or some big thing. That works. Insulated it. Yep. Put it on the porch. It's a lot safer than being out on a lake, too. Put it on the porch. We'll talk about that later. And I get, you know, these 40-pound ice bags every week. They know me very well at Joe's Ice up there. Every time I go in, they say, hey, boss, having a good party again tonight, eh?

34:14I'm like, yep, I can eat a lot of ice. But so this is the interesting thing. When I start first week, it is terrible, super painful. You know, you go in, it's like a whole body cold presser task, right? Second week, it's also, you know, your breathing goes up, your heart rate goes up. But gradually, and kind of with some automaticity to it, now I go into the ice bath immediately. My heart rate goes down. My breathing goes down. I get super relaxed. So this is the interesting part there, apropos of emotion regulation.

34:46It generalizes for me. This is an experiment of one. But for me, it generalizes. So previously, prior to the ice bath, I'm driving around Pasadena, and I don't know, in the last year or two, this seems to have risen somehow. I'm trying to park on the street. There's a lane next to me. I have my signal out. There's a parking space. It's clear what I'm trying to do. I see somebody come up behind me. They can see. I'm trying to park. They can move over. No. They come right up behind me, go on the horn. And, you know, you immediately feel just an immediate anger response, right?

35:21Well, after the ice bath, it's flat. So there was an immediate automatic down regulation of my autonomic emotional response to a psychological stressor, somebody honking at me, that was trained and generalized from the ice bath. It's an experiment of one. I'm not claiming this as a published study. So I think there's a direct autonomic training component as well in terms of the strength and the automaticity, the ease with which you can regulate emotions, that they can become kind of automatically regulated.

35:53You don't have to overthink it. It becomes smooth and effortless to some extent. And that's the place where you want to get. I've known Wim a long time, and although I sometimes, in my opinion, unfairly get tacked to the deliberate cold exposure, as we call it, thing a little too much, because we talk about many things on this podcast, not just that, I do find it very useful. And years ago, my lab had collaborations with the special operations community, and they'll tell you that one of the reasons it's such a wonderful tool is it's so reliable. You always get an increase in adrenaline, norepinephrine in the brain, and to some extent, and this might surprise you, perhaps not, you get often reductions in cortisol, which is kind of paradoxical.

36:34But when people practice, it's very reliable, and provided it's not so cold or it's an open lake where you can- It's reliable and super efficient. And safe. I mean- Unless you're doing it in a lake or you're doing hyperventilation first. Five minutes after a shower, it's extremely efficient. Five is, that's a lot. That's good. Well, after five minutes, you can look at my body mass index. After five minutes, I get hypothermic, so I can't stay in very long. That's a good long while, and even in a cold shower. And there is now evidence of improved resilience to subsequent stressors of the sort that you described. And there are some okay papers. I think it's a wonderful tool, especially for this buffering, this immediate stress or anger response.

37:10Very powerful. Before we went on, Mike, we were talking about a different type of stressor, which is the ultramarathons that you're currently training for, a 100-mile race, which is, by the way, super impressive even just to shoot for it. I know you've done others. Well, trying is the operative word here. Okay, well, I have confidence in you. Talk to me in two months. Yes, I will. I have confidence in you. You're going to finish this 100-mile race. But we were talking about something that I think is relevant to bring up now, which is you were describing how, you know, at some points during these races, you just feel like complete garbage.

37:42But then you start to feel better. And so then the next time you feel like complete garbage, you have the cognitive knowledge that you felt terrible, then better again. And so you're starting to integrate over longer periods of time. So here's another example of emotion regulation, but over much longer timescales. It's a little bit harder to access for most people than a cold shower. No, but I think this is one thing, one reason, there are many reasons, but there's one reason that I love these ultramarathons and sort of identify as an ultrarunner, even though I didn't do it for decades and I'm just now getting back into it.

38:15Because of that nonlinearity, you have these major ups and downs. And, you know, the sort of mantra that ultrarunning has co-opted is, you know, relentless forward momentum. But the sort of psychological equivalent is just relentless optimism, like optimism in the face of adversity. You have to just keep that mindset. And everybody there is like that. You know, you come around like mile 40, mile 50, mile 60, you come around some curve and you look and feel like crap. People go, looking good. Nobody says, oh, looks like you're not going to make it.

38:45Nobody says that, right? So everybody is super positive. You're hanging in there and it is really hard. And, you know, you've just been going downhill. Your knees are shot. You have blisters. You've been vomiting, super tired. And you extrapolate and you think this is not going to work. But if you refuse to give up, it doesn't always work, but about half the time or so, it levels out and it starts going back up again. And you keep going. I mean, you feel wrecked at mile 50. I feel wrecked or earlier, mile 30.

39:15I wouldn't know. I've never run 50 miles. And so trying to think forward and say, well, I have to do this over again. This is like not fathomable. So it's a really interesting exercise in not giving up and being able to do something that you think is impossible to do. For that matter, all of your listeners would think it's impossible. If any of your listeners went running with me, they would conclude two things. One is they're faster than I am. And two, I'm not going to be able to do 100 miles, which means if I actually finished the 100 miles, all of you would be able to do so as well, which I think is true.

39:48I think anybody can do it. Anybody who's basically healthy, if they only wanted to, which is the key, could actually do it. So it's just a really interesting exercise. You know, it's only 30 hours. Well, only, but it's only 30 hours. It's not like, you know, years. How hard can it be? Well, it's hard, but it's doable. It's definitely doable. And so it's just in that sweet spot of something that seems impossible and is just unbelievably hard, but doable. And that's attractive somehow, if you can do it, which, of course, doesn't happen all the time.

40:22Yeah, and I don't know if there are any data on this, but for people that have lived through really hard things and come out better or have pushed themselves to deliberately do hard things of the sort that you're describing, I do think that the memory of that can recall our body and brain's ability to lean into other hard things. I think so. I mean, it must be the case. I don't know of any good experiments on that, but, you know, what's that post-traumatic resilience, I guess they call it? You know, I mean, some people come out of very difficult circumstances.

40:52Maybe they do, quote-unquote, the work they need to or not, and they just say, okay, like, I'm better for life because I'm out of it. Other people carry the wounds of that forward in a way that, you know, their psychological and sometimes their physical health is a downward trajectory. It's a very interesting thing about, like, how should we conceptualize pain and pain ending? Like, some people seem to live in the discomfort of the pain having even happened. Yeah, you can certainly persevere and overcome, you know, severe adversity if it's time-limited. And I think just your own sort of belief in yourself and your capability to overcome adversity, as you were saying, is one important component.

41:31Another one is something like gratitude or awe. And you get to appreciate and just value, you know, just the fact that I'm here talking to you. I mean, I'm just – I'm actually grateful and feeling some sense of awe right now at just existing. And so getting to that point where you're just – every morning you wake up and you have this sense of, I guess, gratitude and awe or some combination of those emotions, I think that's a really valuable thing to carry out of all of this.

42:01And, you know, it takes time to kind of accumulate, but I like living that way. I want to get back to the emotion system, but I'll just – I feel inclined to mention we had Dacher Keltner on the podcast. Oh, yeah, well, he's worked on awe. On awe, and he defined it so beautifully. He said it's when we bring our attention from a small spatial scale to a large spatial scale. Right. Or from large to small. But then during the course of our discussion, he added that this is also true in the time domain. So when we live our life day to day, we start to feel kind of lost in time.

42:32Yeah. And awe becomes less common. But when perhaps we run a 100-mile race across 30 hours, we realize how much can happen in 30 hours. One could say, oh, well, then you finish the race and the rest of life seems trivial. But it seems the opposite is true. Right. That we realize that time is this very elastic thing, at least in our minds. And all of a sudden we have awe for the fact that we have so many days of life to live forward. It's very interesting, and it almost speaks to the ice bath again. Like you have this very compressed, stressful experience that gives you that gap, that gap between stimulus and response that seems very hard to access unless we subject ourselves to these kinds of things.

43:08No, and I think that capability, I mean, people think, you know, chimpanzees maybe can feel awe. But I think it's a uniquely, at least as we have it, it's a uniquely human emotion. And it's based on a broad sort of metacognitive ability we have, which is to detach our conscious experience from the here and now and do like mental time travel. It's pretty derivative to the need to understand other people. So I could put myself into your shoes right now. I can do that. I could imagine sitting where you're sitting, and I'm seeing Ralph Adolfs here.

43:40You know, I could imagine zooming around and adopting another person's perspective in space. We certainly zoom around in time and reminisce, you know, stuff from the past, imagine things in the future. And I think awe is like that too. We adopt a different perspective that's not just tied to the here and now, which I think is probably a crucial ability that distinguishes the nature of conscious experience in humans, which is that we have some control over it. I can simulate what it's like to be you. I can imagine being in the past or in the future.

44:13I can zoom out broadly when I'm feeling awe. And I think animals are more just stuck with whatever the senses are delivering to them right now. That's the content of their conscious experience. We can use it flexibly. And that's, I think, why we can plan and write novels and fiction and think about most of the time, right? If I ask you what's in your consciousness, what are you thinking about, it's not stuff that's in front of you. You're daydreaming. You're like all kinds of places. And that really gives the human mind the power that distinguishes it from any other animals.

44:46And it's the reason we have everything that we have that makes us so different. So awe, I think, is an example of a uniquely human emotion that derives from that ability to adopt a vast point of view or a point of view that's not tied to just whatever the senses are delivering to you. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. I'm excited to share that AG1 has just launched their newest formulation, AG1 Pro. AG1 Pro takes the clinically backed AG1 formula, which is a blend of vitamins, minerals, probiotics, and adaptogens,

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Perceiving facial expressions

46:18As long as we're talking about assessing the emotions or the perspective of another, what are some favorite experiments, either yours or others in the field, about perception and assessment of emotions? You know, I've seen a number of studies like, oh, you know, people with lesions here or there see scary faces. It's not that scary. What's the sort of general conclusions about those studies now in 2026? Because I have a feeling a lot of what was in the textbooks when I was a graduate student may not still hold up. When I started as a postdoc in the early 90s with Damasio,

46:50I started my career on that topic by studying this famous patient, SM, who had selective bilateral amygdala lesions, and the finding was that she's unable to perceive fear in emotional facial expressions. Perceive fear? Could she feel fear? Well, subsequently, we also did that. It took, for some reason, because it's just harder to do, it took some years. Justin Feinstein, who has the float clinic in Maui, was the first author on that paper. So some years later, we took that same patient to haunted houses. We took her to an exotic pet store where there were snakes and spiders.

47:22We showed her horror movies, a whole bunch of things, and found also she doesn't seem to consciously experience fear either. So there seemed to be this very specific deficit for fear tied to the amygdala from one patient. So that's a big caveat. Does this generalize? Well, yes, the amygdala is important for fear, but just saying it's a center for fear is overly simplistic. It's embedded in a big network of structures. There's individual differences and so on and so forth. The perception of emotions has been studied a lot and probably has been the topic of the most acrimonious debates to some extent.

47:59So Paul Ekman back in the 70s, famous, by the way, I dedicate my forthcoming book to him because he probably had the biggest impact on modern emotion science of any single person. But his claim to fame was he went to New Guinea and, you know, these non-Western cultures and claimed that universally across all cultures, people recognize these so-called basic emotions from facial expressions. If you Google this now, you know, emotional facial expressions, you will find pictures of emotional facial expressions.

48:30Lots of AI companies and computer algorithms are predicated on the idea that you can read out the emotion from somebody's facial expression. He had six of them, happiness, surprise, fear, anger, disgust, and sadness, sometimes contempt added in there. Well, it turns out it's more complicated than that. And actually, Lisa Feldman Barrett, of all people, co-authored a paper with me and three other people a couple of years back that the title was something like Emotional Facial Expressions Reconsidered.

49:00We took stock of the whole literature and asked, is this really true? Is Ekman's claim really true? Can you tell how someone feels from their facial expression? And the answer is, well, not nearly as well as you would think, and in general not. And the reasons are methodological. And once you think about it, they make a lot of sense, which is that the emotional facial expressions that Ekman pioneered, I used them in the first 1994 Nature paper with this amygdala lesion patient. Those aren't actually what you normally see walking around the world. People don't have those facial expressions. They are posed facial expressions by actors.

49:33Yeah, they're very extreme. And then the task is like, well, here's a list of emotion words, happiness, fear, anger, disgust, et cetera. Pick the one that matches the face. That's the typical task. That's multiple choice. Look, if I gave you a bunch of emoticons and a bunch of emotion words and asked you to match them, you could do that very easily. It wouldn't show you anything about emotions. It shows you that there's, by convention, there's some association between these things and these things. That's it. So when you actually see real-world facial expressions,

50:04and when instead of giving a list, you just ask people, just generate freely a word that describes that, you get something that has much more variation, much more heterogeneity, which then was part of the ingredient for Lisa's whole claim that variation is the norm and that, in fact, emotions are in some sense constructed rather than packages to be found in nature, which I disagree with that part. But for the emotional facial expressions, for the perception of emotions in others and in animals, I was just talking before coming in here

50:36to one of your colleagues about your cute dog, and they've done studies, there's several studies now where dog owners, if you ask them, can you tell if your dog feels guilty when you come home because it did something bad? Dog owners are pretty convinced they can tell. Well, if you do a controlled experiment, there are a chance. They think they can tell. So our conviction that we can tell something about people or animals, their emotion states, just from looking at the facial expressions, our conviction vastly outstrips our accuracy.

51:07We're pretty convinced we can do it. We're mostly not so accurate. Which makes sense because ordinarily, it's not just some facial expression. If I see you now and you look sad, I wouldn't stop there and I would say, Andrew Huberman is sad. I would ask you, how are you feeling? What's going on? I would probe you and get a lot more information. Maybe you would say, oh no, I'm just this drink I had tasted bad or something. That caused me to make a certain facial expression. So in general, these artificial lab situations where all you see is a picture of a face

51:38and asked for the emotion, we don't do that in the real world anyway. We would probe further. We would take into account the whole circumstances. We would ask the person. And then you can disambiguate these emotions. So it's not that we cannot tell what emotions people or animals feel, but we don't do so normally just from a single slice, like a facial expression. I feel like at least in the context of romantic partnership, so much more of our assessment of another person and their assessment of us is actually a mathematical integration

52:09of noticing when frequency of speech or frequency of text is heading in a negative direction relative to the mean, right? At a particular time of day. And I think the brain is really good at saying like, normally somebody is pretty communicative in the morning, but less at night for sake of example. But suddenly they're like a little more terse with us in the morning, but maybe not even harshness. There's just fewer words exchanged. And then the brain doesn't think, oh, like they looked angry or they looked frustrated. They, you know, like they were like, it's a little quieter this morning

52:41than usual. And if it's a very quiet person, you have fewer data points to work from, but we become exquisitely tuned to this. Absolutely. Much more than like, oh, they're carrying their shoulders differently. At the extremes, I think we see this. Somebody walks in the door and you can tell like, they're sad, they're defeated. But in general, we're looking for change. You're looking for change. It's a time series. It's dynamic. And the number of times, or even just like, you probably had this experience, like in an email with a colleague, let's move it to a different domain. There's a certain kind of language that's used in an email that's different than the usual language.

53:12Like they've never really used these words before. You don't even identify which words those are. Years ago, there was this chart that some graduate student or postdoc put out that if the director of a lab signs off with their name, it means one thing. If they punctuate their email, it means like, let's meet, you know, like you're in trouble. You know, if there's just a dash with a first initial, you know, there's all this. And you kind of, I laugh too. And then you realize, you go, wow, like they're really paying attention to all these subtle cues. But those seem like the kind of cues that we rely on much more than,

53:42than like, do they look sad? Do they sound happy? And I think we vastly underestimate this. I don't know if there are any good studies of this, but this feels like the more relevant in the real world. Yeah, we just finished a study like this where people texted. That's all they had. But it's dynamic. It's a conversation. There's like a whole transcript. And then the question is, what can you tell about a person, both in terms of their stable personality and their current mood, just from that text? It turns out you can tell a lot. So people did the study recently where people generated, I think it's about a page or so,

54:12of sort of diary type written text, and asked just large language models like GPT or Claude to analyze that text without knowing anything else and just tell me the personality profile. And it's as good as the ground truth or as another person or a clinician would be. As good as a clinician? It gets close to the ground truth. And it's as good as like a good friend or a person who knows the person. So if you score the big five, which is what they did in that study, extroversion, conscientiousness,

54:43neuroticism, et cetera, you can tell that. AI can tell that just from a transcript of text quite well. So the information is there clearly in what we say, what we write, and the order in which that progresses, that tells a lot about a person. Enough that AI can basically diagnose your personality from just text. It's almost like our brain is very attuned to when we don't get what we were expecting to get in terms of the amount of interaction.

55:13Like I have some people that clean up the graffiti on the street where I live. And there's always an exchange of hello or like a hi if one of us is on a call or busy. And I can say with certainty because this happened the other day that if I looked over and the person saw me and then turned away, even though we, I don't know their name. Well, maybe I do now, but that there's very little familiarity except with we always acknowledge the other's presence. If they were to do that, I would think, gosh, like this person's like maybe upset. That's one of the key ingredients

55:43of Lisa Feldman Barrett's thinking, certainly in recent years, which is prediction, that most of the information comes from when there's a mismatch between what you're predicting about a circumstance and something that's just different because that carries information. Something changed, right? Like what you were saying. And Lisa's work, Lisa's thinking on emotions incorporates prediction in a big way these days, that there's something that you're predicting about the world, but suddenly there's a tiger or something unexpected and you need to incorporate that and that carries important information.

56:16But absolutely, we're always predicting and we're taking into account things that change, like the facial expressions. You know, the original studies, like the ones I started doing as a postdoc, where you just show these static Paul Ekman pictures of facial affect, well, we never see that in people. It's always dynamic. The face is changing. And so Philip Shins, Rachel Jack, colleagues in Scotland, for instance, have studied this in great detail and used dynamic, actual videos of people making faces and asked,

56:46at what point does the brain start to represent different emotions depending on not how the face looks, but how the face is changing? Interesting. So the dynamics are everywhere. It's super important. Because when we look at babies and they start to smile for the first time or they express what we think is, you know, humor or something like that, we are so tuned to faces because they can't really do much and whether or not they're interacting with us or not is really dependent on our behavior. There's a lot of control there. We're putting them in front of us. As they develop more autonomy,

57:17then these sorts of dynamics really emerge. The face, I mean, the face is visible and the face, the human face has way more muscles and control than other animals do. Great apes have similar sets of muscles, but monkeys or your dog, you can't make those kinds of faces. He side-eyes me every once in a while and I project onto him what that's about, but he's a real sweetie. I had another bulldog mutt, they're both mutts, who is much more coarse, less affectionate. This one is like pure butter. But of course, I don't know what's going on in his head.

57:48He could be thinking like, this guy's the biggest jerk in the world, you know, like I wish he'd be walking right now. This patient, SM, who had bilateral amygdala lesions, could she experience autonomic arousal? Could she experience stress? Could she experience anxiety under any conditions? She could. And that's really important. So you might think that, you know, it's just like the whole emotion system is gone. You just sort of denervated the entire autonomic nervous system and that's why you don't have emotions. But it's much more specific than that

58:18and fits with thinking about emotions as evolved functional modules for dealing with particular types of statistically recurring environmental challenges that share some challenging feature in common. So she doesn't have fear to external stressors. Like we went with her into a haunted house. She poked the monsters and wanted to touch things. Same with the snakes and the spiders and the pet store. But we did a study, again, Justin Feinstein,

58:49I think, was the first author on this one as well, with her and with a couple, two, maybe, or three patients who had similar lesions in collaboration with Renee Herleman from Germany where we put a mask on them and had them inhale carbon dioxide. If you do that, you get a panic attack in about half the population because it makes you feel like you're suffocating. So as soon as you get that carbon dioxide in, it changes the pH in your blood that's detected by the brain and you get this

59:20massive air hunger like you suddenly can't breathe. That's what your brain goes into this alarm mode of some suffocation, like a panic. And she and the other amygdala patients had a full-blown panic attack when they inhaled the carbon dioxide. So this interoceptive signal seems not to depend on the amygdala and to depend on other brainstem circuits. So we had a very important association between different types of fear, which is, I think, a bottom-line story for the way that the science is informing

59:51our folk psychology, which is these categories we have, like anger or fear or disgust. There are many varieties. It's much more finely differentiated than that once you look at the science and once you look at the brain systems. There are distinct brain systems in this instance for fear to something out there in the world versus panic of something happening inside you like having a heart attack or not getting enough air. I see. Maybe we could talk a little bit about the bodily representation of these things we're calling emotions. Years ago, I posted on social media

1:00:22a picture of a figure from your paper from your book, excuse me, with David Anderson, which was describing a study where people self-described, so it's purely subjective reporting as I recall, where in their body they felt different emotions. Oh, the bodily maps of emotions. So it's kind of like a heat map in the forehead for certain emotions and in the whole body for others and there were a wide range of emotions and admittedly it's subjective report but does this hold up? Like, I think to myself like, where do I feel sadness, like heartache? Well, I tend to feel it around my heart

1:00:53but maybe that's because it's called heartache. Where do I feel anger? Well, extreme anger I'm going to feel as a whole body experience. Same thing with awe. So what, if anything, is important about the regularity and or the variation in kind of where in our body we feel emotions? Some people would say this is like their whole experience of life. They feel things in their body all the time. Some people feel I think are more cerebral. They kind of think things more than they feel things. You know, I think it's a great question.

1:01:24I mean, that figure that you're alluding to came from a paper I think in PNAS by Laurie Newman and colleagues in Finland and he and his colleague Haini Sarimaki they've done some of the great recent studies also on experience of emotions in humans using functional MRI but what you mentioned so the experiment is I just give you a word, right? I'm not actually making you feel the emotion. I'm asking you sadness. Draw, you know, where on the body you think you would

1:01:54feel that emotion. So if you think about it it's certainly not about actual physiological changes in the body. Nothing's measured in the body. They don't have electrodes on the body or whatever. There's people just drawing on a little mannequin where they think they would feel the emotion. It's also not about conscious experiences of emotion. I'm not making, I'm not showing you sad movie clips or anything like that. I'm giving you a word, a single word. So it's about concepts. It's about where in the body people's concept of sadness or happiness or fear where that corresponds to changes in the body.

1:02:26Now that's an interesting question but you have to narrow it down to that which is a fundamental problem with most emotions including that one. I think the title, I forget what the title is but it's something like bodily maps of emotions or bodily maps of subjective experience maybe even. It should be something like people's concept of where in the body emotion words are associated with changes or something like that. What's interesting about that study is that Lowry has gone on to look at it in different cultures. He's looked at it developmentally

1:02:58across children and asked how these concepts and where in the body would feel emotion develop. So it's super interesting work but it's ultimately about people's concepts of how emotions correspond to changes in the body not the real actual changes in the body. But then as you were saying of course there are real changes in the body when you really feel an emotion as well. And that's harder to study but people have studied it quite a bit with a focus on the part of the brain that gets a lot of input from the body

1:03:28which is a part of cortex called the insula. And so there's lots and lots of work on the insula. It gets input from all the organs in your body everywhere in your body so you know from your heart from your liver from your kidney I had a kidney stone not too long ago we should talk about have you had a kidney stone? Don't. It's really interesting. You have to pass it? Eventually it's passed but it evokes very interesting adaptive behaviors well just as an aside before I forget it so normally for pain

1:03:58extra receptive pain like we were talking about the hot plate before you know you pull your hand away or there's some kind of reflex for the kidney stone that's not adaptive there's nothing to pull away so my wife this was in Switzerland we're in a remote little town in the middle of the night my wife sees me curled up into a ball right on the floor just kind of breathing loudly and kind of curled up and making rocking motions and goes what's wrong? And I tell her well I have a kidney stone and then she asked me can't you just stop that behavior or can we get on a plane and fly to the US

1:04:28so you can get ultrasound maybe get treated for the kidney stone can you stop curling up into a ball and you know making rocking motions and I was kind of thinking about that through my haze of pain and said well no it's kind of like the hot plate and pulling away it's a really strongly motivated behavior to just kind of withdraw basically so it was a very interesting adaptive behavior and she called you know the equivalent of 911 and in the middle of the night some guy came down and you know

1:04:59put a bunch of opiates into me and he kept having the scale of you know on a scale from 0 to 10 how painful is it and I would sort of go from 10 to 9.5 and it was extremely painful but eventually they got me to our clinic there I passed the stone and it was an interesting experience I mean it's pain but just like what we were talking about for emotions pain is not pain if you have a pain in your eye or you have a pain from a hot stove this is a very different type of pain and one that's I would say worse than the hot stove

1:05:30it's like because you can't escape when you can't rub it you can't do anything except curl up into a ball and pray I mean it was horrible at any rate so at that moment had I been in an MRI study my insula would have been strongly activated so this you know this is a region of the brain that according to theorists but Craig was the first Antonio Damasio has theories in a similar vein this would be the substrate for the conscious experience of the emotion or of pain in your body

1:06:00so it's getting all this input from your body and representing the changes in your body as a conscious experience this was the original theory that William James had back in 1884 he wrote this paper in Mind What is an Emotion and his theory was that you see the bear you run away your heart rate goes up and then you feel the emotion which is a consequence of you perceiving all the changes in your body that happened first now that's I think the conscious experience of emotion yes and a lot

1:06:31of that depends on representing perceiving everything that changes in our body but to my mind that leaves the question of what the emotion is that's still antecedent to that you first have to trigger all the changes in your body and run away what's doing that that's the emotion the conscious experience may well come later and unfold over some time but the emotion state separate from the conscious experience as I've emphasized would be the one that actually motivates all the behaviors and all the different changes in your body so long answer to your question there's these two

1:07:01different ways of talking about the role of the body the one that you alluded to in this figure from Laurie Newmanma and colleagues that we reproduced in our book is about people's concepts of emotions and they're certainly tied to changes in the body whether or not those are accurate I think we just don't know so is it the case that those drawings that they have in the figure that we were speaking about if you put electrodes on your measured blood flow changes that's actually where things change when you have awe or anger

1:07:31I think we just don't know I think that's a set of studies that remains to be done but then in addition there is the fact that all of the changes in your body are represented in your brain in the insula and that seems to be a big part of the substrate for feeling the emotion for the conscious experience of the emotion and other things nausea, pain kidney stones so it's not limited to emotions but the strong feelings that we have like you have a tightness in your chest if you're feeling really sad for example

1:08:02that would be represented in your insula because in eastern medicine there's strong beliefs about different organs being associated with different emotional states even like gall you know someone has a lot of gall the gallbladder you know but then again I always have to remind people that a key feature of schizophrenia and psychosis of other kinds is clang associations two words sound alike and people link them and so we also are subject to this in a much milder way in the world of health and science and especially

1:08:32in the public discourse people will say oh you know a walnut looks like a brain walnuts are good for your brain well they have some fatty acids that are probably good for neurons but it has absolutely nothing to do with the shape of the walnut it's amazing how these ideas can kind of perpetuate well and I think there is some truth to them I think it just has the honest answer is it has not been tested so if you ask someone like Lisa Feldman Barrett has made this point repeatedly that there really is no systematic association between specific emotions and specific changes

1:09:03in your body well if you look at those studies people put a few electrodes on and they measure you know heart rate changes blood pressure changes etc it is extremely crude you're looking at a tiny tiny slice of what's going on in your body what you would want to do is have a detailed high dimensional readout of okay your gallbladder and your liver and your kidney and your heart and changes all over your body and look at that and ask is there some kind of association between specific emotion states and changes

1:09:34some kind of complex change in your body and I would bet that there is but we just don't have those data yet so those studies remain to be done yeah they really should be done because I could make up a story where if someone or an animal feels extreme anger like of the sort that they would have right before they were in a fight that certain immune organs would deploy a bunch of things that prepare for wound healing or prepare for resilience in the aftermath that just stands to reason of course I have no data for that but

1:10:04well and the link between the brain and the body I mean we now understand that that is so detailed and so intricate that really brain and body are very very tightly coupled and we do know that there are signatures that are distributed they're complicated but Lisa Feldman-Berritt herself in collaboration with Tor Weger has published neuroimaging studies showing that for basic emotions like anger and fear and sadness and so on there are reliable signatures of brain activation they're distributed

1:10:34they're spread out they're complicated they're not just like in one place but given that given that association between emotions and patterns of the brain and the fact that the brain and the body are so intimately tied together I think it's a completely reasonable hypothesis that you would find a similar high dimensional signature of changes throughout your body that are systematically associated with certain types of emotions I had a thought spring to mind based on our earlier discussion from the perspective of media and advertising it makes perfect sense why all media and advertising

1:11:05is incentivized to get you to prioritize an emotion to the point where it takes over behavior to go click and buy something or to vote a certain way or to hate a certain group or to like a certain group and so really what they're fighting for is this prioritization thing like the path to behavior is through the prioritization of emotion it's basically an attentional capture it captures your attention which is what emotions are designed to do and once you've captured people's attention you have a captive audience and you can control

1:11:36them much more and in some sense it's obvious right you get people emotional they're more likely to behave in a certain way versus another but I think we underestimate the extent to which all day long we are bombarded with these signals like subtle advertising doesn't really work well someone said I don't know who said it but you know all A-B testing leads to like you know sex or violence because if you really just look at what's likely to grab people's attention you know eventually you regress into the hypothalamus the more primitive states like inspire more attention

1:12:07which tells you a lot about the world you know and there are ethical lines and there are societal lines where you say no no that's too extreme too much violence too much skin but it's all veering like toward the hypothalamus so to speak it's all getting more and more primitive there's a lot of processing that goes on in all these subcortical structures and certainly what we understand best in terms of emotions are all these subcortical circuits and a lot of that is below the radar of our conscious awareness I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor

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1:14:10slash Huberman

Art music and neural circuits

1:14:11at the opposite extreme what happens when I go to like the MoMA and I see a piece of art that just for some reason makes me feel a certain way maybe sadness maybe happiness do you think that art of that sort is able to capture the circuitry related to particular emotions across people so not just about my unique experience and art is subjective right so there's things related to taste but let's assume this is abstract art so there's no

1:14:41apparent faces or animals or no depictions of scenes but let's say out of a hundred people you know more than half say I look at that and I just feel peace is it the case that some art can tap into neural circuits or some music can tap into neural circuits that's independent of the lyrics I mean we don't have the brain imaging presumably but there is a kind of a more sophisticated example we're not regressing to the hypothalamus absolutely but this is the stuff that like the richness of life

1:15:11is also about that sure and so the interesting question is which particular features in the music or in the abstract art is it that are driving those generalizable emotion responses and they're certainly there one of the earliest studies on emotion actually was done by Ann Blood and Robert Zatori in the mid 90s or something I believe using I'm pretty sure using positron emission tomography PET rather than fMRI at the time and what they did was they played music to people and I think they set it up so that you and I could hear the same piece of music in your case

1:15:43the music really does something for you and the particular measure was does it send shivers down your spine do you get like chills goosebumps from listening to the music and it does that for you but not for me and in your case same auditory stimulus different emotion and from the imaging they show that the insula the structure we were just talking about the amygdala several of these emotion related structures are indeed activated when you have shivers chills down your spine listening to music for abstract art my Caltech colleague

1:16:13John O'Doherty had a paper a little while ago where again he found something generalizable he decomposed abstract art into the constituent sort of visual features you can feed it into a neural network and get a representation of all the different you know shades and colors and the basic visual composition basic visual features that constitute that and from that you can reconstitute whether or not it is liked or not liked whether it's a pleasant whether people find it

1:16:43pleasant or unpleasant so it doesn't come out of nowhere yes there's something about even if it's abstract even if it's abstract music or if it's abstract art there's some auditory or visual features there that are generalizable and that can be used to evoke emotions and the big question then is can we link that back obviously the emotions didn't evolve in order to appreciate abstract art but they evolved to detect tigers and bears and other things well other similar kinds

1:17:13of visual features presumably there are so there's some visual features in the real world that for which particular emotions evolved that can also then find a place again in abstract art and evoke similar emotions that's the basic story but the answer to your question is yes even for these very uniquely human sort of abstract kinds of stimuli people have done work and found particular features in those stimuli that will trigger emotion states in humans and they're great stimuli to use talk a little bit

1:17:44about hard wiring versus learned emotional states at the brain level we know there are brain areas that process faces just the organization of two dots and a vertical line and a horizontal line below it there are neurons that like that organization of features and I should know the answer to the next question but I don't are there neurons that are tuned to a smiling face versus a frowning face at the level almost like very sparse emoji like level we call them units in the brain

1:18:15are there units that are tuned to frowning faces or smiling faces and of course you'd love to be able to do the experiment in somebody who had never been exposed to them for the first time but that's impossible to do so I have to assume the experiment has been at least thought about if not done yeah I mean it's a great question I mean with respect to face processing in general the sort of consensus is it's both hardwired and innate in some sense that there's something there in the brain already at birth that's experience independent

1:18:46but then it also depends on normal maturation and development and experience and so people like Rebecca Sachs at MIT for instance has done functional neuroimaging studies on babies and shown them faces and asked the question how does this pulse system develop it's always a mixture people tend to think in terms of black and white it's hardwired and innate or it's learned nothing is either or it's always a good example is the visual word form area so there's regions in the brain like the ones

1:19:16that my former Celtic colleague Doris Sau studied that are specialized for faces but there's also a region in the brain typically on the left in most people that's for recognizing words letters now that couldn't have evolved because you know we had a long history of brain evolution before language written language was ever there so the question is how does it come about it can't be hardwired or innate because there wasn't long enough evolutionary time to evolve a region of the brain for figuring out words

1:19:47but if you take a look in pre-verbal infants at the connectivity of this region that's going to become specialized for processing words once the infant can read it's already wired up in a way to other brain regions that predisposes it to be able to do those computations that with experience it can later be used in order to recognize words so there's certain preset innate systems coming back to your question smiling versus frowning faces there are two parts

1:20:18to it the first part is I can find you a single neuron in the brain that responds selectively for anything you like there's like no shortage of them but those in general those single neurons don't do anything they aren't important to understand how the brain works because the rest of the brain that is getting its input from all these neurons and all the downstream processing is not like a reflex it's not listening to only that one neuron it's getting input from tens of thousands of neurons so at the population level

1:20:49if we record from thousands of neurons and we ask from that is there information in a thousand neurons from which the rest of the brain listening to those thousand neurons or we as the scientist could decode smiles versus frowns the answer is yes we've done that in collaboration with Uli Ruteshauser and Shua Wang and colleagues where we can record from epilepsy patients like what Eddie Chang does same kind of work and so you have information and of course if you think about it

1:21:19there has to be information in the brain neurons that would distinguish frowns from smiles because you can distinguish them so where else would it come from it has to be there in the brain but it's not there mechanistically at the level of single neurons they're very noisy they typically respond to many different types of cues so you always have to think about hundreds or thousands a large ensemble of neurons because that's really the kind of unit of relevant information because that's what the rest of the brain listens to yeah I was thinking about

1:21:50how you know in a hierarchical system like the visual system like we have neurons that are tuned to circles more or less you know center surround we talk about circles then bars then oriented bars of a particular angle then moving bars et cetera et cetera and so built up from simple stuff to more complex stuff so you can build feature detectors for lots of different things I guess I was wondering when we come into the world are there cells in the fusiform area that not just like faces but that are prepared to respond to two dots

1:22:21the eyes a vertical thing the nose and then a bar that is either you know bent up at the edges or bent down at the edges and then we build on that scaffold I don't know that anyone's done these experiments not that exact experiment but I think in broad strokes the answer would be that at birth it's crude and it becomes much more refined and more granular through experience and then indeed exactly what you said happens you know and coming back to emotions if you think about so how does the state of fear come about in the brain from seeing

1:22:52the bear or the tiger well at the level of the retina it's just a bunch of pixels it's some you know blobby black shape that is looming and coming closer etc but then progressively you have to construct more and more abstract representations and you well know how this works in the visual system and artificial systems deep convolutional neural networks that do object classification do exactly that they take just you know pixel wise input but then build something abstract like right now I recognize Andrew Huberman there

1:23:22if I look over here you know I can still recognize you whether you're on the left or the right whether you're close or far away I would be able to recognize you invariantly with respect to those details even though at the level of the retina like a camera taking a picture the detailed pixels can be vastly different you can be left or right or close or lit in different ways and you need to abstract from that an invariant representation regardless of the details same thing for emotions regardless of whether it's a bear or a tiger

1:23:53or a big arm pickup truck coming at you or lots of other kinds of stimuli they all need to funnel in to a central abstract representation that's another key feature of emotions they require abstraction and that's what makes them so flexible and that's where you can get David Anderson and I described it in our book as this sort of fan in fan out architecture I can get to the emotion state from seeing a bear or smelling a bear or hearing a bear or hearing a twig snap hearing somebody yell there's a bear zillions

1:24:23of different inputs completely unlike the rigid reflex which only has one input and that's it you get the central state of fear and then the outputs are also diverse I can hide I can run away I can defend myself and so that flexibility that the central emotion state affords you can get to it in many different ways because many different sensory cues are informative about a potential threat and then you can behave in very flexible ways that are context dependent that's exactly what emotions allow you to do and what makes them so different from reflexes

1:24:54reflexes is just a single path through there's only one way to trigger it and there's only one behavior so if you had only those you would have to have a separate reflex for the bear and for the tiger and for every possible you know large threat out there which you couldn't possibly have it's not efficient yeah the fan in fan out visual is very very useful

Social awareness and autism

1:25:15and it gets to the next topic I'd like to ask you about which is building social intelligence and emotional intelligence because we define that different ways people who seem unable to read the room so to speak versus people who are hypersensitive to other people's emotions not necessarily responding to them but they're really in tune I'll go out on a limb and say that some of the happiest most functional and when I say functional I also include in that they take great care of the people around them their families their co-workers people that I know

1:25:46and have observed are not super emotionally in tune with the emotions of others meaning it doesn't seem like they're clocking every little nuance and some of the more I'm generalizing here less functional more labile people that I've known are really in tune with like what everyone in the room is feeling who did this who didn't do that and going back to our earlier conversation that so much of how we gauge other people's emotions is an integration over you know how often they tend to acknowledge us when we walk down the hall if the first time

1:26:17I met you you walked right by me which who knows what would have happened and the second time and the third time and then the fourth time you say good morning I'd say oh this is a really delightful person if you did the opposite said hello hello hello three days in a row and then the fourth time just like looked at me and brushed right by I'd probably think like that's weird you know so there's some advantage actually to not being in tune with all the subtle cues of everyone around us what in the brain is known about social awareness about reading the room

1:26:48we talk it up these days because indeed empathy is important but this is a tricky one I'm going to get some heat for saying this but it's also a lot to be said for like walking into a room acknowledging okay great and then like getting your work done you don't want to be wrapped up into people's emotional states because unnecessarily because they're labile they're all over the place there's a cost well I think it's extremely heterogeneous and so it's not sort of one size fits all and there's not one type of sort of emotional intelligence skill that fits all occasions

1:27:20and many different kinds can work they depend on the context they depend on the circumstances initially when James Gross had emotion regulation it was sort of focused on some basic mechanisms like suppression reappraisal acceptance and now the big two topics on emotion regulation are variability and flexibility so there's not just one way but you need to be able to have many many different options and you can vary vary your emotion regulation responses but the other big part

1:27:50of emotion regulation which is obvious once you think about it any parent would think about it is it's interpersonal it's between people you regulate other people's emotions and you have to pick up on other people's emotions and you influence other people's emotions it's a bidirectional interaction and so I think a big part of emotional intelligence comes from being able to read that probably in a fairly automatic way and in a context dependent way and depending on the context it can be the case that what's most adaptive

1:28:21is if you really get involved with other people and you really talk to them a lot you're very empathic or you just take over and that can work too depending on the circumstances so there are multiple strategies and I think for any of these social intelligence emotional regulation any of these sort of metacognitive skills the most successful skill is if you don't just have one but you have variety and you can switch between them and you can use context to switch between those just like physiological heart rate variability you don't want to train

1:28:52to just be able to have a low heart rate you want to be able to train to have a variable a big range same thing with emotions what's most adaptive is being able to have a big range of emotions and being able to switch adaptively depending on the context between them and I think that's where in a real long term context dependent social intelligence for people that really come out ahead it's not one tiny slice where they do well and don't do well in lots of other circumstances it's the ability to be really adaptive and flexible and switch around which requires a keen

1:29:25sense of oneself like where we are in our internal state and a keen sense of context in fact I observed a really impressive physician recently like moving through the hospital environment I mean he was just like all agency but then with the patient it was as if he dropped into a bubble you know the patient was understandably a little nervous about what was to come and it was remarkable I was like okay that is superb bedside manner but then it comes time to do the actual work and that's not a time for emotion it's just like

1:29:55100 you have to be able to switch 100% like I mean the life and well-being of the patient relies on being absolutely focused on the task at hand I mean it's related again to the presumptive association between emotional granularity what Lisa Foreman Barrett pioneered decades ago the ability to differentiate and be aware of all the variety of emotions in you and emotion regulation flexibility that you're able to adopt many different

1:30:26emotion regulation strategies but in order to do so you need the emotional granularity to be able to be aware of all the different emotions that are going on in the first place it's pretty two things one is an ability to differentiate at a very fine grain and the other one is to step back and have some kind of metacognitive oversight and control so you can see okay here's this full spectrum of things I could do and you can take a look at all of those incorporate the context and pick one the one path amongst many that you could take that's the most adaptive

1:30:56it's interesting some of my favorite scientists are very emotive people and then some of my favorite scientists I'm thinking of one in particular when I was down at UC San Diego when my lab was there most people probably label as a little bit on the spectrum I won't mention his name he would walk into a faculty meeting where someone else was presenting and he would say out loud to me like sitting there like is this any good I have encountered people like that too and you know it's very disconcerting when you're giving the talk it's disconcerting when you're giving the talk but I was gonna say there's also something incredibly refreshing

1:31:26about it because it's almost like they're asking the questions that they need to ask you're a little embarrassed for them but it's liberating you feel like ah we've broken the social mold here a little bit and someone would say excuse me so and so so and so is presenting and be like oh sorry and then we'll just sit down and then listen I mean they're entirely polite very actively engaged in the conversation but I sometimes wish like how cool would that be like I'm sure there's a cost other areas in life but how cool would that be you lose this person has a little bit less context dependent

1:31:57you know flexibility around emotions and I have to imagine that they move through life in a way that's kind of like liberated well they wouldn't have this huge cognitive load all the time right and he's extremely smart now that's qualitative right but like incredible so actually a physicist turned neuroscientist and I just thought man that's pretty cool and then the more you go into engineering and science fields the more of these people you encounter this is true you see fewer of these people in the performing arts for instance my lab studies autism amongst other things and you certainly would have the case

1:32:28that as a spectrum yes indeed you would have mathematicians engineers lots of people who are very successful who are on the spectrum to some extent and I think you know coming back to what you were saying it's sort of liberating or simplifying if you had to really effortfully cognitively think about how to regulate your social behavior and make all the right moves and not offend anybody you were worried about that all the time it would be overwhelming and I think it is overwhelming for many people with autism that you need to somehow internalize it and it has to be

1:32:59relatively effortless and automatic it has to become automatic at some level and then you can move through life fairly smoothly in a socially very complex way and that's what's difficult for many people with autism that they lack that part they can compensate to some extent but the cognitive load starts really being an impediment because if you have to track everything you have to remember okay I should make eye contact I have to remember turn taking if you have to cognitively remember all those things it's just overwhelming so you have to be able to somehow have it be automatic at some level

1:33:30I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors Element Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't that means the electrolytes sodium, magnesium and potassium all in the correct ratios but no sugar proper hydration is critical for brain and body function even a slight degree of dehydration can diminish your cognitive and physical performance it's also important that you get adequate electrolytes the electrolytes sodium, magnesium and potassium are vital for the functioning of all cells in your body

1:34:01especially your neurons or your nerve cells drinking Element makes it very easy to ensure that you're getting adequate hydration and adequate electrolytes my days tend to start really fast meaning I have to jump right into work or right into exercise so to make sure that I'm hydrated and I have sufficient electrolytes when I first wake up in the morning I drink 16 to 32 ounces of water with an Element packet dissolved in it I also drink Element dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise that I'm doing especially on hot days when I'm sweating a lot and losing water and electrolytes

1:34:31Element has a bunch of great tasting flavors in fact I love them all I love the watermelon the raspberry the citrus and I really love the lemonade flavor so if you'd like to try Element you can go to drinkelement.com slash Huberman to claim a free Element sample pack with any purchase again that's drinkelement.com slash Huberman to claim a free sample pack let's talk about autism and I'll just put the mention up front because this is a topic that sometimes gets people triggered let's leave out for the time being not because it isn't important it is important

1:35:02let's leave out severe cases of autism where people need lifelong care they can't care for themselves and let's talk about the rest of the spectrum already in that statement I'm sure I violated some of the newer nomenclature let's just liberate ourselves a little bit come at this from a place of benevolence and trying to understand social dynamics social processing in the brain so we're not talking about people with severe stereotypies who just need lifelong care even etc we're talking about the rest of the category so something like this former colleague of mine in San Diego

1:35:32a little bit on the spectrum for all I know he would have been one of our participants maybe I mean a delightful person happy marriage happy family everyone in his lab adored him and brilliant scientist and by my read highly functional in all aspects of life but definitely not tuned in to what other people are thinking are doing and context mattered right I mean he understood what not to do in a broad sense but you know he was free of this burden that you described

1:36:03so there's a lot of emphasis nowadays on kids who have autism of the sort that we're describing and the need we're told to train them to make eye contact and read faces so this lands square in your work maybe you could just fill out a bit of what's now known what's thought what's not known it's a great topic I mean the way that I personally have approached it is not with a primary interest in autism I don't have a family member who has autism I don't have any

1:36:33personal experience it's really been just like with the amygdala lesion patient my main motivation has been to just understand the mind cognition emotion in general and with respect to autism by understanding individual differences everybody's different from everybody else and autism is one particular dimension that we just have a lot of tools to look at that is social interaction social awareness ability to read other people's emotions and so that dimension

1:37:04of social variability maps onto one of the facets of autism spectrum disorder and so that's why we've looked at both people who do not have any diagnosis of autism there's still there's a range of autistic like traits that you can quantify with questionnaires that are well regarded and then once you get to a DSM-5 diagnosis you have more and more severe cases of autism with respect to social functioning that again you can quantify using tools like the ADOS etc but it's a spectrum

1:37:34that I personally look at as a particularly interesting and important dimension of individual differences in social interactions with other people in my lab that have different motivations they have family members with autism for instance so they're personally interested in autism as a psychiatric category but coming to your question there's a lot of really interesting work and a lot of opportunities now that we've been actually using in our lab as well to look at the question of processing about faces eye contact etc

1:38:04I mean right now how much eye contact are you making with me how much eye contact am I making with you it is extremely variable I mean the eyes move around they carry a lot of information you know socially there's a gigantic range there it's data that are now fairly easy to quantify and collect in hundreds or thousands of people using their webcams and so we have a study going on where people watch for example a zoom video other people interacting talking and we use

1:38:35the webcam on their laptop to record where they are looking on the screen when they have that zoom video going on so we can quantify across large numbers of people and the basic finding has been that people who are further along have high who score higher on this dimension of the autism spectrum of social interaction with just questionnaire based measures or a psychiatric diagnosis make less eye contact and as well as other features so we're looking at contact

1:39:05with the person who's talking distraction to other things we have experimental features where there's a person talking they're making eye contact there's like TV or something that goes on in the background and we can quantify to what extent is your visual attention your gaze that we can quantify from the webcam captured by somebody looking somebody talking somebody smiling or laughing the TV going on in the background as a distractor and we can put all of that into a big model and ask what is it that normally drives visual attention and what is it

1:39:36that distinguishes people with autism and where they would look and the basic answer is that the social features like eyes or who's talking have less of a weight on where autistic people would look than the distractors but they tend to be more distracted and that that is we've been doing this study every month now for a year that seems to be a temporally stable personality trait like feature of autism spectrum disorder so it fluctuates to some extent and we're trying

1:40:06to quantify does it interact with whether you've slept badly the night before or you're stressed or other things that can change those do have an effect but the answer seems to be it's fairly temporally stable and it's almost like a signature for individuals so there's some people that are real face lookers and they look at faces a lot and there's some people that look at faces hardly at all and that seems to be stable across time and like a basic personality trait in this population of people across the board

1:40:37for everybody I see if I just take the general population on average it's the case that those people who would have a diagnosis of autism or who score higher on autistic traits even if they don't have a diagnosis look less at faces but across everybody it's the case that some people look a lot at faces some people don't and that that's temporally stable so in general right now if you quantify it from this podcast how often do I make eye contact or look at you and then you ask you know like in a classroom or in a lab meeting how often do I make eye contact it would be

1:41:08similar proportion that I'm just like not a face looker or eye looker and you might be it's like a stable personality trait and it's associated coarsely with this dimension in autism spectrum disorder but of course the million dollar question is what else is it associated with is it predictive of career success is it predictive of anything else and so we don't know we're measuring everything else and getting lots of questionnaires on these people to ask what are the associations and is there any

1:41:38causal hypothesis that we would come up with that if you don't look at faces a lot there's some consequences if you look at faces a lot there are other consequences if that were the case we're not there yet that would make very interesting predictions which would mean well maybe I should be looking at your face all the time and the podcast would get a million hits or who knows what just be you as always we say well that's I mean that's another big question which we're looking at in these longitudinal studies which is a question of to what extent can you change who you are

1:42:09and you know we were talking about emotion regulation you can regulate your emotions you can have this metacognitive insight you can have some control can you change if you're extrovert or neurotic can you change your personality and the answer seems to be to some extent for some variables more than others but we're trying to quantify that so we have this big longitudinal data set where we give people tons and tons of questionnaires about their personality about their mood about lots of things and are asking to what extent

1:42:39over time do they get pushed around and that can change and which ones stay constant and constitutes you have the core of their personality that's unchangeable but I think it's a super super interesting question what parts of you can change and what parts of you cannot I think about this all the time I feel like some people this is pseudoscientific what I'm about to describe they seem to have very high autonomic what I call like RPM I have a it's more of a former colleague because I haven't been working in that field for a while but here we see Botton Rosca from Basel

1:43:10give a talk like he moves a lot he's very electric he's also very thin and he moves and his brain he's exceedingly smart but he has a high basal metabolic rate high basal metabolic rate like a hummingbird yeah but he moves a lot right and then other people they move less I think about this all the time because I'm fascinated by and I love dogs I go to this AKC meet the breeds thing every year I don't go every year they do it every year but I highly recommend people go even if you don't want a dog because you get to see all the different genetic variation which of course relates to body size but also temperament

1:43:42and if you just look at them bulldogs are probably more on the slow mellow side compared to Yorkshire Terriers that are more very little spontaneous movement I think it's one of the reasons why people feel comfortable approaching a bulldog whereas like a you know pit bulls are always kind of like winding around and moving but some dogs it relates to other things cuteness and whatnot but some people just seem to have a lot of spontaneous movement other people are more stable in their bodily movements and it does seem to relate to kind of how excitable they are or not excitable they are so you can imagine like if you're if you're humming at a higher RPM

1:44:14you can like more prone to action or speech but it's a super interesting observation because the question of course is to what extent does it relate to how their mind is working right I mean as we're talking now and as you were just talking you're you know we're moving our hands we're moving our body we're moving our face you're not just sitting there speaking so to some extent all of these bodily movements are interfaced with thought if I had to sit completely still and not you know move it would be pretty hard to have this conversation right so to some extent bodily movements actually help us structure our thoughts

1:44:44it's not just like a large language model it's not just language going on it interfaces with the body and it punctuates thoughts to some extent so I think it's super interesting and it's certainly the case that the way that somebody moves their body does say something about how they're thinking as well yeah I've been reading my audio book and I asked them the sound technicians to allow me to stand while I read it much easier to read an audio book and to put inflection you actually can lean in when you want to emphasize something and you can you know point to the words

1:45:16for a moment but then when you need to work through a passage that needs to be very finely structured with little emotion because that happens too if you clasp your hands and do it so our friend Eddie Chang tells me that the hand representations in the brain are very close to the language center so these were probably our first tools of language or at least they co-evolved well your mouth and your hands are the most dexterous and overrepresented in the brain you can you know control the world with them and you can move from the most yeah when you know when the COVID pandemic started 2020

1:45:46we weren't allowed to go on campus at all so we sat around in our apartments I sat at home we had lab meetings on Zoom only Zoom and lectures all the classes were on Zoom prior to that and then Zoom took off and now it's most meetings are hybrid but before that point everything was face to face I would stand up and lecture we would talk face to face and suddenly switching to just seeing a bunch of often little just black squares right for the whole classroom there on Zoom that was a hard switch that lack of an interactive nature

1:46:17which is something that we're looking at now I think it's going to be super cool I have a graduate student just starting this the experiment is this I would see your face on a screen and that's it I would see a video of you I would Zoom with you right now and we could be having this podcast over Zoom I actually thought we were going to have this over Zoom so I'm very happy it's not over Zoom always better in person and then you're in person right and it feels different it feels different and so we're sort of trying to parameterize that degree of social realness of social interaction and then we're doing that with people with autism

1:46:48asking where does it change and how difficult is it for people with autism to interact with another person is it equally difficult over Zoom is it equally difficult over Zoom if you have the selfie camera turned off the other person can't see you and you know that and so we're trying to look at the degree of actual social interaction as a relevant dimension and I think it makes a huge difference I mean it feels completely different being face to face that if you're on Zoom let alone if I just watch a video that's not actually aligned in time the way I described

1:47:19the kind of higher or lower RPM before perhaps made it sound like one or the other was better

Solitude and mental resilience

1:47:25but I think sometimes about like Alex Honnold who again who was a guest on this podcast and there have been claims that his amygdala doesn't react as much anyway we could we could talk about that I think Alex kind of like maybe chuckles a little bit at those studies because he does experience anxiety and fear just not in the context of this like highly trained situation he's put himself in every single day for so long but I do have to wonder whether people who go out on long runs for instance there's not a lot of talking going on or Alex he's devoting his physical and mental

1:47:55energetic resources toward climbing and figuring out these how to navigate high risk high consequence situations you're probably just in flow you're just like totally absorbed in what you're doing if you're doing Alex Honnold type climbing once he's got it but like to work out the puzzle of like with ropes first of how to maneuver so that he can actually free solo it is a remarkable thing but I almost get the impression that if people speak less that they're able to devote more mental and physical resources to the thing they're doing I never ran ultras but I recall like running

1:48:25you know I used to run like a long 8 to 10 mile run on Sundays used to be a thing now it's getting shorter and shorter run I have to go get it back but come back from those and there's a fatigue component that confounds what I'm about to say but one is a lot less reactive when you've spent a bunch of time just in your own head and you've learned to tolerate the voice in your own head I find that I'm much calmer after I've spent a bunch of time alone because I've gone through that kind of initial stage of the mind fluttering and then you want to communicate with people and I'll lock up my phone in a box these days to do real work

1:48:56and I come out of it and things come my way and they're sort of out there and over there and unless they really demand my attention they kind of just don't grab me whereas I think when we're highly engaged in our own mental dialogue it's almost like we're trying to converse with the world so I think there's real value to doing these solo treks and to devoting time to getting past that need to engage with the world I think it's very very useful yeah I mean I'm sure it's idiosyncratic it'll vary but I think that particular aspect

1:49:27that you mentioned that you can just be comfortable in your own mind and that that's beneficial I think that's a big part and it's a big part of lots of training techniques and big part of lots of meditative techniques that you just but again it's very individual it's not just sort of one size fits all but the ability to not just be driven by sensory input and be comfortable with your own mind it's not like you're doing nothing at all you're training you're training your own mind to be comfortable and I think the consequence of that is then subsequently when you encounter challenges in the world

1:49:57you're actually better equipped to deal with those and better equipped to regulate your emotion but when you're just at peace with yourself if you're not doing nothing your brain is being trained all the time and it's being trained in a useful way and I think the ability to detach and decouple from the constant challenges and sensory information that's normally coming in is like sleep allows the brain to actually train itself and focus on particular internal regulation strategies that are then subsequently useful for dealing

1:50:28with the world later could we say that one form of potentially useful emotional intelligence or social intelligence training is to just spend some time in your own head either moving or not moving you could do it meditating or you could do it running but to just resist the temptation to get pulled out into the world and just get good at just sitting with these things that we call emotions and thoughts I think so especially again it's going to be individual and it's going to vary but I think so especially if you can get some kind of metacognitive or reflective awareness

1:50:59and work on what is going on in your mind and ultimately it's training control it's training control of your emotions and training control of your thoughts and if you're constantly bombarded and just dealing with stuff coming in you don't have time to do that it's called social media exactly yes of which I have none and so if you're just by yourself you know if you're running or if you're meditating or if you're trained up if you're in an ice bath I think you actually get a particular type of internal training

1:51:29that you just don't have the leisure to get if you're bombarded by social media for instance yes you know every beginning of my lab meeting now people have their laptops open and their phones out we put them down and we actually have five minutes of silence a sort of meditative silence for people to clear their minds at the beginning of yeah five minutes or three minutes at the beginning of every lab meeting we have a short meditative session I put a picture up of some beautiful beach on the north shore of Kauai and people in case people want to look at that but many people just close their eyes people can do

1:51:59whatever they want but the idea is to clear your mind and focus and relax and get into a frame of mind where you're actually now most receptive to listen to the research presentation that's coming up because you know you come in and your mind is all over the place and you know there's an email here and the phone is going and you're just your mind is buzzing so quieting that finding some focus and then being able to engage subsequently much better with the real world listening to the talk

1:52:30I think that's that helps and we do that every lab meeting Mondays at noon seems to work for people how long have you implemented this we started it in 2020 when George Floyd was killed specifically to remember George Floyd so there was a very specific starting point because many people were upset and we figured we needed some kind of remembrance or just a moment of silence to acknowledge things and then it morphed into you know you can remember whatever you like you can just relax

1:53:01and then it sort of morphed into this idea well you know let's just have a moment of silence and just like recalibrate from the busy world and everything that's just been going on to now you know I mean it's good to do on average every day in any case but certainly right now before we launch into the research presentation at a lab meeting so it sort of morphed from a moment of silence to remember somebody to a short meditation essentially I love it my neuroscience colleagues are doing ice baths training for 100 mile races

1:53:32and doing the question is is it helping am I getting more nature papers as a consequence of any of these things that's a different metric that's a different metric you seem like a happy vital person I'm happy and you're writing books and you're doing public education here in addition to all that I'd like to actually stay on this meditation thing for a moment Rick Rubin famed music producer came on this podcast he also happens to be a friend of mine and right as we sat down he said can we do some coherence breathing first he plays it it's like a tone you do some inhale exhale and you know

1:54:02he likes these transition breathing exercises are great yeah these transition tools and they will increase your heart rate variability and these kinds of things but I think that one of the most interesting and understudied things in our field is task switching whether it's emotional task switching or cognitive task switching like we assume the brain operates in step functions like oh I'm out on the street I navigate traffic I park my car and I come in and I podcast and what you're doing at the beginning of this lab meeting on the one hand is a meditation but it's you're pivoting

1:54:33the brain circuits toward what comes next yeah I don't think we talk enough as neuroscientists about the fact that the brain doesn't just immediately switch over that you're carrying residual activity from whatever you were doing before yes there's a cost to that a well-known cost so as soon as you switch into something there's a cost carried over from the previous task and you're much slower and it's more difficult for the couple of next trials on the new task so there's always a switching cost which shows you that switching is hard

1:55:03and some for some reason there's a couple of theories for why it should be hard there's some residue some sort of inertia being carried over previously there's some reconfiguration in the brain required between what you were doing in the previous task and the new task but all of those would seem to require some effort and it's definitely a skill and something that people are looking at a lot in brain recordings in humans and thinking a lot about how to design into AI that ability to switch quickly and knowing how to switch anticipating when to switch is a hugely important skill

1:55:35and we don't teach it like here we are talking about emotional intelligence social awareness and these kinds of things and I think most people would think oh we should sit down and look at a bunch of faces and learn to detect the subtle cues in faces or we should make more eye contact and what I'm hearing today is while some of that might be true most things are pointing in a different direction we had a guest on this podcast DJ Shipley who's a former tier one SEAL team operator that's another high risk high consequence world but then he's out now he's no longer deploying and he talked about his routine for coming home it's like he knows

1:56:06he's rehearsing as he comes out of the car just like as if it were an op you know I'm gonna hit the door my daughter's gonna come running from this direction my other daughter's gonna come Patsy's gonna be in the kitchen the pool dog's gonna come charging but he's rehearsing and he knows exactly where he'll set his bag so he can scoop his daughter up people either chuckled or I think were kind of taken aback by that until he said but this is the way that I know I can drop everything from the day and be at my best when I enter that environment and you know this is the kind of a quote unquote

1:56:36like hyper Y chromosome version of kind of home and family life but it was remarkable what the comments when we ran this clip on social media the men were all kind of like in awe like you have a system dude and you follow it and the women were like yes fantastic like this is somebody who's prioritizing how he shows up he's leaving everything else outside which is a kind of you know it's more of a 1950s version but that skill being able to switch is super important it was super important and it's trainable it's largely trainable and I think if you have meditative exercises

1:57:08they train exactly that it's a huge switch right you're switching from like constantly being bombarded and dealing with stuff in the world to suddenly like putting all of that aside and just being inside and it has health benefits you know Richie Davidson for instance I don't know if you have heard of it we had him here yeah phenomenal guy he's studied Tibetan monks and long term meditators who've meditated 10,000 hours or whatever which we can't afford to do but he has a lot of studies on even for the rest of us you know short stretches of meditation regular meditative exercises

1:57:39you know he's done well controlled studies have demonstrable health benefits for sure so again it comes back to this issue of variability being able to switch and having lots of variability and training that is definitely beneficial it's beneficial for just basic physiology it's beneficial for emotion granularity and emotion regulation it's beneficial for control of thought as when you're being externally oriented versus meditating all of those are to a large extent

1:58:10trainable skills in variability and control so the experiment I'd love to see done maybe your lab will do this would be what is the cost of tasks switching if you do or do not insert this five minutes of silence like because you're spending five minutes and we know the transition is choppy into the next thing that you're doing so there's some overlap there but by introducing the period of silence you reduce the amount of time in order to switch your brain over to this new mode presumably

1:58:41you're seeing positive effects in these lab meetings of doing we should do a study it would be you know we would have to think about the right controls we are looking at task switching actually in these brain recordings in epilepsy patients we're looking at single unit recordings and how those representations change when you switch between tasks it's a great study we're just working up the analyses now but we don't have the intervention that you were just speaking about so we don't have half the patients are getting meditative training and half are not but the extent to which an intervention like that can improve your ability

1:59:12to switch or some other concrete metric I think that's yes those are exactly the types of studies that should be done I think Richie's probably doing studies like that they did a study of five minutes of meditation per day and showed that people experience tremendous increases in anxiety during the initial phase of the study like just having to sit there with your thoughts and let everything stir I actually think of short meditations like that at least initially as another version of the ice bath well it is and I think when we started and you know we have new

1:59:43summer students coming in the lab and say okay I don't usually say too much and say okay we're gonna just like three minutes of silence and everybody's like this and these summer students are looking around what's going on it's very stressful right and if you just tell them well just like don't do anything I mean this is obviously extremely difficult for young children don't do anything right just be completely silent and quiet for one minute or five minutes it is hard to inhibit behavior it's really hard to do but it's trainable it's completely trainable

2:00:13and a big part of it you know we're in this same conference room that David Anderson has his lab meetings in which is where I can always see that he goes on for hours and hours it has glass walls and so people are walking around outside looking at us sitting there in silence pretty wondering not much progress being done in that lab meeting so there's that whole social perception aspect but again once you get over that and get used to it it's very easy to do these exercises and it's definitely a trainable skill for sure we were on the east coast in Annapolis at the Naval Academy

2:00:45these are very accomplished students almost 4,000 of them and one of the most incredible things about that environment is everyone goes into the cafeteria for lunch and all of a sudden a bell sounds and you could hear a pin drop but there's thousands of people around you you hear a bell again the meal begins walking into the auditorium it's shuffle, shuffle, shuffle talking, talking, talking talking boom it's a step function they're training this in themselves and the other thing no phones no one has phones

2:01:16during the day I think they get an hour where they can access their phones I normally my phone it's on right now because you guys wanted to text me but normally my phone is off or I don't have a phone on me and zero social media not on X and not on Facebook and not on Instagram zero I just and you know whenever people ask me they say oh you know can I hook you up with what's a thing LinkedIn or whatever I'm not on LinkedIn I don't care what LinkedIn and they're always surprised and they say well why are you not on these social media

2:01:46and I say why would I be I'm already above 100% in terms of people emailing me I don't need more so I'm yeah zero love that you've given yourself permission to do that I put social media on a separate phone so that I can really track my time on there and I just use it only to post read a little bit and then I'm out I just I can't take the mental noise

Mortality and personal perspective

2:02:08before we started recording you mentioned that you fortunately successfully overcame a bout of illness yes I'm curious whether the process of going through that the diagnosis the treatment and then emerging from it thank goodness healthy had you at times thinking about the science of emotions I mean that's an emotional experience to say the least you don't have to share with us exactly what it was but were there times when what your knowledge of the brain's ability to process emotions for better or worse was a useful tool

2:02:39to you in that context I guess so I mean you know only in the most indirect sense but I guess it's about emotion regulation well it's about two things I think it's about emotion regulation so you know initially when you get a diagnosis that reminds you of your mortality sort of a mixture of you know fear sadness worry you know all these negative emotions and so you're regulating that and it's interpersonal for sure so interpersonal emotion regulation between me and my wife us talking about it

2:03:10so that's like a huge part of the process if you're not regulating those negative emotions anymore but you're you're buying into you're getting more other emotions like awe gratitude acceptance all of these emotions we were talking about before that I think are largely uniquely human that really make you appreciate and be just grateful for what you have so that whole process of regulating the sort of you know immediate stressors and then coming to

2:03:41having more gratitude and awe in everyday life and then you know also I mean I think one big consequence of anything like that is that you have this metacognitive perspective on your lifeline and you know where you are how much time you have left and how to value that and what to do and what to plan and how to allocate your time to things that are worthwhile and so in my case one of those components was you know signing up for this 100 mile ultra marathon starting to train for it

2:04:11and then just pushing through all of that so you know one of the consequences of the therapy for this was I had lots of joint pain and lots of fatigue so I tell my doctor about that and he says that's great that means it's working it's like yes but the side effects are preventing me from training for a 100 mile race and so pushing through that I think it just it makes you grateful for what you have and makes you just be in awe of the fact that you know we were briefly talking about consciousness before that there's a world

2:04:41there at all you tend to have this perspective that physics gives us of the way the world works that you know the world is going on and when you die you get plucked out of that and everything else goes on but from a neuroscience perspective it's kind of the opposite you get the sense that the whole world is actually a construction of stuff in your brain and as you get older little things drop out and various people die and you're unable to do things and eventually you lose the whole world so rather than thinking of death as we normally do

2:05:12as the world loses you the neuroscience perspective is the inverse which is you lose the world so you have like you know a couple of decades left and then you're going to lose everything and that's coming so live it up I love it and thank you so much for being willing to answer that question throughout today's conversation I'm struck by the fact that your work plays such a prominent role in your life and your life and your work even if we weren't necessarily connecting the dots in that way

2:05:43the fact that you do practices specifically to tap into your autonomic nervous system emotion regulation and at the same time the fact that you look at neural circuits and do extremely well controlled studies to explore the mechanics that translate to everybody like this is a in case anyone hasn't told you and because I sit at a unique vantage point both having done academic research and now in public health communication people need to hear this and see and experience scientists like you so thank you so much

2:06:13for coming here today for being willing to open up about some of this and frankly for doing the work that you do for so many years at such a high level and I'm so grateful that you're writing yet another book if it's not out yet we can't put a link to it just yet but when it comes out I'll surely get a copy and even though you're not on social media I'll be sure to talk about it after I've read it because as I did the prior book that you wrote with David thank you very much Andrew it was a pleasure being here we'll stay in touch and maybe at some point I can tell you that I finished a hundred mile race and the book got published excellent

2:06:44thank you I have no doubt that you will whether I join you for that hundred mile race is a completely different story but thank you so much Ralph appreciate you thanks for the pleasure thank you thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Ralph Adolphs to learn more about his work and to find links to his previous and forthcoming books please see the link in the show note caption if you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's a terrific zero cost way to support us in addition please follow the podcast by clicking the follow button on both Spotify and Apple and on both Spotify

2:07:14and Apple you can leave us up to a five star review and you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode that's the best way to support this podcast if you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast please put those in the comments section on YouTube I do read all the comments for those of you that haven't heard I have a new book coming out it's my very first book it's entitled Protocols an Operating Manual for the Human Body

2:07:45this is a book that I've been working on for more than five years and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience and it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control protocols related to focus and motivation and of course I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included the book is now available by presale at protocolsbook.com there you can find links to various vendors you can pick the one that you like best again the book is called Protocols an Operating Manual

2:08:15for the Human Body and if you're not already following me on social media I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms so that's Instagram X Threads Facebook and LinkedIn and on all those platforms I discuss science and science related tools some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast but much of which is distinct from the information on the Huberman Lab podcast again it's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms and if you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network newsletter the Neural Network newsletter is a zero cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries

2:08:47as well as what we call protocols in the form of one to three page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep how to optimize dopamine deliberate cold exposure we have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training all of that is available completely zero cost you simply go to HubermanLab.com go to the menu tab in the top right corner scroll down to newsletter and enter your email and I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr. Ralph Adolphs

2:09:17and last but certainly not least thank you for your interest in science