Learn Faster Using Failures, Movement & Balance

See Andrew Huberman live in New York, Los Angeles & San Francisco:

Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. My name is Andrew Huberman, and I’m a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. This podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring you zero-cost consumer information about science and science-related tools. In keeping with that theme, I’d like to thank the sponsors of today’s podcast.

Our first sponsor is Headspace. Headspace is a meditation app that makes meditation easy. I’ve been meditating on and off now for about 30 years, although I confess more off than on. And that’s because I think like for a lot of people, sticking to a meditation practice can be pretty challenging. I started using Headspace a few years ago, and I found that it’s really allowed me to stick to a meditation practice on a regular basis.

I meditate anywhere from five to seven times a week. The app includes meditations that are all backed by scientific peer-reviewed studies, and it makes it really easy to start and complete the meditations. I started using these meditations while I was flying a few years back. On JetBlue flights, they started offering Headspace meditation, so that’s where I initially started, and then I moved over to the app, and I really enjoy it, and I derive great benefit from it. If you’d like to try Headspace, you can go to headspace.

com/specialoffer, and if you do that, you’ll get all the meditations that Headspace offers for free for 1 month. That’s headspace. com/specialoffer. You get all the meditations for free, which is the best offer that Headspace has available right now. So, if you’re interested in it, check it out.

The second sponsor of today’s podcast is Athletic Greens. Athletic Greens is an all-in-one vitamin, mineral, probiotic drink. I started using Athletic Greens in 2012, and I’ve been using it continuously ever since. I started using Athletic Greens because I found it rather dizzying to know which vitamins and minerals to take and Athletic Greens allows me to get the full base of all the necessary vitamins and minerals in one easy to consume drink. It also turns out that the drink tastes quite good.

I mix mine with some lemon juice and some water. I’ll drink it once or twice a day. The probiotics in Athletic Greens are also important to me because there are a lot of data now supporting the fact that the gut microbiome is important for the gut-brain axis, for various aspects of cognitive function, immune function, metabolic function. There’s just a huge number of things that having a healthy gut microbiome has been shown to be important for. So, by taking Athletic Greens, I have that base covered as well.

If you’d like to try Athletic Greens, you can go to athleticgreens. com/huberman. And if you do that, they’ll give you a year supply of liquid vitamin D3K2. There’s also a lot of data now showing that vitamin D3 is very important for a number of different biological functions. In addition, they’ll give you five free travel packs with your order.

It can be difficult to mix up powders while on the road, you know, when in a car or, you know, in a hotel or on a plane, etc. The travel packs make everything really clean and easy. So, you’ll get the year supply of vitamin D3K2 plus the five free travel packs if you go to athleticgreens. com/huberman. The third sponsor of today’s podcast is Madefor.

Madefor is a behavioral science company that makes learning positive habits and growth mindset easy. I’ve been involved with Madefor since the beginning as the lead of their scientific advisory. Other members of the scientific advisory include, for instance, the head of the chronobiology unit at the National Institutes of Mental Health, as well as psychiatrists from Harvard Medical School and elsewhere, all of whom are serious about science and science-related tools for developing positive habits and growth mindset. The program is a 10-month program during which each month you engage in a specific activity designed to encourage and cultivate positive habits and growth mindset. As well, we hold a monthly Zoom call, during which we discuss the program, people’s progress, and answer any questions they have directly.

If you’d like to try Madefor, you can go to getmadefor. com. And if you put Huberman in at checkout, you’ll get 20% off the program. That’s getmadefor. com, put Huberman in at checkout, and get 20% off the program.

Today, we’re going to talk about how to change your nervous system for the better. As you recall, your nervous system includes your brain and your spinal cord, but also all the connections that your brain and spinal cord make with the organs of your body, and all the connections that the organs of your body make with your brain and spinal cord. Now, this thing that we call the nervous system is responsible for everything we know, all our behavior, all our emotions, everything we feel about ourselves and the outside world, everything we think and believe. It’s really at the center of our entire experience of life and who we are. Fortunately, in humans, unlike in other species, we can change our nervous system by taking some very specific and deliberate actions.

And today, we’re really going to focus on the actions, the motor commands, and the aspects of movement and balance that allow us to change our nervous system. It turns out that movement and balance actually provide windows or portals into our ability to change our nervous system the way we want, even if those changes are not about learning new movements or learning how to balance. And soon, you’ll understand why. So, today, we’re going to talk a lot about the basic science of neuroplasticity. I promise to not use excessive nomenclature.

There’ll be a little bit, but I’ll try and make it as clear as possible. And we’re also going to talk a lot about protocols and tools that the scientific literature points to and supports for changing our nervous system. Again, not just for sake of learning new motor movements or how to balance better, but for how to feel differently about particular experiences, both past, present, and future, as well as how to learn faster. We’re not going to discuss hacks, a word I loathe. We’re not going to discuss gimmicks.

We’re going to discuss mechanism and scientific data and the tools that those mechanisms and scientific data point to so that you can tailor your practices around learning to your specific needs and goals. So, let’s begin by just examining the big picture question, which is does the brain control behavior? And my hope is that everyone is immediately thinking, yes. The brain and nervous system, we really should say cuz the brain is just one component of the nervous system, controls our behavior. How does it do that?

Well, there are a couple different levels that it does that. First of all, if we’re talking about movement, behavior generally means movement. If we’re talking about movement, we have two categories of neurons that are very important to think about in the context of neural plasticity. First of all, we have what are called lower motor neurons. These are motor neurons that live in our spinal cord.

If for the aficionados out there, for those of you that might be headed to medical school or just want to learn more about the anatomy, they live in the ventral horn of the spinal cord, but that doesn’t matter if you don’t want to know that. Just know that you have these things called lower motor neurons. These are neurons that are in the spinal cord, but they extend a wire that we call an axon out into the peripheral nervous system, into the body, and those neurons connect with muscle. They send electrical potentials out there that allow our muscles to twitch and to contract. As a little