You are listening to the Darren Wilson Show, I'm Darren, I spent the last 20 years devoted to improving health, protecting the environment and finding ways to live a more sustainable life. In this podcast, I have honest conversations with people that inspire me. I hope that through their knowledge and unique perspectives, they'll inspire you to. We talk about all kinds of topics from amping up your diets and improving your well-being to the mind blowing stories behind the human experience and the people that are striving to save us and our incredible planet.

We've investigated some of the life's fatal conveniences. You know, those things that we are told might be good for us, but totally aren't. So here's to making better choices and the small tweaks in your life that amount to big changes for you and the people around you and the planet. Let's do this. This is my show, The Darren Olean Show.

Everybody, welcome to the show, how's it going, how's it going today? I'm excited that you're here. I'm excited for your time that you're using to potentially grow and expand and learn and apply and take action on your life in a positive direction. We need actionable things that we can support our life moving in a positive direction. Because you know what? There's a lot of things that are out of our control. Look around. Right. So when that stuff intensifies, we need to double down on the things that we can do to improve our life, improve our bodies, improve our spirit, improve our connection to ourselves and this beautiful planet and improve our brains.

And that's what we're going to get into today. An incredible guest. This is so funny. You're going to find out on that episode. But I literally had my mind blown. Andrew Huberman, Ph.D., neuroscientist, tenured professor in the Department of Neurobiology at Stanford University of Medicine, blew my mind. We got into it. We had a blast. You're going to learn something that he's never shared publicly about our eyes, our eyeballs and how it relates to our brain.

And you're going to understand the moment when that happens.

So, Andrew, he has contributed a lot of things to neuroplasticity, brain function, brain development, our ability to our for our nervous system to rewire, learn new behaviors, skills and improve cognitive functioning. We're always striving, right. Because, hey, listen, this day and age, we're supposed to produce and always be in a good mood and all this stuff. So whenever we say brain enhancement and learn how to optimize your brain, everyone perks up because they want those insights.

While there's no greater person to give us those insights than Andrew Kuperman, he has the McKnight Foundation and PUE Foundation Fellowship. He was awarded the Congdon War in twenty seventeen for some of the largest discoveries in the study of vision. His work around that is influenced vision, respiration, human performance and brain states such as fear and courage. This guy is so fascinating. We had an incredible conversation, a sit down, a powwow in the yard. I love it getting my brain blown wide open with new information, new insights.

And this guy absolutely did it. So enjoy the next episode of my good friend, the Brain Warrior, Dr. Andrew Government. Well, first of all, thanks so much, it's great to be here this the year is beautiful and the surroundings are are beautiful. Yeah. So I grew up in a family where my dad was a scientist and my mom wrote children's books, essentially. Still does. And still. Yeah, yeah. And so my dad was early in the game of Chaos Theory and so which I still don't really understand, but it's early in the chaos which I still don't understand, which is.

But I would say from a very young age, I was interested in animals and my relationship to animals is a kind of peculiar one. I have always been kind of obsessed with their different shapes and how they move, and I don't really know how to explain why. I just they intrigued me. And, you know, like they I think I'm obsessed with their specialisations. Like, owls are amazing silent hunters, right? They can't move their eyes in their head very much.

We know that. So they swivel their head pretty far around. They have amazing echolocation because they mainly hunt in the dark. And their visual system isn't really excellent for for vision, but it's great for the kind of vision that's at dusk and dawn. At dawn, they're what we call crepuscular. You know, things like that really intrigued me, you know? And I started getting really obsessed with how the different animals on the planet are organized. And this you hear in your biology textbooks is like Kingdome phylum order kingdom played, you know, you know, phylum clade, Jenness order species, whatever.

And I just jumbled it up. But, um, and as I went further and further along this exploration as a kid, like reading the encyclopedia and reading about animals and just getting absolutely obsessive, I got really interested in, like where we fit into that picture. I mean, we are animals. We are old world primates and. That means that just like the owl, just like your dog, there are certain things that our bodies and brains are going to be best for and are going to be optimised for.

And so there was an early seed there wondering about that. And then I went to college and then I essentially kind of flunked out after the first year, and that's when I got my act together. I think the theme of biology in animals resurfaced. When I returned to college, I managed to get myself back and decided, OK, 19 years old, let's move forward in life and actually create something yourself. And I went to work for a guy who ran a laboratory and he was studying temperature regulation and the brain.

And that was the first time in my life where I'd actually seen a brain. So we started I started learning about brains in a neuroanatomy class. I started learning about hormones and behavior of a topic that still fascinates me about how there are these drives that emerge from within our system. And because of a lot of the things that happened in my high school years and some of the kind of pain points that I experienced and some of the suffering I'd seen around me, I was also really intrigued by the fact that neuroscience wasn't called that.

Then biology could explain things like moods, psychosis, depression, things I'd seen a lot of and addiction, all these things. And he was giving me explanations that made sense. What I started to realize was that the brain and the nervous system was creating these versions of ourselves that are more suited to do certain things and not others good things, as well as make us, you know, kind of at risk for certain kinds of things like addiction and mental health issues.

I thought this is it. This is amazing. But I thought it was amazing, mostly because the guy that was teaching me all this stuff was also just really cool. He was an old school biologist. Right. And he also had a deep sense of humanity. He would give these lectures where he would show videos of people with schizophrenia. He started talking about how, you know, this guy was had a. Biological fracture, something was broken in there and that, like, extends your humanity to that person, it makes you feel less separate from them because you realize this guy is getting attacked from the inside.

And that could happen to any of us, really, because we're all carrying around the same machinery. So for me, like all these different pieces, love of animals, interest in the human animal, seeing some a lot of hardship and struggle, having some hardship and struggle, but also seeing some amazing, wonderful things in life and thinking like, well, how does all this work? So I decided, that's it. I'm going to work in a lab and I'm going to become a neuroscientist.

I decided eventually to go do a degree in hormones and behavior, which is at Berkeley. And then eventually I did a PhD in neuroscience and then did a postdoc in science and then eventually got my own lab. I should just say, you know, one thing that's still a topic that's actually very much in the front of my mind these days is this animal thing. I'm not allowed to say it. I'm not going to bullshit anybody like my you know, we work on mice because we can do the sorts of experiments in mice that are invasive that we couldn't do on a human.

But over the last few years, I've started to pivot more towards working on humans and a lot of my lab work now is done on humans trying to address things like anxiety, improve sleep, look at performance, neural regeneration. And I mentioned the animal to human thing because it's always bothered me a lot that we do science the way that we do. I think there are places where it's very justified in the name of human health and there are ways in which we're trying to develop cures for all sorts of diseases, cancer, trying to understand the underlying basis of autism, all these addiction things that create a ton of suffering.

And you cannot, at least at this point in time, the community of scientists can't come up with a better way to do this besides these animal models.

But it's always tugged at me from a very deep place, and I've become increasingly conscious of where I'm placing my efforts and whether or not it's justified to do an experiment on mice or whether or not we should and can go and do that in human. And we've been putting an immense amount of effort in the last few years to move things to humans. And I'm quite proud of that actually, that we're doing that. It's it has some disadvantages. But, you know, I'm not I'm not trying to be on any soapbox about this.

I think the discussion is an important one to have from both sides. But it's something that's really close to my core and what brought me to the whole business of science.

Well, I think you hit on so many amazing points. And that alone is like to thine own self be true. Right? And so, yeah, you have this commitment to research and bettering your understanding in humans, and you're also honoring yourself with the further you go. Is this really necessary? And and that's a beautiful thing because because it's also going to stretch you. It's going to OK, we're not invasively going to go into these areas with the animals, but we're going to have to figure out a different way in the human model because clearly we're not going to be in the invasive structures that we're going to be using.

And so how is that then? I mean, there's so many things from from regeneration to plasticity to I mean, I'm totally aware that people will want to hear from you, like, OK, well, what can I do to help my brain?

And sure, I'll be happy to. Yeah, we can talk about that. Yeah.

So so so when you pivoted from the animal model, how, how did that shift your, your ability to then move into the the human model.

The timing was right to make that shift around 2015, because it's fair to say that for the last twenty five years, neuroscience has produced some but not a lot of knowledge that could be immediately applied to humans. They've been building the base, you know, which is critically important. Every field has this kind of, you know, early stage in neuroscience is a very young science then has come on board and you start understanding things and understanding things. And, you know, some people in other fields, you know, they study bacteria and then flies and then worms and then mice.

And then there's always that debate does it carry over to humans? And I like to think I know the literature pretty well. And certainly in the areas that I work with, your neural regeneration and these things that we call states like states of stress and states of courage and all of these kind of brain states. And I was looking at the mouse literature and the stuff that we were doing and I realized, wow, there's some real gems in this stuff that can be exported to humans now.

So we should do that. So what we did is we actually built a lab, which is a it's mainly grounded in virtual reality. So we use virtual reality to deliver different types of experiences to people because in the laboratory, obviously, we can't bring that real. Rolled into the laboratory, we can't injure people, but we could study fear, for instance, and have the situation of heights, or we could put them in a situation of any kind of phobia.

You can do all that with VR in a very rich way. Actually, a guy that my friend Michael Muller. Yeah, he was really involved in these projects because he's a photographer in Hollywood, an exceptional photographer, really extends beyond Hollywood. He's sort of like on the globe. He's one of the top photographers out there. And he approached me. We got synched up and and I heard that he also does this diving with great white sharks thing.

So we went and did that. We started filming VR, not the VR is the real thing.

And we actually thought about bringing human subjects out there and trying to record from their brains while they were underwater. We actually looked at some of the technology to do EEG underwater and it was just getting too complicated. We were actually worried about the sharks getting tangled up in the wires. It wasn't wireless someday maybe, but we decided to bring this stuff back to the lab and we realized that with VR you could create very real experiences not just of sharks, but of heights, of spiders, of snakes, for people to have generalized anxiety or phobias.

Those are powerful stimuli. And then we could combine those with recordings from the brain in a very non-invasive way. Now, some neurosurgery patients, we actually can lower electrodes down into the brain and record from the brain. We do that. But most of the people that come to the lab, we're recording from their nervous system noninvasively through the skull, through the skin. There's great technology to do this now. So a bunch of technology showed up and we can we can actually study human states of mind in the laboratory.

The other thing is that I've always had an interest in this dates back to an early interest in fitness and wellness, in trying to understand what are the things that people can do outside the laboratory. That can give them better control over what we call the autonomic nervous system, this system that lies at the heart of our state of mind and body. And, you know, in certain communities, things like breastwork and certain kinds of kind of physical exertion are well known phenomenon.

But to the general public, right, they might have heard about things like yoga or breath work a little bit. They haven't really been exposed to it. And I realized that I was in a unique position being a professor in a major place like Stanford. And I had this amazing colleague. I still do. He's a close collaborator named David Spiegel, who's the world expert in mind body stuff. He's a psychiatrist and he works on hypnosis. He's used hypnosis to treat cancer patients.

And so we teamed up and we've been doing studies looking at how specific patterns of respiration, breath work, but also just particular patterns of breathing impact our physiology and our states of mind, how they can be used to buffer stress and improve entrance to sleep, improved sleep et. And so we've got about one hundred and twenty five plus subjects, human subjects, while walking around in the world that are wearing devices that are sending us all the same kinds of data that we would have gotten from mice.

Except they're telling us about their life events. They're also some of them are doing particular patterns of breathing. Some of them also have a meditative practice. So we're doing science outside the lab in the real world, but in a very structured way. And it's you know, it's really cool because for us, because normally people would come to the lab, we get two hours with them. You know, we give them this very immersive experience and then they leave and we don't talk to them again.

We get their data, but only for that little window of time. Now we're getting weeks and weeks and weeks of data and really real world, real world data.

And they can say, you know, I had a rough morning. I didn't feel well, but, you know, my breakfast, I didn't feel well after breakfast. We're getting all of that. And when you move into the real world, the challenges, the tons more variables, I mean, the reason to do laboratory science is you can control everything. And that has its advantages and it has its disadvantages. The advantage right now and in terms of technologies is A.I., you know, and we hear about artificial intelligence and machine learning.

It's like, oh, the A.I. bots are going to come and get us. There's a dark side to A.I., but there's a bright side A.I., which we can take all the data from a human spin. Lifestyle factors what they tell us, how they're feeling, even stuff about what they're eating and what they're doing. And we can take that. And then we can look at how I say a breath work intervention or some other intervention might impact things.

And the A.I. tells us the patterns that matter. It says it can look over four weeks of data, tons of data that we could never pass on our own and say, you know what, it turns out that when they're carbon dioxide to oxygen ratio was X amount before lunch, they were reporting anxiety as more severe in the evening or the next day can start tying together things like all these correlations and it can tell you this stuff. And so our hope is that we're going to be able to identify best practices.

And I think we've identified a few as well as start finding signatures for mental health issues and addiction issues that people themselves might not be aware of. So like people not knowing whether or not they're doing Portmore poorly two days before they might have a depressive crash where they might relapse or God forbid, they might commit suicide, we want to know what are the signatures inside the body because the body has that intelligence and the nervous system knows if oftentimes before the conscious mind knows.

So riffing along there. But that's a that's a kind of a a bulk package of all the things we're doing. And then I should just mention that I do maintain a very active interest in a for a long time, I've been very interested in compounds and how they can improve mental and physical health through the nervous system in the endocrine system. That's not worked at my lab does. But I do some consulting work for some military groups, foreign and domestic, and occasionally do some work with some athletes looking, because I think that, as you know better than anybody, there are substances that come from the Earth that are powerful in modulating our physiology.

And so that's a deep interest as well.

So we could go in any different. One of those avenues is pretty compelling and we're definitely going to touch on that.

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So I'm giving all of my listeners 15 percent off by going to Barracas Dotcom backslash, Daryn. That's B A, are you K.S. Dotcom backslash, Darran D A R I and I know you will enjoy. I think the just the A.I thing is incredibly interesting because you have people in the real world and I'm just like grabbing the correlations at speeds that it's impossible for us to be able to do and and making connections that would probably take in a lab.

It would take a hundred years to try to grab that amount of information. And just unpacking that a little bit in terms of what are some of the things you're finding, because, of course, you know, I've done both work for a long time and I love the intense and then shifting into breath work right away, dropping into parasympathetic and some of the greatest kind of consciousness rest comes when I've done something really aggressive and then I've downshifted as fast and consciously as possible.

Interesting. It's very addicting in a certain sense because it's and all of us, like a bunch of us guys, do it all the time. It's there's something that you can tell me if there's anything really. It's just a personal question, because I've I've work on that in the sense like if I'm doing something really and of course, I know I breathe as much as possible and then as soon as I exert myself and then I'm done with the exercise where I downshift as quickly as possible and consciously drop the heart rate in half as quickly as possible and then go on to a breathing recovery pattern.

And those states, not to mention the body, recovers intimately because one of the first things I learned in physiology was like, oh, two, getting the the the lactic acid out. So it makes sense. I'm going to start breathing. So from that recovery standpoint. But have you seen anything in terms of that? I mean, we're really talking sympathetic parasympathetic, that kind of thing. So what are some of your findings?

Yeah, so some just sort of ground information around this. So sympathetic, I think of as the alertness system just to make it simple, simpler because sympathetic. Often people confuse the sympathy with like feeling sympathetic. So just that try and stay out of nomenclature. That's always a goal. If we can, as long as we can be accurate, you know, the clearer we can be better. So sympathetic, I think, of is the alertness system in the parasympathetic as the calming system.

And they're acting in kind of a seesaw fashion, the autonomic nervous system, autonomic means automatic and it's a total misnomer because it actually can be controlled. We control it all the time. Everyone controls all the time. When you eat a big meal, your gut feels full. You trigger activation of the vagus nerve and it slowly calms you down. That's autonomic control. When you listen to a song you like and it ramps you up, that is the autonomic control.

So the idea that the autonomic nervous system is autonomic, it's kind of ridiculous. When we just look at it, even at a very coarse level, then we say like, well, what are the levers, what are the dials on the autonomic nervous system that can shift our economic nervous system quickly and in very specific ways. And and the two that I'm most aware of. Are breathing respiration and the visual system, which say my lab has been very deeply involved in trying to understand, and then there's a third one, which is movement, because obviously how we move our body is going to feed back on the autonomic nervous system.

We lie still. You're going to be activate the calming system. Right. You might not be completely calm, but if you run up a hillside, you're going to activate the alertness system. That's just how it works. So now the brain and body are reciprocally connected. So once connected, the brain connects to body, body, connected brain. I don't separate the two. I also don't distinguish between mind and brain. It's just sort of a more philosophical discussion than it's worth getting into.

So if I'm seated and I'm breathing quickly, plus taking into account carbon dioxide and oxygen ratios, then my brain has some sense of how stressed or calm I am. If I'm breathing very slowly in general, then my brain thinks I'm calm and if I'm breathing quickly, in general thinks something's going on out there because the brain doesn't have another little brain that's like the master brain. It is just the brain that's paying attention to the body. So there's a beautiful saying that I didn't create yogic saying by comany decide, which is, you know, breath is the mind made visible.

You know, when we focus on our breath, I think the reason why we feel immediately present is because we're bringing our sphere of attention directly into our body. It's like the second hand on our existence. And it's also a lot easier to track than our heart rate moment to moment. It's kind of hard to just pay attention to your heart. You can do it if you work at it. But that interception, which just means pay attention to our inner state, it's best done with breathing.

So there are a couple of patterns of breathing that are really useful. We've discovered in humans and this is based on mouse literature. So this is really a good example of where the mouse literature told us that every once in a while mice and it turns out humans also do what's called a physiological sigh. These have been known about since the 30s. But it turns out it was only recently discovered that there's a set of neurons in the brain stem that cause a double inhale, followed by an extended exhale and typically the double inhale through the nose and the extended exhale is through the mouth.

And animals do this right before they go down for a nap. And you do this periodically during sleep. Any time the carbon dioxide in your bloodstream gets too high that you double inhale totally unaware of it. The alveoli of the lungs get fully expanded and that pulls a little bit of extra carbon dioxide out of the bloodstream. So exhale, you offload that. So if somebody is feeling kind of stressed and they want to offload stress or bring or let's just stay with that alertness, calm thing before you're feeling more alert than you want to be and you want to calm down just a little bit, do a double inhale through the nose, exhale through the mouth.

That's the fastest way I'm aware of to downshift the autonomic nervous system. Sometimes you only need to do that two or three times and you're completely relaxed. So we know that this double inhale long exhales are activated by claustrophobia. It's a spontaneous reaction to being in an environment where there's elevated carbon dioxide. People will just start doing this in an attempt. The body is attempting to regulate the autonomic nervous system. But what's so cool about the diaphragm is its skeletal muscle.

It can be voluntarily controlled, just like I can walk up a set of stairs and think about it, or I can set, you know, arrange my steps at the cadence that is really conscious and voluntary. The diaphragm is the only internal organ that we can do that. We can't do that for our spleen and for our liver and for our heart. The other thing that's cool about the diaphragm in the front nerve is it has what's what are called collaterals.

Collaterals are just branches like branches on a tree and it has a branch to the liver. And there's a reason for that. The liver is obviously stores glycogen. And even for people who are low on glycogen, it is important for metabolizing energy, for exertion. So you hear that and you think all of a sudden, of course, of course, Mother Nature arranged it so that our breathing speed would tell our liver how much energy to liberate. Right.

It's crazy. And so, yeah, and it's also somehow, I don't know the role of the spleen, but it's probably informing the immune system because it has a collateral to the spleen also. So breathing is it's this incredible lever on the inside. And so I think the double inhale, long exhale is, you know, it's not breath work, but you can it's something that's built in all of us. You can do it the first time.

You can do it every time. We've been testing the role of that in allowing people to move through their day and use it as what I call a real time tool to adjust their anxiety and be able to move through life in a calmer, more engaged way. The other thing we've been testing is what people sometimes hear of as kind of Imhoff type breathing or super oxygenated and Briere tuomo breathing or, you know, a lot of different names, but a pattern of breathing.

We've been exploring. There are people now walking around in the world that five minutes a day. We have just five minutes because we want to set kind of a minimal effective dose if we can make it reasonable for most. People there doing five minutes of deep breathing, really like big inhales, big exhales, big and big exhales offloading a lot of carbon dioxide and then doing some exhale hold. And what that does is those big inhales and exhales tell the brain, oh, there's something intense going on in the body.

And then there's a nerve signal sent from the brainstem to the adrenals and says, liberate adrenaline. And that's that alertness that you feel. But then when you breath hold after that, you do the exhale hold and you're calm.

It's like, oh, you're we believe that we're that people are teaching themselves how to be calm even when there's a shot of adrenaline in their system, because most people just experience that as like and they start getting agitated because adrenalin's job is to agitate, move us. So those are two forms of breathing that we are finding. It's preliminary still, but it's grounded in the mouse stuff. So it kind of illustrates the point earlier. But we're doing this in humans.

And the cool thing is people can tell us what they're experiencing. Unlike a mouse. I don't speak mouse. Right. And and so they can tell us and it's also wonderful. And I have to, you know, sacrifice any mice for these experiments where people are telling us that they're having a again, this is preliminary, but that they're having an easier time buffering the stress that we're under right now, that they're having an easier time navigating their day.

They're having an easier time falling asleep at night. So very simple. I mean, it's like five minutes a day or this real time to get you know, we like to think we're giving people the capacity to lean into life in a more engaged way. And the beauty of it for us is also that it's totally cost free. The study is very expensive, but. But the breathing is cost free. Totally cost free. No one has to take anything, you can do it in the moment and everyone has access.

There's actually very little little learning barrier is very low. We just do it right anyway.

Well, that's and it's but it's so important on so many levels because, you know, we're upper respiratory breathers. We're not allowing for oxygen exchange and all of that. And that's got to trigger that that excited response. And especially we're already excited in this day and age where we turn around in this frickin everything sideways. And and I love that because it's it is. And you can turn that into you don't have to buy a special piece of equipment to get something on Amazon.

You just need to stop and kind of learn to breathe. It's almost rebury again because we're just like, no, I'm fine. I'm like, how would I be low on oxygen and how what's my CO2 till I get the breathe all the time kind of stuff.

Yeah, exactly. Well, and there are a couple of things that are really good about doing that five minute breathing practice, you know. So. Twenty five breaths. Exhale. Hold your breath for about our lungs empty for about five to 15 seconds and then repeat some people will do big inhales and holds, but that gets a little bit into the you have to be a little careful with those if for pre-existing heart conditions and stuff. Obviously never do it in your water, never do any of this near water because you can pass out.

Please don't.

But the five minutes of breathing also triggers that release of adrenaline, which actually supports the immune system. It actually this is one of the biggest misconceptions is that stress lowers immunity, stress does not lower immunity, stress activates the immune system. And that makes sense because if we had to, you know, forage for food for a few days or, you know, God forbid, you know, combat an invading group or, you know, fire situation, whatever, you need to go, go, go.

You can't get sick. So the nervous system controls the immune system and deploys these killer cells when there's adrenaline in the system. This is why ice baths. So why high intensity breathing? And this is why when you work, work, work, work, work or take care of somebody, you don't get sick. But then when you finally stop to rest, you start getting that tickle in the back of your throat and whatnot, because the the the immune system now settles down.

So having a daily breath work practice or a breath work practice that you engage when you're starting to feel a little bit off balance and maybe not so good, that's very helpful. Now, you don't want to be stressed at a high level for very long periods of time because it is bad for your system. But people vastly underestimate the extent to which the body can tolerate long bouts of stress. So I'm not encouraging people to seek stress persay, but seeking a period of stress where you're breathing into that stress and creating it.

There's that beautiful study was shown, injecting people with E. coli. Half of them are puking and diarrhea and vomiting, puking, puking is vomiting. Sorry, I realized that the other word for vomiting, puking and diarrhea and fever and the people that do this high intensity breathing right before are essentially asymptomatic because. They didn't the immune system was deployed and was able to counter that the interpretation of that study is always exactly backwards. People are like it. It blocks the immune system like no.

And I don't know how that got started, but I'd like to try and dispel that rumor. So.

And does it also the oxygen saturation, does that play into it as well? Yeah.

So there's some interesting things about how oxygen, carbon dioxide balance in the lungs and bloodstream impacts seller health. And, you know, people got really excited in the Bretthauer community when it was a Nobel Prize given for oxygen sensing and cells and different cells react differently to higher or lower carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is a really interesting one because it kind of gets this bad rap. People think of carbon dioxide is bad, but carbon dioxide actually leads to vasodilation, things like that.

Like if you're ever stuffy in the nose, you can exhale all your air and just hold, you know, if you can't breathe because the congestion and hold your breath for about 15 seconds and you'll notice your nasal passages start to clear. And it's like, well, why will the carbon dioxide elevation starts, you know, triggering a vasodilation? This is also why if you breathe really hard, you do one of these 25 or 30 breaths, you're going to get tingly in the periphery.

That's because you're offloading carbon dioxide and you get veza constriction. And so you're getting tingling in the extremities. People often say, oh, you're getting more blood to the extremities. And I'm always like, no, like, no, no, no. It's not just because I'm a scientist like it like and it's not so important to know all the underlying physiology, but it's kind of fun to think about how Brathwaite can make us calm breath work done a different way can activate our immune system.

It can allow us to learn to be calm and be sort of what I call raise the threshold or the ceiling on what we would call a stress attack. A lot of people who are really stressed, it's hard for them to calm down. Meditation is challenging for them. So some people do better by getting charged up and then learning to be calm in that in that elevated state. And so these are, in my opinion, these are the power tools that Mother Nature installed in us and they were designed to be used.

And so that's why we're studying them and trying to distribute them to as many people as we can.

Yeah, it's amazing because it's I think a lot of it gets lost into even the stigma of meditating. It's creates an overload for people. And like but just focusing on a little understanding of the mechanism of breathing and like you said, like just a double inhale, exhale. Easy thing to do. You'll know you know better than anyone. The body is amazing. It just keeps going and it tries to keep our eyes level and moving forward. And we adapt some sort of way and we get under amazing amount of people, shove a lot of crap in their mouth and they just keep going and going and going.

So we were disconnected in a sense, but breathing is like a good first step to just get reconnected.

The most fundamental. Absolutely.

I mean, you've done a lot of research around the not only the neuroscience, but also eyes. And and I'm I mean, like, it makes me crazy that I have to wear glasses and that kind of thing. I mean, I know you went into a coma and all of these other things. So I'm just I'm curious as to your your the eyes.

The visual system is an area of neuroscience that we know a lot about. And so I got into it because at my undergraduate university, there was a course I took right before I left, which was, oh, did we get to talk about animals again? I was, of course, taught by a guy named Gerald Jacobs, who was a member of the National Academy and had studied the evolution of color, vision and eyes. So really interesting topic because of color vision.

I mean, every animal really has color vision, but we have what's called track chromosome. So we have three cone types of, you know, a red, green and a blue that allows us to see this incredible array of colors. A mantis shrimp sees like sixty four times more colors and can't even really conceive the different color. Some animals see ultraviolet radiations. We can't see that pit vipers can sense heat. You know, there's some humans who think they can do that.

But, you know, in general, most people can't do that. So he studied the genes and the genetic pathways that led to these evolutions of the visual system. And half of the class was about that. It was really, really cool. The other half of the class was about how the foam, the the pupil of the eye and the phobia, the eye changed and changes in animals that occupy different what we call Nicias or habitats. And so you you and I both have a round central phobia.

A phobia is an area of the eye that has a very high concentration of photoreceptors, which is basically like pixels. So your phobia has 90 percent of the pixels in your eye and then the periphery of your eye has very few simple way to look at this as regardless how good or poor your vision is, if you move your hand out to the side of your head, extend your arm. If you're listening to this, extend outside. Wiggle your fingers out there and at some point you'll be able to see those fingers, but you can't really see that distinguish the individual fingers until you move it in front of you.

And then you can I can see, for instance, I'm wiggling four fingers. So our peripheral vision is very low acuity. Our central vision is very high acuity.

Turns out that the elephant also has a high acuity area of its eye, but it's shaped like a J, not a dot. And the reason is shaped like a J is because it wants to visualize the tip of its trunk to be able to grab things out of trees. Yeah. And the Sloss actually has a phobia is high density, high resolution area of its retina and it's at the top of its eye because it hangs upside down and likes to view things on the jungle floor.

Exactly. So I'm glad to hear that you're laughing and smiling because I experienced this incredible sense of delight. When I heard about this. I was like, there's no way this is true, but it's absolutely true. And the best one of all, I think, is the diving birds. So diving birds have a horizontal what's called a visual streak. So they fly along and they because they need to monitor the horizon, but they also have a pupil because they're going to dive for fish and they have to adjust for the refractory index of the water for the non.

You know what? For those that don't know refractory indexes, where you see something underwater is not where that thing actually is. It shifted and their meal depends on it. So they're flying along, monitoring the horizon very carefully. They see the fish, they're monitoring that, and then they make a calculation to adjust their dive so they can get it. And I was like, OK, that's it. I got to I got to be a biologist.

Right. This is so cool. And so you think about people always go, you know, human evolution in the cosmos and the galaxies. For me, that was the thing that was as exciting. I think, for somebody who is interested in astronomy and the galaxies, almost like Mother Nature is genius. Unbelievable genius because it's adaptive. They need this. It it corresponds to how they move their body, the trunk. So there's this connection. It's like, oh, my goodness, amazing.

So I was like, vision. I'm going to just study vision. It turns out that was a good decision because vision, visual neuroscience, as we call it, has a rich history. And a lot of people have worked in that. And there's a lineage in science. So there were great labs to go to to work on this stuff. So I felt I was fortunate enough to fall under the umbrella of a set of two guys named David, who in Wiesel, who won the Nobel Prize for identifying neuroplasticity in the visual system, and Thorsten still alive.

David, unfortunately, passed away. But when I was a first year graduate student, I got a chance to meet David Hubel and chatted with him. And I was just like thrown into this fantasy land of visual neuroscience. And these are the guys that that discovered that the brain from childhood until about age twenty five is very plastic. It can change really easily. And after that it can change also. And we can talk about how to do that at any age.

But it takes some different. You have to engage some different parameters or you got to do some extra things. So just real briefly about the eyes that the eyes are not connected to the brain. The eyes are brain. This is, I think, one thing that I'm. Wait a minute. What? Yeah, the eyes are brain, the the neural retina. There's three layered structure at the back of your eye and your eye are central nervous system there.

So your central nervous system is your brain and all the stuff inside your spinal cord. Then there's a nervous system outside the brain and spinal cord that's called peripheral nervous system. The eyes are two pieces of brain that got squeezed out of the skull early in development.

And there's a genetic program that makes sure. So now, any time you look at somebody. Yeah, right.

People, you just release DMD. Just bluebottles. It's crazy.

But it's it's you know, people say the eyes are the window to the soul. You know, I don't know anything about souls. I mean, I like to think I know a little bit about my own, you know, but the eyes are the brown from the brain.

They are during development. They're squeezed out. They come from what's called the embryonic ecorp. It's a you know, for the aficionados out there, it's a derivative of the dying Cephalon and it gets squeezed out. If you want to check me on the stuff, go for it. And it's back there, you know, in your in your skull. But it's also out there in the world. Your eyes are the only two pieces of your brain that are outside of your skull, dude.

So how have I never heard this before? How is the world not just blabbing about it before? You know what it is? It's most scientists are there in their lives.

You know, they're not to tell you about. Come on. We just need to pause. The world is a pause right now.

So for years, maybe all, most of my life, people have been asking me what kind of foods you eat, what kind of exercises do you do, what kind of water should I drink, all of these things and so much more we put into a 21 day program. So that can take you through a theme every day of knowledge, action, and then eating this delicious meals, working out, getting support, anchoring in these new habits. So you can do what?

So that you can kick ass. So you have the energy, the vitality to live the kind of life that you really want. That's what it's all about. So all in this app, we have grocery lists, we have education about real hydration and what greater oxygenation and the balance of ELGAN is. And all of these things we are diving into as you're heading down this hero's journey of implementation into a new life, to give you the kind of life that you actually want.

So join my tribe. All you have to do is go to one to one tribe, dotcom, sign up and you get three free days. Join me on this hero's journey. Join the tribe. And so you ask why why would there be an entire genetic program to making sure that there are two little pieces of central nervous system, the brain that are outside the skull? And the reason is the brain is in a container called the skull. It needs to know what's going on in the outside world beyond the extent of beyond the extent of your skin so you can get touched by way of skin or wind.

You know, I could maybe sense something that you could say, well, smell. Sure, smell is neurons in the brain are sensing volatile chemicals. We call them volatile because they drift in the in the wind and they go in and we can decipher smells like smoke, smells like food, smells good, smells like a inmates. But so that's at a distance and then sound waves. Right. But. There's one system that's the most ancient system for telling the brain when to be awake and when to be asleep.

So this is the if the thing about the eyes or the brain being outside the the skull isn't weird enough, the next thing is a little weird, too, which is that the original function of the eyes was not to see. It was not to perceive things. It was to subconsciously, without your awareness, set the level of alertness or sleepiness in the brain. So there's a set of cells in the eye, very important, called ganglion cells, and they connect the eyes to the rest of the brain.

Those cells, some of them in humans, are very what we call high acuity. They can see very fine detail. They signal when there's very little things. Some respond to movement, some respond to particular colors like there's, you know, reddish orange over there. And I can see that color because certain of these ganglion cells are active, but not all the ganglion cells are responsible for conscious vision, meaning what we perceive and what we recognize. There's a set of ganglion cells that are especially cool called intrinsically photosensitive melanocytes and ganglion cells, like I was called monopsonistic.

And they are UV and blue light sensing cells. And their job for a long time, at least until last year, was thought to sense blue light and send a signal to the brain to wake up the brain. And that's mostly true and it's all subconscious. Is why getting some sunlight in your eyes early in the day is a really good idea. But it turns out there's a cool little twist in this.

Turns out that these cells actually they do pay attention to blue, they respond when there's blue light, but they respond when blues are going are getting when blues are getting darker. And yellows and oranges are getting brighter, that combination of light in our environment. Wakes up the brain. That's what we call sunrise. These cells are literally sunrise detector's. So and then in the evening they're also sunset detectors because there's a period in which the sun is setting and it's very bright.

And then it goes blue and then the blue goes dark to black. So these cells, which were discovered by my good friend David Berson, who really deserves credit for this, are present in every animal, definitely in humans, strongly impact everything from our metabolism to our heart rate to our cortisol, to our melatonin, to our sleep patterns. If this system gets disrupted, people have poor recovery from stroke, from cancer. Circadian biology is a real thing.

You can even activate psychosis by putting people into environment where the lights are on a weird schedule. But just to sort of back up to the visual part. This does not mean that you need to see the sun rise across the horizon every day or that you need to see the sun settle. That would be wonderful. If you could arrange your life that way, you might even just say, well, wait, sometimes it's cloudy. I don't see blue getting darker and reds and orange getting brighter.

Yeah, you don't because you don't perceive it. But guess what? That photon energy is coming through the clouds.

So as a daily practice, it's extremely beneficial to get two to 10 minutes of light in your eyes upon waking within the first hour, but ideally within the first 30 minutes of waking and then again in the evening as the sun is starting to set. And unless you live in Scandinavia in the depths of winter, you you don't need an artificial light to do this. Now, some people say, well, I could use artificial light, so, well, artificial light won't do it because these cells need very bright light early in the day.

They like bright light. So if you use an artificial light because you're in a northern area and it's really dark in the winter, you need a very bright light. Now, never look at a light that's so bright that it hurts to look at because you can damage the retina. But these the eyes were placed. These pieces of brain we call eyes were placed outside your skull to let the rest of the nervous system know when to be awake and when to be asleep.

And this is also why you don't want to be looking at bright lights between 11:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m. because you're waking up the brain and a lot of IT systems. And it also has it can create problems like reducing dopamine release, which should be happening during the daytime, disrupting sleep and all sorts of things. So vision we always think of as pattern vision or form vision, but the fundamental use of the visual system, the utility of these pieces of brain that we call eyes being outside our skull is to wake up the brain in the morning and to make it go to sleep.

And there are many, many mental and physical disorders, challenges with blood sugar regulation that come from the fact that these cells connect to an area of the brain called the Habila, which connects to the pancreas. So it's I have Ventilla pancreas. When you don't get this light stimulation early in the day, blood sugar starts getting messed up. People who are sleep deprived, people are getting a lot of light in the middle of the night. You end up seeing blood sugar issues.

And just to really underscore how powerful the system is, there's a couple of studies done by a group at the University of Colorado where they took college students camping because these students had completely messed up cortisol and melatonin rhythms and just two days of seeing the sun rise. And again, it doesn't have to be read as it crosses the horizon. But within an hour of waking and seeing the sunset completely reset their melatonin and cortisol rhythms and and that effect lasted for a few weeks or maybe even a year or more.

So vision is not just for seeing your eyes or a piece of your brain in there outside your head, and you need to use them properly. The way to use them properly is to get light in your eyes at the right time of day and not in the middle of the night. Do it like that. Just I needed that. I needed just like a mind blower. And that one definitely.

Yeah. That one trips people out because and surprises them because I think that they were so visual, were so driven by pattern vision that we forget that there are other cells that are tucked into that. I think, you know, that are there to generate some really important functions for the rest of our brain and body.

I can imagine first of the things that come up is, doesn't it make so much sense that the brain, of course, has all this protection mechanisms and periphery and sensory perception and all, but it's pushes out this brain AI to protect itself?

I mean, just think of that in terms of any care, any program, any sort of lifestyle, anything. If people are not in some sort of rhythm with the light and not sleeping at a decent time, it's going to disrupt and undermine almost anything if they're not doing.

Absolutely. Every cell in your body has a twenty four hour clock and it is not a. Coincidence that the spin, the spin of the Earth is once every 24 hours, because for part of that 24 hours, the portion of earth that you happen to be on is bathed in sunlight. And for the other part, it's not. So our whole nervous system, brain, spinal, cord, skin, everything, pancreas, it has to be anchored to something.

It needs to know when the pancreas should be active, when the gut should react, when certain parts of the brain should be active and others should be asleep in humans. What we know absolutely for sure is that we are tied to the light, dark cycle, which is by definition the spin of the earth. Right. And the movement around the sun. And it's and it's translated that the the position of the planet Earth relative to the sun is translated into a hormonal signal, which is called melatonin.

So when days are long, how do you know days are long? Because you're getting a lot of light coming through, even if you're not awake all day. The intensity of light right now is different at other times a year. Days are long that suppresses melatonin. So melatonin is released by the pineal. Melatonin is the sleepy hormone makes you fall asleep when days are long. Melatonin suppressed, looking at light in the middle of the night suppresses melatonin.

That's why it's not good in the middle of the night, when days are shorter, the melatonin pulse gets longer and longer. And depending on where you are in the earth as the earth goes around the sun and it tilts the solstices, right, right. Equinoxes and solstices, all that stuff. If people want to look that up, they can. But the earth is tilted. So the day length changes. Your brain actually knows what time of year it is.

It has a calendar. You have Serkin, your rhythms, rhythms and gene expression and cells that are based on how much melatonin you had last night relative to how much you have tonight, because if you had a little less last night than you do tonight, the days are getting shorter because melatonin longer, melatonin days are getting shorter. These are powerful mechanisms in humans, and so they govern all our internal biology. And so the visual system, hopefully now people will think about it a little differently.

You've got a circadian clock, you got a or canula clock, and it boils down to some really simple behaviors. Get some sunlight in your eyes in the morning. If it's cloudy, get it anyway because it's coming through the clouds if you live in a cave using artificial bright light. But if you don't get some bright light and as much as you can throughout the day and if and you know, if unfortunately you have someone who's who's ill, try and get them in your window, try and get some sunlight coming through the window and then at night try and, you know, you have to be super neurotic about it.

But try and stay away from bright lights, especially screen lights between 11:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m. You have to get up and look at the you know, you go to the bathroom, you turn on the light, OK, if you you know, it's an emergency, OK, you're not going to completely screw yourself up, but then get back on track.

It just informs so much. I mean, it gets me to like because, God, there's so much I would like to dive into that. But I want to just touch on before we go.

I want to touch on the the neurodegenerative compound side of it. And that's a big topic for us, I think. But it's been a fascination of mine every generation. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Let's just touch on on that a little bit like what have you found and what have you started to explore? Because now it's like God, the combination we've got to talk like business wise, there's some potential cool things to merge the neuroscience, the eyes, the breathing compounds like. It could be a xtravaganza for the brain, for sure. Yeah, I think there are a couple of things around regeneration in support of the nervous system. So neuroplasticity brain's ability to change in response to experience is driven by a process where first as an adult, anyway, you need to engage in these highly focused states.

And then and those can be very intense. You need alertness, you need focus, and then you need rest. And it's during the rest of the actually rewiring happens. The actual like for instance, BDNF brain derived in trophic factor, which you mentioned is involved in that process. But most of the brain driving near trophic factor, it's going to have those effects during the period of sleep, not the trigger sets the release of things like acetylcholine and and after that then come in and it's like it's cause I call in the construction workers.

It's like on a building that's working pretty well. It's saying, well, wait, but we need to put an addition on this thing. And you, Mark, what what part of the building you want to put it on, that's acetylcholine and f and then but sorry, the calling marks the location, BDNF and some other growth factors come in in the middle of the night and they strengthen the synapses. They put the new addition on the building, so to speak, and that's happening in deep sleep.

So if you want to learn, you have to do focus bouts of learning of any kind and then periods of rest and rest is fundamental to that process. And in kids, rest is also fundamental. Kids can also learn passively and all at all ages. I think we can afford to learn through a process like play because play evokes the release of dopamine, putting some humor in there, also putting some intensity in there to get the acetylcholine released, some norepinephrine, you know, like really you have to drive the process.

It can't be passive. Now, in terms of nutrients, they're going to be two ways that nutrients and supplements might affect this process. Whatever compounds nutrient supplements, I don't know what to call them these days. I don't like the word supplement. I'm hoping that in a few years it'll disappear because it implies that you are already are getting most of what you need and it's just kind of a little bit extra or you're adding to what you already need, whereas some supplements are actually supplying something that's really essential.

So they're going to be two ways that you could affect the regeneration and plasticity process with nutrients and compounds. One is going to be to shift the state, your state of mind. So more focus will give you more plasticity because the more focused you get, the more plasticity. So it's it's indirect, but nonetheless, it's important. The other would be. More deeply relaxed for the recovery phase, something sometimes called when the actual plasticity happens, the deeper you can get into slow wave sleep and the more not the more times during the day.

You can access a 20 minute, deeply relaxed state. The more the faster the plasticity is going to happen, because that's when the plasticity happens. So we think of compound, I think of compounds as directly supporting the process, like involved in the changing of connections BDNF release. And I also think of them in terms of adjusting our state so that we can go into plasticity. There's certain things like Berberian, for instance, which comes from a tree bark, which is right.

I think it's an Olympic analog and it tends to suppress things like mTOR. Right. It will lead to a heightened state of alertness. It's it's actually it's a little bit like metformin. It can drop blood sugar. So people have to be cautious with it. You have to know what you're doing. But at the same time, it can cause people to go into states of alertness that can trigger plasticity because starvation and hunger, not bad starvation, but hunger and fasting create a sense of alertness in the body.

Actually, one of the problems where people do long faces, they have trouble sleeping long before you you get lethargic from fasting, you get more alert because agitation and stress were designed to get you to get up and go find food or go find a mate or go find water like that. Discomfort is as a purpose. So in terms of compounds that directly support plasticity or some interesting things out there, there are some things that can trigger the release of growth factors like IGF one.

And those are going to be things that well, for instance, we know exercise increases IGF one in the brain, which is a little counterintuitive because exercise kind of tends to be kind of catabolic. It's kind of burning off energy. But the IGF one release is known to increase neurogenesis in the twenty jars. So the hippocampus, you're getting new neurons, for instance, and the growth factors that are involved. There are other things that can increase. The plasticity process will be things that increase dopamine.

So the one that comes to mind from the more non synthetic side would be like McKernon Perens the word that's impossible to pronounce because I want to. How do you say yeah. Yeah, OK. And that, you know, I think it's the, the outside of a it's the velvet exterior of a bean product that actually is l dopa. Yeah. It's chemically identical to l dopa. It's, it is the precursor to dopamine and dopamine. In addition to being important for reward systems in the brain and positive feelings and things like that, dopamine is a very strong trigger for plasticity because dopamine isn't just released when we achieve something.

A lot of people think it's just released when we win. It's also released as we move toward winning. And we think we're doing we're heading in the right direction. And nature wants to reinforce whatever behaviors or thought patterns occurred. Enroute to the big dopamine payoff. This is actually why drugs like cocaine are so bad, because it reinforces the pursuit of more cocaine.

But in the right double, yeah, it looks back on itself. Whereas if you for instance, if you want to get better at a certain physical or mental pursuit or you're trying to recover, recover from brain injury. And here I want to be clear, I'm not a neurologist. So this is medical advice. But, you know, thinking about how systems in the brain like dopamine can reinforce certain kinds of learning for people that are struggling really hard to learn.

So increasing acetylcholine, increasing dopamine through healthy means, you know, safe means is going to potentially be powerful for increasing plasticity. So I think of it and those are more direct, right? Those are getting to the underlying neurochemistry. So the more substances out there, healthy substances, safe substances that we can find that can. Increase these pathways for dopamine or acetylcholine, the better off we're going to be and and then, of course, in the sleep world, things that can increase GABA, which shuts down the forebrain.

You do that with two to, you know, two vodka and tonics. But that's not a healthy approach, especially over time. But if there are things like Theunissen, which I'm guessing is and that comes naturally from from where does the most mature green things go? There you go. Yeah. So for falling asleep. So you want serotonin and GABA for getting into those deeply relaxed days. So I think there's it's likely that there are going to be or and I should just throw it out one that I use.

And this is not my laboratory's work, but I'm a big fan, at least for men of opinion, which API ge anion, which is a camomile and partially derivative that it is an as a little bit of a hypnotic to help you fall asleep, but also Buffer's estrogen. That's why I don't think it's not necessarily good for women. But so there are some really interesting compounds out there. And then if we were to go on, if we really wanted to go underneath all that, we'd say, well, what supports dopamine, acetylcholine in drive?

You'd say, well, the endocrine system, the hormone system supports the nervous system. You'd say, well, then that there are herbs like Nigerien, herbs like for Dodgier that can support Leweni using hormones, testosterone and testosterone and dopamine are close cousins. Testosterone promotes the release of dopamine. Dopamine does all the beautiful things it does. So you just start to go. It just goes. It just goes and goes. And I do think there are no pun intended.

There are roots in nature's biology at the level of plants. For sure. For sure. And herbs. I mean, some of them I take and some of them are, you know, are unknown to me at this time. I'd love to learn more about them, but they are all funneling towards these neurochemical systems. There's no question about it. So that's a maybe we're doing a deep dive on that.

I think we're going to have the neural thing as a whole galaxy that would be fun to explore.

Epic. Epic, thank you. What a great thanks for the conversation and thanks for letting me talk about animals, because they provide a really rich landscape for thinking about our own biology. And it's just fun to think about. Thanks for the. Thank you.

What a fantastic episode. So tell me, what is one thing you got out of today's conversation? If this episode struck a chord with you and you want to dive a little deeper into my other conversations with incredible guests, you can head over to my website, Derrinallum Dotcom, for more episodes and in-depth articles. Keep diving, my friends. Keep diving. This episode is produced by my team at Must Amplify, an audio marketing company that specializes in giving a voice to a brand and making sure the right people hear it.

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