Huberman Lab

And I got this idea, my friend, Dacher Keltner, who I did a research on Awe long ago, and he really continued it. He wrote this amazing book called Awe.

And he wrote a great book on Awe.

And in it, he talks about his research where he catalogued, what are the experiences that most commonly produce Awe in a large sample, large representative sample of people?

And there's no amount just like technology in saying leave your phone outside of the room for two hours before bed and don't check it for the first four hours that that genie is out of the bottle

And there's a whole book on how you can work less, which a lot of people want to do.

The hero's journey, the hero of 1,000 Faces is that Joseph Campbell.

One of the most important books in my life in the last 12 years has been Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces for the back end of the hero's journey and I haven't read it.

You should actually listen to it.

It's better to listen.

That book is better listen to hero with a thousand faces hero with a thousand faces.

When I so I listened to it audio first and I went back to it and listen to it in paper.

I could not believe how a human could put this narrative together honestly.

When I first read that book Andrews like I'm trapped in the return.

What he lays out in the book is I don't know maybe supposedly 2000 years of culture across multiple cultures.

If you haven't already read books such as surely your joking Mr. Feynman or What Do You Care What Other People Think I encourage you to do so

if you read any of the books about Feynman or by Feynman surely you're joking Mr. Feynman or What Do You Care What Other People Think these are wonderful short stories mostly about Feynman doing things like picking all the locks at the Los Alamos laboratory and putting all the top secret documents out on the floor of the office so that when people came in in the morning they were all out there

The first one entitled How Emotions Are Made and the Second Book, which includes information about emotions but extends beyond that, entitled Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain.

Lisa's at Northeastern University she runs a big lab there she's a world expert in emotions she's written two books that are really wonderful one is how emotions are made which was her first book the second one is seven and a half facts about the brain

One of his more notable books is entitled Deep Work, Rules for Focus Success in a Distracted World.

Deep Work is a book that has had tremendous positive influence on my work life and indeed my life in general, because it spells out how exactly to go about doing one's best possible work.

For me, that's in the context of science and podcasting, but it includes tools that I and many others have extended to other aspects of their life as well, and it's a book that I highly, highly recommend everybody read.

I can't say that I've adopted all the principles but that's on me not you. You provide incredible incentive for Y1, ought to pursue Deep Work and slow productivity in service to high quality true productivity etc.

And I always used to say okay when your Deep Work is not flow because of this like a lot of Deep Work is you're trying to do something that is beyond your comfort zone and that's going to be difficult where Anders actually explicitly says deliberate practice and flow are very different.

I'm a big fan of Cal Newport, he wrote the book Deep Work. I believe he was the one who said context switching is terrible for the brain.

The title of that book is Life Span Why We Age and Why We Don't Have To.

The book didn't get much attention but one of the things that you just said really remind him of ory I sat down with him I actually went to his home and sat down with him and he said fasting is wonderful but these pulses where you nourish the body or even slightly over nourish the body provided they aren't too frequent have a tremendous effect on vitality

After reading your book, I started purchasing for her and giving her an amend supplement.

David Sinclair's book, Lifespan. David as many of you know is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School. LiveWired is a terrific book about aging as a disease and the future and present of longevity treatments.

I'm not going to lean everything on the visual system, but I've been listening to this book that unfortunately is only available as an audio book called Daily Rituals, which it's got two minute chapters and it describes the Daily Rituals of writers and artists and creatives.

One of the old book that Tim actually produced the audio book, Daily Rituals.

I first learned about Robert's work from reading the book Mastery, which to my mind is a brilliant exploration and a practical tool for how to think about and pursue one's purpose.

And the reason I recommended Mastery is because these students were soon going to go into the great jungle of post undergraduate education.

Mastery transform my entire life and in many ways this podcast probably wouldn't exist where it not for Mastery because it really embedded in me this idea that we all have a deeper purpose and it explains how to go about finding that purpose.

And then I read Mastery and I realized yes I love running a laboratory I love teaching but there's something else for me and it has to do not with a podcast I even know what a podcast I probably knew what a podcast was

And so I tell you that and I also will use that as a segue for asking you now since I'm sure people's ears are picked up to this. How do you find your purpose?

I like Robert Green's book Mastery because I've had amazing mentors and that book is all about finding mentors and assigning mentors to you even if you don't know them.

She has a wonderful book called The Creative Habit. And she claims that as people get older, one of the reasons that they slow down so much is that--she's not a neuroscientist, but she hypothesizes that they engage in a lot less spontaneous movement.

I knew I wanted to host Twyla on this podcast after listening to her book, The Creative Habit, where she spells out how to build a schedule, habits, and routines that make your best creative expressions come to life.

The Creative Habit. It's just an incredible book, and it's taught me so much.

To learn more about her work and to find a link to her truly spectacular book, The Creative Habit, please see the show note captions.

I think it was Sam Sheridan who wrote A Fighter's Heart, an excellent book.

And for anyone male or female, any age who's interested in the human spirit, I recommend A Fighter's Heart because it's about the different fight sports, but it's really about the path of self-discovery.

There's a book called A Fighter's Heart by Sam Sheridan. And it's a pretty interesting account of all the different forms of martial arts and fighting.

There's a theory of emotional development that I find particularly interesting which is from Alan Shore at UCLA, the talks about how most of our testing of bonds and relationships is this sea-sawing back and forth between very dopaminergic so driven by dopamine or serotonergic driven by serotonin states.

...the way it's framed in that book and in his book and in some of the language around there's a round right brain left brain and we've all heard this stuff before that the right brain is thought to be the emotional side...

...that the right brain is holistic that it's emotive and that the left brain is logical sequential and analytic and that's not what Schor was proposing...

...there are some right brain left brain differences but the idea that the right brain is synthetic holistic and emotive and that the left brain is logical sequential and analytic is false, there is zero neuroscience evidence for that whatsoever...

...I invite anyone who's interested in this to look up some of Dr. Shore's work...

My favorite book about meditation is called Wherever You Go There You Are.

I just got sent the 30th anniversary edition, which is completely rewritten. I have not yet read the rewritten version. But I love the original version and I know the rewritten version.

Such a great book.

And one of the things that I remember about that book that helped me through so many years of life and I have to go back to is this mountain visualization meditation? Being a mountain.

I don't know why I was so helpful. But goodness, was it helpful for me? It's a beautiful idea.

That book is still available now. That book is called Wherever You Go There You Are by John Kabat-Zinn.

And one of the books was the book Longitude which is a wonderful story about discovery of time keeping devices at sea.

the book Longitude ... it's an incredible book ... doesn't require any science or technical background to read

The Naked Warrior

I read The Naked Warrior. I was closed when I read it. It's a wonderful book because it talks about body weight only exercises and the concept of crushing your fist to improve grip strength.

John Rady who's a professor in Harvard Medical School. He wrote a book called Spark which is one of the early books, at least from an academic about brain plasticity and the relationship between exercise and movement in plasticity.

And John who I have the good fortune to know has described to me experiments or I should say observations of species of ocean dwelling animals that have at least for the early part of their life a very robust and complicated nervous system.

But then these particular animals are in the habit of plopping down onto a rock they find a kind of a safe comfy space and they actually stick to that rock.

And they don't move anymore for a certain portion I should say the late portion of their life and it is at the transition between moving a lot and being stationary that those animals actually digest their own brain.

They literally metabolize a good portion of their nervous system because they decide don't need this anymore and gobble it up use it for its nutritional value and then sit there like a moron version of themselves with a limited amount of brain tissue because they don't need to move anymore.

one of the more popular books that I think is quite good is from my friend and colleague John Raidi who's a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School ...he wrote the book Spark a few years back and I think it's still very relevant and John talks about the important role that play exerts in the neuroplasticity process and points to a number of different protocols that one can engage in he also points to the importance of navigating new environments to not just go on the same hike every week or take the same walk but actually get into new novel environments so you're starting to sense a theme here there's novelty exploring contingencies keeping the stakes relatively low etc etc but these really are the gates to this holy grail that we call neuroplasticity

The Salt Fix is an interesting read because it points to first of all the history of salt in society and as it relates to health it actually emphasizes some of the major missteps maybe even pretty drastic errors that have been made in terms of trying to interpret the role that salt has in various diseases and emphasizes some of the ways in which perhaps increasing salt can actually improve health outcomes and I think it strikes a pretty nice balance between what's commonly known about salt and what I believe ought to be known about salt or at least taking into consideration.

The recommendation he made was anywhere from 8 to 12 grams of salt a day which corresponds to 3.2 to 4.8 grams of sodium

The Salt Fix also describes in quite beautiful detail the relationship between salt intake potassium intake and the relationship to the sugar consumption system

The Salt Fix describes the rationale behind those recommendations

and indeed many people find, and it's reviewed a bit and some of the data are reviewed in the book, The Salt Fix, that when people increase their salt intake in a backdrop of relatively unprocessed foods, that sugar cravings can indeed be vastly reduced.

He has a wonderful book called Right Brain Psychotherapy, it's a little bit technical but if you're interested in some of the studies this book Right Brain Psychotherapy details how everything from nursing of children to play time behavior to strange situation type task behavior that we talked about before which of course occurs when children get dropped off at daycare or nursery school or with babysitters etc and indeed all types of caregiver child interactions tune up that autonomic nervous system so that the child ends up with an autonomic nervous system that either tends to lean more towards alert and anxious or can be very alert but calm or can be very calm and hard to budge again it's the tightness of that hinge that really underlies these attachment styles that we were talking about earlier.

And if you want to check out his work, he's actually got a few YouTube videos out there. Again it's Alan Shore spelled SCHORI. I'd love to get him as a guest on the podcast. He also has a book, it's called Right Brain Psychotherapy and it's an excellent book. It's actually pretty accessible even if you don't have a background in biology or psychology.

And his most recent book is the one that I'm reading now, which is called When Men Behave Badly. The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment and Assault.

It's a really important book, I believe, and one that doesn't just get into the darker aspects of human mating behavior and violence, but also strategies that people can take to ensure healthy mating behavior and relationships.

In my new book When Men Behave Badly I have a section on financial infidelity where I summarize all the research that has been done.

And then in this book, When Men Behave Badly, about some of the darker sides of human mating like intimate partner violence, stalking, sexual harassment, sexual coercion.

So that's what that book's about and I think it, you know, it's gotten well reviewed and people find it very useful in understanding what is otherwise a lot of baffling phenomena and why do men and women seem at odds with each other in so many domains, why do some of these recurrent forms of sexual conflict occur.

my most recent book is called When Men Behave Badly, The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault. And that book deals with conflict between the sexes, sexual conflict.

We also discuss Dr. Deisseroth's newly released book which is entitled Projections, a Story of Human Emotions.

This is an absolutely remarkable book that uses stories about his interactions with his patients to teach you how the brain works in the healthy and disease state and also reveals the motivation for and discovery of these channel options and other technologies by Carl's laboratory that are being used now to treat various disorders of the nervous system

I found our conversation to be an absolutely fascinating one about how the brain functions in the healthy state and why and how it breaks down in disorders of the mind.

Projections is absolutely masterfully written. It's just beautiful and it's accessible to anybody even if you don't have a science background.

I learned through the course of reading Carl's book, Projections, that not only is he an accomplished psychiatrist and obviously an accomplished research scientist and a family man but he's also a phenomenal writer.

One of the things that I took from reading your book, in addition to learning so much science and the future of psychiatry and brain science, was amidst these very tragic cases and sadness, and a lot of the weight that that puts on the clinician, on you also, that there's a central cord of optimism, that where we're headed is not just possible, but very likely and better.

I wanted it to be for everybody, literally everybody in the world who wants to read it. I kept these two goals in mind the entire time, balancing rigorous science with hopeful optimism.

It's a wonderful, it's a masterful book, really, and one that as a scientist and somebody who is a fellow brain explorer, hits all the marks of rigor and is incredibly interesting. Definitely check out the book.