The Biology of Social Interactions & Emotions | Dr. Kay Tye

welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine my guest today is Dr K Tai Dr K Tai is a professor of neuroscience at the sulk Institute for biological studies she did her training at MIT and at Stanford and is currently an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute which is a highly curated group of individuals who are incentivized to do high-risk High reward work and Pioneer new areas of biological study throughout her career Dr Kai has made fundamental breakthroughs into our understanding of the brain including demonstrating that a brain area called the amydala which most people associate with fear and threat detection is actually involved in reinforcement of behaviors and experiences that are positive and involve reward her current work focuses on various aspects of social interaction including what happens when we feel lonely or isolated indeed today K Tai will tell us about her discovery of so-called loneliness neurons neurons that give us that sense that we are not being fulfilled from our social interactions she also describes a phenomenon she discovered called social homeostasis which is our sense that we are experiencing enough not enough or just enough social interaction irrespective of whether or not we are an introvert or an extrovert we also talk about social hierarchies and social rank how people and animals tear out into so-called alphas and betas subordinates and dominants Etc in all sorts of social interactions I think everyone will find that discussion especially interesting and we talk about the role of social media and online interactions and why despite extensive interaction with many many individuals those social media and online interactions can often leave us feeling deprived in specific ways we talk about the neurochemical the neuros circuit and some of the hormonal aspects of social interactions it's a discussion that by the end will have you thinking far more deeply about what is a social interaction and why certain social interactions leave us feeling so good others feeling sort of me and why other social interactions or lack of social interactions can often leave us feeling quite depleted even depressed it's a conversation Central to mental illness and the understanding of things like depression and anxiety PTSD and isolation and it's a conversation Central to mental health and in order to build healthy social interactions before we begin I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford it is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast our first sponsor is eight sleep eight sleep makes Smart mattress covers with cooling Heating and sleep tracking capacity I've spoken many times before on this other podcast about the fact that sleep is the foundation of mental health physical health and performance now one of the key aspects to getting a great night's sleep is to control the temperature of your sleeping environment and that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep your body temperature actually has to drop by about 1 to 3° and in order to wake up in the morning feeling refreshed your body temperature actually has to increase by about 1 to 3 degrees eight sleep makes it extremely easy to control the temperature of your sleeping environment at the beginning middle and throughout the night and when you wake up in the morning I've been sleeping on an eight Sleep mattress cover for nearly 3 years now and it has dramatically improved my sleep if you'd like to try eights sleep you can go to 8sleep.com huberman to save $150 off their pod3 cover eight sleep currently ships to the USA Canada UK select countries in the EU and Australia again that's 8sleep.com huberman today's episode is also brought To Us by levels levels is a program that lets you see how different foods and different activities and your sleep patterns impact your health by giving you real-time feedback on your diet using a continuous glucose monitor now blood glucose sometimes referred to as blood sugar has an immediate and long-term impact on your energy levels and your overall health one of the best ways to maintain focus and energy throughout your day as well as to keep your so-called metabolic Health in best order is to make sure that your blood glucose never spikes too much nor does it get too low with levels you can monitor how different foods and food combinations impact your blood glucose levels on a momentto moment basis I've been using levels for some time now and it's really helped me understand which foods and food combinations exercise schedules and sleep schedules are optimal for my blood glucose 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huberman and now for my conversation with Dr K Tai Dr K Tai welcome Andy huberman what a treat folks are going to hear you call me Andy and wonder if my name is Andy I always know who I'm speaking to according to whether or not they call me Andrew which is my family and people that I know after a certain period of my life Drew which are people that know me through my very brief and a non- illustrious career in boxing and Andy which are people that met me as I was coming up through science uh let's just put it this way there was another Andrew we did a coin flip and I lost so Andy is fine Andrew is fine whatever makes you comfortable what's important today is not how anyone refers to me but rather the discussion about your work which is spectacular I've known you a long time and I've been following your career and it's just been a amazing and wonderful to see the contributions you've made to science and also to the culture of science so we're going to talk about both of those things to kick things off let's talk about a brain structure that most people I think have heard of but that is badly misunderstood and that's the amydala most people hear amydala and they think oh fear that's what the amydala is all about but you know and I'm hoping you'll educate us on the fact that that the amydala is actually far more complex than that and far more interesting than that so when you hear the word amydala where does your mind go I agree that a lot of the the bandwidth on the amydala has been occupied by fear studies but we've known actually for really long time that the amydala is important for all sorts of emotional processing since cluver and buy performed lesions on on monkeys and found that monkeys would then have flat affective responses to all sorts of different stimuli poop food inanimate object whatever it was just nothing no emotion no emotional response no motivational significance however you want to phrase it to things that usually would make you either you know disgusted or excited or neutral and so um I think that that knowledge about the amigdala was there from the beginning it's not something I came up with um but then it's interesting it's almost a it's a meta statement or meta observation about how scientific research progresses sometimes you make a lot of progress in one particular vein because it's easy to press forward there but it's important to also think about all the other parts and filling in the space in between to make sure you haven't missed anything so the narrative about the amigdala became about fear and I think also just when we think about survival when you are an animal in the natural world especially if you're a prey animal which is the majority you know that's a lot of animals um then you need to prioritize escaping a predator it's immediate threat on your survival versus reward set mating drinking water getting food these things can be done later escaping this Predator is Paramount and so there should be some natural asymmetry in how we process emotion at Baseline and so that's something that we've looked into a lot as well but um I think the the big picture discovery that um my team has contributed to our understanding of the migula is that it represents a fork in the road uh for processing emotional veence and thinking about all these old psychological theories about how do you emotionally evaluate the world around you what's what's the what's the chain of events is there a chain of events what's happening in a certain order um versus what's happening in parallel for example one model is you know there's all this information that comes in and then we have to filter out what's important um what's going to be something I need to pay attention to versus what do I need to ignore if I'm driving I need to pay attention to the road this this light this pedestrian just started walking versus you know what it feels like for my sock to be touching my foot not super relevant right now or the my butt against the seat not nothing I need to pay attention to I need to focus on you know the dynamic information then you have to select you know the Second Step would be selecting whether it's good or bad and what you want to do with it and so that process I think the selection of whether you're um assigning it a positive or negative veilance happens in the amydala so glad you brought up this word veilance I think it's a word that some scientists but most of the general public are probably not familiar with so let's um talk about veilance and then I want to go back to the amydala and um kind of explore some of its diversity of function a little bit more so when I hear the word veilance I think goodness versus Badness yeah of something is that basically basically it's been used in a lot of different fields I think of that you know negative and positive numbers or or um but it's an analogy that we take to just mean yeah net positive net net negative and it's it's a intentional departure from the word value um value becomes very scalar everything's on you know it can be in the same direction with different magnitudes is often how we think about value it it could be representing both valances but um often it's a small reward and a big reward or small punishment and big punishment is how experimentally we parse um value and so veillance is just asking about um how your brain responds to things that are good or bad what are neurons that might respond similarly to things that are good and bad you know those might be importance neurons rather than um positive or negative veilance neurons so yeah I I think it's a it's just a term that that signifies that next step so when we walk into say a novel environment um do you think that our amygdalas are active and really trying to figure out whether or not an environment a set of people or person is safe and really just check that box first in order to be able to do other things is you know is this business of um determining veilance and the role of the amydala in that kind of the first gate that we have to walk through anytime we're in a new environment for instance you showed up here today and you mentioned you know I think I locked my car and um and I said you'll be fine in this neighborhood either way and then you walked in and presumably you were taking in the new environment meeting some new people um we had a little discussion about caffeine uh a little discussion about alcohol and presumably because you and I know one another you felt safe I would hope so but presumably the amydala is always performing this role even if we have some prior knowledge about something just figuring out am I safe here where are the exits where are the entrances uh who's here what's their story um do you think all of that is is operating and do you think it's always conscious or is it largely unconscious to us okay so there's a few different questions there um first I want to address the the question about novelty and then I want to come back to this the other issue of conscious but um the way that amigdala works is its job is is to assign meaning to anything that could have motivational significance and so if it's a brand new thing we're paying attention we're seeing if if it if it mattered did it matter and so I think anything that's novel even if we don't know what it means a loud sound you've never heard before um um even if it signifies nothing of motivational significance the first few times that you're presented with it you'll get an amigdalar response so you see this in the lab play the tone for the first time and then there's a response that rapidly decays when the tone doesn't end up predicting anything that the the animal can can detect or human is this also true in this is true in humans um if you're the type of person that puts your phone on do not disturb versus has it on vibrate and you know sometimes it's always vibrating and it's just it vibrates all the time whereas I put my phone on do not disturb and so when someone else's phone rings it's very startling to me but they're they don't even notice because their phone that's just the sound their phone makes it makes it all the time so I think it has to do with how many times you're presented with it and it's a startle response so the first few times that you are presented with a stimulus uh the amydala will respond and then it decays very quickly and then only if that stimulus predicts something important or something rewarding or or punishing then uh will will it begin to respond again so it's it's like you're giving everything novel a chance to to tell you in one trial in single trial learning um if something's going to happen and so um I think a fire alarm is a great example you know fire alarm goes off you're you're instantly you know you're looking around is there anything happening even even just people rushing out you know there's there's this the Salient thing that you're going to respond to and you know if you have lot of fire drills then you might respond differently after a while so I think that's the habituation component you mentioned that the igala will respond to a novel stimulus um and if it predicts something interesting then other things happen we'll talk about those um if not the amydala stops responding and you said something really important which is that the amydala will respond to something that is predicting reward or punishment and I think most people don't realize that in fact I think a lot of early career neurobiologists don't realize that that the amydala is not just involved in fear and Punishment um so when we talk about the amydala presumably we're talking about the amydala complex a bunch of other things so is it true that there are neurons in the amydala complex that predict reward and others that predict fear and Punishment yeah so um as a graduate student I worked on a part of the amydala called the basolateral amydala it's still a complex within the broader amydala um this brain region is cortical like in that it's mostly glutamatergic neurons with some gab argic neurons mixed in but without the same structure that the cortex has um and I studied the that mdala in the context of reward I found essentially that when you induce plasticity you get a synaptic strengthening when you uh when animals learn things amigdala neurons fire in response to cues that predict rewards and this was you coming into the context of a field that had shown that this happens with fear and so this became I I remember my the very first time I gave um a SC a presentation at a scientific conference I was a junior graduate student I was given a 10-minute talk at the you know inaugural amigdala a Gordon research conference many famous professors were speaking and there were two talks about the amigdala and reward and I was one of them and the response to the talk was just how is this possible how can how can the amydala how can how can you get the same readout for reward and fear and really it came to be there's two two possibilities I mean there's more possibilities but the main two possibilities are number one that the amydala wasn't specific for fear at all it just responds to anything important if it's important it responds period the other possibility is that the amydala is sending has different neurons that respond to positive and negative predictive stimuli and sends this information to different Downstream targets to respond differently obviously I respond differently to a reward I walk towards it I I consume it a punishment I'm avoiding it and so clearly the behaviors are diametrically opposed and so to me it seemed very possible at least that that there was a Divergence point and maybe this could be it and so we just did some very simple experiments when I first started my lab to trace the projection targets of amydala neurons and record and so everything's all mixed up together so it's not obvious that they would that that this would be a fork in the road but when you look at them you do see that there are projections that come from the amigdala that are predominantly encoding either reward or fear and there's many different projections and um you know this is just the beginning but this was a time when it was a novel concept to even think that neurons from one region could have completely different functions going to different Downstream targets which now seems totally obvious um and it there's hundreds and hundreds of papers showing it now but at the time it was difficult to get this work published because that's just not how people thought about information moving through the brain I guess well I think um first of all such important work and so wonderful to be uh early in the the phase of recasting how the brain works which is what you did um I think most people in the general public still think amydala fear and uh clearly it's able to Signal reward and Punishment as you discovered and are now pointing out um I'm curious does the amydala have a direct line to some of the organs of the body that can change our bodily activation State heart breathing rate um muscle tension because I think most of us experience fear and reward as both in our head in our brains but also of the body great question great question so um I'll tell you the clues that lead me to my current working model which may you know is not necessarily the final word but I would say that I think the amydala complex as we're discussing it these 13 subnuclei that reside you know in the temporal lobe they are important for assigning importance but they're not important for producing the actual autonomic arousal that we associate with Panic or fear the reason I say this is there's a famous case study patient SM who have has bilateral damage to her amyd and um in you know no responses to emotional faces no responses to fearful stimuli um but if you if capable of having the Panic response due to low to to Suffocation associated with with Suffocation and so there's still the ability to produce that panic and arousal response um it's just not the cognitive evaluation of it I think that's what we think the amydala is doing is assigning that it it does receive information from the rest of the body um there are for example gin receptors in the amydala things that can sense hunger and um we've done some some work looking at this kind of inspired by I'm not sure if this if you're familiar with this study um it's a controversial study Dan zigger 2011 but where the Supreme Court judges they they looked at Supreme Court Judge rulings on on parole decisions um across the day relative to meal breaks and you can see right after it's like it's like breakfast you know 90% everybody's getting P everybody's getting out yeah and then it just drops to 10% then there's lunch then we're back to 80% and then it just precipitously drops to single digits again W so the judges are changing the leniency of their rulings depending on how wellfed they are you know there there are counterarguments to this but that is strongly what the data suggests you know it is not a controlled study it's just a striking correlation um but it's the it's it's not a completely novel concept the hangry phenomenon I'm sure I don't know everybody's different I certainly experience it um but we we think that when you are getting strong signals from the body for example you know I think I think the amdal is going to be able to detect a lot of different homeostatic inputs even though we haven't we don't have evidence for that yet but for specifically energy balance when you're hungry um your amydala can detect it perhaps through grin receptors or other other you know mechanisms um and then what we see is that in that food deprive after one day of food dep deprivation for mice um you can see this shift in the balance between the positive veilance um encoding projection neurons and the negative bance and coating projection neurons and a at Baseline fear trumps all the negative projection neurons you know can silence the reward projection ones which makes sense if I need to run away from this Predator you know I can't I can't worry about eating this food right now but if I'm in a near starvation like state which for my they have very high metabolism so one day without food is a really big deal deal um they only last a few days so um at this point they are kicking into survival mode where actually getting food becomes the the greater need and you'll see animals you know hunting in ways they normally wouldn't hunt when when they're really desperate and so this mode of of food deprivation shifts things so that the reward um pathway actually has stronger power to to influence and silence the uh fear pathway than before wow the brain is so smart it really is it can take what we normally think of as a priority list fear and staying safe is more important than food reward and then if food and acquiring food is critical to survival it can invert all that is what you're saying exactly amazing and it happens you know in a day it seems reversible so that's something that we're looking at right now and thinking about um how specific is this this to food is this true for lots of different things what about exercise other other stressors that are you know potentially more positive the amydala is able to detect a lot of different signals from the environment and we're not sure how all of that gets in there um so I think one of the the detection of the environment has been you know really well worked out in terms of our basic sensory modalities but think about the things that really affect your emotions day-to- day at least for me as a human in this Society the things that affect my emotions mostly today are almost entirely social interactions very subtle ones ones that don't seem to threaten my life or safety you know very small subtle um social interactions are are what you know have the greatest bearing I think on um my emotional evaluation and my emotional bandwidth and what is that how do we detect that how do we assemble this information apply all the Nuance you know put on the onion layers of social programming to come out with whatever you know I interpret this gesture to mean it's it's pretty incredible and so that's kind of where uh my research program has has been sliding it's such a interesting area let's drill into it a bit um and to put it in context maybe um talk about social media um so on social media um whether or not it's Instagram or X those are seem to be the two major platforms I'm not on Tik Tok um people say stuff sometimes they say positive things sometimes they see say negative things sometimes they say things that are sort of neutral um so it seems to me that nowadays if one is on these social media platforms that we are um we've sort of crowdsourced this phenomenon of social interaction in a way that we hadn't before because I I grew up prior to the Advent of social media and I could bring my physical body into certain environments and not others even at high school I could hang out we had an area called the Batcave where you know skateboarders and some other at that time Misfits hung out with the quad where the cool kids hung out um Etc you could you could pick your Niche okay social media is not like that you can pick followers they can pick you Etc but I think since most people have social media nowadays seems or on there in some ways that we've placed ourselves in the center of an arena which we have a ton of incoming input we all most of us have amigdalas two of them amigdala you pointed out one on each side of the brain and presumably we're on these platforms to receive positive feedback and avoid negative feedback however there does seem to be a cohort of people who seem to like the friction of com combat or kind of let's just call it high friction interactions or moderate friction interactions they like to argue they like to parse ideas it's not all bad necessarily um so have you ever looked at social media in your in your own mind looked at social media through the lens of of amydala filtering or through the lens of of neural circuit filtering and wondered um what's going on there that someone with without your in-depth knowledge of these brain circuitries would not think to uh look at that landscape through or maybe we could just do that now as a as as a kind of playful exper I like that um so I a lot of people ask me about social media from the context of is this of is this social contact meaningful is this positive does this count does this help you not feel lonely um and of course I don't know the answer we haven't done that particular study yet and I don't I don't know of that specific study having been performed but my prediction um is that it's not going to do much because I I believe that a key component of what I would consider social contact heavily depends on having some interbrain synchrony some interaction in in that is synchronous and I think with social media sometimes there can be an engaging dialogue that plays out in near real time but generally speaking it's asynchronous you're looking at things that are happened that you're not a part of you're excluded from all these things they happened in Australia yesterday and I'm on there saying cool love it and then the person's already asleep yes exactly that's what you mean by ASN asynchronous like that we're not experiencing things at the same time it's not a shared experience you know that in in terms of that having that Bond necessarily and so I've never actually been asked about how the amydala processes social media um I guess I think what happens is you know the amydala is just responding to stimuli it's sending up bottom up signals you know it's a caricature of of um bottom up and top down processing let's give an example that I'm I'm walking down the street and all of a sudden I hear like a really ferocious dog barking at me all going crazy and then I get super scared and then I realize okay there's a fence so the amydala detect you know heard the dog barking he there's a dog barking and you know I'm freaking out then my prefrontal cortex realizes there the F it looks very sturdy this fence looks stable and then I'm relaxing and I'm resuming my walking normally you know I think that's sort of the dance that our brain is doing when we have top down and bottom up uh information that we're trying to stay focused so for me I think when I'm on social media there's so many stimuli that that are evoking responses and um to be completely transparent and I know this is not something that everybody else does or can do or is necessarily what's best for them but I work very hard to control input from the top down um in terms of I really really limit the amount I I basically don't check email or go on social media I would say I'm on social media or email less than one hour per week basically per week per week all I have to say to that is congratulations we'll talk about social media again in a second but as a fellow professor email once a week I've heard of people scheduling their times for email responses but once a week that is awesome I have have people who help me get through it and filter out what's important but otherwise I just whenever I do my own email I say yes to all these things then I make all these plans and then I'm and then I'm have too many trips and I'm responding fra fragmented fragmented and it's just you know overc committing and I think um I know my limits sometimes it's difficult for me to be in my amydala mode responding to stimuli and yet letting my prefrontal cortex do its thing so I've set some very heavy prefrontal cortically selected limits of the input I put in so that my brain can function and be clear I can't be creative I can't have epiphanies if there's all this clutter of like writing this person back and blah blah blah blah blah tweet tweet it's just you know trash out wipe squeegee squeegee the brain down so that we can actually grow something beautiful and new well and I want to re-emphasize what I said in my introduction which is that I mean you are oh so productive and when I say productive I don't just mean productive like plug-and chug you you the work you've done is incredibly creative you transformed our understanding of what this famous structure the amydala actually does I mean you've made so many important discoveries as a consequence of presumably other things but including wiping away all this incoming and clutter as you said controlling the top- down inputs I have to ask just from a practical standpoint during that one hour a week are you reading every email that came in or are you just being very selective about which emails so you're not opening most emails no I don't open most emails amazing no I just I search for the ones that my assistant identifies as the one I need to open there's like a list of things that I'd be interested in and then we'll go through the list and then you know sometimes it requires me to go and find the email and respond to it myself because it that is and then I will do that for 10 you know 10 10 minutes a day or something do you recommend get out of there as soon as I can love it um do you pass on this advice to the people that you train I think it depends on what resources and what's your what's the what's your job right now right so I think um as a trainee I definitely did my as assistant professor I did my own emails but at a certain point um I was just never getting to the bottom and then it would just stress me out make me feel overwhelmed and what is my job my job is to number one be a stable core of a sustainable research program and um that just requires me having a lot of mental health and well-being and um and and clear-mindedness and I need to be able to come up with creative ideas I need to be able to Sprint when there's a deadline and I I just can't exhaust my system with unnecessary I would call them quad four in the time management quadrant if you're familiar with this you know important urgent certain things are urgent but not important some things are Urgent some things are neither important nor urgent that's most emails are are like if you read time management literature and you have the luxury to have someone else help you or something that's like so well trained to be really good at Capt capturing things that are important and you know sometimes I miss emails but emails are not the way my traines would reach me they would reach me in a different way um and then emails are for everyone else that I didn't give my number two you know I feel so honored to have have your contact I'd like to take a brief moment and thank one of our sponsors and that's ag1 ag1 is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that also contains adaptogens I started taking ag1 way back in 2012 the reason I started taking it and the reason I still take it every day is that it ensures that I meet all of my quotas for vitamins and minerals and it ensures that I get enough Prebiotic and probiotic to support gut health now gut health is something that over the last 10 years we realized is not just important for the health of our gut but also for our immune system and for the production of neurotransmitters and neuromodulators things like dopamine and serotonin in other words gut health is critical for proper brain functioning now of course I strive to consume healthy Whole Foods for the majority of my nutritional intake every single day but there are a number of things in ag1 including specific micronutrients that are hard to get from Whole Foods or at least in sufficient quantities so ag1 allows me to get the vitamins and minerals that I need probiotics prebiotics the adaptogens and critical micronutrients so anytime somebody asks me if they were to take Just One supplement what that supplement should be I tell them ag1 because ag1 supports so many different systems within the body that are involved in mental health physical health and performance to try ag1 go to drink a1.com huberman and you'll get a year supply of vitamin D3 K2 and five free travel packs of ag1 again that's a drink a1.com huberman I think this is wonderful advice for people to hear um we have a future guest on this podcast named Cal Newport he wrote the book deep work and he has another book called the world without email he's a computer science professor at Georgetown where he talks extensively about the tremendous career but also relationship and life value of doing essentially what you're describing although I do think Kay that you represent kind of the extreme of what I've um become aware of in terms of people that can limit the amount of time on uh social media platforms and email anyway I just want to say um congratulations I just want to say that again and I think it even if people don't reduce to one hour per week I think that making some effort toward reducing the amount of incoming as you said controlling the top- down inputs to the amydala but also to the rest of the brain involved in Creative processing Etc is so key and we actually do have agency it's just as it's it's tough um sometimes to build up that discipline so uh you're doing a tremendous service by sharing that somebody as successful as you does this presumably is successful in part because you do this could we by extension say that many people since billions of people are on social media are likely um triggering the activation of their amydala clouding out other more potentially productive activation of their neural circuits by sort of just making themselves freely available to the to the uh thoughts and words and impulses of others I mean to me it seems the answer would be yes but I'd like to know what you think I mean I think um and there's something to be said there's definitely been moments where I've I've you know gone a deep into social media and spent more time in a certain burst right that is isolated and I think that there's a lot to be learned from social media so to actually to bring it back to one point you mentioned earlier um on social media sometimes people Pro just want accolades and sometimes there's a lot of of friction one of the reasons I stay on social media even though I'm making this big effort to sort of declutter my Consciousness is because of that feedback especially when you know for someone like you I imagine this has got to be super true and even for me at a certain point in my career it just felt like people don't want to tell me bad news to my face as much anymore everybody's so positive all the the time and you know what they what are they really thinking and social media allows you the protection of anonymity to say what you really think without um consequence essentially and so on the one hand the consequence-free um nature of being able to just say things can be very dangerous but at the same time for me I really value just being able to receive it I I'm you know know I'm a big girl I can filter out what I want when I get the all the inputs but if I don't receive the inputs sometimes it's hard to learn from the feedback I'm not getting so even sometimes feedback is given in a not very nice way I can still create a model for someone else that has this perspective that I can take with me and that can be another perspective I can honor easily in the future because I have this theory of mind for someone some someone would get upset about that you know that's something that could be harmful to people who are you know have this theory of mind so I think it's super valuable from that perspective and that's why I continue to use it great yeah I I really applaud that as well I I always read my teaching evals because they're Anonymous and yes I do wonder you know what grade the different uh people who gave different evals you know got I don't know that information I sometimes wonder do they attend the class or are they just angry they didn't do well on the exam but that really represents the small fraction of feedback that I'm um that I wonder about most of it um that's valuable to me is the hey you know liked the course but these parts really sucked Professor huberman or this part was completely unclear or completely hated the way you blank blank and blanked because that feedback is something I can really work with to improve so I think um course EV vals are are similar to what you're describing I think there's there if I were to just look at the the positive feedback and then ignore the negative feedback and write those people off then I don't think I could improve as a teacher actually I always encourage comments and feedback and suggestions in the YouTube comments for this podcast for that reason and I do read the comments I go through and I read and um a few of them sting um but you know the positive feedback is great too sometimes it's more of this please y or less of that please I think there there's information in that um so I think it sounds like you've been doing all of these things naturally I so so actually then uh since I've had my research group my my lab um we do an anonymous lab survey every it's supposed to be about every 18 months and then it's a whole long process of going through it and it's just evolved it's I think it's the fourth or fifth time we've done it and so it's now I think it's like 70 questions it's so many question we got maybe we should we should trim it down but it it ends up being hundreds of pages of of text you know short answer sometimes long answer feedback from anonymously from people in my lab my lab is pretty big so it's it's you know I'm not even trying to really guess who is saying it it's just feedback and it takes me months to go through with it and and get all the feedback and it is so useful I mean in a class the the the amount of contact that you have is it's it's restricted to this very specific time and space whereas when you're mentoring someone over the course of years there's a lot of different there's a lot of different points of of content and interaction and you know you're in the lab all 40 hours a week or whatever and you know going trips meeting here there's just a lot of different different ways to improve and ways we've never you know I haven't had any training in how to be a really great mentor and so I'm getting that training now I'm making my own course and my mentees are my teachers and um I really am grateful for the the tutelage that they provide for free in this Anonymous must survey sometimes it makes me cry but sometimes it makes me feel really good about something that I'm doing that's working and in any case it makes me feel that I have ground truth I guess I still don't know but when people say things that sting um it makes me feel like they're saying what they really think and they're not holding back it doesn't you know and um bad news feels like reality and so that is very something about that is rewarding um just to feel like I have reality rather than I'm getting something else you know the the model doesn't quite fit it's very unsatisfying with the model doesn't quite fit so I love the word ground truth there's something so beautiful to that and I I resonate with um what you're saying let's go back to social interaction something that your lab is doing um lots of work on nowadays and maybe we could shift to the sorts of social interaction that most of us are familiar with the um sitting across the table having a coffee with somebody that taking a walk with somebody maybe a phone call yeah um maybe a tough conversation um maybe a playful you know um you know unscripted conversation um maybe a meal at a holiday dinner you know there's a huge range there what what do we know about the value of social interaction at the level of sort of core biological needs at the level of neural circuits and maybe even hormones I mean you know most people have heard of oxytocin they think the love hormone but it's there's so much more there for people to understand and know about you know how important is this thing that we call social interaction and how bad do things get when we're not getting the right kinds of social interaction you know I think this is this is a great question and I'm glad that it's become something that has been recognized at a more Global and national scale just the importance of of having social support in our lives for heal for our well-being um but social isolation or even just perceived loneliness has immense Health consequences for all social species so um shortened lifespan increased mood disorders um increased actually morbidity and mortality for diseases like cancer or heart disease that you know um might not be what we would normally think and so I think understanding how each of those processes is happening those mechanisms are far from being worked out but the the correlational evidence is undeniable we're now taking this into the lab really for the first time and so something so simple as social isolation how come we don't know way more about it and um I'm someone who stumbled into the field of social isolation by accident prior to the pandemic and so I'll just say you know the whole story on why there's such a gaping hole in our knowledge as a neuroscience Community about social isolation really comes from Harry haro's work this original work of maternal separation that was undeniably cruel it it caused irreparable damage to these baby monkeys and they never recovered and sorry to interrupt I apologize I'm striving to not interrupt in my life but I but so that people are on on board um could you just briefly describe the harlo experiments yes so they're very famous experiments where they separated uh baby monkeys from their moms and then had either a wire sort of thing holding a bottle so okay what what do you miss most about the mom is it the wire is it the food or is it the the the comfort and then they had so they had a wire thing with with a milk bottle versus you know blankets and cuddly soft things and and the the baby monkeys would go to the cuddly soft thing but you know a blanket is not a replacement for a mother nobody's saying that it is and and through these experiments there's extended maternal separation and it's it it was deemed cruel um there was permanent irreparable damage when you when you rehouse these monkeys they never resocialized normally they had lots of different mental and physical health problems um and I think in humans we know that so you know solitary confinement is considered torture um you know social isolation is a difficult thing to study in in a lot of conditions and we stumbled onto it by complete accident through working with a postdoc a former postdoc in my lab Jillian Matthews who was a graduate student um doing an experiment on on it was just trying to figure out if these dopamine neurons um would also respond to cocaine the way VTA these sorry these vental tegmental area dopamine were known to respond to cocaine wanted to see if these other dopamine respond to cocaine so sort of a incremental study so when you do these cocaine studies you you inject the animal with cocaine or saline and then leave the naive animal in the cage and then you take brain slices record from the neurons and look at the synaptic strengths and so you know the expected outcome sort of was that these dopamine would would be similar to other dopamine erand that showed in you know long-lasting potentiation after a single dose of cocaine but what happened instead was that yes there was potentiation in the cocaine animals there's also potentiation in the saline animals relative to the naive group and this was a huge puzzle what was this and it turned out through many many different experiments um that it's actually because when you inject animals with cocaine you're separating them from the group because they act they act all crazy this is what the way people did the experiment so you inject them with saline you separate them the naive animals just stay there so with their other lit their other litter mates I see so the control group the saine control group is actually a social isolation condition so by accident this control group that didn't make sense was how we stumbled onto so then we tried is it novel cage it's not the novel cage it's the it's the social isolation and so um that is how we became a lab that studied social isolation it was complete accident we weren't sure what what we were looking at and then um we man we found these neurons and we manipulated these neurons and they produced um something very different than other dopamine neurons which normally if you stimulate dopamine neurons these vental tental area midbrain dops like 90% of the time when you you hear people talk about dopam NS they mean these ones and they're the ones where you press the lever stimulate the ner will press the lever thousands of times you know and they love to be stimulated yes if if you're a human and you do cocaine you you most people love cocaine they they want they're very pro-social when they're on cocaine and so that's what dopamine neurons were thought to be doing but these other dopamine neurons in the dorsal rap that I will also say is in the brain stem near to an aqueduct where you could detect signals from the body um but these other dopamine neurons in the raap they when you stimulate them animals don't like it they will not work for reward they actually will move away from a space that's where they're being stimulated you know condition place and real-time Place aversion I don't like the feeling of these neurons being activated please stop it and yet they would be pro-social and so for a long time this was super confusing we couldn't understand it and then just because at the same time we had a um a hunger study going on in the lab we just thought about it like I can eat food because it's delicious and I I want to eat this yummy treat or I can eat because I'm super hungry I feel shaky I'm just to eat this nasty fiber bar the bot of my backpack because I'm so desperate and I need like I need my my blood sugar is dangerously low you know and so there's two reasons that you can eat and one of them is uncomfortable hunger is not comfortable you don't it's not a good feeling to be hungry and so we thought about this and that's kind of how we circularly came around to thinking I think we've discovered the loneliness neurons essentially and so what is loneliness and loneliness is this unpleasant need state of wanting social contact that would have this pro-social effect as well and so um that's basically the very serendipitous loop-de-loop way that I came to be um uh studying how loneliness is represented in the brain amazing before we talk a bit more about these loneliness neurons and some of their inputs and outputs in the brain um how has the discovery of these neurons um perhaps changed the way that you organize your day and week in life right um if at all um for instance are you more aware of how much time you spend alone versus with others are you um more careful or Discerning about who you spend your time with um you know I I asked this um because you know there's so many examples for me in the Neuroscience literature where you know I learned something new about how the brain works and I think oh yeah you know it makes a lot of sense why my sleep isn't great you know it turns out that light exposure to the eyes at particular times of day really sets the whole body and brain into particular rhythms that you know explain why I was a little depressed when I was in graduate school staying up all night doing experiments and I'd sleep much of the day and feel like I was getting 8 nine hours I don't get 8 to nine hours now but um you know and when I wake up early for me personally there's a bit of an anti-depressant effect as long as I slept the night before seasonal effect disorder is real right so you know I think as new information comes online um at least for me it's it's changed the way that I organize my life to to s in subtle or or in not so subtle ways so the idea that there are neurons in the brain that encode loneliness the absence of social contact does that have you thinking you know after a few days of managing the lab uh with which as you point out you have a very large lab lots of social interaction but it's work context social interaction does that um has that led you to think hey you know we should go out to dinner as a lab or I should spend time with somebody who's not in science um or I should spend time by myself because I've had too much social interaction I'm not asking for strict protocols here I'm just wondering if you're willing to get um like play in the sandbox of this with me a bit um how this information perhaps has shaped some of your choices you personally and and be very clear I'm not asking you to dictate what other people do um has it changed your social life so it's really interesting that you ask this question and now that you you know now that you're asking it this way um I I mean of course when I learn new things I I I um take them and Implement them into my life but to be honest in in the cycle of of you know learning and studying and being curious and I actually think where I reside more is when something's going on with me my research program you know research is Mee search it becomes what the re it dictates what the research program evolves into and so for ex for example so I've just had started studying loneliness um a few years before the pandemic hit and then the pandemic hit and it was just a step function like change I went from I'm never alone unless you being in an Uber Alone um or being on a plane and and and just you know constantly people in my office even when I'm going to the bathroom someone's waiting for me outside like you know I'm not it's like I'm hurrying in the bathroom I'm never alone there's like four people in my bed kicking me in the face I'm just you know there's just so much Social contact and then boom you know there would be a day I wouldn't see another like you know just the a not zero but just extremely sudden drop of social contact when there's no more work and you know it was just that that period of time and it was it was very depressing it was just this huge I felt like I was in freef fall and it made me you know at first it was really disruptive and I was worried about myself you know and then at some point I adjusted to it and then I got used to working from home I got started a garden like I got all this you know I got you know I just started a different life pattern that involved a lot of alone time and you know some an alone time personal life AG grew where there wasn't any space for anything to grow before and then I became comfortable with it and so then I start thinking about that that's really where the idea of social homeostasis was born this idea that okay why is it with acute social isolation humans monkeys mice you know you acutely isolate the individual from the social group you reintroduce them to the social group rebound of pro-social interaction oh so happy to see you there's like all these affiliative interactions a Hu a burst of affiliative interactions whereas with chronic social isolation in humans monkeys mice even flies you reintroduce into the social group and you get territorial Behavior aggression avoidance antisocial behavior um or just you know sort of a very different negative veence response to the exposure to the group and so this maybe people brushed it off for a long time is just oh it's confusing this literature is inconsistent or maybe there's one model that makes it all make sense that is social home homeostasis where you know you're used to getting this at a certain point and so my affector system gets activated I I detect that I'm alone it's I want more the deficits detected then my affector systems gets activated this and then I start spinning all the systems that try to get me back into contact I'm calling my friends I'm texting my friend I'm I'm if I'm a mouse I'm making ultrasonic vocalizations I'm exploring outside of the burrow and then you know if my friends don't call me back they're like sorry we don't want to see anyone till end of covid bye whatever it is you know you it's it's not working my correction efforts are failing or maybe a certain amount of time we don't know then I give up I stop I stop calling I stop going out I just make a different life you know you the the the they don't you don't leave the burrow whatever it is and there's in in animals and humans at least behaviorally there's a near step function like drop off of attempts to you know you could see sort of dat oh then they just give up on dating after this one you know whatever happens there's some some straw that breaks the camels back and then this person doesn't want to date anymore or doesn't want to go out anymore whatever and and what is that so that adaptation then you're at a new Baseline you're You're Expecting now your new normal I'm I'm expecting to have a gardening day at home alone not see anyone and then and then a bunch of people come over it feels like a surplus so my previous Optimum you know reintroduction to the social group is now feeling like a surplus an overload overstimulated and that's I think something that a lot of people experience this Whiplash of going into the pandemic and coming out of it different people to different levels it depends on how much you you know isolated while you were on in the pandemic but I think thinking about um your social set point as being being flexible and dynamic Was A New Concept to me and then in my mind the question is what is the part of this process that is causing all these harmful Health consequences like shorten lifespan mood disorders Etc is it the initial detection that I'm missing something and affect your system activation because if that was the case maybe I want to Band-Aid that you know maybe I want to get get a pet get a get a get a zoom buddy I don't know what you know you would have different prescriptions and advice to give people if that were the case versus you would give almost opposite advice if the thing that's causing it is the the set point adaptation then you want to you want to save it off versus if you wanted to accelerate getting into the set point which is better you know is it the adaptation or is it you know kind of trying to fix it and so in one case you would want to ease off the the having the set point happen the set point transition happen in the other case rip it off like a bandaid cold turkey Just Adjust and then you'll be fine you know then you won't worry about it then you won't be lonely anymore because you'll just be comfortable being alone you know people talk about cognitive flexibility um and I think it's it's sort of like that but it's social flexibility I want to be able to be alone I also want to be able to be in a large group and be comfortable and so I think what I've done if anything to change my lifestyle um to accommodate these new insights I've had is is to consciously create Dynamic social experiences lots of social EXP expences yes but also protecting alone time which I never did before I just I just just just gave it all away and you know I realized that having that just made my social homeostatic system feel more elastic and flexible and resilient and less like a crisis if something you know I'm very comfortable being alone I'm super comfortable with my own skin now and it requires investing in that relationship I like how you framed uh earlier I think we were not not recording yet but the relationship with yourself as being a very important relationship and um when I think about brain States you know we don't know this yet but my working model would be that different individuals we represent their identities and whenever they're present it creates a unique Ensemble of that combination of people being present and being alone is also a unique state that cannot be achieved I have the brain state of being alone I cannot achieve it if anyone else is around and that's just what you know that's kind of the working model I have I think what you're saying is uh essential for people to hear because um it makes sense that loneliness would hurt um it makes sense that some people are more extroverted which I think is defined as getting energy from social interactions and resetting energy through social interactions as opposed to introverted which by the way folks introverts like myself do enjoy social interaction it's just that we reset through more um Solo or one-on-one time than we do in larger groups that's my understanding of the introversion extroversion literature we can revisit that but this notion of social homeostasis is I think so key uh important enough that I think we probably want to redefine it um as many times or restate it rather as many times as it's necessary because I believe what you're describing is the same thing that one would experience with food if we eat a lot we're consuming I know 3500 calories a day and then um suddenly we only have access to 1,800 calories a day there's it feels like a deficit because indeed it is whereas after some period of time at 1,800 calories a day 2200 calories a day feels like relative abundance relative abundance um when the pandemic hit I certainly um was unhappy about the State of Affairs in the world of course um but I recall feeling like oh my goodness I finally don't have to commute 90 minutes in each Direction ction to Stanford CU I lived in the East Bay at that time um I felt like I had time to do things I hadn't done in a long time and uh thanks to zoom I was able to get certain things done not others then after about six to eight months when I realized this is going to carry on for a while I remember feeling quite lonely and making some efforts to repair that I think social media not to harp on social media um could do either one of two things and I don't know which in the context of uh social homeostasis either going on Instagram and seeing a lot of familiar faces and comments and accounts could make me feel like I'm getting some social interaction such that then when I close that app and move to my work at my desk or something uh which these days is mostly done um solo um that I would feel like I had social interaction or perhaps it's the equivalent of um calories that um then makes me feel more isolated when I'm not in the app perhaps I find it to be distinctly different than like the experience I had last night of going to dinner with someone I know quite well sitting down and having a open-ended conversation and deciding to close out the night only when we realize you know we got to get up tomorrow for work so when our separate ways um there's something that felt very sading about it so I wonder in this context of social homeostasis whether or not the analogy of social interaction to C caloric intake we could is there another dimension to it where it's not just the total number of calories or the total amount of social interaction but the quality of social interaction the type of social interaction that actually feels like nourishment as opposed to just calories I love where you're going with this and and so um when we wrote this review the first time we you know we're we're conceptu this idea of of how your social set point can change based on if if you're acutely isolated or or chronically isolated and um the Y AIS is the quality SL quantity of detected social contact which is so fuzzy and you know there's it's it's again one of the most challenging frontiers of this field because how even if we measured every single component that the brain can detect of the social the social contact so much of it is about expectation you know like if I think I got a gesture if if I get a nod from the president I'm like oh my god did the president just nod at me that's so exciting versus if I get a nod from my partner I'm like oh my God are they mad at me what's going on why why did I just get a nod right it totally matters the gesture you need the identity there's many different cognitive systems that need to all plug in to this wheel um to make it spin so I think that uh that is one of the the I I think that's going to keep us busy for a while but in terms of your question about social media and when you switch from you know getting social media feedback and then doing work um I think I think it really depends I mean social media is such a large category you can have many different types of responses generally I think the bounds so you know when you say social media versus a real life interaction where you're with someone maybe you're touching maybe you're not touching but even if you're having conversation um you have interbrain synchrony you are um having a lot of interbrain security you're in the same place if but you can have interbrain Security even on the phone right just a voice call is actually a lot more interbrain synchrony than than messages I think I think text messages can bring a lot of anxiety and there's been a lot of commentary about that um and same thing with with with social media I think the the thing about social media that is perhaps um the most harmful or NE negative I think in terms of I when I'm thinking about social nourishment if I you know sort of making that term up on the Fly here but um it's it's almost a withdrawal when social media is posted it's not to you it's to everyone and you could be one of the people that receives this message but it's not even what to you I'm not even talking to you and I'm doing something that's without you otherwise you'd be in this picture and not reading on social media listening to whatever so it's like by almost exclusively you're you're posting about activities that you're being excluded from and someone's not even really talking to you unless they're D you know direct messaging you but then I I kind of consider that a different category if it's like a onetoone communication social media to me is is a blast right it's not it's just you know catching up with someone on social media I I don't really see the Merit of it because I'll just catch up with them when I catch up with them and their kids will just be like way older but you know I don't know I'll actually really catch up with them then just see pictures of you know I don't know I I feel mixed about it because it's not a real connection and it doesn't for me Sate my social appetite to catch up with to to look at someone else's profile on on social media um that doesn't actually do anything for the the connection I I don't know but I seriously doubt tons of oxytocin is released when I you know follow someone's feed about their vacation so I don't know I would I think that it definitely matters the quality and social media is is different than real life interactions for many reasons I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor insid tracker insid tracker is a personalized nutrition platform that analyzes data from your blood and DNA to help you better understand your body and help you reach your health goals I've long been a believer in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason that many of the factors that impact your immediate and long-term Health can only be analyzed from a quality blood test now a major problem with a lot of blood tests out there however is that you get information back about metabolic factors lipids and hormones and so forth but you don't know what to do with that information with inside tracker they make it very easy because they have a personalized platform that allows you to see the levels of all those things metabolic factors lipids hormones Etc but it gives you specific directives that you can follow that relate to nutrition behavioral modifications supplements Etc that can help you bring those numbers into the ranges that are optimal for you if you'd like to try inside tracker you can go to insidetracker docomo to get 20% off any of insid tracker's plans again that's insidetracker docomo I really appreciate your willingness to uh explore in this uh in this context I think your mention of the fact that um real life interaction involves interbrain synchron could be by text scaling up from that by phone um FaceTime or something akin to that video video chat um on social media there is comments back and forth um although that's timec consuming and it's difficult because there's anonymity people are in different places different time zones if you don't know someone it's different context um so I'm really thanks to what you're describing I'm really starting to think about social media as so different than in-person social interactions or by phone or video chat social interactions and how those would differentially impact social homeostasis and it's leading me at least to conclude that at least for me that most social media interactions would create more hunger as opposed to a um sading of of the need for social interaction it's um I have to be careful with the analogies here but since I can do this I I was almost going to make an analogy between um porn pornography uhuh in-person sexual intimacy I suppose there's something in between where people could talk by phone but we don't want to explore this in any kind of salacious way and then um sexual intimacy with with uh with emotion with positive emotion right those there's a scaling Factor there and I'm not P I'm not putting um judgment or veilance I'm I'm certainly not that's not my place as a good friend of mine says I'm not a cop you know I'm not telling people what to do they can't do but it's so interesting to think about these um these circuits within us that create these what you and I in our field call repetitive the desire for or aversive the desire to move away from type responses and how so much of our life aside from you because you're regulating your social media and your uh and your email intake but so much of Life Now is offering us the opportunity to um tickle these circuits or even hit them hard with a Sledgehammer but we're not thinking about these homeostatic mechanisms of whether or not they're creating more hunger for or more satisfaction from yeah and I I I cannot emphasize enough how critical this is and I think that's because you know I'm somebody who does spend a fair amount of time on social media a lot of my my work exists on social media YouTube Etc and I would hope that the work that we're putting into the world with this podcast is creating a assciation of the desire for information rather than a Hunger for More I do hope that but I recognize that educational material on social media represents the the a tiny tiny fraction of what's there so social homeostasis I think is a term that if people haven't already stamped into their mind they should be stamping into their mind and and Dr K Tai deserves credit for that I don't uh I will say that so you don't have to um I've heard you say before you wrote in a review something akin to social contact is either positive or negative when it's deficient or in excess which is I think what you're describing as is social homeostasis is that right when we talked about the quality and quantity um there's just in terms of contact just amount of contact there's such a thing as just the right amount there's some thing is too little there's such a thing as too much there's overcrowding right it doesn't matter who it can be your family it could just sometimes it's like a lot maybe your family depends you know do you know the famous rum dos quote no think you're enlightened go spend a weekend with your parents no no disrespect Mom and Dad I know right um but um I think with quality it matters so much like I was sort of saying before you know the same gesture from the president or my partner it's going to feel very different to me whether that was a slight or a you know it's just it's relative to what is appropriate for our rank for our prior history of relationships for you know the the environmental context and so I think with social media in general and I agree social media is great for a lot of things I mean I and I I I think that having a podcast like this that is accessible to the public makes research more sustainable so I have a lot of things to say about science communication that I'm very you know grateful for but in terms of social media think about the mutual investment when you are interacting with someone on soci social media what are they investing in this connection so if I put out a post about my vacation that is public I'm investing 000000000000 Z one% of my bandwidth to make contact with you you know what I mean and so it's it's it scales up from them if if you're making a voice call with someone you're giving them at least most of your attention for the time that you're on the call that's a lot right whereas you know so so just thinking about the investment is another component there's the realtime component and then there's the the investment component who is it coming from it matters if you're anonymous I really I cannot tell what this means you know a compliment from an or or a hate hate comment or a love comment from Anonymous person I don't know what to do with this you like I just literally don't know how to you know it doesn't really doesn't really do anything for me because I don't know how to interpret it it's almost you know uninterpretable without this other dimension that my brain is has evolved to look for I think so that's you know speculation but I think social media is is operating in a way that that is not ethological and not designed to make us feel better it's just designed to make us want to use it and I think a lot of this comes down to things that are relative you know there's the famous um there's the famous observations if if a monkey sees Another Monkey get a cucumber it's happy with the Cucumber but if a monkey sees the other monkey get grape monkey wants grape you know you want you want to keep up with the Joneses you want what if you see someone else having something suddenly it feels like a loss that you don't have it that you didn't even think that of this thing that you needed right and so I think social media is exposing you to a lot of things that you don't you know that it's it's like this this parameter space you didn't have there's all these things you didn't know you were missing that you didn't need to miss out on and so we have this whole project now we have two projects one that's looking at Social isolation and and following what happens with social isolation across the time course to try to understand is it the amount of time or is it the amount of effort that you put into correcting that deficit um that that makes you leads you to the giving up you know kind of state change and another project that um is about the quality of social contact specifically social exclusion so a different kind of deficit you're with your other animals but there's this this you you know it's four animals that have are um are cagemates and um three animals are on one side able to drink a chocolate milkshake and the other animals ex excluded and this one excluded animal will go up against the the divider and and you know look look frantic and you know ex exhibit lots of behaviors that we would associate in humans with fear of missing out trying to reunite with the group trying to get the attention of the group trying to get over there a lot of attending looks frantic and studying what we think is actually going on and so I think I think coming up with paradigms to try to probe social isolation and we don't even know what behaviors animals exhibit when they're lonely this is this is a challenging field because there's no number of lever presses you know there's no there's no script to follow and there's no trial structure and so for a neuroscientist neuroscientists were trained to be be rigorous about our statistics because of the stochastic nature of neural neural activity and you know how do we process things without a trial structure how do we be statistically rigorous when the animal is just free floating deciding whatever it wants to do and so that is kind of The Crucible that my lab is is working through right now to establish pipelines and techniques and ways to quantify social behaviors and off all the layers I love where your lab is headed which just means we're going to have to have you back on here again at some point in the future to get the answers to those questions that you're now addressing I've long thought that we really know how we feel about somebody when something good happens to them or for them and I never quite understood this at the level of mechanisms how could I it's not more my lab studies but you know I think that there's a natural sort of empathy if one is a healthy uh empathic person to seeing a member of our own species and hopefully uh also to observing the members of other species um you know experiencing some discomfort we don't like that nor should we so another human is in emotional pain right um you know the whale or the Cry of loss is like one that just I think for any person who's empathically tuned is just like G or an animal you hear an animal in pain like goodness I mean I'm not here to diagnose sociopathy but if if that doesn't evoke a at least some sort of response of like oh gosh like what I wouldn't do to remove that pain that their pain is your pain empathy um that seems like a very reflexive circuit or at least I would hope so um but when somebody experiences something positive I think it's normal and healthy to have a um a graded set of responses if it's somebody that we really love um we may not even know them we think yeah like you're you're just reflexively happy for them um somebody that we dislike I think there's a more natural tendency to be like oh you know right you know as as opposed to if that person were in pain I would like to think that even if one didn't like them that you would think like oh that that sucks I'm really sorry to hear that um so I feel like there's some asymmetry in these empathic interactions they're both empathy one has negative veilance pain the other one has positive veilance another member of our species or other species receiving reward and we can Delight in that I mean I I'm almost embarrassed to admit how many ferret and Otter and raccoon accounts I follow because I love seeing them eat I love seeing the little hands of the raccoons there's some great raccoon accounts by the way um and I Delight in it I like Delight in it I want to see the raccoons win I don't know why I just I love animals and so I suppose that's why um so do you think that there that we are asymmetrically wired for this empathic Attunement um can we observe that in other animals I realize this might not be squarely in the Wheelhouse of what your lab is focusing on but I think it it relates enough to the topics that we're covering today that just you know if you'd like to speculate um uh on what might be going on there yeah I I I can definitely speculate something that we think about a lot but again you know I there's some there's some level of this which is semantic um I think of empathy as being defined as being able to understand another animal's emotion and also taking it on so I think um something that's a little bit different than emotional contagion right I see a panic I'm going a group with pan it's not the same thing as uh as as empathy um empathy is often used in in sort of certain contexts like feeling sorry for someone and it's maybe different if for feeling happy for someone and this is something I was just talking about with one of my graduate students the other day why is there is is there an asymmetry in in empathy for positive and negative or is it just what we've studied it's easier to study this so there's a number of you know we don't know the answer but I guess another conceptual framework to put out there I'm not saying it's correct it's I think just a a good tool for debate but um it's not so much that there's good people and bad people and that good people are empathic and bad people aren't uh so you that's quite so simple I I guess the way I think about it is whether you view this other social agent as having aligned goals or agendas as you or are they adversarial so if they're if they're in in your alliance whatever that means broadly defined versus adversarial you would have a different feeling and you know it's it's you see this I guess I was just I was just watching this okay this is just sort of oversharing but this is a podcast not a primary research Journal so I can just say things right so I I watch some trash TV sometimes and you know these reality competition shows where it's like then you vote the two best friends into elimination and they have to they have to eliminate each other mildly sadistic but you know then they're best friends and they like like they you know and then it's basically mutually exclusive either you can care about your friend and feel bad not wanting to send them home or you you kick it you just you know you it's game time and you you you compete and so you can see different individuals wrestling with these two brain States and and how to like what to do but they are essentially you know my my my speculation is that viewing someone as a competitor and they're an adversary they are standing in the way of me getting what I want you empathy goes down it's like inversely correlated to empathy if you are viewed as a competitor so things that would contribute to you creating a model where an in a social agent it is an adversary as opposed to an a potential ally is really what it's going to come down to to the degree that you feel empathy you know like you the second someone you realize someone's out to get you no empathy no and no more empathy for this person who I just realized is out to get me or something like that or you know uh in the case of being isolated for a long period of time you've learned to exist on your own now maybe everyone's your competitor adversary you know and none of you guys are really helping me do my dat like I don't really need you guys for anything so so I'm eating this food or whatever you know I think it just becomes different um when you're part of an ecosystem and you realize that you know there's consequences and there's there's EV every action that you take you know every Act of altruism will be recognized and there you know there's there's there's a there's some score being kept in your when you're part of a society and um and then when you're when you're not there's no there's there's none of that and so I think the degree to which you're integrated in society um it's almost like the extracellular Matrix you know this is a really this is an out there analogy but you know when you think about synapses being made um connections between people there's also all the support material that facilitates certain patterns and certain connections from happening or not happening and and I think um that's it's it's stuff that we haven't Quantified yet but it doesn't you know I think those things should be studied years ago I worked with at risk kids and and a fair number of them had just arrived um from a region of the world that had undergone dramatic sociopolitical um Evolution um and change and it was remarkable because we would put out a tray of food to eat and then the the format was everyone would serve themselves and then um you could uh go get more food if if you if everyone finished um and a couple of these kidss that had come from these very deprived environments um would just take more than their their share it was clear that by taking that other kids weren't going to get any and um and I remember telling them listen we all have to eat more or less equal parts and then we can there is more we can get more and um I'll never forget this kid's response he just turned to me and he said you can't hit us and I said that's true I can't hit you and he and he said so I'm just going to take as much as I want and this took several weeks actually to work out right um because of course I would never hit him and um everyone's his adversary everyone's his adversary and it was remarkable to see the evolution of these kids across that it was about three and a half weeks um at which point they actually became incredibly um good at sharing um but it it took a lot of work it was almost as if even though they knew more trays of food could arrive yeah um not Limitless but there was there was an abundance of food yeah in the moment they were they were solving for that short Horizon moment yeah and it and here we're talking about human beings capable of speech and expression of emotion Etc and he understood the fundamental rule which was I couldn't hit him therefore he could basically do what he wanted without that consequence and which is the main consequence he just faced apparently exactly and um and I remember you know it was it was so striking I'll never forget that and Evolution to a different more um altruistic state was wonderful especially because of what I think what it did for him but but I'll never forget thinking this is a human being who's essentially functioning like an animal MH like an animal I mean I had a Bulldog Mastiff and he was kind to other dogs but if there were unattended to toys at the dog park he was going to pick them up and he put him right in front of himself and his this was down in San Diego and he'd sit with them right in front of him and I'm like C you're not going to play with all those toys but if another dog came and and he wouldn't he would just sit in front of them but another dog would come and try and take one of those toys and he would he had these giant mitts and he would just boom Stam it out and drag it back and so it seems that there are these very primitive circuits about uh resource allocation and protection of resources that in the absence of understanding that there's a much bigger landscape like Costello eventually figured out like tug's a fun game although most dogs couldn't play tug with him there were a few that could he was a 90b bulldog he was just a neck like this but you know to see this in a human being was just so striking I just as you're describing this it's like this adversary versus um neutral versus uh friend it is just so striking and it's got to be you know that that the brain as complex as it is I've often wondered and our colleague Marcus Meister once said that you know circuits in the brain um Can broadly divided into these sorts of circuits into yum yuck and me right Which is far too simplistic right but who am I to argue with the great Marcus Meister um and I'm not going to but it's sort of interesting we sort of Bin our responses into yes okay let let's cooperate or yes let's cooperate you're summarizing veence yeah or or no way no chance like mine yeah versus like me me and um you know as complex as I'd like to think the brain is and we are I mean maybe when it comes down to behaviors and how we interpret input and our decision-making um maybe it's really all about feelings of safety and feelings of um relatedness yeah I think it's also about the IR experiential statistics that you have been exposed to so this this boy who says you I'm gonna take all this food because you can't hit me I mean we don't know but the the picture that grows out of my imagination is this boy had a lot of experiences of people hitting them a lot of experiences of not enough food MH and not a lot of experiences of strangers being nice to them you know like not a lot of people that you could trust that's the that's the experiential statistics that would fit this model someone like like you who's coming in being like Oh no there's more I'm going to give you guys more food for free you know I'm going to give you even more food for it's you know it the experiential statistics are you've come from a world of abundance where people are you know generosity being you've learned being generous can make you have a lifelong friend and all these amazing opportunities that make your quality of life that food is you're never going to think about food again it's about the relationships because that's your experiential statistics and so I think this is such a profound concept about about neuroscience and the Brain about our social structures and how they form what makes a structure egalitarian or despotic right like how how can we as individuals take a structure that is is one format let's say despotic hierarchy and evolve it into something that's more egalitarian and um what are what are the the the levers and what are the parameter spaces that we can pull on and I think these are questions that I mean it's hard to think of what could be more important um but that perspective of thinking about from experiential statistics I think really supports you know the need of of of diversity having bringing in people to Academia whove had very different experiences experiential statistics different biases of what they're going to think is interesting to work on and study and obviously in every every sector of our society so I think um how can we get more diverse sets of experiences represented at each decision-making body that really matters yeah Amen to that and also to be able to understand that um differences in background experience um require that we we earlier you mentioned theory of mind this ability to get into the mindset of others and and sort of assume or presume certain mindsets in order to hopefully create a more benevolent environment for everybody um you know it requires um you know realizing that some people's social interactions are you know have been terrible or traumatic or um you know it requires a departure from self essentially it requires this empathy or something like empathy um in all directions right I mean in all directions it requires that everyone at least make some effort to try and understand that I do wonder and maybe someone would put on the comments on YouTube maybe maybe you're aware um K of um whether or not kids are being trained in that beautiful period of time of life where neuroplasticity is so robust um although it does continue to throughout the rights lifespan it is especially robust early in life to um to be in a healthy way empathically attuned to be able to have theory of mind more robust theory of mind yeah so I think it's it's really I mean I'm I'm so I'm a parent I have two kids kids that are in public school and I think their public school is rated you know it's fine but we won say it's all right and um but but at their school they definitely do get education about um more holistic health and emotional regulation I think and and considering others um that's been that's that's a big focus of the school and I think that's actually really important I I mean you know again I'm I'm super biased from from my upbringing but my kids are going to learn math whenever it's time to learn the math they'll learn it whenever they need it you know whenever they need it they're going to learn it in a couple I don't know a couple weeks and figure it out do the thing and most of the things that they learn they're going to forget them and then have to relearn them um so what are the things that you're going to really need to know no matter what you choose to do and I think regulating your your own emotions in and and engaging other individuals in a healthy sustainable way that you know and I mean sustainable in terms of the longevity of the relationships and I think those are the things that end up really mattering so I think um also this question about exposure to abundance and scarcity uh is really interesting too I mean I don't know if that's a direction we want to go into so please yeah well I think you know this whole you know sort of sounds sort of new Agy when I say you know abund the abundance mindset right um I mean you see this in people who are like uh recently divorced or newly single for whatever reason like is is the world a place where like finding um partnership is is relatively straightforward with some work involved um or is it like well there's only one person on the planet for you and they might be dead already right like um is there PL if someone else's business takes off maybe someone you went to college or high school with where their lab is doing really well you're seeing them you know tremendously successful that maybe they made a hundred million in a in a new in a company acquisition do you immediately feel like oh those are resources that I don't have um even though I'm not in that business um or do you see it as wow that there must be a lot of money out there that um that people could earn and and potentially make I really you know prescribe and believe in this abundance versus scarcity mindset framework um I think there's absolutes like the example we just talked about this the the kid that you know there's just not food there's scarce it of food fact you know of course there are individuals that experience scarcity of various different needs but many of us we reach a threshold of abundance and then it becomes relative we have everything we absolutely physiologically need if we're not comparing ourselves to anyone else but then once we work enter the social Arena comparison is essential why do we compare ourselves to others it's it's ingrain because social status is something that we need to tend to a large part of our our our brain is devoted to representing our relative social rank what's our place with a social network what's the dynamic how do we fit into the social landscape and comparison I think is just a way to do that that's that's been evolutionarily conserved perhaps for less of a good purpose at this point because so many of our basic survival needs are met for the large majority of of humans on the planet today not for everybody of course but so yet what is the percentage of humans who feel they have everything that they desire how many people feel like they don't want for anything and you know it's interesting because having things doesn't make you have an abundance mindset having abundance does not is not sufficient to give you the mindset of abundance that's such an important statement I mean just I don't think they could be restated enough um you've studied social rank uh people hear social Rank and hierarchy and I have to guess that at least some neurons in their amydala and other areas of the brain get buzzing because as soon as people hear social rank they I think naturally started thinking well where am I in this social Rank and um how do I feel about how that rank is you know established and and all sorts of interesting and important questions um some people get very angry that there are billionaires on this planet MH especially given that in most major cities you don't have to go very far to see people who have very limited uh resources so social rank is something that um I think exists in every little niche like you know at work and maybe even in the family there social rank um I have a sibling I remember um who got more of a of a piece of cake like even a slight difference in that what you know was something that my older sibling would point out um because she was more effective at getting the slightly larger piece of cake because I was until I was you know big enough to offend for myself um and my friends with larger sibling pools in their family it was especially competitive yeah I don't if you've ever gone to a meal with somebody who had a lot of siblings they eat fast they they different resource allocation methods than if they were an only child versus uh one sibling there there's variation here I'm generalizing but um but yeah let's talk about social rank what do we know about how social rank is organized in the brain how we perceive our own social ranking and um yeah like what's the what's the modern science on this stuff I find it fascinating um I'm not scared of any topic well most standing topic and I think this is one that that affects us all yeah I mean I'll first say that social rank is something very specific to a certain type of hierarchy that assumes a linear hierarchy which sometimes forms but oftentimes there's different types of hierarchies that are flatter or more Amorphis it's not really clear who's who's the alpha on the playground I don't know there's this click here there's you know it can be dynamic right right it's Dynamic it's not always organized as such but um if you get animals into a sort of small space um you will see in many species especially with in the males um forming a linear hierarchy and um we wanted to EXP explore this and so I think one of the biggest challenges with studying social Rank and this is something we've struggled with as well is how do you control for the individual identity versus the uh the actual rank so what I mean by this is let's say there's a study that says um that you know neurons in a certain brain region fire to animals of different ranks according to their rank fire most of the alpha less less less less down to the rank you know does that does that tell us that this brain region encod social rank maybe in a loose sense and I'm sure that when rank issues come up a lot of the brain lights up for different comp different reasons but for example let's say the amydala would respond more to the Alpha maybe because it encodes social rank but maybe also because whoever is the dominant is the one who's most likely to have consequences and so all of my interactions with the alpha are relatively High consequence and so I'm sort of stressed out whenever I'm talking about Alpha paying attention and you know you remember all the interactions you have with your boss more so than you know someone else there's an attention hierarchy subordinates attend more to dominance and so there's it's almost hard to make this comparison because it's not all flat like the the clean experiment which we are still trying to do it's it's difficult to do the perfect experiment would be if you take an individual and change the rank so for example um I like to use this example with Barack Obama so just indulge me I know that this is from a while ago but once upon a time I met Barack Obama for a very brief moment when he was president and and maybe there's some neurons that light up oh wow you know there's the Barack Obama president neurons but if they are identity neurons once he was no longer president if I was to be presented with Barack Obama then they would still fire if they were ranked Neons then maybe after he was no longer president it just these Nur fire to whoever is president now and so I think that experiment is very difficult to do and has not been done but we're working on it right now um in uh uh another experiment where we take animals and they're living in groups uh and we rank them all and then we rehouse them so everybody has a rank that they start with then we put all the alphas together put all the betas together Etc so that everybody forms a new rank then you have animals that went up a rank went down a rank or stayed the same for every group and so that's something that we're looking at right now so initially you take a pool of animals and then let's say you got your number one two 3 four just for sake of Simplicity let's say I take the number four lowest in that hierarchy but now I make them the top of a new hierarchy that's right that's right got it and so it's really preliminary and we'll see what happens but we're investigating it it seems that when you take Alphas intermediates or subordinates and put them together into new hierarchies it takes them different amounts of time and the Dynamics are very different in forming the new hierarch Archy and so in any kind of predictable way that you're willing to share or is it just too early I think it's too early but I'll just say I guess it seems like the um the intermediates might be taking the longest amount of time to form the hierarchy they don't know where they sit in the hierarchy they they were flexible or something whereas the dominance they're going to Duke it out and then you know we're gonna we're going to battle there'll be defeat it's quick the fight doesn't last that long subordinates you know I I I you know we have to still observe this is all still you know being we'll see if everything replicates but certainly the Dynamics are different what the exact readouts we you know we're working on what the features are what key features to to see but it's kind of uncanny because these are genetically inbred animals that are all housing these should be all everyone should be the same theoretically but this makes me think that during certain developmental periods rank is shaping your long- lasting development I think it's a simple similar phenomenon perhaps to the older child younger child phenomenon where you know if you're the oldest you go into the world and you have lots of different roles you might be the bottom you know you're going to play on sports teams and be in different classes and have all these job but the the the leadership desire slash potential skill seems to be correlated in a very non-scientific way you know the number of presidents that's often old oldest or only children this type of thing it's it's a loose correlation there's a lot of other reasons why it might not be behavioral but there's sort of you know fluffy fluffy correlations about that I think there's something to it though um when plasticity is happening you're this this becomes your most familiar state of assuming a certain role and that attractor state deepens with more time spent there I find that so fascinating I've also observed and I think I've seen a few papers on I don't know how rigorous these papers are that um youngest or let's just say not oldest siblings um here we're setting aside single children that don't have any siblings but that youngest siblings uh do tend to quote unquote break the mold more in terms of uh socio and cultural norms of the family they they Venture further in terms of um experiences and value systems they're often seen as um having had fewer constraints than the older sibling which may or may not be true um but that the youngest uh siblings often will um take on risk that older siblings won't y yeah and that's certainly been my observ non-conformists right I mean I'm a young younger brother of an older sister um but and then but then there was times in our childhood where she was out of the house and I was at home just with my mom so so that sort of changes things but and it's very Dynamic I realize we're playing here loose space but but I find Social rank stuff to be super interesting I grew up in a big pack of mostly boys um that's just kind of how it worked out in my neighborhood um at the time um and it was very interesting because it was very clear it was a dynamic hierarchy where if we were skateboarding certain kids were Alpha if we were playing soccer other kids were Alpha if we were doing anything artistic um if it was uh kind of geeky knowledge and and nerdy stuff um you know then you know might have been somebody else who had the knowledge um and had the information that people wanted so I think Dynamic hierarchies are really interesting and I think um get us out of that sort of more standard Alpha like kind of chest beating telling everyone what to do dictatorial model I mean and this is now fully out of any science land and into speculation opinion land but I think that type of structural structure where when you're doing different tasks different individuals become the alpha or the leader because it's based on compet is very healthy I think structures where you have locked down this is the this is the hierarchy where someone's the boss of you because of this one skill but there's all these other skills that they're not as they're they're not Superior you know they they they don't don't outrank you at and and so how do you work all of that out and so I think that's also something about keeping score like what is what is the rank right and so we did this experiment where we designed a task um animals are trained that a queue predicts reward delivery only one animal can get at a time it's just a very narrow place so if one animal's getting it you can't get it then um we would have four animals that are CAG mates four mice that are CAG mates and we would have two of them do get out at each point and they we know the ranks the ranks are stable they have a rank one two three four in the cage and everybody does a round robin ones versus twos ones versus threes twoos versus yeah they well they they do round robin in this reward competition task they're food deprived you know and we we present rewards what's the what happens and so subordinates do win some of the times even though dominants win more all you know they they consistently win more and we found that prefrontal cortical neurons you could represent very stably and decode which animal was dominant um flat regardless of the trial and then when you looked at whether we could decode competitive success meaning who is going to win that next trial so there's a new trial every 30 or 40 seconds and so but 30 seconds before which is as far as we can measure because then we're like kind of into the previous trial as soon as the last trial ends even before the next trial ends You can predict above chance significantly which animal is going to win the next trial just based on the firing pattern of prefrontal cortical so you can predict winners and losers you can predict and understand where they are in the hierarchy as well based on the ACT activation of neurons prior to the battle like recording from the um by analogy it's like recording from the prefrontal cortex of two let's say business competitors or um martial arts competitors and you can predict who's going to win based on the pattern of firing in their brains prior to the competition that's right and so um that suggests all sorts of things number one it doesn't mean these competitions are not independent there's something about the state of the animal and when we looked at is it just whoever won the previous trial that did not account for this and so um I thought this was really interesting but when you look at the decoding accuracy for dominance versus subordinates about uh who will win the next trial for dominance it stays pretty flat it just has to do with I think this is my speculation of our data um that you know they they either are engaged or they're not engaged the subordinates the decoding accuracy is it's above it's above chance but then it shoots up somewhere around closer to the queue presentation and so my speculation about that is that the subordinates are looking at the dominance they're looking the dominant doesn't look like they're it doesn't look like they're going to go for it okay yeah they there looks like they're turning away I'm gonna go I'm gonna go so it's it's not like they're both going out full every time it's it's a calculation which trials oh he's not paying attention you know it's like when you're driving in traffic and you're trying to find the the moment to cut over and you're waiting for the person who's like te texting and they're just there's a big space and then everybody's just getting in right here you know you can just see you're like looking for clues about the state of level you know of competition and then and then the dominants they are not looking at the subordinate they're just doing whatever they feel like doing it's like uh there's uh I think there's that one scene in Madmen where something happened in the work environment and um and it was clear someone's account didn't sell or something didn't work out for one person versus the other and I think one of the characters says to uh Don Draper who's clearly one of the alpha was in that work environment by virtue of yeah role and and um position um says you know you know I sometimes think about the way that you blank blank blank and blank and he goes on this brief tiate about how upset he was and um and Draper says well I don't think about you at all and then the elevator I believe closes and it really cemented his status in the office as somebody who's really not paying much attention to what other people are doing he's just making decisions according to what's going to be best for the firm in some cases for himself and in some cases both so I think that's essentially what you're talking about yeah I think it's um it's kind of the nature of the structure that's what makes you the alpha is you're you you have you have other things that are occupying your attention and your your Visionary status hopefully if you're you know a productive successful Alpha and for a sustainable you know group and then everyone else is they don't they don't need to have the big picture they don't they don't you know it it becomes the reinforcement schedule is different I'm just looking for validation am I am I playing my role okay it's a very different mindset I think you know as a scientist when you're a trainee sometimes you're a supporting member on a team where you're getting instruction someone's telling you what to do versus the moment where you get your own project and maybe you're working by yourself maybe there's no one to command but no one's telling you what to do that is to me one of the biggest thresholds to step over when you're becoming a scientist or an investigator is the first time where you just do something and like try and experiment no one told you to do and it feels super weird it feels like you're sneaking around or something and and then you know I think I think um in today's mentorship chain sometimes that that happens too late I think if we could have that experience happen earlier um I think that would only be good for for the future of research I agree I was very fortunate that my graduate adviser um told me look I'm going to help you but I'm going to have two kids while you're in the lab and I'm not going to be around a lot so you're going to have to figure it out don't burn the lab down don't kill yourself with any of the poisons in the lab and then my post talk adviser um the late and great Ben Baris um largely treated the postdocs as as Junior professors from an early stage and I remember thinking he can't control the experiments I'm going to do this is up to me and he and and a great number of us who were training with him at that time went on to have our own lab so I think um uh there's really something important to that model and of course we're discussing the research field but um this could be exported to any number of different fields because what those mentors were essentially training us to do was to um to assume the role that we would eventually have as opposed to be subordinates um do you watch chimp Empire so actually um just this week yet yesterday and the day before before this uh an postto interview who worked with the Chimp on chimp Empire visited and interviewed him in my lab and um talked about his work so I have not seen chimp Empire but it's at the very top of my to-do list oh God it's so good I don't want to spend the next 20 minutes talking about it but you see all sorts of interesting um Behavior very relevant human behavior hierarchies yes but also um altruistic behavior um allopathic grooming I mean in in chimp culture um as I've learned from the show assuming it's accurate um that who Grooms who is very important um and there's all sorts of interesting um Maneuvers that subordinates make and there's all sorts of interesting displays of vigor that the alpha makes to remind people that they are the alpha and then as they age or make mistakes Stakes of judgment the subordinates also will feain deference they'll be like oh yeah you're the alpha you're really tough and secretly they're plotting to replace the alpha um so whether or not we're talking about a scene from Mad Men or we're talking about chimp Empire we're talking about Research Laboratories or um or any other landscape kindergarten I think these circuits are active in all of us and the sooner that we uh acknowledge those and try and find um ones that generalize to the the goodness of as many uh members as possible um we're not doing our task but clearly you're doing the task so okay social rank is something that uh we need to acknowledge no doubt um which actually leads me to what might seem like a desperate topic but um one that I know we're both very interested in and that you're focusing on now which is psychedelics because one of the interesting things about psychedelics is their capacity to increase neuroplasticity um but also some of the psychedelics and I realize MDMA is not a classic psychedelic but they are classified as empathogens they increase empathy for self and others so uh what are you looking into with psychedelics which psychedelics and um yeah what brought you to the study of psychedelics and by the way I've done participated in clinical because people will wonder I have participated in clinical trials for uh psilocybin and MDMA I don't recommend people do psychedelics recreationally I do think they hold great promise for the treatment of depression and trauma but people need to be careful there are certain people who could not and should not take psychedelics because it would be genuinely unsafe for them um psychologically especially young people so there's my disclaimer and um but they are fascinating compounds so um I guess I've always been interested in psychedelics I think I wrote my undergraduate thesis about it's just about hallucinations produced by psychedelics psychotic breaks and REM sleep and schizophrenia just comparing what is the common thread when our brain creates a reality that is not objectively there and um psychedelics of course is a way that we can experience that and remember it and recall it in a way that's very difficult with REM sleep and and sometimes with psychotic breaks um obviously schizophrenia is not something that you can transiently give yourself and have that experience so I think having the ability to to move into other brain States is what makes it so attractive I think the other component is the the plasticity you can you can have an experience and perhaps the firsthand experience is you have an epiphany that you take with you it's life-changing and you know your life habits are completely different for a long lasting way after this singular experience is is kind of one of the things that makes it so different from all of the other um therapeutic treatments that we've got or most of the other ones I'd say um and so for me you know right now there's a lot of work going on exploring psychedelics as a therapy for various different conditions disease States um I think that's great I think it's really important work I'm glad a lot is being done on that I think my focus is is to turn over some rocks that might not have been turned over yet and just to get really down at a quantitative rigorous mathematical level of what is a hallucination for example um when I asked this question what is a hallucination I'm interested in the actual cellular mechanisms are we just you know we think about neurons having signal to noise and neurom modulation as changing that are we just changing the signal to noise ratio and then pattern completing all the noise and that's what a Hallucination is we just you know take that's we're just reinterpreting noise and and putting sort of existing Maps everything's fitting to existing mold or map that we've already got that then appears as some hallucination um or is and and and you know maybe it doesn't have to be hallucination there's also obviously some various different thresholds of the Psychedelic experience um but all these clinical statements this human self-reported um qualitative descriptions of the Psychedelic experience things like being having just more positive outlook being uh uniting one self and other like a sort of you know Clarity of the world um more labile in thoughts more flexible thoughts uh we are trying to just create actual ways to test them so for example this idea about what is what is going on in your mind when you when you're having a psychedelic experience all this of these different states might feel more labile um it maybe the transition probabilities between different brain states of like happy sad thinking nostalgic you know maybe it's just all looser and so you can access everything because the transition probabilities are just High another possibility is that and maybe it's dose dependent at a certain dose you go into another brain State and so previously we've done this in the same project I was just telling you about rank um we were recording for prefrontal cordal neurons and looking at all the behaviors and so the behaviors for representing social rank we don't know what they are so we Ed computer vision to extract a bunch of Behavioral motifs and then try to understand what's the best model that would predict you know what the animal's going to do next not just wins and losses but all the subtle gestures are we going to fight are we going to give it up are we going to back off and predict the behaviors from prefrontal cortical activity and the best model that we found was something called a hidden marvian model which essentially just means that there are hidden States you might think of them as moods um you might give them some other name but I'll I'll I'll use moods Loosely it's not perfect but um that's kind of one way that helps me think about hidden states where you have certain statistics of behaviors that you would produce if I'm sad there's certain things I'm going to do it's a different statistics than when I'm happy different probability of going surfing if I'm sad or happy or you know things like that so we basically found that there are a certain number of hidden States and so if you are on psychedelics would that change the number of states or just the transitions between them we also found in our prefrontal cortical representation that there's a certain distance of the representation of self and other in this you know dimensionality reduced activity space so for mumbo jumbo that just means there's a representation of self and other there's some quantifiable distance in in abstract you know terms in the brain and we can quantify if those representations get closer together and merge of self versus other of self versus other so that's something that we would want we would be looking for if you are putting psychedelics on these are these are questions that I'm interested in that are under construction so right now we're recording from um animals while we're giving them psilocybin using neuropixels recordings so we're recording from thousands of neurons um in preal cortex and other parts of Cortex cu the you know the shank goes to lots of places and looking at how um animals respond in a conflict task so there's there's trials where there's a CU that predicts reward a cue that predicts shock then there's some trials where both cues are presented and both outcomes are presented and the reason for this conflict trial is that actually if you give you know moderate to low doses of psilocybin or most drugs honestly animals can do this you know even on lots of different drugs most people can still eat food and avoid getting hit by this truck I mean there are exceptions of course but generally speaking you know there's a lot of different brain states where you can still do these these essential functions pretty robustly but it's about what happens in the more ambiguous Zone what happens when there's a conflict and and what do you do how do you when there when it's a little gray I think that's when you can see a shift in veilance assignment so that's something that we've been looking for and trying to see if um you know in clinical studies they're exploring set and setting um as maybe the factors that have in the past historically given very unpredictable outcomes for psychedelic therapies um it's possible that it's set in setting it's also possible that there's individual variability it's possible that there are biomarkers that can predict which individuals would be well suited for this type of therapy and so those are also things that we're interested in I find this so fascinating and I I just want to applaud you again for taking on these hard questions these are fairly high level questions um certainly there's a lot of uh clinical trials exploring psychedelics like psilocybin and their role in treating mental health um and there's at the same time um a real dir of studies exploring mechanistically how these compounds are working I mean um I do want to tip my hat to all the folks that have explored dendritic changes and you know so cellular changes in the level of neurons and and on and on but in terms of these like higher level states of um self ver versus other recognition um in psychedelics um you know that those are tough questions that need to be addressed mechanistically and it's clear you're doing that um I I think this um this notion that you're testing of whether or not psychedelics reveal more accessibility or lability as you described it of between different states like oh wow I can actually move from sad to happy there's a there's a route for that and you can erience that as opposed to just being told that hey when you're feeling sad feel your you know the field of psychology especially pop psychology is in a real crisis right now in my opinion because we're told to feel our feelings but then we're also told to not react to our feelings which sounds great but if those feelings get intense enough that's very hard for most people to do so it's feel your feelings but don't stay with you know what there's the cathartic model you know like feel your feelings and and get them out screaming and Etc and then there's the the no you know the more you engage a neural pathway the stronger that neural pathway gets and therefore you're just going to feel more anger there's a lot of conflict right now in terms of the popular psychology version of this whereas the the clinical Fields I think have a an understanding that hasn't been translated I think one other thing about psychedelics that is interesting is that the transitions into States is also more labile like if you start feeling a little sad you know there's the potential to feel very very sad and to go into a state of sadness of of an intensity you've never experienced before which by the way could be therapeutically beneficial um I think there's some evidence for that provided there's adequate support before during an after those sessions um but I think most people feel when they're not on psychedelics will feel emotions that are uncomfortable and we'll do all sorts of things to try and avoid those emotions so I I'm not speaking as a clinician here but I just again I think what the the uh the range and specificity of questions that you're asking about psychedelics I I find so exciting another uh uh reason I'll say that you we want to have you back to to discuss those findings when when they come out let's talk a little bit about you okay um I've known you for a while but to be honest I think this is the longest conversation we've ever had which is one of the reasons I love doing this podcast I get to sit down with colleagues and have intellectual slash other conversations of of substantial depth that I wouldn't have the opportunity to have elsewhere I know enough about you however to know that um you've been involved in various things um I'm not going to say peripheral to science but you have other interests as well um as I recall um you have been a yoga instructor or a or you've been involved in the uh kind of wellness fitness uh Community industry tell us about that and then I'm also curious about um how you structure your day your routines given that you're a parent of two young children you run a very large laboratory operating at the very highest level um and of course you value important things like relationships and relationship to self and health and all these sorts of things so um not to make it too open-ended but yeah like tell us of tell us of your interests and and of your relationship to Wellness and fitness and well-being yeah um I guess I think you know I everybody comes to their their calling in in some what feels like a path that you could have predict but when you look at outside I guess both of my parents are professors so it doesn't look super surprising that I'm a professor but that's not how it felt to me when I was in high school I was a total rebel I just threw parties at my house my parents weren't there sorry everybody who's listening it's not I don't recommend that but I just cared about I just cared about having fun and sports and um I think school wasn't maybe challenging enough for me at that time I didn't necessarily recognize that that was what it was but um I've always enjoyed being really active and that's what makes me feel good it's I I I definitely um agree with stuff youve said on your podcast about having exercise routines in the morning that really influence the rest of your day I I didn't always exercise in the morning I have different phases but um yeah after I was an undergrad I took some time to travel around Australia backpack around Australia live in some very remote places spend some time living in a tent then I was a yoga instructor um then I I went to grad school in the Bay Area I had a very active uh hobby of I was a semi-professional break dancer I was very into break dancing really really competitive break dancer in area yes we did um you know halftime shows or I guess technically third quarter timeout shows at Oracle Stadium for the Golden State Warriors I was the one girl who could do a windmill so they would use me though windmills someone's going to find footage of this yeah yeah there's some you know very mediocre footage of me break dancing um and I was just really into it but I think that's where my work life balance passion comes from I talk about it a lot I think about it a lot and people say to me all the time well you is this really true why do you why do you preach all this work life balance stuff when you know you must have been a workaholic at some point in your life and I think you know when I was younger I definitely didn't like the idea that you had to only be one thing I wanted to be so many things I couldn't decide it was a huge challenge I was going to be a writer I was going to be a yoga instructor I was going to be I never really thought I was going to be a professional dancer I just wasn't good enough and there's not careers to be made from dancing really it's very difficult but um you know had a lot of other interests and I wanted to prove I don't know who I wanted to prove it to I think myself at first and then eventually it made me maybe feel like I should maybe prove it to everyone that you can have a very whole life and not sacrifice everything you don't have to choose between family and career or personal life you can have them all you just have to decide that it's a priority and own that and make those choices on on a daily basis and comes down to time management and so it's been a very even though it looks like oh K just likes to have fun and have all these other Hobbies it it's it's important because I think that we need more role models in especially in academic science where people bring their whole selves to their job and even though your job is a very specific thing um because you have a role as a mentor and you know I suppose the mentor apprenticeship relationship has evolved then there's I've you know lots of comments about that too um in Academia I still think ultimately when when I was working in someone else's lab and I definitely looked up to them they were the role model obviously I'm looking at yes they's science but I'm looking at how they make this all work how you how are you doing this how how do they live their lives and how do they approach balancing it all and so I guess I just wanted to put some more data points on the on the scoreboard where people are having lots of hobbies and other nonwork activities while still making meaningful contributions and it doesn't make you less of a hum less of a scientist or less less of a person because you're a whole human if anything perhaps it makes people better scientists yeah did your exploration of of yoga Andor break dancing inform anything about your your research or was it really about resetting uh your mind and body in healthy ways so that you could return to the lab feeling excited about returning to the lab I think I've always been of the mindset where sometimes things don't go well in a certain Arena and it's it doesn't feel good to have all your eggs in that basket stuff goes wrong sometimes experiment doesn't work sometimes you find something out you lose the whole data set it's you know bad news happens in the lab and um I think just want to diversify your portfolio so that your happiness portfolio is not entirely based on your accomplishments at work um I think we just want to have more elements and the same thing goes for you know at one point when I was really into dancing I got a very serious injury and it took this huge part of my life away from me I was so glad I had work thank God I have work you know I have something I can do else and I just think having a lot of different parts of your life make you more flexible more creative more awake more engaged and you know when I don't I definitely have been a workaholic when I was a postto and assistant professor period definitely did not make enough time for myself to have a a richer a rich personal life at certain points and very quickly I just wither away into a shell of a human a shell an empty shell of a the person I used to be and it's noticeable everybody can feel it you can't pretend you know everyone that works with you feels it eventually and so I think that's a big thing and so as I've taken feedback from my Anonymous lab surveys and other other forms of feedback and just reflecting it's clear I you know taking your lifestyle in to and having agency over designing your lifestyle to be ideal for you is super important so a typical day for me uh might look like um okay the last work day let's say I woke up actually so it was early high tide so I got to wake up in the dark pack up my bags go surfing and then get home before surf see my friends in the water and I think surfing is a lot of things it's exercise it's a cold plunge it's photons some of your favorite things maybe a little bit meditative maybe some social Community then and I you know go every time at the same day so there's the same group of people then I go home make the kids their snacks breakfast drop them off at school then I go to a lab and then run lab meeting um and have meetings most of my day when I'm at work is spent meeting with people drawing on a whiteboard mostly meeting with my trainees um is what I like to spend most of my time on of course there's other stuff that gets in the mix like administrative whatever and then come home at a pretty early hour pick up my kids make dinner and then go to sleep kind of early kind of boring these days that's my typical day sounds exciting to me sounds exciting to me um I think uh if one were to stay up late then one feel sleep deprived if they wake up early if you wake up late you're missing out on the early morning Sunrise the surf all of that I've never surfed actually once I paddled out once when I was in college and uh there was no surf so I would paddle back in but um I keep hearing about this surfing thing and um people seem to love it that's one of my concerns is that if you fall in love with it you're going to spend a lot of time out in the ocean but clearly it's all serving you well and um uh must be wonderful to be a child in your home I can imagine how much fun it is and how interesting it is um you mentioned several times uh mentorship and trainees and it's clear that uh reshaping um the landscape of science for the Next Generation coming up is something that's of real passion to you um I take great uh pleasure in asking this because um you know it wasn't long ago that you and I were graduate students in postdocs and more or less the same vintage right and as is the case people retire people die this is the reality of life and people move up up the ranks uh as you have um so what are some of the things that you're most passionate about in terms of shaping the future of science um in particular research science but maybe more broadly and um what are you doing about it I think that um science academic culture has evolved and and I guess I should start by just saying first I as I was driving over here was just beautiful drive and I'm just thinking it is so tool that we get to do this for a living isn't it amazing that studying whatever I find interesting to me is something that I can you know have a secure job for and then just thinking about cool ideas and directions and talking about it stuff that I would do for free is is really my job and I I just am so grateful to have that and um I think there are a lot of beautiful sides of Academia that sometimes don't get the air time that they deserve and of course there's a lot of Doom and Gloom there always has been when I was a grad student there's lots of Doom and Gloom in The Ether there's plenty now um I think perhaps it has become a little bit more dire um the plight of Academia right now uh there's been a nationwide drop of posts in general there's a just a mass exitus away from Academia to Industry and I think that reflects the changing in environment and so um I guess when I was a graduate student I had this book in my desk drawer called advice for young investigator written by ramonica Hall which is a great book it's thin it's a quick read it's got some winds Whimsical anecdotes and some some some important insights I think um also a lot of misogyny very much glamorizing work workaholic Tendencies and you know there was definitely a picture of a scientist this was the way to succeed other options not really offered and and I really struggled with that I had a lot of impostor syndrome coming up through I mean I someone asked me when when did I when did I stop having imposter syndrome I think maybe 2021 you know very recently I think I spent 20 years of my career having impostor syndrome wondering if I was good enough if I was going to make it am I gonna do I have what it takes and constantly doubting and questioning it um and I think that it would have been nice to to not feel so alone at that period of of my career um so I think some of the things that were described in this original book um were really important for academic research to be born as a thing like how do we make this be a thing that you can get paid for you know how do we make this be a job that people get to have and then at this point I think most people would agree we need science science is important we want to we want to we benefit from science um and I think at this point it's not so clear that we need elitism as much as we did before it's not um we're we're looking at a crumbling academic culture where where we're struggling to retain people and you know that's it's not it's not a great sustainable Dynamic I think trainees are not getting compensated well enough or treated treated well enough that it's an attractive choice and so I think we need to sort of make a change and nothing wrong necessarily about about the intentions that were set hundreds of years ago but things change and we where we are now and things are changing very quickly so um I I guess I get to make one of my childhood dreams which is to to write a book come true um in uh I get in in one of the benefits of social media I did have a tweet kind of you know just sort of spontaneously ranting about about how this book is problematic and it's very misogynistic and maybe we need another book for other types of people um and that makes people feel more included um and so and and this tweet went around and it s I didn't expect you know I didn't expect anything to come of this I'm just you know living my daily life and then my DM suddenly had literary agents and a book deal and then okay I'm now I'm writing this book and so I'm about halfway through but I think the the goal of the book I I don't really have time for this project to be honest but it's such an important project to me um I think that I I want to see Academia be uh one of the healthiest places why is it second only to the military in the pervasiveness of sexual misconduct and you know things like right yeah y did you know that actually you know factoid is Academia is the military is worse in terms of sexual misconduct retaliation issues that occur but Academia second and I and it makes you wonder what are the parameters that make this type of abuse so rampant I think one of the obvious ones is the clear ranks how stable the ranks are how the power structure um of of Academia and the military very fixed not super debatable not difficult to move these the ranks are you know they're there and the power structure is very skewed and those are the ingredients that facilitate abuse and so I think in the military I could see a very good argument for why that hierarch that strict rigid hierarchical structure is necessary there's not time for making mistakes get it but with Academia there's there's time there's where what are we we're not you know it's not a war we're we're just studying stuff that we think is cool why is uh such a rigid hierarchy with such devastating consequences necessary I would argue maybe it's not and um I think I've been spending a lot of time thinking about this for myself I've been um I I found this professional leadership coach I I love and just think about sustainability how do we make an a sustainable ecosystem and um it's not something you've find in a lot of leadership management uh literature that I that I've been exposed to so I'll take I'll take a note from from the the podcast and say if anyone knows of literature that talks about developing sustainable um ecosystems within leadership and management I would love to hear about that in the comments but um I think that's a big hole um people think about making things stable the power structure should be stable but actually being flexible and dynamic is what gives systems resilience and and flexibility um to to survive and right now all the cracks in in the towers of Academia are showing and it's time to to see if this is are we going to adapt and survive or are we going to crumble there's a lot to pack there and um grateful that you're drilling into all of that with I'm sure the same rigor and um attention to asking the really critical questions that you have in your lab um certainly I observe the landscape changing very rapidly um I think there's also a lot to be learned and to explore that um exports to other professions I certainly um believe that the more um firsttime opportunities to experience the beauty of doing research and biology in particular because that's what I'm familiar with um the more likely that we are as a field of research and science to make more fundamental discoveries in other words the more people that get the experience of trying science doing exploratory research science the more likely we are to pull from that pool and within that pool there will be people of competence uh talent and also gifted like we just you know sort of like increase the the size of the n y um and the net of course is netting something very specific which is you and I both know that um while training certainly matters knowledge is important um that ultimately you know love of craft and passion um and just being tickled by that research bug once that neuron that you know gets tickled that lets us see something for the first time or know something um down the microscope or in a in a data applaud or something there's there's really no going back so I I you know I want to be very clear that I loudly applaud your efforts to extend the experience of research to people and earlier you were telling me that you're doing this that many of the people in your lab are firsttime researchers they didn't come through the pedigree of research yeah I know we do a lot of Outreach about 25% of my lab this summer was first time research experiences and so um we've been really privileged to have the bandwidth just support that um I will say though I mean on the same tip I think what you've done with this podcast is incredible you've made millions of people who didn't have access to science or Neuroscience be fascinated with neuroscience and now imagine what if every person that listened to this podcast and thought this is such a great podcast I wish I could do some Neuroscience could do it with some you know not full-time what if they could contribute in any just whatever level that they wanted to that's so much more contribution that we're currently missing out on because there's so many barriers to be able to contribute to science and I think um removing the ones that are really there as well as the ones that are just perceived to be there is so powerful but I mean the podcast is a a you know proof the proof is in the pudding the proof is in this podcast how many people could fall in love with science if they were given a chance to well thank you for that it is indeed a labor of love for me and and um and there are opportunities maybe we'll provide a link to a couple of them um where uh certain projects in Neuroscience are crowdsourcing data analysis it's actually quite fun there's the connectone project where you can trace neurons it's actually very very pleasing you can do it while listening to podcast or a book kids can do it you're you're tracing these neurons basically filling in lines it's like a coloring book and you're contributing to the parcelation of understanding the structure of of the brain yeah including the human brain and without that crowdsourcing um it's just not going to happen I mean there efforts to make machine learning do it and to do it through AI but that there's a lot to be gained from having actual humans do this that those Technologies don't quite yet approximate so we'll provide a link to to some of those projects but Len K Dr Tai of course um I want to thank you so much first of all for coming here today and sharing so much knowledge and also being willing to go into some places that were um by virtue of my questions a little speculative and and and really think about those and and and address those through the lens of of deep mechanistic understanding of how these circuits work and to make it clear to people um your enthusiasm for science is infectious in the most positive sense of the word and I know that so many people are going to benefit from from your knowledge and also from the work that you've been doing in your laboratory you know I've seen your star rise and it's um still going going going and it's just remarkable and extraordinary but I must say not at all surprising so um that and your advocacy work and for all you do and that you're doing um I just on behalf of myself and everyone listening I just want to extend a genuine and really heartfelt thanks thank you thank you so much and it's been such an honor to be on the hubin Lab podcast it's legendary so thank you so much for having me absolutely we'll do it again thank you for joining me for today's discussion all about the biology of social interactions with Dr K Tai to learn more about her work and to follow her on social media please see the links in the show note captions if you're learning from Andor enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's a terrific zeroc cost way to support us in addition please subscribe to the podcast on both Spotify and apple and on both Spotify and apple you can leave us up to a festar review please check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode that's the best way to to support this podcast if you have questions or 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