What Happens To Your Brain During Moments Of Stillness - Andrew Huberman

this is why I'm such a fan of taking some space from all action this is actually something I learned from Rick Ruben um you know I'm fortunate to call him a close friend we we communicate pretty much every day and I went and spend a week with him abroad this summer it was the worst time to travel and I decided to go over to where he was in Europe and just spend the week with him we had no plan and um uh first of all on the way over there there was nothing to watch on the plane but there was this Tom Petty documentary and I turn it on I'm not a huge Tom Petty fan but it was interesting enough and then rck Rick is in the documentary and he's in the documentary lying down doing the interview typical like typical meaning unusual for most people typical because it's unusual for Rick to be lying down um and I thought okay so get there I I know his family well and I love them and and it was really wonderful it was beautiful it's a beautiful part of Europe but you know I noticed so we had this habit of of we would tread water in the pool and listen to podcast in the morning um um and there's a wonderful podcast by the way that uh we should all be aware of I think is a history of rock and roll in 500 songs by Andrew hickey super nerdy it's like a getting a like a graduate degree in rock and roll it talks about the music but also what's happening in like organized crime how it impacted record sales very contextual very cool I'm very into that lately and I'm in and this show on Netflix have you seen Spy Ops yes which is very good right because it's not just like shoot them up type stuff it's it's really about how spy operations uh let me put this way it can teach you a lot about history International history and and um geopolitical history um so um I go over there and we do some shading water listening to um podcasts I learn about this history of of rock and roll in 500 songs podcasts um we talk about a little bit and then I noticed that you know Rick has a practice I hope he doesn't mind me sharing this um because I'm about to um you know Rick has a practice he has many practices but one of them is he'll spend a good amount of time you just sitting and thinking or lying down and thinking and I it didn't occur to me at the time but later after I returned I thought back to our first guest episode of my podcast I host a guy named Carl di Roth who's probably the the finest bioengineer on the planet he's also a fully active clinician psychiatrist he's got five children he's one of these phenoms you know that seems to be able to do everything and he's a true genius um he went to school with uh medical school petera and Paul kti they were all in the same class yeah um and I know him very well he's a colleague of mine at Stanford and um and everyone knows he's he's a super he's a super he's like the Michael Jordan of Neuroscience um except he's still active um and that it's not a statement about personality just in terms of of successful hit rate and Carl described a practice that he does after he puts his kids to sleep of where he sits deliberately sits completely still and forces himself to think in complete sentences and this set off a light in my head when I realize Rick does a form of this and Carl does a form of this if you read the new Elon Musk book they talk about Elon doing a form of this the Great Richard feeman physicist Nobel Prize winner talked about going into flotation tanks and doing a form of this Einstein did a form of this so what are we talking about so I'm a neuroscientist but I'm certainly not smart as any of those guys what we're talking about is body still mind active now I've become in increasingly curious about psychedelic therapies um one of which is and by the way only in a clinical context Etc legality Etc not in kids Etc but the practice is essentially um macr doil ayin but with the eye mask on completely still M very active Okay contrast that to a different Behavior SL protocol that I'm very familiar with which is I like to long runs or rucks on Sunday body very active mind not directed at anything in particular sometimes I'll do it without a book or podcast sometimes they do it with a combination of both many people talk about swimming or in the shower or um cycling some sort of rhythmic movement drumming the great Joe Strummer was really big on campfires he you know I was going to mention this earlier but I'll mention it now that as an alternative to alcohol consumption get your friends together around a fire by the way the Fire Light the light from fire does not disrupt the Circadian system this has actually been shown candle light Moonlight fire light as bright as it is it's just very low Lux so that's where great things happen independent of alcohol right around a campfire that's it goes way back in our lineage so there are these two states of mind and body that I find fascinating to the point of being intriguing to the point of having modified what I do now because they they are the inverse of one another body completely still or close to completely still mind very active could be wasil cybin but that's not the protocol I'm recommending I'm talking about some very very smart extremely accomplished people who all did the same thing the other is body very active mind isn't still but is not deliberately um channeled to any particular linear kind of story or something like that there's a state in sleep where our body is literally paralyzed and the brain is extremely active it's called rapid eye movement sleep so I'm s raising a flag for this potential protocol SL practice I don't have any peer-reviewed science to support what I'm about to say but I have enough examples of extremely accomplished people now in front of me to realize that there's something special about divorcing mind and body function temporarily deliberately sitting there and just thinking and recently I had a conversation with the great Paul kti and the addition of the words the great in front of him are appropriate here he's I I believe based on my observation of his clinical work and and uh intellectual Acumen that he's the finest psychiatrist of our age clearly integrating from so many backgrounds has worked with a ton of interesting people coming on the podcast in December amazing I and he's just phenomenal right um not just about trauma but about everything personality types narcissism gaslighting I mean people throw those terms around like crazy proba will tell you what it actually means okay what those terms actually mean but the ability to think and to access the unconscious Paul refers to the unconscious as the supercomputer of the brain for the UN the unconscious mind and the conscious mind are always in a dialogue but here's the theory here's the the hypothesis that when we bring our body into states of Stillness in REM sleep in these deliberate states that I just described that these other people actively engage in and have for a long time that the unconscious mind can start to take over a larger percentage of that conversation and we have access to new ideas new ways of structuring thought Etc and I don't think one require psilocybin to do it but I do think that is one Avenue into it reliable um that's reliable it also carries certain hazards right uh because it's it's like being put on a mental rocket ship to some extent it's not like DMT but um very little control over where On's cognition goes although there is some in there um anyway I just wanted to throw this up on the wall because it's always fun to talk about new things and kind of what's coming what I think is coming next I think if I were to make a prediction I think in the next two years you're not just going to hear about meditation non-sleep deep rest um something I'm a big fan of Yoga Nidra hypnosis but also whatever we want to call this you'll probably come up with a better name than I can body still mind active states to access different aspects of our unconscious and cognition and I must say that we do this with the phone sorry I just uh because I realized you were about to say something and when you speak you say interesting things and I learned cosplay laring Lear don't put those ones as the most interesting you say many there's no well in terms of new terms new terms Newcastle yeah sorry those one of the most Concepts I but I'm learning is the point I wasn't I wasn't being sarcastic um that when we sit and we're just scrolling yeah we're we're we're more or less body still mind active but guess what none of it's coming from within it's all coming from the outside so whether or not it's Sil cybin in the IM mask or or Carl sitting their eyes closed deliberately still thinking or Fineman in the in the salt equilibration chamber you know the the float flotation tank or or Rick lying there thinking whatever it is he happens to be thinking whatever amazing album he's going to now you know help produce more Einstein I mean you know we can think of the phone and the scrolling as as lending itself to less ability to focus in ADH but just the real crime the real insult to humanity for me the real cost is what about all the creative imagination of things that come from inside that could be generated by by people in that time so I I'm I've started doing a practice of 20 minutes a day of just sitting and eyes closed typically sometimes it's right as I wake up but usually it's not and just trying to think about certain topics and hold those topics in a kind of a linear way or sometimes just letting stuff geyser up anyway um some people might think of this as like completely um wacko woo uh new Agy stuff but the list of names I I read off there people that do that and have been doing this for a long time and attribute this practice as one of the major sources of their best ideas is a a non-trivial list when I think about that there's a few different ways that are slightly similar uh the number of people who've had great ideas whilst walking and attribute an awful lot of their success to walking and thinking I'm that you're talking body still mind active but it's like mostly it's not exactly or or perhaps there is a unique way to access this too maybe it's a different channel to a different brain State maybe it's a different channel to the same brain State like I love doing long rocks and long runs on Sunday that's my goal on Sunday get out as much as possible into the nature and just move in some sort of repetitive way like a mu all throw on a ruck sack because petera got me into that um sometimes it's with other people sometimes alone sometimes I listen to a podcast sometimes they don't sometimes in audiobook sometimes I don't but something about about motor repetition uh so this is not sets and Reps this is not restacking the plate this is you know minimum amount of cognition require freeing up mental space to do other things yeah could be on the row so again I think different people would do it differently I've been hanging around with a lot of musicians lately um I've become good friends with one of my favorite musicians songwriters Tim Armstrong lead singer for rancid transplants he and Travis Barker did transplants and you know it's it um and you know it's clear that musicians especially drummers but other musicians well they're always in a rhythm in their head there actually Tim and I the other day we we went someplace and we walked out he's like did you hear that like did you hear what he's like you didn't hear that I was like what he's like you know they had the news on and the radio on and this you know he's so tuned into the audio environment I'm not right I'm not that audio um oriented more visually oriented but you know people who have an internal Rhythm that they're they're they're they're noodling on something in their head I mean this is this is the substrate of creative work right and I and again the phone isn't evil but the moment you're taking in sensory input from that includes things that have already been creative uh excuse me created you're yeah you could argue that those are the macronutrients that you're going to combine for your own creative thing the gems and the internet so studies scientific studies for me are interesting things on YouTube but there's also just the raw materials of creative work that come from limiting sensory input and just going inside self-generating it in other news this episode is brought to you by element element contains a science packed electrolyte ratio of sodium potassium and magnesium that will help to regulate your appetite curb cravings and optimize your brain health you do not need coffee first thing in the morning your adenosine system that caffeine Acton isn't even active for the first 90 minutes of the day but your adrenal system is and salt act on your adrenal system best of all it just tastes phenomenal this orange flavor is honestly like a Godly nectar that I've been taking every single morning for over 3 years 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