Dr. Poppy Crum: Neuroscientist, Stanford professor, and former chief scientist at Dolby Laboratories. Her work focuses on how technology shapes neuroplasticity, perception, and human performance, including 'hearable' tech that infers brain and body states.
What this episode covers
Huberman and former grad-school classmate Poppy Crum discuss how every technology we use reshapes our brains through neuroplasticity, from texting to video games. They dig into using AI as a tool that can make us cognitively sharper (self-testing, custom computer-vision apps) versus one that erodes 'germane cognitive load' and learning. A large portion covers 'digital twins' and ambient sensors (CO2, pupillometry, voice, posture) that could measure and modify our waking states the way smart mattresses optimize sleep. Crum also shares her own story of perfect/absolute pitch and how studying owls, bats, moths, crickets, marmosets, and spiders reveals how brains adapt under pressure. The episode closes on self-directed plasticity: we can change fast if the incentives are high enough.
The guest's own work
Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body
Andrew Huberman
“I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body.”— Andrew Huberman
Also referenced (named, not recommended)
Pison (Timex partnership wearable)
Pison
“One interesting company that I think is worth mentioning is Pyson... they're measuring psycho motor vigilance.”— Poppy Crum
Passive Logic (digital twin HVAC)
PassiveLogic
“there's a company, Passive Logic. I love them. They actually have some of the smartest digital twin HVAC systems”— Poppy Crum
Free Solo
Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi
“We brought people in... had them watching Free Solo, you know, the Alex Honnold movie where they're climbing El Cap”— Poppy Crum
The Sound of Silence
Michael Tyburski
“there was a film called I think it's the sound of silence and it started... Peter Sarsgaard he was one of the the actors in it”— Poppy Crum
The Hunger Games
Gary Ross
“they've got different audiences watching Hunger Games... you can tell exactly where Katniss's dress catches on fire”— Poppy Crum
Call of Duty
Activision
“make them play 40 hours of Call of Duty and now their contrast sensitivity looks like a video game player and it persists”— Poppy Crum
Big reveals from this episode
- Crum can walk into a hotel room and be forced to move because of a pitch she hears, due to her absolute pitch.
- 40 hours of Call of Duty permanently improves a non-gamer's contrast sensitivity and it persists a year later.
- A recent MIT EEG study showed using LLMs to write papers reduces 'germane cognitive load' and real learning.
- Huberman says he gets close to two hours of REM sleep a night using his Eight Sleep mattress.
- At Dolby, Crum measured audiences' CO2 to detect exactly when Alex Honnold summited or hurt his ankle in Free Solo.
- AI voice analysis can flag neural degeneration like Alzheimer's up to 10 years before clinical symptoms appear.
- Crum developed a second absolute-pitch map at A415 from Baroque violin, paralleling Knudsen's prism-shifted owls.
- Orb-weaver spiders tune their webs like a violin and react to ~880 Hz, using the web as a sound-detection instrument.
Worth remembering
- You can roughly predict where someone lives by their hearing thresholds, because cities have unique sonic imprints.
- Texting acronyms like 'LOL' act as lossy compression that triggers a much richer internal experience.
- London taxi drivers had more hippocampal gray matter from mental maps; GPS made that adaptation unnecessary.
- Cognitive load splits into intrinsic (material difficulty), extraneous (presentation/environment), and germane (building mental schemas).
- CO2 is heavier than air, so audience stress can be tracked from tubes on the floor reading exhaled breath.
- Earbuds can detect heart rate, blood oxygen, eye movements (EOG), and even attention from in-ear signatures.
- Diabetes (dehydration) and heart disease both produce detectable changes in the spectrum of the human voice.
- Echolocating bats subtly shift their call frequency so echoes return in their most sensitive hearing range.
- A moth escapes a bat about 80% of the time using random flight, dropping to the ground, and body 'metareflectors'.
- Crickets have one neuron with peaks at 6kHz and 40kHz that trigger opposite approach/flee behaviors.