Andrew Huberman: Andrew Huberman is a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine and host of the Huberman Lab podcast. Here he answers audience questions at a live Brain-Body Contract event in Melbourne, Australia.
What this episode covers
Recorded at the Plenary Theatre in Melbourne, this episode is the audience question-and-answer session following Huberman's Brain-Body Contract lecture. He covers dementia prevention through cardiovascular exercise, neuromodulator maintenance, and avoiding head injury, then digs into the anterior mid-cingulate cortex as the seat of willpower and a marker of superagers. Other questions address circadian disruption in shift workers, the difference between NSDR and meditation, breaking phone-scrolling habits, and his dream clinical trials. Late in the session he opens the floor for the audience to suggest research topics, touching on psychedelics, trauma, consciousness, genetics, and the microbiome. The tone is conversational, humorous, and tool-focused throughout.
Recommended on this episode
Lonsdale Against Racism and Hate shirt
Lonsdale
“I love your shirt. I own that shirt. It's like, yes, a Lonsdale shirt is against racism and hate. I love I love that shirt.”— Andrew Huberman
Also referenced (named, not recommended)
Zyn
Zyn
“you don't want to smoke, vape, dip, or snuff. I'm not even recommending people take Zyn patches, but I think there is some use cases for nicotine”— Andrew Huberman
Modafinil
“Some people are trying to take things like modafinil and Adderall in older age. But, keep in mind these are not modafinil, but Adderall”— Andrew Huberman
Nicorette
Nicorette
“whose name I won't tell you or maybe I will who when I went to visit his office chewed no fewer than five pieces of Nicorette in the course of a half an hour.”— Andrew Huberman
Star Wars
Lucasfilm
“I guess you need a Star Wars character named after your brain part. Um isn't there one? Right. I only saw the first three.”— Andrew Huberman
Waking Up app
Waking Up
“who does them as well. These are all zero cost protocols. She's also in the Waking Up app. Um and there are many of them.”— Andrew Huberman
The Breakfast Club
John Hughes
“Like you watched The Breakfast Club or something. I don't know how he knew that movie. I was like, You're right, I did watch The Breakfast Club”— Andrew Huberman
Big reveals from this episode
- Age-related decline in working memory can stem from reduced dopamine transmission, so behaviorally increasing catecholamines may help offset it.
- Huberman says nicotine, despite raising blood pressure, may offset age-related reductions in dopaminergic and cholinergic transmission, citing a Nobel laureate who chews Nicorette for this reason.
- Neurosurgeon Joe Parvizi's stimulation of the anterior mid-cingulate cortex made patients feel a storm coming or the urge to do something hard, before its function was known.
- Research points to the anterior mid-cingulate cortex as the seat of willpower, grit, and tenacity, growing when we do challenging things we don't enjoy.
- The anterior mid-cingulate cortex is hyperactive in superagers and may be linked to the will to live, even in terminal cancer cases.
- A Scandinavian study found yoga nidra can increase striatal dopamine by up to 60 percent measured via PET imaging.
- Self-directed hypnosis produces far greater smoking-cessation success than nearly any other protocol by merging focus and rest to access neuroplasticity.
Worth remembering
- Event sponsors were 8 Sleep and AG1; Huberman says he has slept on an 8 Sleep cover for nearly three years and taken AG1 daily since 2012.
- Huberman recommends roughly 150, more like 180 to 200 minutes of zone two cardio per week, crediting Peter Attia for popularizing it.
- Methamphetamine causes bad teeth because dry mouth limits saliva, which is needed to remineralize teeth.
- MDMA was studied in Latter-Day Saints because they avoid other drugs and even caffeine, making them an unusually clean test population.
- Shift work is defined as at least a two-hour variance in sleep-wake cycle more than three nights a week, meaning most people technically do it.
- The Hubermanlab.com website lets users combine multiple topics to find exact timestamps across episodes, plus a zero-cost AI.hubermanlab.com tool.
- The Spiegel eye-roll test gauges hypnotizability: if the whites of your eyes still show as your eyelids close while gazing up, you are highly hypnotizable.
- CRISPR gene editing of a human embryo's HIV receptor was already done in China, against international ethics committees, so those edited babies exist.
- Only about eight years ago did the US National Institutes of Health begin urging researchers to study female mice as well as male.