Change Your Brain: Neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman Notes

Change Your Brain: Neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman Summary

• Study done by Eric Knudsen found that the plasticity in the adult brain can be as robust as a child's, provided the focus is there while learning something new.
• Should I learn to do something out of desire or fear? Either one works. It is dependent on the person or situation, for Dr.Huberman it was fear that drove him to success.
• We have to be careful about how much of our internal dopamine we attach to external rewards. The moment we take those rewards away we will no longer find pleasure doing the task. We need to dig deeper and attach hard things with a why, a reason, and to supplement that with external rewards but the why should be central reason why you are working at something.
• Action controls your mood, not the other way around. You can't sit around hoping to get motivated, you just need to get moving.
• If that irritation or stress level is not high enough you will not move forward.
• Do a Physiologocial sigh when you feel your monkey mind running all over the place and you can't focus on the task at hand →  1:18:35 two inhales followed by an extended exhale
• Breath quickly and your level of andrenaline goes up, breathe slowly and it goes down
• Visual focus leads to cognitive focus
• Duration, path and outcome → most stringent high focus regime for the brain. The way to get better at duration, path and outcome is to engage in activites that are low duration, path and outcome → sleep.
• This sequence is where most focused work comes from.
• Deliberate decompression (example using the bathroom) will allow to refocus on the task at hand much more intensely.
• When you take a break your conserving noreeprhine for your next activity. Otherwise your spending this noreephrine, it doesn't matter if your on instagram or watching the news it is spending it. So Dr.Huberman suggests looking out at the horizon or window to dilate our gaze even for just a minute.
• Besides sleep you can do yoganidra in order to recover energy. Lying down, and not really concentrating on one task really, but also not enough so you fall asleep. Argues that we can recover sleep loss, by doing practices like this and through his own tests have seen subjects cognitive ability rise as a result of this action.
• Yoganidra/hypnosis scripts (can be found on youtube)/taking a walk and letting your mind go teaches you how to turn off your focus modes, which can as a result help you fall asleep faster.
• Rewiring of the brain requires focus and deep rest. Hypnosis combines these two things and accelerates this process.
• Lateralized eye movement causes your threat detection system to quiet down and you become relaxed as a result. Stress comes from a soda straw perspective of the world. (Addiction)
• Control your autonomic nervous system, is the key to controlling your behavior.
• Autonomic arousal → very happy, very sad, very angry these emotions cloud our judgement. Top-down control → allows us to intervene in our own feeling and action states.