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Speaker A: Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Doctor Kay Tai. Doctor Kay Tai is a professor of neuroscience at the Salk Insti... |
Speaker B: Andy Huberman what a treat. |
Speaker A: 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 illustrio... |
Speaker B: I agree that a lot of the bandwidth on the amygdala has been occupied by fear studies. But we've known, actually for a really long time that the amygdala is important for all sorts of emotional processing. Since Kluver and Busey performed lesions on monkeys and found that monkeys would then have flat affecti... |
Speaker A: So glad you brought up this word valence. I think it's a word that some scientists, but most of the general public, are probably not familiar with. So let's talk about valence, and then I want to go back to the amygdala and kind of explore some of its diversity of function a little bit more. So when I hear t... |
Speaker B: Basically it's been used in a lot of different fields, I think, of that, you know, negative and positive numbers, or. But it's an analogy that we take to just mean, yeah, net positive, net negative. And it's an intentional departure from the word value. Value becomes very scalar. Everything's on, you know, i... |
Speaker A: So when we walk into, say, a novel environment, do you think that our amygdalas are active and really trying to figure out whether or not an environment, a set of people or a person is safe and really just check that box first in order to be able to do other things. Is this business of determining valence an... |
Speaker B: Okay, so there's a few different questions there. First, I want to address the question about novelty, and then I want to come back to the other issue of conscious. But the way the amygdala works is its job is to assign meaning to anything that could have motivational significance. And so if it's a brand new... |
Speaker A: Is this also true in humans? |
Speaker B: Yes, this is true in humans. 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 start... |
Speaker A: You mentioned that the amygdala will respond to a novel stimulus, and if it predicts something interesting, then other things happen. We'll talk about those. If not, the amygdala stops responding. And you said something really important, which is that the amygdala will respond to something that is predicting... |
Speaker B: Yeah. So as a graduate student, I worked on a part of the amygdala called the basolateral amygdala. It's still a complex within the broader amygdala. This brain region is cortical like, in that it's mostly glutamatergic neurons with some gabaergic neurons mixed in, but without the same structure that the cor... |
Speaker A: Well, I think, first of all, such important work and so wonderful to be early in the phase of recasting how the brain works, which is what you did. I think most people in the general public still think amygdala fear, and clearly it's able to signal reward and punishment, as you discovered and are now pointin... |
Speaker B: Great question. Great question. So I'll tell you the clues that lead me to my current working model, which may is not necessarily the final word, but I would say that I think the amygdala complex, as we're discussing it, these 13 subnuclei that reside in the temporal lobe, they are important for assigning im... |
Speaker A: So the judges are changing the leniency of their rulings depending on how well fed they are. |
Speaker B: You know, 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. But it's the. It's not a completely novel concept, the hangry phenomenon, I'm sure. I don't know, everybody's different. I certainly experience ... |
Speaker A: Wow. The brain is so smart. |
Speaker B: It really is. |
Speaker A: 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. |
Speaker B: Exactly. |
Speaker A: Amazing. |
Speaker B: 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 how specific is 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 amygdala is a... |
Speaker A: Such an interesting area. Let's drill into it a bit. And to put it in context, maybe we talk about social media. So on social media, whether or not it's Instagram or X, those seem to be the two major platforms. I'm not on TikTok. People say stuff. Sometimes they say positive things. Sometimes they say negati... |
Speaker B: I like that. So, a lot of people ask me about social media from the context of, is this social contact meaningful? Is this positive? Does this count? Does this help you not feel lonely? And of course, I don't know the answer. We haven't done that particular study yet, and I don't know of that specific study ... |
Speaker A: It happened in Australia yesterday, and I'm on there saying, cool, love it. And then the person's already asleep. |
Speaker B: Yes, exactly. |
Speaker A: So that's what you mean by asynchronous. |
Speaker B: Asynchronous, like that we're not experiencing things at the same time. It's not a shared experience. You know, that in terms of that having that bond, necessarily. And so I've never actually been asked about how the amygdala processes social media. I guess I think what happens is, you know, the amygdala is ... |
Speaker A: 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. |
Speaker B: I have no wonder you're so productive. People who help me get through it and then 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 have too many trips, and I'm responding, fragmented, fragmented. And it's ju... |
Speaker A: Well, and I want to reemphasize 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. The work you've done is incredibly creative. You transformed our understanding of what this famous structure, the amygda... |
Speaker B: No. |
Speaker A: So you're not opening most emails? |
Speaker B: No, I don't open most emails, 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 bec... |
Speaker A: Do you recommend out of there as. |
Speaker B: Soon as I can. |
Speaker A: Love it. Do you pass on this advice to the people that you train? |
Speaker B: I think it depends on what resources and what's your job right now? Right. So I think as a trainee, I definitely did my, as an assistant professor, I did my own emails, but at a certain point, I was just never getting to the bottom. And then it would just stress me out, make me feel overwhelmed. And what is ... |
Speaker A: Oh, yeah, what is it? It's important. Urgent? Yes, certain things are urgent, but not important. Some things are urgent. |
Speaker B: Some things are neither important nor urgent. That's most emails 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 chaptering things that are important. And, you know, sometimes I miss emails, ... |
Speaker A: You know, I feel so honored to have you your contact. I'd like to take a brief moment and thank one of our sponsors, and that's ag one. Ag one is a vitamin, mineral, probiotic drink that also contains adaptogens. I started taking ag one way back in 2012. The reason I started taking it, and the reason I still... |
Speaker B: I mean, I think, and there's something to be said. There's definitely been moments where I've gone deep into social media and spent more time in a certain burst. Right. That is isolated. I think that there's a lot to be learned from social media. So, actually, to bring it back to one point you mentioned earl... |
Speaker A: Great. Yeah, I really applaud that as well. I always read my teaching evals because they're anonymous. And yes, I do wonder what grade the different people who gave different evals got. I don't know that information. I sometimes wonder, did they attend the class or are they just angry? They didn't do well on... |
Speaker B: So, actually, since I've had my research group, my lab, 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. I think it's the fourth or fifth time we've done it, and so it's now I think it's like 70 ques... |
Speaker A: I love the word ground truth. There's something so beautiful to that, and I resonate with what you're saying. Let's go back to social interaction, something that your lab is doing lots of work on nowadays. And maybe we could shift to the sorts of social interaction that most of us are familiar with. The sitt... |
Speaker B: You know, I think 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 having social support in our lives for our well being. But social isolation, or even just perceived loneliness has immense health consequence... |
Speaker A: Sorry to interrupt. I apologize. I'm striving to not interrupt in my life. But I. But so that people are on board, could you just briefly describe the Harlow experiments? |
Speaker B: Yes. So they're very famous experiments where they separated baby monkeys from their moms and then had either a wire sort of thing holding a bottle. So, okay, what do you miss most about the mom? Is it the food or is it the comfort? And then they had. So they had a wire thing with a milk bottle versus blanke... |
Speaker A: So with their other litter mates. |
Speaker B: With their other litter mates. |
Speaker A: I see. So the control group, the saline control group is actually a social isolation condition. |
Speaker B: 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 social isolation. And so that is how we became a lab that studied social isolation. It was a complete accident. We weren't sure what we were looking at. An... |
Speaker A: And they love to be stimulated. |
Speaker B: Yes. And if you're a human and you do cocaine, most people love cocaine. They're very prosocial 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 raphe, that I will also say is in the brainstem, near to an aqueduct, where you... |
Speaker A: Amazing. Before we talk a bit more about these loneliness neurons and some of their inputs and outputs in the brain, how has the discovery of these neurons perhaps changed the way that you organize your day and week in life, if at all? For instance, are you more aware of how much time you spend alone versus ... |
Speaker B: Seasonal affect disorder is real, right? |
Speaker A: So, you know, I think as new information comes online, at least for me, it's changed the way that I organize my life, in subtle 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 after a few days of mana... |
Speaker B: So it's really interesting that you ask this question, and now that you. You know, now that you're asking this way. I mean, of course, when I learn new things, I take them and implement them into my life. But to be honest, in the cycle of learning and studying and being curious, I actually think where I resi... |
Speaker A: I think what you're saying is essential for people to hear. Because it makes sense that loneliness would hurt. 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,... |
Speaker B: I love where you're going with this. And so when we wrote this review the first time, we were conceptualizing this idea of how your social set point can change based on if you're acutely isolated or chronically isolated. And the y axis is the quality quantity of detected social contact, which is so fuzzy. An... |
Speaker A: I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor, Insidetracker. Insidetracker 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... |
Speaker B: When we talked about the quality and quantity, there's just, in terms of contact, just amount of contact. There's such a thing as just the right amount. There's such a thing as 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 ju... |
Speaker A: Do you know the famous ram dass quote? |
Speaker B: No. |
Speaker A: Think you're enlightened. Go spend a weekend with your parents. No disrespect. Mom and dad. |
Speaker B: I know, right? But 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 gonna feel very different to me whether that was a slight or, you know, it's just. It's relative to what is appropriate for our rank, for our prior ... |
Speaker A: 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. ... |
Speaker B: Yeah, I can definitely speculate something that we think about a lot. But again, there's some level of this which is semantics. I think of empathy as being defined, as being able to understand another animal's emotion and also taking it on. So I think something that's a little bit different than emotional co... |
Speaker A: Years ago, I worked with at risk kids, and a fair number of them had just arrived from a region of the world that had undergone dramatic socio political evolution and change. And it was remarkable because we would put out a tray of food to eat, and then the format was, everyone would serve themselves, and th... |
Speaker B: Everyone's his adversary. |
Speaker A: 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, at which point they actually became incredibly good at sharing, but it took a lot of work. It was almost as if, even though they knew more trays of food could arrive, not limitl... |
Speaker B: Main consequence he'd face, apparently. |
Speaker A: Exactly. And I remember it was so striking. I'll never forget that. And the evolution to a different, more altruistic state was wonderful, especially because of, I think, what it did for him. But I'll never forget thinking this is a human being who's essentially functioning like an animal. Like an animal. I ... |
Speaker B: Summarizing valence or no, way. |
Speaker A: No chance, like mine versus, like, meh meh. And 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, maybe it's really all about feelings of safety and feelings of relatedness. |
Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's also about the experiential statistics that you have been exposed to. So this boy who says, I'm gonna take all this food. Cause you can't hit me. I mean, we don't know. But the picture that grows out of my imagination is this boy's had a lot of experiences of people hitting them, a lot of ... |
Speaker A: Yeah. Amen to that. And also to be able to understand that differences in background experience require that we, earlier you mentioned theory of mind, this ability to get into the mindset of others and sort of assume or presume certain mindsets in order to hopefully create a more benevolent environment for e... |
Speaker B: Yeah. So I think it's really, I mean, I'm a parent, I have two kids that are in public school and I think their public school is rated, it's fine, but we won't say where it's all right. But at the same time, school, they definitely do get education about more holistic health and emotional regulation, I think... |
Speaker A: Yeah, well, I think this whole, it sounds sort of new Agey when I say the abundance mindset. I mean, you see this in people who are like recently divorced or newly single for whatever reason. Is the world a place where finding partnership is relatively straightforward, with some work involved? Or is it like ... |
Speaker B: I really prescribe and believe in this abundance versus scarcity mindset framework. I think there's absolutes, like the example we just talked about, the kidde. There's just not food. There's scarcity of food. Fact, you know, of course, there are individuals that experience scarcity of various different need... |
Speaker A: That's such an important statement. I mean, just, I don't think they could be restated enough. You've studied social rank. People hear social rank and hierarchy, and I have to guess that at least some neurons in their amygdala and other areas of the brain get buzzing, because as soon as people hear social ra... |
Speaker B: They eat fast. |
Speaker A: Different resource allocation methods than if they were an only child versus one sibling. There's variation here. I'm generalizing, 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, yeah, what's the modern sc... |
Speaker B: 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 amorphous. It's not really clear who's. Who's the alpha on the playgro... |
Speaker A: So, initially, you take a pool of animals, and then, let's say you got your number, 1234. 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. |
Speaker B: That's right. That's right. |
Speaker A: Got it. |
Speaker B: And so it's really preliminary, and we'll see what happens. But we're investigating. 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 hierarchy. |
Speaker A: And so in any kind of predictable way that you're willing to share, or is it just too early? |
Speaker B: I think it's too early, but I'll just say I guess it seems like the intermediates might be taking the longest amount of time to form the hierarchy. |
Speaker A: They don't know where they sit in the hierarchy. |
Speaker B: They were flexible or something, whereas the dominants, they're going to duke it out and then we're going to battle. There'll be defeat. It's quick. The fight doesn't last that long. Subordinates, we have to still observe. This is all still being. We'll see if everything replicates. But certainly the dynamic... |
Speaker A: 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 youngest, or let's just say not oldest siblings. Here we're setting aside single children that don't have any siblings, but that youngest siblings do tend to, quote unquote,... |
Speaker B: More nonconformists, right? |
Speaker A: I mean, I'm a younger, younger brother of an older sister, 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 that sort of changes things, and it's very dynamic. I realize we're playing here in a kind of loose space, but I find social rank stuff to... |
Speaker B: Dictatorial model, fully out of any science, landed 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 competence. It's very healthy. I think structures where you ha... |
Speaker A: They fight. |
Speaker B: Yeah, well, they do round robin. In this reward competition task, they're food deprived, you know, and we present rewards. What happens? And so subordinates do win some of the times, even though dominants win more, they consistently win more. And we found that prefrontal cortical neurons, you could represent... |
Speaker A: Just based on the firing pattern of prefrontal cortical. |
Speaker B: That's right. |
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