Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
00:21:49 · Andrew Huberman
So, I do think that the public health discourse is harmed when it becomes about the theatrics. And I'm not trying to not name names here, mean, think everyone can look out on the landscape of everyone, from Brian to me to Gary Breca to Asprey to anyone else, there are a lot in the space, and just go, like, whose persona resonates, not just what captures the entertainment value? So what I would expect will happen next, now that we've gone from high amounts of interest in this, to this optimization optimization, now it's turned into, are we over optimizing? I I think we're going see a downturn in the number of things that people are willing to do each day. They're like, this is just too much. It's gotten kind of kooky. It's kind of crazy. And the characters, I need more serious peers. I need serious peers with training in either science or medicine, maybe pharmacology, and they're out there. But I think those people are going to rise to the surface. We haven't seen them yet. So I look forward to having colleagues like that. And then I think what's going happen is we're going to get many, many more people trained as PhDs, trained as MDs, are going to be doing serious science health discourse, not regressing to the TikTok dance model, the focus on me model, and really educating people in a way that's unique, that I'm certain I haven't even tapped into. Someone's gonna come along that's better than me. So I think this field is gonna go into a downturn now, the public education around health and optimization, longevity, etcetera, is going to go into a bit of a downturn. And then I think we're gonna get an influx of a lot of great people, and then it will be where I would like to see it.
00:23:16 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:23:16] S0: How about on the research side? Biggest problem facing the field.
00:23:19 · Andrew Huberman
[00:23:19] S1: Well, think the coolest problem that's also the biggest problem is how we can non invasively write to the nervous system in So sleep and waking my best friend from childhood, Eddie Chang, is chair of neurosurgery at UCSF. He's a bioengineer. He's doing things similar ish to what Neuralink is doing, but removing brain tumors and this kind of thing. I've been with him to surgeries, like right up there next to the tumors. Patient is awake, he's probing areas of the brain, he has permission to map areas related to speech and language, etc. So breaching the skull is a big deal. The neurosurgeons say, Well, you know, a titanium plate would be better, it's stronger, it lasts longer, but most people don't want to have to do that. They do it because they need something taken out, like a tumor, or an epileptic foci. I think the big one now is who can develop, it will probably be ultrasound, but a noninvasive way of selectively activating or quieting brain areas with high amounts of temporal precision. Like getting people who are in locked in syndrome to speak, as Eddie has done, or getting people who have a spinal injury to walk, which Neuralink and Eddie and others are trying to develop technologies to do, that is heroic, right? But ultimately, and I'll go on record saying this, anyone who thinks that Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, or Elon's got Neuralink as his stated neural interest, Anyone that thinks that those are LLM AI companies is perhaps going to be surprised at this prediction. Every single one of those is going to be a biotech company. They're all interested in the brain. You talk to any of those guys, they may not have formal training in it, but they understand a lot of neuroscience, and they will all tell you, Here's the goal, right? The goal is to be able to read and write from your brain non invasively. And there are straightforward ways to do that. So the big thing is, how can you stimulate a brain area with temporal and spatial precision? How can you quiet that brain area with spatial and temporal precision? How can you dial up or down the level of quieting? Because it's one thing to say silent versus activated, but the nervous system has a lot of graded signals in it.
00:25:15 · Andrew Huberman
Mean, we don't think about those signals, but the communication between areas is gated, it's graded, thresholds for activation change, even just for things like drive and motivation. A non invasive device where you could literally crank up your level of motivation by stimulating the nucleus accumbens and related pathways while engaging in a particular learning task or in hard work, and then turning it off so that you can capture more energy, you have more of a square wave function on your energy output, that's coming. And those companies are all about that. That's what the real arms race of AI is about. So I sort of chuckle when I think, like, okay, like the LLMs are great or terrible, depending on who you are, and I believe they're great. I'm a big fan of AI. But the dynamic modulation of your own neural activity, using non invasive technologies, not pharmacology, but then using AI to be able to understand, okay, this level of activation in this brain area for you, Patrick, is related to a hyper motivated brain state that makes it very hard for you to do anything else the rest of the day, and it will just learn to titrate. But you say, Well, that sounds kind of science fiction. How far off is that? I mean, my eight sleep changes the temperature throughout the night to give me more REM sleep or deep sleep. It's already doing that. It's just we're okay with these things in sleep, and it's doing that through a powerful but indirect method, temperature change. But it's no small thing to dynamically change and measure the degree of change in the nervous system in order to access a given state, sleep or otherwise, better. And that's what these companies want to do. So my field of neuroscience has to embrace this, and they are. That the people who are trying to figure out what are the natural signals occurring in the brain when people think, when people see, when people move their limbs in a particular way. That's been the last thirty, forty years. That's all reading from the nervous system. Now it's about writing to the nervous system non invasive.
00:27:04 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:27:04] S0: I have a stupid basic question. What is the method by which we can read and how precise is our ability to read activity, and what does activity even mean in different parts of the brain?
00:27:13 · Andrew Huberman
[00:27:13] S1: Great questions. So it depends on how invasive you want to get. So most people understand, or if you have it, no big deal, that neurons communicate through action potentials, electrical signals. And we were taught, and it's still in the textbooks, that they're always the same size and shape for a given neuron. It turns out that's not even true. So there's a variability there, but we sort of have this all or none, a neuron either fires or it doesn't, but there are graded potentials. You get to a threshold, the neuron fires, communicates with the next neuron, depending on the milieu there, how many other inputs, what they're doing, the next neuron fires, you sort of set off a chain or not. So, you can record from neurons by putting an electrode close to them, extracellular recordings, you can put a bed of nails nearby, record lots of those extracellular signals, you can impale a neuron, record intracellularly, all of that requires breaching the skull, sticking wires basically down into the brain. The methods that are really exciting are things like ultrasound, transcranial magnetic stimulation, which is used for the treatment of depression and other things. The spatial control there, that's for stimulation, is not great. The recording from the nervous system, you can go from what I just described, intracellular recording at the most extreme, then extracellular recording, and then you go all the way to, like, fMRI, or EEG, when people see these, like, heat maps of the brain, where you really can only measure signals in the surface, like at the cortex, which is interesting, but you're not gonna get to the deeper layers. A big problem now is how important is it to understand the natural patterns of activity in detail before we start poking around and stimulating with writing? And obviously there are two ways to write, at least two. You can use pharmacology. So what does most pharmacology do? Whether it's alcohol, barbiturates, sedatives of some kind, what are you doing? You're increasing the threshold for activation. You're quieting the brain by just increasing the threshold for activation. You're doing it indirectly, by increasing inhibitory release. So there's less excitation overall.