Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
00:45:46 · Andrew Huberman
You can do this in humans. They've done it in humans for other purposes, but it's more localized, like into the eyes. So here's where we're going. This is where we're going to end up. I know it sounds scary, but at some point in the not too distant future, if you're willing and it can be done safely, you get an injection of a virus. Everyone knows, Oh my God, it's gonna make me sick. No, it's not gonna make you sick, it's not the active virus. The virus is just a vector, it's just a carrier for some genetic cargo that puts into your brain a channel such that if you have a hat on, wool cap, or a baseball cap, that it can direct stimulation of only those neurons, because it will cast a nonspecific stimulus, like a cone of maybe light that can go through the skull, like long wavelength light, that seems the most likely, or ultrasound, in a nonspecific way, so not illuminating or activating the whole brain, but it'll sort of send a beam of sound or light onto these neurons that if they express that tag, will be active. You can increase the intensity of the light, you could flicker the light. We'll work through all the different parameters that allow you to turn those neurons from inactive to active, to more active to hyperactive, and dial it down. And then with most likely through AI, you're not going be turning a knob, You, if you're somebody who is suffering from severe motivational issues, or you have healthy levels of motivation, you want to ramp it up. We'll just increase the stimulation. Now, does this open up into people cranking the circuit for themselves? Yeah. But we also have this thing called caffeine and we also have this thing called methamphetamine. Methamphetamine is a problem. Ninety percent plus of the adult world's population drinks caffeine every day, which increases excitability in the brain, basically.
00:47:22 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:47:22] S0: Yeah.
00:47:22 · Andrew Huberman
[00:47:22] S1: It blocks the thing that shuts down excitation, but you know, the net effect is more excitation. So you know how much coffee you can drink at a given time of day, given how much sleep you've had. You'll decide how much alertness you want to have. I don't have a better word for it. The opportunity or vulnerability of a given set of neurons will be set by some genetic thing that will be introduced through a virus. Maybe it's an and gate. Maybe you also have to take a pill. So you can't just have the virus and the ultrasound, need a third factor there. So it could be an and gate, it could have any number of different safeguards in there, but these people with vagal stimulators can unplug them too. I know it sounds scary, but it's absolutely going to happen for the people that want to do it. I think not everyone's going to want to do it. And right now, the reading and measurement from the brain and body are freaking some people out. I put out a post on X a few weeks ago, like, Oh, if the cost of whole body MRI comes down, I can imagine most people would want it. I know people who have told me they've saved patients' lives because they went and got this done and saw a tumor and we took it out and the neurosurgery community did not like that. I thought it'd be like, Oh, more business for them, but they did not like it. The public gaining more access to their own health data is scaring some sectors of medicine. Dermatologists, ophthalmologists love the AI and the more measurements better. But I think the Wall Street Journal just put something out saying like whole body MRIs basically said it's bad. But you don't have to do it, assuming it's safe. If the cost is low enough or insurance covers, like, I just don't get the logic. But my friends in medicine tell me, we all know within twenty months, I don't know why twenty and not twenty four, within twenty months, it's going be commonplace because the cost is coming down. Just like blood testing. Everyone was resistant to blood testing and should genetic testing. I'm old enough to remember the '80s, when it was like, will you get your genome mapped? It was like, what if you have the Huntington's gene? What if you're gonna get... Would you wanna know? They had, like, episodes of sixty Minutes about this. Now it's very simple. You wanna know, you go take the test.
00:49:22 · Andrew Huberman
You don't want know, you don't take the test. No one's talking about whether or not getting your genetics done is worthwhile or not or scary or not. It's up to you. Same thing with your blood.
00:49:33 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
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00:50:59 · Andrew Huberman
[00:50:59] S1: More and more specificity. That's what you want as an experimental neurobiologist. The early days of neurobiology were like lesion this or find a patient who had a spike through his head and, oh, that's what the orbital frontal cortex does? It's involved in morality? No, it's involved in contextual decision making strategy. That's Phineas Gage. Certainly not the whole story, but it goes to He's got lesions in his hippocampus. Can't remember new things. We now are at the level of tickling specific neurons that are involved in a particular memory or expression of a particular behavior using chemical genetic tags, using light, using sound. I mean, we only have so many different ways to manipulate neurons, but in the health realm, love that you bring this up because it really bridges the two areas that we've been talking about, public health discourse and neuroscience, reading and writing to the nervous system. And it bridges the two because what are we talking about? Get morning sunlight. Why? To set your circadian rhythm, spike your cortisol. It seems like a blunt tool, but there's a circuit in place from your eye to your hypothalamus and on and on that is there for that purpose. So it's not biohacking, right? This is important. It's not like using a paper clip to fix my glasses. That's not what the paper clip was designed for. It's not a good solution. It's a temporary solution. The problem with a lot of pharmacology, like SSRIs, believe it or not, helped so many people with true clinical grade OCD. They were over prescribed for depression. And really what they do is increase serotonin, which allows for more neuroplasticity. Now everyone's down on SSRIs, understandably so, although they have their place, but everyone's really excited about psilocybin. What is psilocybin? It increases serotonin, and massively so, it unmasks lateral connections in the brain, allows you to form new associations in a very condensed timeframe. Sometimes it works great, sometimes not. But it's interesting. Same thing with MDMA. Create really massive increases in neuromodulators in a specific context that we're going to work on this thing, this pain, this issue, this trauma, this depression. And you get more plasticity than you do if you're just lathing away at the problem through talking about it day in, day out.