Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
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.
00:53:02 · Andrew Huberman
You need the therapy, but what did you really do to create plasticity? You put serotonin through the roof with psilocybin, or in the case of MDMA, you increase serotonin and dopamine, and you have this heightened opportunity for plasticity. Okay, TMS, or what I think will soon happen is combined transcranial magnetic stimulation and pharmacology in order to work through a clinical issue that is of, you know, emotions or mind like depression, like PTSD. So these two things are going to start to intersect. ADHD with stimulants. Yep. Ramps up activity in the prefrontal cortex and you can focus better on things that you normally wouldn't be able to focus on. It's just a nonspecific focus enhancer because it increases activity there. You could also do sleep creatine in particular when sleep deprived. Is it like Adderall? No. But those two things, great night's sleep plus some caffeine, you're pretty close to Adderall level effects. It's just that the people taking Adderall aren't getting great sleep. And so, we're really talking about tools of different types, different margins of safety, but they are all very blunt because all these receptors are expressed everywhere. So you get sexual side effects, weight gain or excessive weight loss with certain antidepressants, or hypersexuality with certain drugs, etcetera, because these receptors are all over the brain. The same thing with electrical stimulation. You just want more spatial and temporal specificity. It has to go that way. Neuroscience went that way in terms of reading and understanding the nervous system. You can talk about Dario's work, for instance, no one talks about his work in this realm, but he was recording in Mike Berry's lab from retina is usually a salamander retina or some other creature, and they record as many neurons as you could. And then you knew what visual signals you were giving the retina. So you knew the input, you knew the responses at the lower photoreceptors, the output cells, what we call ganglion cells, the signals going off to the brain. The goal was get as much information about the total collection of neurons responding to an image so we can move from image to perception deep in the brain.
00:54:58 · Andrew Huberman, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Now you're still a few steps away from the actual perception, which takes place in the brain, but those, and the guys that they were trained under, Markus Meister, those were heroes of our field, because dropping electrodes in an area and buzzing in like the animal goes into a rage or starts mating or whatever. That's super cool. But then you have to move to like, what's the nature of the switch in real life? And people are studying those things. What moves an animal from exploring mating to actual mating? What moves an animal from exploring an aggressive interaction to an actual aggressive interaction? But these are all still very low level behaviors and motivations. And we're just starting to understand those. So the cyborg thing, like, can I increase your creativity? We're not even close to that. We don't even know what circuit... [00:55:43] S0: Or IQ or something.