How to Focus to Change Your Brain | Huberman Lab Podcast #6 Flashcards
Customizing our brain from birth to 25 years old
So, I want you to imagine in your mind that when you were brought into this world, you were essentially a widely connected web of connections that was really poor at doing any one thing. And that through your experience, what you were exposed to by your parents or rather caretakers, through your social interactions, through your thoughts, through the languages that you learn, through the places you traveled or didn’t travel, your nervous system became customized
to your unique experience. Now, that’s true for certain parts of your brain –> not for breathing etc.
How to change your brain after 25 years old?
From birth until about age 25 those connections get refined mainly through the removal of connections that don’t serve us and the incredible strengthening of connections that relate to either powerful experiences or that allow us to do things like walk and talk and do the math, et cetera. And then after age 25, if we want to change those connections, those super highways of connectivity, we have to engage in some very specific processes. And those processes, as we’ll soon learn are gated. Meaning you can’t just decide to change your brain. You actually have to go through a series of steps to change your internal state in ways that will allow you to change your brain
The brain can be seen as real estate that can chang during our lives, more easily early in our life
Parts of the brain can change into different functions –> blind people will use the part of the brain that is normally used to see for example hearing
What is the first step into making changes in our brain?
So that’s important. If you want to learn something or you want to change your nervous system in any way,
whether or not it’s because of some impairment or because of something that you want to acquire,
a cognitive skill, a motor skill, an emotional skill, the first thing is recognizing what that thing is. And that often can be the hardest thing to identify but the brain has the self recognition mechanisms and those self recognition mechanisms are not vague, spiritual or mystical or even psychological concepts. They are neurochemicals. We’re going to talk next about the neurochemicals that stamp down particular behaviors and thoughts and emotional patterns and tell the rest of the nervous system, this is something to pay attention to because this is in the direction of the change that I want to make. So I’ll repeat that, there are specific chemicals that when we are consciously aware of a change we want to make or even just that we want to make some change, chemicals are released in the brain
that allow us the opportunity to make those changes
The brain can be a seen as map with limited space
the brain is in fact a customized map of the outside world, we said that already. But that what it’s doing is it’s measuring the amount of activity for a given part of our body, one eye or the other, or our fingers, this finger or that finger and all of those inputs are competing for space in the brain. Now this is fundamentally important because what it means is that if we are to change our nervous system in adulthood,
we need to think about not just what we’re trying to get, but what we’re trying to give up. We can’t actually add new connections without removing something else
Why is alertness essential for brain plasticity
But the most important thing for getting plasticity is that there’ll be epinephrin which equates to alertness,
plus the release of this neuromodulator, acetylcholine.
Acetylcholine acts as a spotlight but epinephrin for alertness. acetylcholine spotlighting these inputs. Those two things alone are not enough to get plasticity.
There needs to be this third component. And the third component is acetylcholine released from an area of the forebrain called nucleus basalis.
Ways to change your brain
- Your ability to engage in deliberate focused alertness is in direct proportion to how well you are sleeping
on a regular basis. I think that’s kind of an obvious one. So get your sleep handled. - ALERTNESS - Metal tricks of mention, fear or love, or pharmacology or caffeine. The truth is that from the standpoint of epinephrinand getting alert and activated, it doesn’t really matter. Epinephrin is a chemical and your brain does not distinguish between doing things out of love or hate, anger or fear. It really doesn’t, all of those promote autonomic arousal and the release of epinephrin. So I think for most people if you’re feeling not motivated to make these changes the key thing is to identify not just one but probably at kit of reasons, several reasons as to why you would want to make this particular change and being drawn toward a particular goal that you’re excited about can be one, also being motivated to not be completely afraid, ashamed, or humiliated for not following through on a goal is another. So I suggest that everyone asks themselves
A. what is it that I want to accomplish?
B. And what is it that’s driving me to accomplish this and come up with two or three things. Fear-based perhaps, love-based perhaps or perhaps several of those in order to ensure alertness, energy and attention for the task. And that brings us to the attention part. - FOCUS. –> You need focus and visual focus is the primary way in which we start to deploy these neurochemicals That small cone of visual imagery or soda straw view of the world has much higher acuity, higher resolution than if I were to look at everything. Now you see, of course, this makes perfect sense but that’s about visual attention, not mental attention. Well, it turns out that focus in the brain
is anchored to our visual system. - FOR HOW LONG? 90 minutes cyles
- SLEEP - So mastering sleep is key in order to reinforce the learning that occurs
More information about visual focus
So in other words, when our eyes are relaxed in our head when we’re just kind of looking at our entire visual environment, moving our head around, moving through space we’re in optic flow, things moving past us or we’re sitting still, we’re looking broadly at our space, we’re relaxed. When our eyes move slightly inward toward a particular visual target our visual world shrinks, our level of visual focus goes up and we know that this relates to the release of acetylcholine and epinephrin at the relevant sites in the brain for plasticity. focusing spending just 60 to 120 seconds focusing my visual attention on a small window of my screen, meaning just on my screen with nothing on it, but bringing my eyes to that particular location increases not just my visual acuity for that location but it brings about an increase in activity in a bunch of other brain areas that are associated with gathering information from this location. So put simply, if you want to improve your ability to focus practice visual focus
Key to plasticity
So the key to plasticity in childhood is to be a child. Early, from birth until 25, mere exposure to a sensory event can create plasticity. That could be a good thing or a bad thing. The key to plasticity in adulthood is to engage alertness, engage focus and then to engage Non Sleep Deep Rest and deep sleep while you’re in your typical about of sleep.
