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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. Today, my guest is Doctor Mary Helen Imordino Yang. Doctor Imordino Yang is a professor of education, psycho... |
B | For those of you who don't know. |
A | Yoga Nidra is a process of lying very still but keeping an active mind. It's very different than most meditations, and there's excellent scientific data to show that yoga Nidra and something similar to it called non sleep deep rest or NSDR, can greatly restore levels of cognitive and physical energy, even with just a s... |
B | Free 30 day trial. |
A | And now for my discussion with Doctor Mary Helen Imordino Yang. |
B | Doctor Imordino Yang, good to be here. Great to have you. I'd like to start off talking about something that, to me, seems a little bit high level, but I think is the perfect jumping off point. I've heard you talk before about inspiration and awe. And as somebody who's interested in the brain and as somebody who's inte... |
C | Yeah, I mean, I think what you've noticed is actually fundamental to the conundrum of being a human is that our most high level complex brain states, mind states, are also fundamentally hooking themselves into the most basic biological machinery that literally we share with alligators, that keeps us alive. And that is ... |
B | So when I was a kid, I loved stories of all kinds. I think, like most kids, I loved my curious George books. I'm told I liked the Babar books, but then quickly didn't like the Babar books. I liked the book where the red fern grows. I liked books and stories about it generally was boys for me, for whatever reason, that ... |
C | Sure. So the first thing I'll say is that I learned that idea from working with Antonio Damasio. So he was my postdoctoral mentor, and he taught me a first. That this notion that it's the feeling of the body. It's an organism's ability to represent or map the state of the interior and exterior of the body that becomes ... |
B | I'm fascinated by the idea that early in life, we experienced some interaction with the world. It could be with other people, could be with an object in the world, and it makes us feel something powerful. And that lays a template of recognition, meaning that later in life and perhaps throughout life, we're always consc... |
C | Yeah. It's a dynamic emergency. Let me give you an example that I use sometimes to help myself understand the notion. So my little daughter, okay, Nora, when she was two, two and some months, two and four months, something like that. She's a very verbal kid, and I was sitting in the kitchen one day drinking a cup of te... |
B | You're describing my biggest fear, people. Listeners to this podcast will know that I'm gonna go into the grave, hopefully a long time from now, telling people to get morning sunlight in their eyes. |
C | I know. |
B | I still do it, both of you, but please continue. |
C | No, but that's right. So she's thinking about how much she is grateful for there to be sunlight. And in her little mind, she connected that to the feeling of being attached to me and used one to explain the other. Right. So that both things now have meaning. And that is the way I think that we start to elaborate these ... |
B | It answers it incredibly clearly, and so much so that I'd like to continue to build on that example because I think it's very relatable for people. And it's the first time that I've ever heard the embodiment of emotions described in a developmental framework that truly makes sense. Oh, good. So, thank you. So, the cont... |
C | Functions of every species of your ideas or more of your work or more. |
B | Of your art, right, exactly. So is that an overly simplistic way to think about it, or does it work? Even if there's more that needs to be added? Does that work? As a 20 year old, I learned things in college, and I'm like, this is awesome. The first time I learned about the hypothalamus, this little marble sized struct... |
C | Yeah. |
B | I mean, it just. It blew me away. It still blows me away. But the feeling is the same as looking at the discus fish in Monet's pet shop on California Avenue when I'm nine years old. So is that the way to think about it? |
C | Yes. I think there's an awful lot of basic physiological mechanisms that become motivational mechanisms in all the senses, adaptive mechanisms that we share with all life forms, not even just all animals, but all life forms. But they look different in different life forms, for sure, because the adaptive functions, the ... |
B | I'd like to take a quick break. |
A | And acknowledge one of our sponsors, athletic greens. Athletic greens, now called ag one, is a vitamin mineral probiotic drink that covers all of your foundational nutritional needs. I've been taking athletic greens since 2012, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast. The reason I started taking athletic g... |
B | I started off studying the visual system, and I don't want this to turn into a discussion about the visual system. But in the visual system, we know that there's what's called a hierarchical organization where the eye encodes and can respond to edges and light versus dark and red, green, blue. And from that very basic ... |
C | What you're doing with your face, right? Yeah. |
B | I mean, I've broken my left foot five times growing up doing the same sport, and just. I can still hear and feel the thing going. And that means six months in a cast or whatever it is, versus a story? You know, seeing somebody sitting alone in a cafe, writing in their journal, and then you learning that they just lost ... |
C | Yes, and actually that is exactly what we found, a whole system of brain areas that that did this, which now many people have described, and we're still trying to understand the full role of these networks. But these regions together are called in the literature, the so called default mode network, right? Because the c... |
B | The losing of the spouse. |
C | The losing of the spouse. So what we later showed in a series of experiments contrasting true stories that are meant to induce admiration for skill, right? Like something physically skillful, somebody can or cognitively skillful and memorize a Rubik's cube and solve it with your eyes closed, right? Or do flips on your ... |
B | Incredible. If I'm understanding correctly, there's a feeling state in our body. When we experience or observe somebody in their own feeling state or experience, it may be the same as theirs might be different. And frankly, as a neuroscientist, I'm going to say we'll never know. Exactly. We won't know. |
C | It's the age old philosophical debate. If I see blue and you see blue, is it the same experience? |
B | It's probably not based on. So from my knowledge of color vision and the distribution of cones, to explain why I'm saying that the distribution of cone photopigments in your eye and my eye are extremely different, to the point where we're not working with the same palette. |
C | Cool. |
B | And I think that makes life interesting. |
C | Makes life interesting, exactly. |
B | But assuming that neither of us is colorblind, red is similar enough to both of us that we would both look at it and say, that's red. But one in 80 males is red. Green colorblind would look at it and would have see what you and I call red and call it orange. In any event, when we, let's say, listen to or watch and list... |
C | A thing's a thing. |
B | We'll talk about adolescents, right? I'll just say. I'll go on record by saying that I think that the music that we listen to in our adolescents and teen years is one of the main ways in which we come to recognize the extremes of these feeling state templates that you're describing. One of the ways I prepare for podcas... |
C | Maybe they're both right. |
B | That's right. Exactly. But I always know what music to listen to before I do a solo podcast, depending on the state that I happen to be in, driving into the studio versus the one I need to be in in order to deliver that particular material. And I know because it's almost like knowing what palette of colors, of emotiona... |
C | Yeah. Transportation is another way to say it. Being transported by story. |
B | Right. And I think that it has its adaptive utility. I'm not being critical. I think that's an incredibly interesting aspect to ourselves. Some of us. I have a lot more narrative distancing, especially with violence. And I think that's because I grew up around a lot more violence than she did. And so I see somebody get... |
C | Yeah. |
B | But I don't. I'm not horrified in the way that she's horrified. I'm horrified, but not to the same extent. So obviously, some of us have more of a buffer than others. And you can see this in a movie or in a classroom full of kids watching a speech, like the I have a dream speech, or hearing the Rosa parks story, for in... |
C | Okay, wow, there's a lot in there. A couple of things to start. The first thing I was thinking before, when you were talking about the visual system, which I think is relevant now, is that as humans, the more developed we get, the more experience we have, the more we've adapted to the contexts in which we live. You kno... |
B | Can I just say, I'm glad that you brought up that dark example, because my understanding from my psychology courses in university were that as much as we would all like to think that we are incapable of being the committers of genocide, that there are studies that were done in the fifties, but then have been repeated o... |
C | It is. And I think it really, I think, I mean, I'm ever the optimist. I'm also ever the educator, right? You know, I'm a teacher. I'm very, also very interested in the ways that we design educational experiences for young people. I think the only hope we have to protect ourselves against these possibilities is to syste... |
B | Well, exactly what you said. So much so that I'm a big believer in following lots of different types of social media accounts. I've taken some heat here and there because people automatically assume that if you follow an account, that you subscribe to that ideology. But I follow many accounts to whom I disagree with wh... |
C | Yes, as far as we are. |
B | Sometimes I wonder, but they probably wonder the same about me. They wonder, too. And there's enormous range in those accounts that I follow. I follow different accounts for different reasons. Some for entertainment, some for information, some for challenging myself, some for my desire to be baffled every now and again... |
C | But I. Yeah, dissonance, it's very, you know, that kind of cognitive dissonance we call it, is very difficult. It takes work to resolve it? |
B | Yeah, I guess. Is there. I like to think there's a way to step back from that and observe it, not from a disconnected stance, but from a place of curiosity about what's driving those mechanisms in people and maybe where we need to adjust our thinking, maybe not to adopt their mode of thinking 100%, but maybe, you know,... |
C | Well, I won't comment on should you send your family members. There's other people that do that. They do that work and they know how to. |
B | We're always frustrating each other over text messages. It's okay. |
C | It's okay. |
B | It can't get any worse. |
C | Yeah. No. Okay. |
B | We all love each other anyway. |
C | But one thing I really do think a lot about in this is the way in which we educate our young people, and what do we do without ten year olds? Right? And, like, the first thing I'll say about your ten year old, I don't know if you actually have a ten year old, but is query them about their beliefs when they follow somet... |
B | So it seems to me that in the way that things actually happen in school, what is created is kind of desire for the kid to be a computer, not a human. And they do have a dopamine system, however. And so what becomes the buzz, the emotional buzz is performance, if it becomes a buzz at all. So for the kids that don't get ... |
C | I dropped out of 6th grade for a few months. Yeah. Didn't work for me. |
B | Yeah, I eventually got back to it and as I imagine you did too, because we ended up as academics. But I think what you're describing is so key, and I never thought about it from the perspective of, oh, yeah, as young kids, we're given all the things that are going to drive our sensory world in the appropriate ways, tou... |
C | Right. We're trying to build meaning in our. |
B | Mind and that we get to as students, very young learners, impose some of our own intrinsic motivation to do certain things and not others, and that isn't supported as we're adults. What you're describing is so vital. What age do you think this cliffs off? Okay, so in preschool, kids are allowed to do this. In kindergar... |
C | Yeah. |
B | And also, how do we address this issue that there are certain basic skills that not everyone is going to perform well at? And so for the kid that says, I don't like math, well, you still. |
C | Have to learn it. You need to appreciate it. |
B | So how do you conjure up in a joy or an appreciation in that kid? It seems like a hard thing. I mean, I eventually set myself along a academic trajectory that worked out, but that was initially just out of pure fear because my life was really bad. Circumstances in myself made it bad, and I was rescuing myself from basi... |
C | You could say it this way. Whatever you're having emotion about is what you're thinking about. And whatever you're thinking about, you could hope to learn about. Remember something from. Right. Understand differently. So the key question for educators is what? Everybody's always having some kind of emotions all the tim... |
B | Why? |
C | Or why not? Right? And they spent months learning the math that would help them get at that problem. And he talks about how I had a problem, he says, and I had to learn fractions. I had to in order to be able to solve the problem I had. And as I engaged with fractions and that problem, I got fascinated, he says, by fin... |
B | Right? |
C | That's the development of the person and what they put in their cart then serves that development. It's the toolkit of ways of knowing and understanding that come with you as you move into the world. But this takes real, real developmental skill on the part of educators who are not supported or resourced or trained to ... |
B | Demographic groups, especially bad and young girls, as I understand. |
C | Yes, that's right. But it's bad in everybody, and it's worse than girls. Yes. We don't fully understand why that is. Get some suggestions. What we're really doing is actually producing people who are gutted of their own inner drive, to become someone who thinks powerfully in the space of the world. We are frightened to... |
B | I think so much of what we see in terms of these failure to launch examples are because I know some of these, the children of friends, really, really smart kids that didn't map well to the system and therefore are not doing well, really struggling, and clearly have the intellectual power. It just wasn't served up to th... |
C | Yeah, that's what says much about the system as it does about the kid, right? |
B | Yeah. I teach a course at Stanford to the medical students that every first year medical student takes about neuroscience. It's team taught. It's a phenomenal course because of the range of expertise in the teaching that comes through. And one thing I've noticed is that they're all phenomenal teachers, but the best ins... |
C | Obviously, I deeply understand what you're trying to get at if you want people to engage with ideas. Yeah. |
B | They are true luminaries in their respective fields. Addiction, pain, memory. Every system of the body and brain that relates to the nervous system is taught in this course. But that I've noticed every once in a while that there's a subset of them that as they teach from that position of expertise, not only are they cl... |
C | It's that intellectual curiosity that they're keeping alive. They have this disposition we're talking about cultivating. Sorry to cut you off. |
B | No, please, sue. As academics, we're familiar with that, right? Interrupting in the landscape of academics, interrupting me is a sign of interest. I think Carol Dweck was the one who told me. That's right. And she's right. Carol. She's right. The great Carol Dweck. But I've seen this especially. So there are some topic... |
C | Yeah. |
B | I've still never talked about this or done a podcast on it because it tends to require visuals and we don't use those because the podcast, most people listen to the podcast, but maybe I'll do something just for YouTube at some point. I think the same experience occurs when I see somebody like Doctor Sean Mackey, who ru... |
C | He's not a squirrel with nuts and giving all the nuts to the kids. He's inventing the knowledge in front of them. Right? |
B | That's a great way to put it. As usual, others are more succinct in collecting my ideas and expressing them than I am. So I think that's a powerful thing. I went to a high school that has a kind of a split reputation. It's known as being one of the best public high schools in the country. It's also the high school that... |
C | Sort of gentleman's farm. My dad was a surgeon, but we had animals and a farm and tried, my parents tried to have us growing the things we ate. |
B | You've had a number of different experiences that we were talking about before we started recording. But one of the things that you mentioned was getting involved in education, where you were exposed to students who had very different backgrounds than you. Maybe you could just talk a little bit about the nodes of your ... |
C | I'll just jump in. I mean, it's always hard to talk about yourself. I don't know what's interesting and what's not. To me, it's just me. |
B | I think what's interesting is knowing where you've been and things that mapped back to your emotional networks in a way that, for you feel like that mattered in terms of what you're doing now. |
C | As a little kid, I remember, even as a little kid, not liking school, I was a very good kid. I was a very well behaved kid. I went to a decent public school. But just the whole idea of it, I just always felt like I had two left feet. It never felt like it was really me there. I was always trying to escape a little bit,... |
B | And you're a professor. You're a professor. |
C | I was already fascinated by the natural world and able to make meaning out of something in a way that inspired other people, if I can be so blunt as to say that. And yet I was constantly in trouble at school for not having my homework. I was just. The feeling of release on the Friday afternoon and the feeling of dread ... |
B | When I went as cold as they. |
C | Say in Siberia, it was gloomy and rainy and muddy and cold. Yes. |
B | Yeah, Siberia always sounds so bleak. My parents threatened many times to send me there. |
C | Oh, yeah. No, that's a real threat. I mean, it's beautiful in many ways, but, yeah, that was sad. It was a sad, sad story. Anyway, I think what I was trying to do was actually learn by doing, by being. By engaging with other people who knew things I didn't, learning how to build things. I was always really interested i... |
B | Cabinetry. |
C | Yeah, cabinetry. You know what I mean? |
B | You can actually build furniture. So when people say they built furniture, but they basically assembled Ikea furniture. We're not talking about that. |
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