back to indexScience of Social Bonding in Family, Friendship & Romantic Love | Huberman Lab Podcast #51
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Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,
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where we discuss science and science-based tools
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for everyday life.
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I'm Andrew Huberman,
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and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology
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at Stanford School of Medicine.
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Today's episode is about the biology, psychology,
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and practices of social bonding.
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From the day we are born until the day we die,
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the quality of our social bonds
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dictates much of our quality of life.
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It should therefore be no surprise that our brain,
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and indeed much of our entire nervous system,
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is wired for social bonds.
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Now, social bonds occur between infant and parent.
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There are even particular wiring diagrams
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within the brain and spinal cord and body
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that are oriented towards the specific bonds
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that occur between infant and mother,
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as well as infant and father.
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And we have specific brain circuitries for friendship,
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specific brain circuitries that are activated
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in romantic relationships.
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And as it goes, specific brain circuitries
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that are activated when we break up with a romantic partner,
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or when they break up with us,
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or when somebody passes away, moves away,
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or otherwise leaves our lives in one form or another.
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Today, we are going to talk about
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those brain and nervous system circuitries.
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We're also going to talk about the neurochemicals
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and hormones that underlie their function.
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And we are going to touch on a number of important
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and actionable tools that you can apply in everyday life.
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And because we are headed into the holiday,
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the New Year's and Christmas holiday,
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that you can deploy in your various interactions
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with family members and friends.
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And should you not be spending time
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with family members and friends,
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today we are also going to talk about
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how to achieve social bonds out of the context
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of family and romantic partnership and friendship.
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So today's episode is going to include a lot of science,
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a lot of actionable tools,
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and I'm confident that you will come away
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from today's episode with tremendous knowledge
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about how you function.
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For instance, if you're an introvert or an extrovert,
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Turns out there may be a neurochemical basis for that.
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Maybe you're somebody that really enjoys social media.
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Maybe you're somebody that doesn't.
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Today, I'm going to talk about a gene or a set of genes
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that predicts whether or not you will follow more people
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or seek out more online social interactions or fewer.
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Believe it or not, there's biology around that now,
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and it's excellent peer reviewed work.
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We will also talk about how bonds are broken
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and why breakups can be so painful,
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not just romantic breakups,
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but breakups with friendships and coworkers
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and how to move through those more seamlessly.
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So regardless of your age and regardless of whether or not
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you are in a romantic partnership of one form or another
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or not, I do believe this episode will be useful to you
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as you explore the social bonds
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that already exist in your life
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and as you seek out new and changing social bonds.
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Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast
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is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
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It is, however, part of my desire and effort
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to bring zero cost to consumer information about science
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and science-related tools to the general public.
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In keeping with that theme,
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I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.
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Our first sponsor is Roca.
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Roca makes eyeglasses and sunglasses
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that are the absolute highest quality.
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I've spent a lifetime working on the biology
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of the visual system,
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and the visual system has many important features
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even if it's brightly lit or dimly lit
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Today's episode is also brought to us by Athletic Greens.
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I started taking Athletic Greens way back in 2012
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I've been meditating for a very long time,
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I think many people have that experience.
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Let's talk about the biology of social bonding
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and I want to point out
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that I use the word bonding intentionally.
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It's a verb and in biology, we want to think about verbs
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because everything in biology is a process.
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It's not an event.
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And when we think about things in biology as a process,
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that means it's going to have multiple steps
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and today we are going to explore the steps
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start to finish of social bonding,
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meaning how social bonds are established,
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how they are maintained, how they are broken
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and how they are reestablished.
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Now an important feature of biology generally,
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but in particular, as it relates to social bonding
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is that the neural circuits,
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meaning the brain areas and neurons and the hormones,
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things like oxytocin, which we'll talk about today
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and the other chemicals in the brain and body
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that are responsible for the process we call social bonding
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are not unique to particular social bonds.
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What I mean by that is that the same brain circuits
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that are responsible for establishing a bond
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between parent and child are actually repurposed
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in romantic relationships.
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And this might not come as a surprise to many of you.
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Many of you are probably familiar with this idea
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of securely attached people versus anxious attached people
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versus avoidant attached people.
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We're going to touch on that a little bit,
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but all of that has roots in whether or not children
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and parents formed healthy social bonds
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or whether or not they had challenged social bonds.
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Now it's clear from the scientific
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and psychological literature
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that just because you might've had a not so great
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or even terrible social bond with a parent
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or with some other caretaker or loved one as a child,
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that doesn't fate you to have poor social bonds as an adult.
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There's a lot of plasticity in the system,
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meaning it can change,
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it can rewire in response to experience.
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And as we will soon discover,
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there are specific components within the neural circuits
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of your brain that are responsible for social bonding
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that allow you to place subjective labels
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on why you are doing certain things
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and to rewire the neural circuits for social bonding.
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So we're going to touch on all of that today.
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But the important feature really to point out
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is that we don't have 12 different circuits
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in the brain and body for different types of social bonds.
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We have one, and there's some universal features
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that underlie all forms of social bonds.
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So we're going to start by exploring
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what those neural circuits are.
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And then we are going to see how they plug in
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to different types of social bonds.
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And then we are going to explore things like introversion,
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extraversion, where you're going to touch on a little bit
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about things like trauma bonds, healthy bonds,
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and various other aspects
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of how humans can bond to one another.
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And as you'll soon discover,
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there is a unique chemical signature
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of all bonding of all kinds.
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And you're going to learn
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how to modulate that chemical signature.
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Before we talk about social bonding,
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I want to talk about its mirror image,
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which is lack of social bonding or social isolation.
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Now, for better or for worse,
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there is a tremendous literature
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on the biology of social isolation
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and all of the terrible things that happen
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when animals or humans are socially isolated
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at particular phases of life.
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Now, for those of you that are introverts,
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you are not necessarily damaging yourself
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by deciding to spend less time with other people.
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Many people like time alone.
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I personally am an introvert.
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I get a thrill out of spending time
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with one or two close friends,
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but I enjoy a lot of time by myself.
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I like to socialize,
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so I wouldn't call myself an extreme introvert,
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but I know there are some extreme introverts out there.
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But when we talk about social isolation,
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what we're referring to is when animals or humans
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are restricted from having the social contacts
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that they would prefer to have.
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And to just briefly touch on the major takeaways
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from this literature, which spans back 100 years or more,
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being socially isolated is stressful.
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And one of the hallmark features of social isolation
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is chronically elevated stress hormones,
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like adrenaline, also called epinephrine,
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like cortisol, a stress hormone that at healthy levels
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is good for combating inflammation,
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helps us have energy early in the day,
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focused throughout the day.
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But if cortisol is elevated for too long,
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which is the consequence of social isolation,
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the immune system suffers and other chemicals
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start to be released in the brain and body
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that are designed to motivate the organism,
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animal or human, to seek out social bonds.
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An example of one such chemical
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is a peptide called tachykinin.
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Tachykinin is present in flies, in mice, and in humans,
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and under conditions of social isolation,
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its levels go up, and because of the brain areas
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that contain receptors for tachykinin,
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people start feeling very aggressive and irritable
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after social isolation.
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Now, that should be a little bit counterintuitive to you.
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You would think, oh, if you isolate an animal or human,
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and then you give them the opportunity
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for social interaction, they should behave very well,
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they should be thrilled,
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they're finally getting the nourishment,
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the social nourishment that they've been lacking
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for so long, it turns out that's not the case.
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Chronic social isolation changes the nature
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of the brain and body such that it makes
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social connection harder,
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and it makes the person who's been isolated irritable,
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even aggressive with other people.
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Now, I don't want to go too deeply
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into the biology of social isolation,
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because it doesn't actually afford us that much insight
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into what healthy social bonding looks like.
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So today we're going to focus more
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on the functional biology,
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dual meaning of the word functional,
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as opposed to the pathology of social isolation.
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However, I do want to point out
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that social isolation starts to deteriorate
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certain aspects of brain and body pretty quickly,
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but how quickly depends, again,
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on how introverted or extroverted somebody is.
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So if you're somebody who's socially isolated
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for the holidays or has been socially isolated
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for a period of time and is craving social contact,
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that is a healthy craving.
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And as we'll learn next,
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the healthy craving for social contact
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has a very specific brain circuit,
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has a very specific neurochemical signature
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associated with it,
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and has some remarkable features
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that you can leverage in social contacts of all kinds.
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I think some of the more important and exciting work
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on social bonding comes from the laboratory of Kay Tai.
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Kay is a professor
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at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.
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She's an investigator with the Howard Hughes
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Medical Institute.
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And in recent years,
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I would say in about the last five or six years,
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her laboratory has made a fundamental discovery
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as to why we seek out
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and put so much effort into social bonds.
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And the key discovery that she made
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is that much like hunger, much like temperature,
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we have brain circuits that are devoted
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to what's called a social homeostasis.
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Many of you have probably heard about homeostasis before.
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Homeostasis is the characteristic
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of various biological circuits and even individual cells
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to try and maintain a certain level.
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It's most easily thought of in the context of hunger.
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If you don't eat for a while,
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your drive to pursue food and think about food
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and make food and spend money on food,
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and indeed to enjoy food goes up.
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Whereas when you're well-fed,
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you don't tend to seek out food
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with as much vigor or as much intensity.
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You wouldn't invest as much time, effort, money, et cetera.
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So homeostasis is the aspect of cells, tissues,
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and organisms to seek some sort of balance,
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to regulate themselves.
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you can think about the thermostat on your home
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as a homeostatic circuit.
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When the temperature goes up a little bit,
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it cools things down to maintain a certain temperature.
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When the room gets cold, it hits a certain level
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and a sensor detects that, it clicks on,
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and then the heat goes on
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to maintain a certain set temperature.
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So that's a simple way of thinking about homeostasis.
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Every homeostatic circuit has three components,
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or at least three.
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One is a detector,
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meaning the organism or the thermostat on your wall
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has to have some way of detecting
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what's going on in the environment, all right?
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In the context of social bonding,
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whether or not you are interacting with others
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and whether or not those interactions are going well.
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So that has to be detected, that's the first thing.
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Then there has to be a control center,
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that's the second thing.
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And the control center is the one that makes the adjustments
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to, in the case of social bonding,
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to your behavior and to your psychology.
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So you'll soon learn that there are ways
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in which the more time that you spend alone,
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the more motivated you are to seek out
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the pictures of faces, the interactions with actual people,
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physical contact, and so forth.
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Now that might seem obvious to you,
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but thanks to the work of Keitai and others,
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it's remarkable to learn
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that there are specific brain centers
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that are adjusting our psychology and biology
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so that we seek out bonds more aggressively,
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or maybe we don't because we are perfectly sated
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or satiated with respect to how much contact
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we've had with other people.
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Now, the third component of this homeostatic circuit
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The effector is actually what drives
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the behavioral response.
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It's what leads you to pick up your social media
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and start scrolling.
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It's what leads you to text a friend.
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It's what leads you to call a friend or make plans
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and what leads you to follow through on those plans.
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So again, those three components are a detector,
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a control center, and an effector.
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And as you'll soon learn,
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the neural circuit that controls this social homeostasis
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actually has a fourth component.
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And that fourth component is one
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that places subjective understanding
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as to why you are doing what you are doing
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and establishes your place in a hierarchy.
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Now, I know the word hierarchy
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can be a little bit of a barbed wire one
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because people immediately start thinking
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about boss and subordinate or in couples,
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a leader and a follower.
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But when we talk about social hierarchies
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in the context of human interactions,
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social hierarchies are very plastic,
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meaning in one setting, one person can be the leader.
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In another setting, the other person can be the leader.
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You probably have groups of friends or family members
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where you're constantly passing the baton
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as to who's going to drive, who's going to navigate,
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who's going to pick the restaurant,
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who's going to clear the dishes,
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and who's going to do certain activities and not others.
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So hierarchies are very dynamic.
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And as a consequence,
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social bonding has to be very plastic and very fluid
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so that you move from one environment to the next,
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even with the same people,
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you have to be able to make those adjustments.
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And in the case of the social homeostasis circuit,
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those adjustments are made by a particular brain structure.
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I've talked about in this podcast before,
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it's called the prefrontal cortex.
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It is the seat of our higher consciousness, if you will.
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It's what allows us to play subjective labels on things
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so we are not strictly input-output, we're not robotic.
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Meaning if you go to dinner with a friend
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and they are exceptional at choosing restaurants,
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well, in the context of the social homeostasis circuit,
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your prefrontal cortex would allow them
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to pick the restaurant because basically
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they are dominant over you in their capacity
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to pick good restaurants, at least in this example.
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Whereas as you leave that restaurant
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and perhaps you are navigating
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to where to get a drink after dinner
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or where to walk through the city,
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perhaps you have the better sense of direction.
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And so then the social bonding has to be maintained
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as you switch the hierarchy, okay?
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So that's the role of that fourth element,
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the prefrontal cortex.
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Now, I just briefly want to touch on some of the brain areas
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that thanks to the work of Keitai and others,
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we now know underlie the detection, control, and response.
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Okay, I call them the detector, control center, and effector
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because inside of that description
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isn't just a bunch of names of neural structures.
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There are also hints
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as to what the underlying neurochemicals are.
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And by understanding what the neurochemicals are,
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you can start to think about tools that you can use
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to form social bonds and maintain social bonds
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in better, healthier ways.
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So let's talk about the detector first.
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Now, keep in mind that you have your senses.
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You have your vision, you have your hearing,
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you have touch, you have smell, you have taste.
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Sensation, as I've talked about many times before
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in the podcast, but I'll just remind you,
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sensation is the conversion of physical stimuli
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in the environment into electrical and chemical signals
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in your nervous system.
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The language of the nervous system
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is electrical and chemical signals.
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So photons of light are converted
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to electrical and chemical signals.
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Pressure on the skin or light touch on the skin
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is converted into electrical and chemical signals
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and so on and so forth.
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So all of that, of course, is flowing into the nervous system
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but the detector that underlies social homeostasis
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involves mainly two structures.
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One is called the ACC, the anterior cingulate cortex,
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and the other is the BLA, basolateral amygdala.
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And when you hear the word amygdala,
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you're probably thinking fear.
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But today, as you'll see,
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the amygdala actually has many different subcompartments
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And there's a reason why the basolateral amygdala,
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which is associated with certain aspects
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of aversive behaviors, meaning moving away
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from certain types of things or interactions,
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there's a reason why the BLA is such an integral part
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of the detector system.
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And that's because just as it's important to form
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healthy social bonds, it's vitally important
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to try and avoid unhealthy social bonds.
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And so the basolateral amygdala is mainly associated
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with these aversive type responses
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of just moving away from certain things.
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The control center in the social homeostasis circuit
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involves a brain area called the lateral hypothalamus
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and the periventricular hypothalamus.
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The lateral hypothalamus and the periventricular hypothalamus
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contain neurons that are able to access the hormone system
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in order to influence the release of things like oxytocin,
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which is a hormone neuropeptide.
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It's kind of part hormone, part neurotransmitter.
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It's kind of a hybrid.
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We're going to talk a lot about oxytocin today.
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So we've got the ACC and the BLA.
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These are areas that are mainly involved
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in moving away from things, although also toward them.
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That's the detector.
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Then we've got the control center,
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which is in the hypothalamus.
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And then there's a very special and important area
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associated with social bonding that I want everyone to learn,
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which is the dorsal raphe nucleus or DRN,
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dorsal raphe nucleus.
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The dorsal raphe nucleus is a small collection of neurons
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in the midbrain, so it's deep in the brain.
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And most of the time when you hear about raphe,
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R-A-P-H-E, by the way, raphe nucleus,
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you're talking about serotonin.
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Serotonin is a neuromodulator that is often associated
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with feelings of satiety after eating, warmth,
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basically satisfaction with things that you already have.
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However, within this dorsal raphe nucleus,
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there is a small subset of neurons that release dopamine.
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Dopamine is a neuromodulator most often associated
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with movement, craving, motivation, and desire.
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And the neural circuits that are rich with dopamine
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are things like the substantia nigra,
link |
the mesolimbic dopamine system, the VTA,
link |
the nucleus accumbens, et cetera.
link |
Those names don't have to mean anything to you.
link |
However, this unique population of dopamine neurons
link |
in the raphe is truly unique in that it's responsible
link |
for mediating what I've been calling social homeostasis.
link |
It is the effector or the response
link |
that mediates social homeostasis.
link |
Now, I haven't told you exactly what social homeostasis is.
link |
Social homeostasis, just like hunger,
link |
is the process by which when you lack social interaction,
link |
you start to crave it.
link |
What's very interesting about the fact
link |
that there are dopamine neurons in this raphe structure
link |
that is the effector for social homeostasis
link |
is that what this means is that when you are not interacting
link |
with people at a frequency or intensity
link |
that is right for you, dopamine is released into the brain.
link |
In most popular conversations about dopamine
link |
and even in scientific circles,
link |
when you hear dopamine release,
link |
you think about reward or feeling good
link |
because indeed many behaviors
link |
and drugs of abuse increase dopamine.
link |
That's one of the reasons
link |
they have so much addictive potential.
link |
However, dopamine is not associated with feeling good.
link |
It is actually the neurochemical that's responsible
link |
for movement toward things that feel good.
link |
So to zoom out and conceptualize what we have here,
link |
we have a brain area that is a detector
link |
that either will move us toward or away
link |
from certain types of experiences or sensations.
link |
We have a control center that is going to release
link |
certain hormones and neuropeptides into our brain and blood
link |
depending on the sorts of interactions
link |
that we happen to be having.
link |
And we have this response system,
link |
which is the dorsal raphe nucleus
link |
that contains dopamine neurons.
link |
And when we are not interacting with people
link |
at the frequency or intensity that we crave,
link |
dopamine is released and that dopamine causes us
link |
to seek out social interactions of particular kinds.
link |
So let's talk about what social homeostasis is
link |
and how it plays out.
link |
And again, let's use hunger as an example.
link |
So let's say you're a person
link |
who eats every three or four hours regularly.
link |
So on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday,
link |
you're just accustomed to eating every three or four hours.
link |
If just suddenly I steal your meal out of the fridge
link |
at work, something I would not do,
link |
but just for sake of mental experimentation,
link |
that would probably cause you to go and seek out food
link |
through some other route.
link |
You might buy food, you'd probably be upset first,
link |
but then you go buy food or replace the food
link |
that you were going to eat.
link |
You'd be hungry for that food.
link |
And indeed there are hormonal type mechanisms
link |
and other mechanisms that when we eat regularly
link |
and we predict that food is coming in,
link |
we actually start secreting insulin,
link |
which is for mobilizing blood sugar,
link |
there are hormones in the bloodstream
link |
that make us hungry on a regular clock-like schedule,
link |
and you would seek out more food.
link |
Similarly, if you're somebody who is accustomed
link |
to a lot of social interaction,
link |
and suddenly I take away that social interaction,
link |
you would feel kind of let down.
link |
You would crave a replacement social interaction.
link |
You might be upset that you had a lunch date with a friend,
link |
you're used to having lunch with them every Wednesday,
link |
and they cancel and you would crave the interaction, okay?
link |
This is called a prosocial craving.
link |
And indeed, this is what you see in animals and humans.
link |
If you, what's called acutely isolate them,
link |
which is just a fancy scientific word of saying,
link |
deprive them of social interactions in a short-term basis,
link |
they start engaging in prosocial behaviors.
link |
They start texting other people,
link |
they start seeking out social interactions
link |
of different kinds, and that makes perfect sense, right?
link |
But thought of from a different side,
link |
you could also imagine how, well,
link |
if you're getting a social interaction
link |
with somebody on a daily or weekly basis,
link |
and suddenly you remove that interaction,
link |
well, then people might not care.
link |
They might just think, well,
link |
I'll get the interaction tomorrow or the next year
link |
or the next day because they're sated,
link |
much in the same way that the person who eats very regularly
link |
might say, well, I ate four hours ago
link |
and I'll eat eight hours later, no big deal.
link |
But that's not what happens.
link |
There's a prediction that we are going to have
link |
certain types of interactions,
link |
and when those interactions don't happen,
link |
we replace that lack of interaction
link |
with a drive and a motivation
link |
to seek out social interaction.
link |
And that drive and motivation is caused by,
link |
or I should say is driven by dopamine release
link |
from that dorsal raphe.
link |
And so the takeaway is that when we lack social interaction
link |
that we expect, we become prosocial.
link |
However, if we are chronically socially isolated,
link |
meaning we don't have interactions with people
link |
for a long time, we become actually more introverted.
link |
This is separate from all of the tacky kind and stuff
link |
that I talked about earlier
link |
or falling into states of chronic stress,
link |
but it's well-established now that in humans and in animals,
link |
if you don't give them enough social interaction,
link |
they actually become antisocial.
link |
And so this is actually a little bit like
link |
what one might see with long-term fasting, okay?
link |
I give the example of eating every four hours.
link |
Now let's give the parallel example of somebody
link |
who's been fasting perhaps for two or three days.
link |
If they are expecting to eat
link |
and then the meal doesn't arrive,
link |
they are not necessarily going to immediately
link |
try and seek out food.
link |
And that's a little bit counterintuitive.
link |
You would have thought,
link |
well, they haven't eaten in a very long time.
link |
They're going to be very motivated to seek out food,
link |
but no, they are accustomed to fasting.
link |
Similarly, the social homeostasis circuit works in a way
link |
such that when we don't have social interactions
link |
for a very long time,
link |
we start to lose our craving for social interactions.
link |
Let's look at the social homeostasis circuit
link |
through the lens of what's commonly called
link |
introversion and extroversion.
link |
Now, typically when we hear about introverts,
link |
we think about the quiet person at the party
link |
or the person that doesn't want to go out at all.
link |
And we think about an extrovert
link |
as somebody who's really social,
link |
the so-called social butterfly,
link |
who enjoys social interactions, is really chatty,
link |
is kind of life of the party type person.
link |
That's the cliche or the kind of pop psychology cliche.
link |
But actually in the psychology literature,
link |
that's not really the way it holds up.
link |
Many people who appear introverted are actually extroverted.
link |
The quiet person at a party could be an extrovert,
link |
except that they just don't talk very much.
link |
The characteristic of an extrovert is somebody
link |
that gets energy or feels good from social interactions.
link |
They sort of get a lift.
link |
And we can predict that that lift occurs
link |
because of some release of dopamine
link |
within their brain and body.
link |
And indeed there's evidence for that.
link |
Neuroimaging studies support that.
link |
Other forms of neurobiological analysis
link |
support that as well.
link |
We can also imagine that the person who's talking a lot
link |
is somebody who's very extroverted.
link |
But oftentimes people who talk a lot for their work
link |
or they're somebody who's very social
link |
when you interact with them,
link |
that person gets back to their car
link |
and is absolutely depleted and exhausted by that interaction
link |
or all sorts of social interactions.
link |
So we really can't predict whether or not somebody
link |
is an introvert or an extrovert
link |
simply based on their behavior.
link |
It's really more of an internal subjective label.
link |
However, if we look at introversion and extroversion
link |
through this lens of the social homeostatic set point,
link |
and we think about dopamine as this molecule
link |
that drives motivation to seek out social interactions,
link |
what we can reasonably assume is that introverts are people
link |
that when they engage in certain forms
link |
of social interaction,
link |
either the amount of dopamine that's released
link |
is greater than it is in an extrovert.
link |
That's right, I said greater than it is in an extrovert.
link |
And so they actually feel quite motivated
link |
but also satisfied by very brief
link |
or we could say sort of sparse social interactions.
link |
They don't need a lot of social engagement to feel sated.
link |
Again, the parallel example will be hunger.
link |
This would be somebody who doesn't need to eat much
link |
in order to feel satisfied.
link |
Whereas the extrovert, we can reasonably assume
link |
releases less dopamine
link |
in response to an individual social interaction.
link |
And so they need much more social interaction
link |
in order to feel filled up by that interaction.
link |
And indeed, this is supported
link |
by the neurobiological imaging studies.
link |
So rather than thinking about introverts and extroverts
link |
as chatty versus quiet,
link |
it's useful to think about people, maybe yourself,
link |
maybe other people you know,
link |
as how much social interaction they need
link |
in order to bring the social homeostasis into balance.
link |
Now there's the fourth component
link |
of this social homeostasis circuit that I mentioned before
link |
and that's the prefrontal cortex.
link |
The prefrontal cortex is involved in thinking
link |
and planning and action,
link |
and has extensive connections with areas of the brain
link |
like the hypothalamus,
link |
which is responsible for a lot of motivated drives.
link |
It also has connections
link |
with the various reward centers of the brain
link |
and it can act as kind of an accelerator,
link |
meaning it can encourage more electrical activity
link |
of other brain centers or as a brake on those brain centers.
link |
Really good example, it's kind of a trivial one
link |
in the context of today's discussion,
link |
but it's a concrete one, so I'll use it,
link |
would be, I know many people out there use cold showers
link |
as a way to stimulate metabolism
link |
and build up resilience and this sort of thing.
link |
If you get into a very cold shower
link |
and you feel as if you want to get out,
link |
but you force yourself to stay in,
link |
you're forcing yourself to stay in
link |
because your prefrontal cortex
link |
is placing some subjective label on that experience.
link |
Either you're doing it for a certain benefit
link |
or you've got a timer and you're using the timer
link |
as the regulator of how long you're going to stay in,
link |
basically you're overriding reflexes
link |
and that's the main function of the prefrontal cortex.
link |
But as I mentioned earlier,
link |
the prefrontal cortex components
link |
that wire into the social homeostasis circuit
link |
are responsible for evaluating
link |
where you are in a given hierarchy.
link |
And that affords you a ton of flexibility
link |
in terms of the types of social interactions
link |
that you can engage in
link |
and whether or not you're going to spend time
link |
with certain people or not,
link |
whether or not you're going to engage and then disengage.
link |
What do I mean by this?
link |
Well, let's say you're an extroverted person.
link |
You're somebody that likes a lot of social interaction
link |
and you get a lot of dopamine release on whole
link |
from a lot of social interaction.
link |
So maybe one interaction with a teller at the supermarket
link |
isn't really going to give you much dopamine,
link |
but going to a party will give you more dopamine
link |
and so you seek out these larger social interactions.
link |
However, you might go to a party
link |
where somebody says something or you see somebody there
link |
that you'd much prefer not to see
link |
and therefore you decide to leave.
link |
The deciding to leave is regulated
link |
by that prefrontal cortex component.
link |
So it's important to understand
link |
that just because there's a homeostatic circuit
link |
that involves areas like the amygdala and the hypothalamus
link |
and these deep brain regions like the dorsal raphe,
link |
you have flexibility over your social interactions
link |
and that flexibility arrives from those prefrontal circuits.
link |
So there's a ton of subjective nature to it.
link |
There's a lot of context to it.
link |
So while there are some predictable elements
link |
of these circuits,
link |
they are not simply what we would call plug and chug.
link |
You have flexibility.
link |
You are able to say, you know, I love parties,
link |
but I really don't want to go to that party
link |
because so-and-so is there.
link |
Or I very much don't like going across town in traffic,
link |
but I'm going to do it today
link |
because a certain collection of people
link |
or perhaps a certain individual
link |
will be at that particular party.
link |
And so the prefrontal cortex again
link |
is what allows you that subjective ruling
link |
or ruling over what would otherwise just be reflexes.
link |
So now I'd like to drill a little bit deeper
link |
into this incredible neural structure
link |
that is the dorsal raphe nucleus
link |
and the small collection of neurons,
link |
the dopamine neurons of the dorsal raphe,
link |
because while it's a small collection,
link |
they are very powerful.
link |
Loneliness has been defined by the great psychologists,
link |
John Cacioppo, as the distress that results
link |
from discrepancies between ideal
link |
and perceived social relationships.
link |
Let me repeat that.
link |
Loneliness is not just being isolated.
link |
Loneliness, as he defines it,
link |
is the distress that results from discrepancies
link |
between ideal and perceived social relationships.
link |
It's when we expect things to be one way
link |
and they're actually another way.
link |
And which way we expect them to be
link |
and which way they turn out, again, is highly subjective.
link |
What you expect from friendships
link |
and what other people expect from friendships
link |
could be entirely different,
link |
but the circuit that underlies friendship bonding
link |
is exactly the same.
link |
And it is this dorsal raphe nucleus
link |
and the dopamine neurons in that nucleus
link |
that underlie the bond that is social friendship
link |
and all types of social bonds.
link |
There's a key finding in the literature.
link |
The title of this paper is
link |
Dorsal Raphe Dopamine Neurons
link |
Represent the Experience of Social Isolation.
link |
This is a paper from Kay Tye's lab.
link |
The first author is Matthews,
link |
Gillian Matthews, to be specific.
link |
What they did is they were able to selectively activate
link |
the dopamine neurons in the dorsal raphe nucleus.
link |
And when they did that,
link |
they induced a loneliness-like state.
link |
Now, how did they know it was a loneliness-like state?
link |
They knew because it motivated
link |
the seeking out of social connections.
link |
This is the kind of social hunger
link |
that I was referring to before.
link |
Whereas when the dopamine neurons
link |
of the dorsal raphe are inhibited,
link |
meaning their activity is quieted,
link |
that suppressed a loneliness state.
link |
So that's a little counterintuitive, right?
link |
It's a group of neurons that when activated
link |
makes you feel lonely.
link |
And when this brain area is not activated,
link |
it suppresses loneliness.
link |
But if you think about it,
link |
that's exactly the kind of circuit that you would want
link |
in order to drive social behavior.
link |
When you're feeling lonely, dopamine is released
link |
and it causes you to go out and seek social interactions.
link |
When this brain area has enough social interactions,
link |
that's sort of a figure of speech,
link |
brain areas don't have enough social interactions.
link |
But when enough social interactions have happened,
link |
that the neurons in this brain area
link |
shut down their production of dopamine,
link |
well, the loneliness state turns off.
link |
So what we think of as loneliness,
link |
as this big kind of dark cloud
link |
or fog in our psychological landscape,
link |
boils down to a very small set of neurons
link |
releasing a specific neurochemical for motivation.
link |
And to me, this really changes the way
link |
that we think about loneliness
link |
and that we think about social interactions.
link |
There's so much subjective landscape to loneliness
link |
and to social interactions.
link |
But at the end of the day,
link |
what it really is is that we are all social animals
link |
to some extent or another,
link |
and we all crave social interactions
link |
to some extent or another,
link |
although the extent will vary
link |
depending on where you are
link |
in the introversion-extroversion continuum,
link |
and it is indeed a continuum.
link |
Now, the other aspect of the study that was really important
link |
gets back to that issue of hierarchy and social rank.
link |
What they found is that depending on where you see yourself
link |
in the social rank,
link |
the dopamine neurons in the raphe
link |
will lead to one consequence or another,
link |
meaning moving toward social interactions
link |
or moving away from them.
link |
So the whole system is set up
link |
so that you have a ton of flexibility
link |
and control over social interactions.
link |
So just a couple of key points and actionable takeaways
link |
based on the information I've offered up until now.
link |
If you think of yourself as an introvert,
link |
it's very likely that you get a lot of dopamine
link |
from a few or minimal social interactions,
link |
whereas if you're an extrovert,
link |
contrary to what you might think,
link |
social interactions are not going to flood your system
link |
They actually are going to lead to less dopamine release
link |
than it would for an introvert,
link |
and therefore you're going to need
link |
a lot more social interactions
link |
in order to feel filled up by those interactions.
link |
Now, I've been drawing a lot of parallels
link |
between this social seeking
link |
or avoiding social isolation and hunger,
link |
but is that really the case?
link |
And could it be that there are actually interactions
link |
between the different drives,
link |
meaning could social isolation
link |
or the desire to seek out social interactions
link |
actually relate to the hunger system and vice versa?
link |
And indeed the answer is yes.
link |
We don't have 50 different homeostatic systems
link |
and 50 different neurochemicals
link |
to underlie our drive to eat,
link |
our drive for romantic interactions,
link |
our drive for friendship interactions.
link |
We have essentially one, maybe two,
link |
and they all funnel into the same dopamine system.
link |
And there's a beautiful paper
link |
that illustrates some of the crossover
link |
between these different homeostatic drives.
link |
The title of the paper is
link |
acute social isolation evokes midbrain craving responses
link |
similar to hunger.
link |
This is from Rebecca Saxe's lab at MIT,
link |
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
link |
Dr. Kay Tai is also an author on this paper.
link |
The paper was published in Nature Neuroscience.
link |
It's a really terrific paper.
link |
Just to briefly summarize what they did,
link |
they took people that were categorized
link |
as socially connected, healthy human adults.
link |
So these are people that are used
link |
to pretty frequent social interactions.
link |
And they socially isolated them for about 10 hours.
link |
And they had no opportunity to access social media,
link |
email, fiction reading even,
link |
and certainly didn't have the opportunity
link |
to interact with people face-to-face.
link |
So what this did is it increased social craving,
link |
both objectively, the people said
link |
that they were now craving social interactions,
link |
and then they did brain imaging
link |
in response to images of people,
link |
people interacting, food, flowers, other types of stimuli.
link |
Some of the stimuli or these images,
link |
we call them stimuli, but they're images really,
link |
had a lot of social engagement going on in them.
link |
Some had a lot of faces showing, others did not.
link |
And as you might suspect,
link |
there was activation of many of the brain areas
link |
that we've talked about earlier,
link |
dorsal raphe nucleus and other brain areas
link |
associated with dopaminergic neurons.
link |
When the socially isolated people viewed social cues,
link |
people interacting faces and so on,
link |
and less so for things like flowers.
link |
However, they also had increased responses
link |
to images of food, which is interesting,
link |
and actually is consistent with the literature
link |
that when people are socially isolated,
link |
they often will start eating more,
link |
or they will change the nature of the foods that they eat.
link |
Now, we think of that as comfort foods
link |
or soothing oneself through eating
link |
rather than social interaction as a kind of pathology.
link |
But while it might not be healthy,
link |
depending on the context and the person,
link |
it's really important to understand
link |
that the reason that happens
link |
is because we have a common circuit
link |
and that the system, meaning the person,
link |
is actually craving dopamine release.
link |
They don't consciously know this,
link |
this is all subconsciously carried out,
link |
but they're craving dopamine release.
link |
And if they can't get it from social interactions
link |
as they normally would, they'll start seeking it from food.
link |
Now, they did an important reverse experiment as well
link |
where they had subjects go on 10 hours of food fasting.
link |
Now, these were not people that were familiar with fasting.
link |
They weren't doing intermittent fasting.
link |
They were eating more typical meal schedules.
link |
And so that created increased hunger, et cetera,
link |
but it also increased their appetite, if you will,
link |
for social interactions.
link |
And so the important point here
link |
is that there's a common biology,
link |
there's a common circuitry
link |
that underlies homeostatic craving of things
link |
that maintain us as individuals and as a species.
link |
And it really places social interactions
link |
as right up there in the list of things
link |
that we could consider so vital for our survival
link |
and for our health.
link |
Things like food, water, social interactions
link |
are really sit within a top tier amongst each other,
link |
and they use the same common circuitry,
link |
dorsal raphe dopamine neurons,
link |
in addition to other structures
link |
in order to create this drive
link |
to seek out certain types of stimuli.
link |
Now, this is a very reductionist view of social bonding.
link |
But it's important to realize
link |
that while we place all this subjective context,
link |
oh, I miss this person,
link |
or I really would like to avoid that person,
link |
at the end of the day,
link |
it really all funnels into a system
link |
whereby a single neurochemical
link |
is either being released and motivating us
link |
to seek out more of a particular type of interaction
link |
or is not released,
link |
and therefore we are perfectly comfortable
link |
staying exactly where we are.
link |
As I say this, some of you are probably thinking,
link |
oh, that's probably what happens when you fall in love.
link |
And indeed, that's the case.
link |
When people enter romantic relationships
link |
that to them are very satisfying,
link |
there's this period that the theory is
link |
that it lasts anywhere from six days to six months,
link |
although some people report
link |
that this feeling can last many, many years, even decades,
link |
of just feeling completely filled up and sated
link |
by the experience of being with that person,
link |
so much so that cravings for food are reduced,
link |
cravings for sleep are reduced.
link |
Now, there's all sorts of activities
link |
and things that go along with new romantic partnerships
link |
that take up time that might get in the way
link |
of things like sleep or things like food.
link |
But the point is that dopamine is the final common pathway
link |
by which we seek out things
link |
and we end up feeling as if we are satisfied
link |
by certain types of interactions.
link |
Now, similarly, if you've ever been isolated
link |
for a long period of time,
link |
your focus might've shifted to what you're going to eat,
link |
what you're going to cook for dinner
link |
in a much more heightened way,
link |
the importance of those sensory stimuli
link |
and those types of interactions,
link |
and indeed the taste of food itself expands.
link |
So normally, when we are in social relationships
link |
that are ones that are familiar to us,
link |
we have a balance of these different drives.
link |
But when one particular drive takes over
link |
and we are very focused on it,
link |
because they all funnel into the same circuitry,
link |
there really isn't the seeking out
link |
of certain types of behaviors like food seeking
link |
when we're newly in love.
link |
Now, that doesn't mean that food won't taste good to us
link |
or that we don't seek it.
link |
And indeed, there are experiments that have been done
link |
where if people have just fallen in love,
link |
the taste of a strawberry can just be incredible.
link |
The other effect of dopamine is that it changes
link |
the way that we interpret sensory stimuli.
link |
Our detectors actually change
link |
when we are in heightened states
link |
of dopaminergic activity or drive.
link |
Basically, what this means is that things seem better
link |
than they would when we have less dopamine in our system.
link |
The point here is that there's a lot of crossover.
link |
There's a lot of meshing together
link |
of different homeostatic drives,
link |
that they don't exist in separate channels.
link |
And it's only under conditions
link |
in which one particular homeostatic drive
link |
is kind of being played out to the extreme,
link |
such as the example of falling in love,
link |
that we tend to avoid or sort of overlook
link |
the other homeostatic drives.
link |
And that's because simply we're getting enough dopamine,
link |
we don't need anymore.
link |
Up until now, I've been focused
link |
on the organizational logic of social bonding,
link |
which is really just nerd speak
link |
for how is it that we form bonds, avoid bonds?
link |
Why do people seek out more or fewer bonds
link |
than others, et cetera?
link |
Now I'd like to shift gears a bit
link |
and focus on what are some things that we can do
link |
to encourage the formation of healthy bonds.
link |
There's a beautiful study that was published
link |
in Cell Reports, Cell Press Journal, excellent journal.
link |
The title of this paper is
link |
is Conscious Processing of Narrative Stimuli
link |
Synchronizes Heart Rate Between Individuals.
link |
I mentioned this on a previous podcast,
link |
but I'd like to mention it again
link |
and go into a little bit more depth
link |
because it points to specific actionable items
link |
that we can all use in order to enhance the quality
link |
and depth of social bonds of all kinds.
link |
Now, this study involved a very simple type of experiment.
link |
They had people listen to a story.
link |
Everybody in the study listened to the same story,
link |
but they listened to that story at different times
link |
and indeed in different locations.
link |
So different people, same story.
link |
And they measured things like heart rate.
link |
They measured breathing, et cetera.
link |
Now, what was the motivation for doing this?
link |
Well, there's a long standing literature showing
link |
that our physiology, things like our heart rate,
link |
our breathing, our skin conductance,
link |
meaning the amount of sweating,
link |
can be synchronized between individuals.
link |
And that synchronization can occur
link |
according to a variety of different things.
link |
There've been studies that have people look at one another
link |
and they look and actually see that their pupil size
link |
of their eyes starts to synchronize.
link |
People's breathing can synchronize.
link |
People's body temperatures can even start to synchronize
link |
or at least shifts in body temperature can synchronize.
link |
One person gets cooler, the other person gets cooler.
link |
A lot of this is subconscious.
link |
Some of it can be detected by conscious cues
link |
like flushing of the skin
link |
or actually seeing someone's pupils change.
link |
But actually the pupil reflex is a really good example
link |
whereby except for rare cases
link |
and certain highly trained individuals,
link |
most people can't control their pupil reflexes
link |
in a very deliberate way.
link |
It's truly a reflex.
link |
It's an autonomic reflex.
link |
So there's a lot of literature showing
link |
that within small groups or two people,
link |
these physiological signals can be synchronized.
link |
What this study found was that when people listen
link |
to the same story but at different times,
link |
their heart rates start to synchronize.
link |
This is incredible because people are listening
link |
to the story at different times,
link |
but the gaps between their heartbeats
link |
become very stereotyped
link |
and map almost precisely onto one another.
link |
That's incredible.
link |
Now, we also know from an extensive literature
link |
that the quality and perceived depth of a social bond
link |
correlates very strongly
link |
with how much physiological synchronization there is
link |
between individuals.
link |
In other words, when your bodies feel the same,
link |
you tend to feel more bonded to somebody else.
link |
And so this whole thing is a rather circular argument.
link |
When you feel closer to somebody else,
link |
your physiology synchronize.
link |
And the reverse is true as well.
link |
When your physiologies are synchronized,
link |
you feel closer to other people.
link |
This is what I call the concert phenomenon.
link |
If you ever go to see your favorite band
link |
or you go to a concert that you particularly love,
link |
you will often look over at somebody
link |
and you'll see them enjoying the same thing.
link |
And they're often in a similar state as you are.
link |
Maybe the sort of like favorite song comes on
link |
and you actually feel connected to that person.
link |
You feel like you're in,
link |
obviously there's a shared experience,
link |
but there's also a shared physiological response
link |
to that experience.
link |
And so this can happen en masse with large groups of people,
link |
or it can happen just between two individuals.
link |
And as this study points out,
link |
it can actually happen between individuals
link |
without them actually interacting with one another
link |
when the story they are listening to is the anchor
link |
or the driver of their physiology.
link |
This really points to the fact
link |
that the body and the brain are reciprocally connected.
link |
Yes, indeed, what we think, what we hear, what we feel
link |
drives our physiology, our heartbeat,
link |
our respiration, et cetera,
link |
but our heartbeat and respiration
link |
also are influencing our state of mind.
link |
it's encouraging certain types of social bonds
link |
when our heart rates are synchronized.
link |
You can leverage this.
link |
How can you leverage this?
link |
Well, let's take a upcoming example of the holidays.
link |
There's a sort of a joke.
link |
I think it was Ram Dass, sort of Buddhist philosopher type
link |
that said, if you think you're enlightened,
link |
go visit your parents.
link |
And I think what he was referring to
link |
is that some people, not all people,
link |
have challenging relationships with their parents.
link |
We're going to talk about child-parent attachment
link |
and interactions in a few minutes,
link |
but some people have a wonderful relationship
link |
to both their parents and more power to them.
link |
I think that's wonderful.
link |
We should all be so lucky.
link |
Many people have challenged relationships
link |
with their parents,
link |
or they have a great relationship with their parents,
link |
but their parents know, or they know how to drive that dart
link |
right into that particular soft piece of psychological flesh
link |
by saying just the slightest thing,
link |
or even by raising their eyebrow or rolling their eyes,
link |
or the tone in which they do something.
link |
This is also true between siblings.
link |
I think many of you can think of examples
link |
where this is true.
link |
Many people, when they interact with others,
link |
expect that the mere interaction with the other person
link |
is going to create the sense of bonding.
link |
And often that is the case.
link |
For instance, if people are involved in intimate disclosure,
link |
if people enjoy each other's company so much
link |
that just the mere sight of somebody evokes great feelings
link |
and it's mutual, that often can happen.
link |
But in many types of social interactions,
link |
it's not the direct interaction with that person
link |
that makes us feel close to them,
link |
but rather it's shared experience.
link |
And shared experience is shared physiology.
link |
That's the point I'm trying to make by way of this study
link |
about conscious processing of narrative stimuli
link |
synchronizes heart rate of different individuals.
link |
So for instance, if you have a somewhat challenged
link |
or a somewhat, let's call it a slight friction
link |
in getting close with somebody,
link |
or it can be a challenging interaction,
link |
oftentimes it's very useful to focus outward
link |
on some other common narrative, a movie.
link |
Oftentimes people will watch a game together.
link |
Actually, there's a lot of critique
link |
that people or families will focus outward too much
link |
on external events.
link |
But these external events can be observing the grandchild
link |
and how wonderful they are,
link |
or observing the meal and how wonderful it is.
link |
Or as we commonly see in various traditions,
link |
there's a story that's repeated each year.
link |
Certainly in the upcoming holidays,
link |
there's Christmas stories, there are themes and traditions.
link |
And those themes and traditions
link |
anchor a number of different aspects of our psychology.
link |
They're really wonderful.
link |
They thread through the ages really
link |
and allow us to link our own experiences up
link |
with previous generations and experiences.
link |
But in addition to that, they synchronize our physiologies.
link |
And so sometimes it can be useful
link |
rather than expecting others to shift our physiology
link |
in the way that we wish,
link |
or us shifting their physiologies in the way that we wish,
link |
and then expecting some bond to mushroom out of that
link |
in some beautiful way,
link |
to focus on some external stimulus,
link |
to focus on something that will synchronize
link |
the physiologies of both people.
link |
That can act as a bridge
link |
in order to establish social bonds.
link |
And this is not a hack or a workaround
link |
for making terrible relationships good.
link |
This is actually at the seat
link |
of what we come away from a social interaction with
link |
as feeling, wow, that was a really wonderful time.
link |
Often a really wonderful time
link |
can be by virtue of the specific things that were said
link |
or the specific things that one engaged in.
link |
But more often than not,
link |
the final common pathway, we should say,
link |
of great experiences was a great physiological experience
link |
and a shared physiological experience.
link |
I have a short anecdote that relates to this.
link |
I have an older sibling,
link |
and she used to say that when she was in college,
link |
the best dates that she ever went on
link |
were dates where she was asked to go out
link |
and listen to music.
link |
She pointed out, however, that oftentimes
link |
the guys that would ask her out
link |
would take her to jazz clubs.
link |
She always had the theory
link |
that they would ask her to jazz clubs
link |
because at jazz clubs, typically you would sit down
link |
and then she had to conclude that they couldn't dance.
link |
My sister likes to dance.
link |
And so anytime someone actually had the nerve
link |
to take her dancing,
link |
those turned out to be particularly,
link |
let's just say, satisfying dates and relationships.
link |
At least they lasted longer.
link |
That's all I know about them.
link |
That's all I want to know about them.
link |
She's my sister after all.
link |
But the theory behind whoever was asking her out
link |
on these dates was the right one,
link |
which is that if you want to bond with somebody,
link |
you create a common physiological response
link |
through a common and shared experience.
link |
And that is often a good entry way
link |
into establishing whether or not, it's always a question,
link |
whether or not there can be common physiological experience
link |
between two individuals.
link |
Up until now, we've been talking about social bonding
link |
through the lens of neural circuits
link |
that are already established.
link |
However, early in the episode,
link |
I mentioned that these very neural circuits
link |
that are responsible for social bonding
link |
in adult forms of attachment,
link |
be it romantic or friendship or otherwise,
link |
are actually established during development.
link |
One of the more important and I think exciting areas
link |
of early attachment as it relates to adult attachment
link |
comes to us from the work of Alan Shore.
link |
Alan Shore, spelled A-L-L-A-N, Shore, S-C-H-O-R-E,
link |
is a psychoanalyst who also has deep understanding
link |
of neurobiology of attachment,
link |
both in childhood and in adulthood.
link |
And he's focused a lot on differences
link |
between right brain and left brain forms of attachment.
link |
Now, in a early episode of the Huberman Lab Podcast,
link |
I touched into the fact that most of what's discussed
link |
in the general public and sort of pop psychology
link |
and even in some neurobiology courses
link |
about right brain versus left brain
link |
and one side of the brain being more emotional
link |
and the other side being more rational is completely wrong.
link |
Most of what I see out there is actually backwards
link |
to the way things actually work.
link |
And while there is some what we call lateralization
link |
of function, meaning certain brain functions
link |
are handled by neurons on one side of the brain
link |
or the other, the idea that one side of your brain
link |
is emotional and the other side of your brain is rational
link |
is just simply not true.
link |
However, the work of Alan Shore
link |
points to some very concrete neural circuits
link |
that do have a lateralization bias,
link |
meaning they are more right brain than left brain
link |
or more left brain than right brain,
link |
that underlies certain forms of attachment
link |
between child and parent, in particular, child and mother,
link |
and that these right brain isms, if you will,
link |
and left brain isms for attachment get played out
link |
again and again in our forms of attachment as adults.
link |
So I'd like to talk about that work briefly now
link |
because I think it really points
link |
to a number of important features of how we establish bonds
link |
and the different routes to establishing bonds.
link |
So within the field of psychoanalysis,
link |
there's a longstanding discussion, of course,
link |
about the so-called unconscious or subconscious,
link |
the things that we are not aware of.
link |
And I think there's growing evidence pointing to the fact
link |
that at least one major component of the subconscious
link |
or the unconscious is the so-called autonomic nervous system.
link |
The autonomic nervous system
link |
is the portion of our nervous system
link |
that controls our reflexive breathing, our heart rate,
link |
our skin conductance, meaning our sweating, pupil size.
link |
It's the aspect of our nervous system
link |
that makes us more alert or more calm.
link |
It's the so-called sympathetic, meaning for alertness
link |
or parasympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system,
link |
parasympathetic for more calming responses.
link |
Now, what Dr. Schor's work and the work of others
link |
is now showing is that early infant parent,
link |
in particular infant mother attachment,
link |
involves a coordination or synchronization
link |
of these right brain circuits and these left brain circuits
link |
as they relate to the autonomic nervous system.
link |
How does this play out?
link |
Well, it plays out where early on as an infant,
link |
when you're born, you're truly helpless,
link |
you can't feed yourself, you can't warm yourself,
link |
you can't change yourself,
link |
and you certainly can't ambulate, walk anywhere
link |
to get the things that you need.
link |
All of those functions, all of those needs, rather,
link |
are met by your primary caretaker.
link |
Typically, that's the mother.
link |
Fathers, of course, play a role also,
link |
but because of breastfeeding or even bottle feeding,
link |
typically mothers play a more prominent role.
link |
I realize there are exceptions, but that's the general rule.
link |
There are now brain imaging studies
link |
examining the brains of infants and the brains of mothers
link |
as they interact and showing that the physical contact
link |
between the two, the breathing of the mother and child,
link |
the heart rate of the mother and child,
link |
and indeed the pupil size of the mother and child
link |
are actually actively getting coordinated.
link |
In other words, the mother is regulating
link |
the infant's autonomic nervous system primarily,
link |
and the infant is also regulating
link |
the mother's autonomic nervous system.
link |
A small coo from a baby or a cry,
link |
which is a stress cry from a baby,
link |
will definitely regulate the autonomic nervous system
link |
This whole right brain system is directly tapped
link |
into the so-called oxytocin system,
link |
and we'll talk more about oxytocin in a moment.
link |
Oxytocin, again, being this peptide hormone
link |
that is involved in social bonds of all kinds,
link |
but that at least in early childhood
link |
is very closely associated with milk letdown
link |
and milk production.
link |
There's actually a lot of stimulation of oxytocin release
link |
in the mother by nursing itself,
link |
so physical contact with the nipple
link |
and by the contact of skin between baby and mother,
link |
and there's specificity there.
link |
It's not just any baby that can evoke
link |
the most amount of oxytocin release from the mother.
link |
Now, however, there are examples where just holding a child
link |
will evoke oxytocin release in the non-parent
link |
or somebody other than the parent.
link |
I think most people experience that.
link |
That's the new puppy or new baby phenomenon,
link |
because indeed puppies can evoke oxytocin release as well.
link |
The point is not that oxytocin is only released
link |
in response to the primary relationship
link |
or the mother and their child,
link |
but rather that the amount of oxytocin scales
link |
with how closely related one is to that particular child
link |
So there's oxytocin release occurring
link |
in both the child and the mother.
link |
So this right brain system is an emotional
link |
but autonomic system.
link |
It is below our subconscious detection.
link |
Now, as we get older, there's another system
link |
that starts to come into play in parent-child interactions,
link |
and this also comes into play in sibling interactions
link |
and so forth, and that's the left brain system
link |
as described by Alan Shore.
link |
Now, again, this isn't about emotion versus rationality.
link |
This is about autonomic
link |
versus more conscious forms of bonding.
link |
So on the left brain circuit side,
link |
there is evidence for, based on neuroimaging studies,
link |
but also animal studies to support the idea
link |
that on the left brain side of things,
link |
there is a processing more of narratives
link |
that are very concrete, logical narratives, okay?
link |
And again, I have to zoom out and just really tamp down
link |
the idea that it's not that one side of the brain
link |
is emotional and the other side is rational,
link |
but rather that these two things are happening in parallel,
link |
and that there's a bit of a dominance
link |
for the left brain circuitry to be involved
link |
in the kinds of bonding that are associated
link |
with prediction and reward.
link |
So a good example would be reading to a child every night,
link |
sitting there and reading.
link |
I can recall reading to my niece
link |
and seeing her parents read to her,
link |
and she had no clue whatsoever with what they were saying,
link |
because she, well, at least I don't know,
link |
but she certainly couldn't speak,
link |
but she liked looking at the pictures,
link |
and it was a very predictable sort of interaction.
link |
It was, okay, out come the books,
link |
it was usually here's the bath, then there's the pajamas,
link |
then there's the lights go down, then out comes the book,
link |
and then there's the interaction between parent and child,
link |
which of course usually also involves physical contact.
link |
So it's not like the right brain system
link |
and the left brain system are operating separately,
link |
they're operating in parallel.
link |
But that sort of prediction and reward
link |
kids like to be read to
link |
is generally mediated by this left brain system.
link |
And this carries on as children get older
link |
and as parents take on and evolve their parenting roles.
link |
It's very apparent that healthy social bonding
link |
between children and caretaker
link |
relies on the fact that both this right brain system
link |
and the left brain system are engaged,
link |
that there's a synchronization of autonomic function,
link |
meaning a joining together in actual somatic feeling,
link |
and that there's a synchronization of experience
link |
that's more about some outward or external stimulus,
link |
like reading a book or watching a show together,
link |
or enjoying some common experience of a meal together.
link |
And of course, as children get older,
link |
they're able to access more and more
link |
cognitively sophisticated things.
link |
You can watch a movie with them
link |
and they'll make predictions about which characters
link |
are going to show up, for instance,
link |
or you can take them to a concert
link |
and they can appreciate the concert or play in that concert,
link |
and they appreciate that they're being appreciated, okay?
link |
So there are a million different,
link |
there's infinite number of examples here,
link |
but the idea is that there are two parallel circuits
link |
that are important for establishing bonds,
link |
and that this is set up very early on in childhood,
link |
and that it's neither emotional nor rational, but both.
link |
Now, both of these circuits tap into the circuitry
link |
that we talked about earlier,
link |
where dopamine is released and molecules like serotonin,
link |
which again is a neuromodulator
link |
more associated with feelings of warmth,
link |
comfort, and satisfaction with our immediate surroundings
link |
and possessions rather than seeking of things
link |
and motivation and drive to go look for things,
link |
as is the case with dopamine.
link |
So there's still interactions with those systems,
link |
but the work of Alan Shore has stimulated
link |
a lot of interest in what are these circuits
link |
that underlie these autonomic bonding,
link |
this matching of heart rate and breathing,
link |
and what are the neural circuits that underlie
link |
this bonding or this synchronization of experience
link |
on the kind of left brain side.
link |
And the reason I find this model so attractive
link |
is that it's very clear that healthy child-parent bonds
link |
are established not by one or the other
link |
of these right brain or left brain systems, but by both.
link |
And there isn't enough time to go into it right now,
link |
but some of you are probably familiar with this idea
link |
of anxious attached versus avoidant attached
link |
versus there's a kind of dissociative attached model
link |
of infant-parent bonding.
link |
Just briefly, what's becoming clear
link |
from the neurobiological imaging studies
link |
is that as people start to advance into adolescence
link |
and adulthood and well into their elderly years,
link |
the same circuits that were active
link |
and established in childhood are repurposed
link |
for other forms of attachment.
link |
And that to have truly complete bonds
link |
with other individuals,
link |
but in particular with romantic partners,
link |
it's important that there be both synchronization
link |
of physiology and synchronization of these more,
link |
I guess we could call them more rational
link |
or predictive type circuits.
link |
So we can leverage this information.
link |
We can start to think about what sorts of bonds to us
link |
feel very enriching and very complete.
link |
We know that we can have, for instance,
link |
an emotional connection with somebody,
link |
but we can also have a cognitive connection with somebody.
link |
I have many colleagues with whom I have
link |
deep intellectual connection and convergence with.
link |
I wouldn't say that I have deep emotional connection
link |
with most of them, a few of them, yes,
link |
but most of them, no.
link |
Others in my life, for instance,
link |
I have a deep emotional connection to,
link |
but not a lot of deep cognitive connection to.
link |
A good example would be the connection that I had
link |
with my bulldog who unfortunately passed away,
link |
but Costello, we had a very close emotional connection.
link |
It was based on touch, it was based on our walks,
link |
it was based on fun, it was very autonomic.
link |
We rarely discussed, if ever, what we were doing.
link |
We had a felt relationship
link |
as opposed to a cognitive relationship.
link |
And while I'm sort of half kidding about that as an example,
link |
it's a really good example, it was a very real bond.
link |
And in fact, just as a brief anecdote,
link |
I can remember when Costello was a puppy
link |
and I was entirely responsible for his wellbeing,
link |
I, like any parent of any infant,
link |
I lost my appetite for those few weeks
link |
when I was house training him,
link |
and I seemed to lose all ability
link |
to process any cognitive information.
link |
Now, I was also sleep deprived,
link |
but I was entirely focused on the autonomic bond
link |
that we were forming.
link |
Now, thankfully, that eventually
link |
was established pretty quickly.
link |
Basically, I went on to just basically feed him,
link |
walk him and do everything for him,
link |
and we had a wonderful relationship.
link |
Now, it's very clear that what we're talking about here
link |
is a form of empathy.
link |
Empathy is the ability to feel,
link |
or at least think we feel what others feel.
link |
Because again, as my colleague and the great bio engineer
link |
and psychiatrist at Stanford, Carl Deisseroth,
link |
has said, and he was a guest on this podcast,
link |
we really don't know how other people feel.
link |
We just get the sense that perhaps
link |
we are feeling the same thing
link |
or we're feeling something different
link |
and we infer or we project what they might be thinking.
link |
Empathy is this sense that we are sensing
link |
what other people are sensing, okay?
link |
And there's no real way to verify that
link |
except if you're measuring physiologies,
link |
you could get some insight into that.
link |
In the clinical psychology
link |
and in the neurobiological literature now,
link |
it's understood that there is both emotional empathy,
link |
like actually feeling what somebody is feeling,
link |
and what is now called cognitive empathy.
link |
Cognitive empathy is this idea
link |
that we both see and experience something the same way
link |
at a mental level.
link |
Emotional empathy is this idea that yes,
link |
I can feel what you feel at a visceral,
link |
somatic or autonomic level.
link |
And it's absolutely clear that strong social bonds
link |
between children and caretaker
link |
involve both emotional empathy,
link |
this autonomic function, and cognitive empathy,
link |
that there's a mutual understanding
link |
of how the other person feels
link |
and how the other person thinks
link |
in order to be able to make predictions
link |
about what they're going to do.
link |
It's also very clear based on the emerging literature
link |
that romantic relationships,
link |
and to some extent friendships,
link |
although friendships have been explored a bit less
link |
in the literature,
link |
that emotional empathy and cognitive empathy
link |
are both required in order to establish
link |
what we call a trusting social bond.
link |
And there's some beautiful experiments done
link |
using neuroimaging of two individuals playing a trust game,
link |
essentially a game where you're trying to predict
link |
the other person's behavior,
link |
whether or not they will behave in a trustworthy way.
link |
And these experiments tend to use real money,
link |
so there's actually something at stake.
link |
And you can more or less predict
link |
whether or not somebody feels a lot of trust
link |
for somebody else and whether or not they believe
link |
they will act in a trustworthy manner
link |
based on whether or not they have high levels
link |
of both cognitive empathy and emotional empathy.
link |
So for those of you that are seeking
link |
to establish deeper bonds or bonds of any kind,
link |
it's important that you think about synchronization
link |
of bodily states, we talked about that earlier,
link |
and synchronization of cognitive states.
link |
Now that doesn't mean you have to agree on everything.
link |
In fact, oftentimes people who feel very close
link |
to one another cognitively and emotionally
link |
argue about all sorts of things
link |
and disagree about a lot of things.
link |
In fact, we probably know,
link |
I certainly know people and couples
link |
that seem to bond through arguing,
link |
which is an interesting phenotype in itself.
link |
But the point isn't that there be total convergence
link |
of opinion or stance,
link |
but rather that we understand how the other feels
link |
and we believe that they understand how we feel,
link |
that we understand how the other person thinks,
link |
and that they think that we understand how they think.
link |
So it's a reciprocal loop between two people
link |
that involves this cognition and involves emotion.
link |
And it's grounded, as Dr. Schor has pointed out,
link |
in our earliest forms of attachment.
link |
And that makes perfect sense
link |
because the same sorts of circuits
link |
that are responsible for social homeostasis,
link |
the kind of right brain and left brain circuits
link |
that are responsible for infant-mother attachment,
link |
and then later for more intellectual
link |
or predictive type attachments between child and caregiver
link |
are the exact same circuits that we superimpose
link |
into all other types of relationships
link |
throughout the rest of our life.
link |
And I should just mention that for those of you
link |
that might be thinking that you had a less than satisfactory
link |
infant-caretaker interaction or form of attachment,
link |
you are not alone.
link |
And in fact, much of the work that Dr. Schor focuses on
link |
is about how those early circumstances
link |
can be understood and rewired
link |
toward the development of healthy adult attachment.
link |
And if you want to check out his work,
link |
he's actually got a few YouTube videos out there.
link |
Again, it's Alan Schor, spelled S-C-H-O-R-E.
link |
I'd love to get him as a guest on the podcast.
link |
He also has a book, it's called Right Brain Psychotherapy,
link |
and it's an excellent book.
link |
It's actually pretty accessible,
link |
even if you don't have a background
link |
in biology or psychology.
link |
I found it to be very interesting.
link |
There are a lot of excellent references.
link |
And again, if you're listening,
link |
Dr. Schor or you know Alan Schor,
link |
we'd love to get you on the podcast.
link |
One of the key themes to understand
link |
about biological processes is that they often work
link |
on short timescales and longer timescales.
link |
And up until now, we've mainly been talking
link |
about the stuff that happens on short timescales.
link |
So the kind of synchronization of heart rate
link |
or activation of a given set of neurons
link |
that dumps some dopamine and causes us
link |
to seek out more social interaction or less, for instance.
link |
But every biological circuit and function needs
link |
to have longstanding effects as well.
link |
And typically when you're thinking
link |
about longstanding effects in the brain and body,
link |
you start looking towards the hormone system.
link |
It's not always the case, but more often than not,
link |
neurotransmitters and neuromodulators are pretty quick,
link |
whereas hormones have longer lasting effects.
link |
In fact, a lot of hormones can actually travel
link |
to the nucleus of a cell and actually change
link |
which genes are expressed.
link |
So if ever there was a hormone or hormone-like molecule
link |
that's associated with social bonding, it's oxytocin.
link |
And oxytocin has gotten a ton of interest
link |
in the popular press.
link |
I don't know why that is, but perhaps it's because
link |
of all the incredible things
link |
that oxytocin is associated with.
link |
And it is indeed a lot of things.
link |
So for instance, oxytocin is released in the brain
link |
and binds to receptors in different locations in the body.
link |
And the moment you hear different locations
link |
in the body, receptors, you should think,
link |
well, it's going to have lots of different effects.
link |
And indeed it does.
link |
Oxytocin is involved in orgasm.
link |
It's involved in social recognition.
link |
When you see people that you consider your people,
link |
your team, your group, your friends, oxytocin is released.
link |
Even if you don't come into physical contact with them.
link |
Oxytocin is also associated with pair bonding,
link |
the feeling that they are your person
link |
and that you are their person is a common language
link |
It's also associated with honesty.
link |
Believe it or not, there are experiments that show
link |
that if people receive oxytocin through an inhalation spray,
link |
that they will be more honest and forthcoming
link |
about certain things.
link |
And the oxytocin system and variants in the oxytocin system
link |
have also been associated with autism
link |
and various autism spectrum disorders.
link |
So there's a huge range of behaviors that it's involved in
link |
because you have receptors for oxytocin
link |
and lots of different brain structures
link |
and areas of the body that do different things.
link |
However, there's some very consistent effects of oxytocin
link |
that are worth just listing off.
link |
And then I'm going to talk about two separate pathways
link |
by which oxytocin can manifest its effects
link |
and how you can actually regulate oxytocin
link |
in ways that are interesting and perhaps useful as well.
link |
First of all, oxytocin is involved
link |
in the milk letdown reflex, lactation.
link |
This makes perfect sense.
link |
There needs to be a cue by which the suckling on the nipple
link |
of the infant causes the release or letdown of milk
link |
and milk letdown and lactation is controlled by prolactin,
link |
another hormone, but also oxytocin.
link |
Oxytocin is also involved in uterine contraction
link |
during childbirth.
link |
It's involved in cervical dilation
link |
to allow the baby to pass out of the birth canal.
link |
So it's involved in induction of breastfeeding and of labor,
link |
which is remarkable and especially remarkable
link |
given that in males, or at least in some male animals
link |
and in some male humans, and I do want to say some,
link |
and I'll get back to this,
link |
it can be involved in the erection response.
link |
It can be involved in the orgasm response
link |
in both males and females.
link |
Although there, there's a very interesting difference.
link |
There's a little bit of controversy about this,
link |
but it does appear that in females,
link |
sexual stimulation and orgasm cause the release of oxytocin,
link |
whereas in males, sexual stimulation
link |
does not cause the release of oxytocin,
link |
but rather a different molecule vasopressin
link |
is triggered by sexual stimulation.
link |
But orgasm does trigger the release of oxytocin in males,
link |
but with a delay of about 30 minutes.
link |
Why that is and the specific function of that is not clear,
link |
but it does seem that oxytocin is involved
link |
in the sexual response in both males and females.
link |
The main types of interactions that release oxytocin
link |
at high levels are, first of all,
link |
that the interaction be between individuals
link |
that see each other as very closely associated, right?
link |
So a infant and mother are very closely associated,
link |
whether or not it's an adopted infant or not.
link |
Oftentimes they are in close contact.
link |
Oftentimes they are from the very body of the other.
link |
And so the amount or the amplitude of oxytocin release
link |
tends to scale with how closely associated individuals are.
link |
Just the sight of one's baby or smell of one's baby
link |
can evoke oxytocin release and vice versa from the mother.
link |
Physical contact even more so.
link |
In romantic partners, physical contact,
link |
even the sight of a picture of a partner
link |
can evoke oxytocin release and sexual desire, also trust.
link |
So there's this whole collection of psychological
link |
and physiological things that are packaged
link |
into the oxytocin system.
link |
It's not just a one-way system.
link |
Now, a lot of people out there have written to me
link |
asking about inhalant oxytocin,
link |
asking whether or not that can actually increase
link |
the depth or rate of pair bonding.
link |
And there does seem to be some evidence for that.
link |
Now, I think in most places, oxytocin is prescription,
link |
although it might be over the counter in others.
link |
I don't know, you have to check where you are.
link |
As far as I know, you can't just go out
link |
and buy oxytocin nasal spray, although you may be able to.
link |
Forgive me, I'm naive to that point.
link |
But it's interesting to note that some drugs
link |
that are being used in clinical trials
link |
for things like trauma and are also used
link |
in clinical therapeutic settings for increasing bonding,
link |
in particular MDMA, also called ecstasy,
link |
increase dopamine and serotonin.
link |
Dopamine and serotonin have a vast number of effects
link |
throughout the brain and body
link |
that I've talked about some of them today
link |
in another podcast.
link |
But one of the lesser appreciated effects of MDMA
link |
is that it causes huge increases,
link |
massive increases in the amount of oxytocin
link |
that's released into the brain and body.
link |
And MDMA-assisted psychotherapy,
link |
while still illegal, as far as I know,
link |
certainly in the United States,
link |
but in most places throughout the world,
link |
is being explored in clinical trials,
link |
not just for trauma, not just for depression,
link |
not just for eating disorders,
link |
but also for reestablishing what seem to be fractured
link |
or challenged bonds between romantic partners.
link |
And while most of the attention has been focused
link |
on the dopaminergic and serotonergic aspects
link |
of the MDMA response, it's clear to me,
link |
based on my read of the literature,
link |
that the enormously elevated oxytocin
link |
that occurs during the consumption of MDMA
link |
is part of the reason why people experience
link |
during the MDMA session and post-MDMA session
link |
a much greater degree and depth of kinship
link |
or feeling of connection with that person.
link |
And it's important to point out
link |
that that feeling of connection is of the autonomic type
link |
that I was referring to earlier,
link |
a la Alan Shore's work, that it's not of the,
link |
oh, we think about things the exact same way,
link |
we agree on everything now,
link |
it's more of that their physiologies are synchronized.
link |
So much so that even in individuals within a couple
link |
where one does a therapeutic session and the other does not,
link |
they still both feel quite more bonded to the other.
link |
Now, oftentimes in the clinical therapeutic setting,
link |
both members of a couple or romantic partnership,
link |
whatever that form it may take, are consuming MDMA
link |
and then thereby experiencing elevated oxytocin
link |
and this enhanced sense of bonding.
link |
And again, it's this autonomic bonding,
link |
but it's so powerful,
link |
meaning the oxytocin response is so powerful
link |
that it doesn't even require that both individuals
link |
experience this huge inflection in oxytocin
link |
and that's because one person's physiology
link |
is influencing the other
link |
and oxytocin is this kind of bridging signal
link |
that occurs in both nervous systems,
link |
synchronizes things like heartbeat.
link |
Obviously it's associated with touch
link |
and so if people are touching or people are engaging
link |
in the sorts of behaviors that I mentioned earlier
link |
that can increase oxytocin further,
link |
that's going to further increase the depth of the bond.
link |
But the point here is that there's actually a hormonal glue
link |
between individuals, okay?
link |
Infant and mother, friends, teammates,
link |
romantic partners and so on
link |
and that hormonal glue is oxytocin.
link |
Now, people vary in the extent to which they feel
link |
or have the capacity to feel bonded to anyone.
link |
And it is now generally understood
link |
that some of that variation
link |
might depend on variations in oxytocin receptors
link |
or what are called gene polymorphisms for oxytocin.
link |
Genes can have a number of different sequences in them.
link |
They're nucleotide sequences.
link |
We won't go into genetics right now.
link |
As and Gs and Cs and Ts in various combinations
link |
are what make up the genes.
link |
Genes are transcribed into RNA.
link |
RNA is translated into proteins that affect cells, okay?
link |
The oxytocin gene encodes for oxytocin
link |
and variants in that gene change the amount
link |
and function of oxytocin.
link |
There's a really interesting study
link |
published just this last year in a relatively new journal.
link |
That journal has a kind of a unusual name.
link |
It's Helion, I think it's Helion and not Helion,
link |
but Helion, H-E-L-I-Y-O-N.
link |
This is a cell press journal.
link |
As far as I can tell, it's a very solid journal.
link |
Certainly the cell press label is very stringent.
link |
And this paper is entitled
link |
the relation between oxytocin receptor gene polymorphisms,
link |
which just means changes in genes or variations in genes,
link |
adult attachment and Instagram sociability,
link |
an exploratory analysis.
link |
This is a really wild study, but I like the study.
link |
It's very thorough.
link |
First author, last name Carollo, C-A-R-O-L-L-O.
link |
And what they found was that by analyzing the genetics
link |
of different individuals who are on social media
link |
and looking at how many people those individuals follow
link |
and how many people follow them
link |
and what they come up with
link |
is a so-called social desirability index.
link |
They were able to correlate in a very straightforward way
link |
that people that carry certain variants
link |
in the oxytocin and oxytocin receptor genes
link |
actually seek out more online
link |
social Instagram interactions.
link |
So some people I know, I won't name their names,
link |
only follow anywhere from zero to six accounts.
link |
Other people follow thousands of accounts
link |
and they take the ratio of how many accounts people follow
link |
versus how many followers they have.
link |
Arguably not a perfect measure,
link |
but a nice one in the sense that you can do this
link |
in a completely unbiased way
link |
with many, many thousands of subjects.
link |
And then they were able to get genomic analysis
link |
from a number of these subjects.
link |
And it turns out that people who have,
link |
let's say higher levels of oxytocin function
link |
or potential levels of oxytocin function
link |
actively seek out more social interactions on social media.
link |
So this I think represents an important first
link |
in the area of how social media and data from social media
link |
are starting to merge with biological data
link |
in terms of predicting how avidly people
link |
will seek out social interactions of an online type.
link |
And nowadays we hear a lot about how online
link |
we are connected, but we're not really, what is it?
link |
We're communicating, but we're not connected
link |
or the connections aren't real.
link |
I think we're going to need to revisit that.
link |
While I'm certainly a believer in the idea
link |
that face-to-face communication and common interactions
link |
with people standing in the same space
link |
or playing sports together, enjoying music together,
link |
enjoying meals together is vitally important.
link |
There's an entire generation or several generations
link |
of people that are coming up
link |
who much of their social interaction has been online.
link |
And if you think about it,
link |
all of the things that we've spelled out earlier
link |
about common mental narrative,
link |
this left brain system, a la Alan Shore,
link |
or autonomic bonding or synchronization of heartbeats
link |
according to common stories,
link |
all that is happening in online social interactions.
link |
When a thousand of us look at the exact same Instagram post,
link |
yes, we will have a thousand independent responses to that,
link |
but chances are many of us have a similar or same response
link |
based on the data that we talked about earlier
link |
in synchronization of heartbeats.
link |
And so we are socially bonded with other people
link |
through social media.
link |
And it's very apparent that the oxytocin system
link |
is playing some role in that.
link |
And this, if we zoom out, makes perfect sense,
link |
because again, dopamine, serotonin, prolactin, oxytocin,
link |
none of these systems were placed in us
link |
or are organized within us in order to encourage specific
link |
and only specific types of social interactions.
link |
The one that we can say is absolutely critical
link |
is the child-parent interaction, right?
link |
Because children simply can't take care of themselves,
link |
they need a caretaker.
link |
I should have said caretaker, not parent.
link |
But infants, if they're not taking care, will die.
link |
But beyond that, we have evolved or come to realize
link |
many different types of social interactions.
link |
And online interactions nowadays are very, very common.
link |
I'm certainly involved in them.
link |
I'm guessing you're involved in them as well.
link |
We're involved in one right now, for example.
link |
The oxytocin system is absolutely threaded through
link |
and largely responsible for those types
link |
of social bonds as well.
link |
And incidentally, oxytocin is the name of the fifth song
link |
on Billie Eilish's second album, Happier Than Ever.
link |
So we've covered a lot about the biology
link |
and indeed the neural circuitry and neurochemistry
link |
and neuroendocrinology of social bonding.
link |
I want to make sure that I highlight the key features
link |
that go into any and all of your social bonds.
link |
First of all, all social bonds have the potential
link |
to include both what we called emotional empathy
link |
and cognitive empathy.
link |
And so if you are interested in establishing
link |
and deepening social bonds of any kind,
link |
it's important that you put some effort
link |
toward this thing that we call emotional empathy,
link |
which is really about sharing autonomic experience.
link |
Now, depending on the relationship,
link |
that will take on different contexts.
link |
What's appropriate in one type of bond
link |
is not going to be appropriate in another type of bond.
link |
Physical contact, for instance,
link |
is appropriate for certain types of bonds
link |
and not for others.
link |
Nonetheless, emotional empathy and the synchronization
link |
of autonomic function, heart rate, breathing, et cetera,
link |
can be best accomplished by paying attention
link |
to external events, in particular narrative, story, music,
link |
and perhaps sports or other types of experience
link |
as an external stimulus to drive synchrony
link |
of those internal states.
link |
The other aspect of forming deep bonds
link |
is cognitive empathy.
link |
Again, cognitive empathy is not about agreeing on things
link |
or viewing things the exact same way.
link |
It's about really gaining understanding
link |
of how somebody else thinks about something,
link |
really paying attention to that,
link |
and then paying attention to how you think about
link |
and feel about something.
link |
So that's what cognitive empathy is.
link |
So emotional and cognitive empathy together
link |
are what make up these really robust bonds
link |
Now, we also talked about introversion and extroversion,
link |
and I'd like to try and dismantle the common misperceptions
link |
about introversion and extroversion,
link |
because when we look at the neural circuitry,
link |
as you recall, introverts are not people
link |
that don't like social interaction.
link |
It's just that they feel filled up or sated
link |
by less social interaction than would be an extrovert.
link |
And that's because,
link |
at least according to the social homeostasis circuit model,
link |
they actually get more dopamine
link |
from less social interaction, okay?
link |
It's like somebody who's sated by less amount of food, okay?
link |
It doesn't mean they don't have the same appetite.
link |
It just means that they get more from less.
link |
Whereas extroverts get less dopamine release
link |
from an equivalent amount of social interaction.
link |
And of course, these aren't precise measurements,
link |
but on the whole, extroverts need more social interaction,
link |
more frequent, more long-lasting, et cetera,
link |
in order to achieve that dopamine threshold.
link |
Because again, dopamine is driving
link |
that craving of social interaction.
link |
And once it's met, then people don't feel
link |
like they have to seek social interaction as much.
link |
So for those of you that feel
link |
as if you're an introvert or extrovert,
link |
or that know introverts and extroverts,
link |
it's not about how verbal people are.
link |
It's not about how much they seek out
link |
social interactions per se.
link |
It's about how much social interaction
link |
is enough for the given person.
link |
Now, the whole reason for providing this framework,
link |
this biological circuitry, et cetera,
link |
is not to simply put a reductionist view
link |
on things that you already realized and knew,
link |
but rather to give you some leverage points
link |
to understand how is it that you form social bonds?
link |
How is it that you might be challenged
link |
in forming certain types of social bonds?
link |
And to think about entry points
link |
to both establishing and reinforcing social bonds
link |
of different kinds.
link |
Hopefully, it will also give you insight
link |
into why breakups, whether it be between friendships
link |
or romantic partners, can be so painful.
link |
A breakup of any kind involves both a breaking
link |
of that emotional empathy and that cognitive empathy.
link |
And indeed, it has a neurobiological
link |
and hormonal underpinning, right?
link |
We go into some sense a social isolation,
link |
even if we're surrounded by other types of people.
link |
If one of our major sources of oxytocin
link |
or one of our major sources of dopamine
link |
suddenly is not around,
link |
that is incredibly devastating to a nervous system.
link |
And to borrow from the great psychologist
link |
and neurobiologist, Lisa Feldman Barrett,
link |
who says, you know, we are not just individuals,
link |
we are nervous systems influencing other nervous systems,
link |
and their nervous systems are influencing us.
link |
I think that's the right way to think about it.
link |
So it should come as no surprise
link |
that breakups of various kinds are very challenging,
link |
regardless of what underlied that breakup,
link |
whether or not somebody moving or an actual decision
link |
of one person to leave the relationship or both, et cetera.
link |
On the more positive side, largely biological,
link |
but to some extent, psychological view of social bonding
link |
will also allow you to orient in this vast landscape
link |
that we call social bonds,
link |
to understand why it is perhaps
link |
that you seek out so many online interactions.
link |
Maybe you have the oxytocin polymorphism
link |
that causes you to want more,
link |
follow more accounts or interact more with people
link |
and comment more, respond to comments, who knows?
link |
I'm also hoping that it will allow you
link |
to get a lens into how you can strengthen the social bonds
link |
that you want to strengthen
link |
and to establish new social bonds
link |
that you want to establish.
link |
None of this is meant to manipulate
link |
or leverage social bonds that wouldn't otherwise form.
link |
To the contrary, it's about identifying
link |
what are the specific routes
link |
by which social bonds are created
link |
and allowing you, I hope, to work with people
link |
that you feel challenged in forming social bonds with,
link |
or maybe deciding to completely divorce
link |
from those social bonds entirely
link |
because there's absolutely no hope
link |
of ever forming emotional or cognitive empathy.
link |
I certainly acknowledge that that could be the case too.
link |
So there's both a light and a dark and a gray zone
link |
to this entire thing that we call social bonding.
link |
What is not graded, but is absolute, as they say,
link |
is that social bonds are vitally important
link |
to us as a species,
link |
whether or not they are at a distance over social media,
link |
whether or not they are in close proximity,
link |
actual physical contact.
link |
Today, what I've really tried to illustrate
link |
is that there are a common set of biological,
link |
neurochemical, and hormonal underpinnings
link |
to what we call social bonding.
link |
And so while it is complex and it is subjective,
link |
it involves the hierarchies,
link |
it involves our previous upbringing,
link |
it involves our goals, et cetera,
link |
it is not infinitely complex.
link |
And in that sense, it is tractable.
link |
Hopefully I've offered you some levers or some entry points
link |
under which you can both understand
link |
and move towards social bonds
link |
that would be more satisfying and more gratifying for you.
link |
That's certainly one of the goals.
link |
The other one is that hopefully if you're a clinician
link |
or simply the friend that people go to
link |
or the family member that people go to
link |
when they are challenged
link |
through various challenges and social bonds,
link |
that you can start to perhaps pass along
link |
some of the information as a way of people understanding
link |
what they're going through as they are breaking up,
link |
but also as they are falling in love,
link |
as they are forming attachments
link |
and as they are being challenged with attachments.
link |
And especially as you head into the holidays
link |
and end of year, but also as it continues into 2022,
link |
I would hope that you would take this knowledge
link |
and apply it in any of the ways
link |
that you feel are meaningful and adaptive for you.
link |
If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast,
link |
please subscribe to our YouTube channel.
link |
That really helps us.
link |
In addition, please put comments
link |
in the comment section on YouTube if you have them.
link |
And if you have suggestions for future podcast guests
link |
that you'd like us to host on the Huberman Lab Podcast,
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please put those in the comment section as well.
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We do eventually read all the comments.
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In addition, please subscribe to the Huberman Lab Podcast
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on Apple and or Spotify.
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And on Apple, you have the opportunity
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to leave us up to a five-star review
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and a comment if you like.
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Please also check out our sponsors
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mentioned at the beginning of the podcast.
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That's perhaps the best way to support this podcast.
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And we have a Patreon.
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It's patreon.com slash Andrew Huberman.
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And there you can support the podcast
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at any level that you like.
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We didn't talk about supplements on today's episode
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of the Huberman Lab Podcast, but on many episodes we do.
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While supplements aren't necessary for everybody,
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many people derive tremendous benefit from them
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for things like enhancing the depth and quality of sleep,
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for things like focus, immune system, et cetera.
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If you'd like to see the supplements that I take,
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you can go to thorne.com slash the letter U slash Huberman.
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The reason we partnered with Thorne
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is because Thorne has the highest levels of stringency
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in terms of the quality of the ingredients
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that they include in their supplements
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and the precision of the amounts
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of the supplements that they include.
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This is not true for a lot
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of other supplement brands out there.
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Thorne is partnered with the Mayo Clinic,
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with all the major sports teams,
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so there's tremendous confidence in their stringency.
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Again, if you go to thorne.com slash the letter U
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slash Huberman, you can see all the supplements that I take.
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You can get 20% off any of those supplements,
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and if you navigate deeper into the Thorne site
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through that portal,
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you can also get 20% off any of the other supplements
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that Thorne makes.
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If you're not already following the Huberman Lab
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on Instagram and Twitter, please do so.
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On Instagram, I regularly teach short snippets
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about neuroscience and neuroscience-related tools.
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Some of that information overlaps
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with what's covered on the podcast.
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Often, it does not.
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So check us out at Huberman Lab on Instagram and on Twitter.
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And last, but certainly not least,
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thank you for your interest in science.