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How to Make Better Decisions | Dr. Michael Platt

Huberman Lab

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  • Primate Parallels
    • Human decision-making, social interaction, and exploration closely resemble those of old-world primates like macaque monkeys.
    • Language is a primary differentiator, but underlying neural circuits and expressions are remarkably similar. Transcript: Michael Platt That’s a great way of putting it because I think it’s both. I always like to say there’s a little monkey in all of us, right? And I believe that going in, you know, having spent actually my formative years, you know, just watching monkeys. And I worked at the Cleveland Zoo, you know, when I was in college. And I took every opportunity I could get to go, you know, I went to the field. You know, I watched monkeys in South America and in Mexico. And I think we all get that. But over the course of my career, I’m astonished at how deep that goes. And basically, for every behavioral, cognitive, emotional phenomenon that we’ve trained our lens on, it looks almost exactly the same in people and monkeys. Now, obviously, we’re not just monkeys, and we can talk, and we’re doing this, and that’s a big, big difference. But all the things that you talked about, decision-making, social interaction, the way that we explore the world, the fountain of creativity, not only the neural circuits, but the Actual expression is so similar. We have monkeys and people do the exact same things in the lab, and if I didn’t label the videos, the outputs of like the avatars and whatnot in games, you couldn’t tell the difference. Andrew Huberman What’s striking about what you just said is that I recall, I guess at that time it was called a tweet. And I think it was from Elon that said that we’re basically a species that got a supercomputer placed on top of a monkey brain. So in thinking about it the other way, what aspects of being human, this old world primate that we are, I think is distinctly different than, say, a macaque monkey, aside from language? Michael Platt I don’t know that anything really is. I mean, so actually, it’s an interesting time to have you ask me that question, because this spring semester, I teach a seminar for the psychology department at Penn called Being Human. And the whole idea of that, each week, we tackle an aspect of who we are that has, at one point or another, been considered to be uniquely human or close to, right? And that could be something like art and creativity or theory of mind, right? Or, you know, economics and markets and things like that. And when you take a look at these things through the lenses of neuroscience and anthropology, this is how we do it, economics, psychology, neurology, on and on and on, you start to really See that there’s a lot more continuity than discontinuity. I want to go back to that Elon tweet, if I may, because I think that’s where we go a little bit astray to in thinking about the brain as a computer, right? So it’s – well, obviously, it’s not built on silica, right? It’s made of meat and fat, and it’s subject to all of the constraints that go along with that. And what I think instead is a better metaphor is that we’ve got a 30 million year old Swiss army knife in our heads, right? So yes, you can learn how to do all kinds of different things, but you’ve got a brain that’s got essentially specific tools in it. You know, you’ll have, you know, it’s like having a knife and a corkscrew, which is the most important one, you know, nail file, saw, et cetera. And the monkey’s got those too. Now, ours might be a little bigger, you know, and sharper, but they look pretty similar and they do the job in a very similar way. And I think once we appreciate that, then that opens up a lot of territory for applications, you know, not just trying to understand how some of the tools might get broken or dull as a result Of illness or injury or disorders, etc., but also how we can measure them and how we can develop them better because some of those we use all the time, (Time 0:03:40)
  • Directing Attention
    • Attention prioritizes based on inherent biases (like faces) and learned experiences.
    • Control over attention is possible but requires deliberate effort due to our brains’ foraging tendencies. Transcript: Andrew Huberman Most humans are sighted. We rely on vision to assess the world around us, to assess emotions of others, et cetera. And so are the other old world primates. Yeah. Right. How do we allocate attention? Like what grabs our attention? And maybe in this discussion, we could also touch on, because I know you’ve worked on this, what underlies some deficits in attention? So yeah, if we could just explore this from the perspective of, okay, you go into an environment, let’s say it’s a familiar environment, you wake up in the room, you wake up in each day. What grabs your attention? What keeps your attention? And if we do in fact have control over our attention, which we do to some extent, why is it so difficult for many of us to decide, you know what? I’m just going to put everything away and I’m just going to focus on this task for the next hour. Why is that so challenging for so many people, regardless of whether they have a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder? Okay, (Time 0:11:16)
  • Phone and Focus
    • To improve working memory and focus, remove your phone from the room entirely.
    • Simply having it nearby, even if turned off, can unconsciously divide your attention. Transcript: Andrew Huberman In what, the preceding bin of time, like 10 minutes, until you arrive at a site or within sight so that that’s less well known but we’re now learning that it is it is pretty short term right Michael Platt So it seems to be driven by reinforcement learning processes that kind of are telling you how rich that environment is and so what one of the things about the marginal value theorem I Think is really, really profound for understanding our current predicament is that it says that if you’re in a really poor environment, like you, let’s say you forage for apples, right? And there’s one apple tree for the next 10 miles. You stay in that apple tree until you picked every apple, rotten or not rotten, not ripe, right, before you move on. If you were in an orchard with apple trees everywhere, you just pick the ones that are easiest to get and then you move on. So now think about it in the context of web surfing, web, like when you were, you know, if you’re coming up when I did, you know, I was in graduate school or, you know, I was an undergraduate, The way I accessed the internet was through a dial-up modem. So it was very slow. It was a very poor environment. You’re sitting there waiting for the information to load up, right? And it might take 30 seconds or longer. You don’t abandon that. You read the whole thing. You might print it out, put it in your file cabinet, right? Now you get like super high speed internet. Yeah, you can have 12 tabs open, 50 tabs open. And you’re like, you just, so you spend like, you know, half a second or a couple of seconds on anyone. You don’t, you certainly don’t scroll down beneath the fold, right? So it totally makes sense. Now think about all the devices you might have in, or it could be tabs. It could be, most people are sitting around with a TV on, you know, their phone, a tablet, a laptop, whatnot. Yeah, I’m guilty of having – I have three phones and a laptop. Yeah, so you’re just cycling – you are doing exactly what you’re designed to do, right, which is to move between these resources quickly and easily because it’s so easy. So in some of that’s going back to your question about like, why is it so hard? It’s going to be really, really deliberate. You have to either reduce, you know, make it a harder environment, I guess, is the idea. You would have to actually put things away or make the return rate that you’re getting from any of them much worse. Like, for example, if you turn your phone monochrome, which we know works, right? It helps you to stop checking your phone and spend less time on it because it’s just not as good of a source. Andrew Huberman Yeah, the information feels really depleted. You reposted a paper result recently, and I did as well after I saw it on your X account, that if you look at working memory, the ability to keep information online in real time and work With it, it seems that working memory is worst when your phone is right next to you. (Time 0:19:50)
  • Internal Conversation
    • Maintaining a focused thought train, without visual input, can be challenging initially but improves with practice.
    • This internal conversation differs from meditation and acts like foraging in a resource-rich environment. Transcript: Michael Platt Or Cal Newport would call deep work? So I’ve never tried that. And it sounds fascinating and I’m going to try to give it a shot, you know, tomorrow morning. At first I was thinking this sounds a lot like meditation, right? But there are a whole variety, I’m no expert on meditation, but there are a whole variety of different kinds of meditation. Some, as you mentioned, you know, you’re focusing on breathwork, physical stimulus. But there are others that are not and that are much more kind of cognitively focused. So for example, like loving kindness meditation is one where you’re kind of thinking about a particular person, you’re imagining them and you’re imagining something really good Happening to them, right? So it’s sort of one of these, you know, self-transcendent types of meditation, which are not, I don’t think, really tied to any external input coming out, although it’s an internal Input, right, that’s based on your memory or awe-based meditation. So maybe it’s more similar to those, but I- But that’s like thematically anchored. Exactly, exactly. Andrew Huberman As opposed to visually anchored, like staring at a flame or concentrating on one’s breath. Yeah, I didn’t have a, it was like free, in terms of putting in language of foraging, it was like, I didn’t have a plan. I wasn’t writing a paragraph. It was just, can I stay in a conversation with myself that’s – where there’s no moment that some external voice or input or thought about something else in the room, you know, just can I just kind of stay in there? Can I just stay in there? That was really the question. Michael Platt Yeah, I think that that makes complete sense because it’s kind of like you’re foraging for apples in that tree that’s, you know, in the middle of the Serengeti somewhere, right? And there’s nothing anywhere around you. And so you’re going to stick with that and just keep mining it until there’s nothing left. One of the reasons that (Time 0:27:30)
  • Cognitive Warm-up
    • Engaging in focused tasks beforehand can improve subsequent concentration, similar to physical warm-ups.
    • The dispersion of attention versus focused attention during cognitive tasks alters brain activation patterns. Transcript: Michael Platt That it can help them get into that trench of attention. I have a bunch of disconnected thoughts on this. Please. So one would be the converse of that, which you kind of alluded to earlier, which is the not warming up, but the opposite of warming up, like the distraction. So there have been some really interesting studies done in sort of more business-y settings, management settings, that looked at foraging. And think of it this way. It’s more like a measure of creativity, your proclivity to explore, to try new things, to go to, you know, to be the opposite of focused. Okay, so, and you can measure that, for example, like an anagram task. So you get a bunch of letters, make as many words as you can. At some point, you decide to dump them and get new letters, right? And so that’s sort of, you know, you’re taking a risk and you’re exploring and you’re getting a new set. You don’t know what’s going to happen, right? And really cool studies showed that if you proceed that task with a task where people are foraging for points on a screen, there’s hidden, it’s like a visual kind of thing, and you’re Just looking for stuff. If the points are really dispersed and spread out, then people, we don’t know how long that kind of after effect lasts, but then people are way more kind of hyper explorers. With the words. With the word thing later. And if they’re doing, if they have to like decide if they’re playing virtual fishing and the number of the rate at which you catch fish in a pond is declining and you can press a button and Take a time out to travel to another pond, people are much more willing to move on when they do that. Essentially related to what you’re saying, cognitively warming up by focusing, literally instead of having your filter, your aperture, your lens like this, it’s now like this, even Though it’s a different task that you’re going to do. Oh, I love this. Then you’re much more focused on that. Okay. (Time 0:34:00)
  • Monkey Porn
    • Platt’s “monkey porn” study revealed that monkeys, like humans, prioritize status and mating cues.
    • Male monkeys paid to see female hindquarters, highlighting the value of reproductive signals. Transcript: Michael Platt So talk to me about monkey porn. Okay. We never called it monkey porn, but a lot of people have said that, you know, essentially, you know, no matter what else I do in my career, that’s going to be on my tombstone. This man worked on monkey. This man unpacked the neurobiology of monkey porn. Okay. So let’s go back in the way back machine. And so back when I was an anthropologist and I’m going out, I’m watching monkeys. And it’s very clear that there are certain things in the world that are important to them that they prioritize, and those are very similar, the same things that we do. So they pay attention to each other, to their faces, but also to other cues. And these cues seem to make adaptive significance, right? That they’re relevant for your ability to survive and reproduce, which is the name of the game for evolution. That’s all that really counts. Okay. And what are those things? Well, they’re cues to status, like, so who’s dominant, who’s subordinate, who can take my stuff, who do I got to watch out for, who can I, you know, dominate and take stuff from, and cues To how, you know, mate quality mating opportunities. And if you look at non-human primates, they display those things very conspicuously. So males have these big canines and they have sort of physical dominant features, very square jaw, all that kind of stuff. And females, for example, in macaques display their state, their hormonal state, how receptive they are to mating and likelihood of ovulating at that time through the sort of the swelling And coloration on their perineum. Here’s a good word for your listeners, perineum, which we introduced, I think, into the neuroscience literature. And that’s just the sort of anogenital region. So that’s where they’re putting a lot of… (Time 1:00:20)
  • Multitasking Neurons
    • Brain areas traditionally considered distinct, like prefrontal cortex and temporal lobe, show similar activity patterns in social contexts.
    • Neurons multiplex, responding to multiple factors simultaneously, challenging the “grandmother cell” theory. Transcript: Michael Platt Although I will, based on a paper we published last year in Nature, I would say that our notions of sort of the breakdowns of like where stuff is in the brain and how it’s encoded, I think Is going to change a lot. And there are a number of other studies that have come out in the last year or so that echo this. And so this was a paper in which we did something unthinkable, I think, in the sort of history of neuroscience, which is all about reduction. Let’s make the experiment as simple as possible. Only very one thing, right? And we’re going to find where that one thing is in the brain. And that’s the tradition going back to Hubel and Weasel, right? Andrew Huberman Hubel and Weasel folks are my scientific great-grandparents. No, we were bound to do it sooner or later. They won the Nobel Prize for their understanding, for their parsing of the neural basis of vision, neuroplasticity, et cetera. Torsten’s still alive. I think he’s like 100 now. Last time I saw him, he was 96 and he was still jogging and doing art. David passed away. Amazing. You can look it up. H&W, we call him Hewlett-Wiesel. They’re among our… They’re on the Mount Rushmore of neuroscience and we’ll get back to this. So please, yeah, explain to us what this paper showed. And then we will then talk about how humans signal their hormonal status. And we’ll go all the way back to monkey porn, I hope, because it’s really near and dear. We won’t leave monkey porn in the past. So near and dear to my heart. Michael Platt Okay. So human weasel, you know, let’s, we’re going to really simplify because, you know, that’s how we figure out exactly how it works. But it’s not what our brains do. That’s not the environment our brains are in. I mean, when you’re out there in the world, you’ve got this well-term, this just incredibly complex visual environment, social environment, and what you do in any moment depends on What you experienced recently, what you think might happen next, what might have happened last week in a similar circumstance. It’s super complicated. And it reflects all these different competing interests and values. And that’s true for monkeys too. Okay. And so we did the dream, my dream experiment from back when I was an anthropologist, which was to get rid of the lab. And instead, we recorded wirelessly from thousands of neurons in the brain in prefrontal cortex, which you mentioned. And we tend to think of as being important for decision making and kind of setting goals and context. And also the sort of high-level visual area in the temporal lobe that’s important for sensing objects and maybe faces and things like that. So seemingly, one at an input level, one at a higher order level. We did this mostly because of some of technological limitations, but it turned out to be really like a good thing in the end because it told us something really unusual. So what we did then is we let monkeys just be monkeys with each other, okay? So we’d have a male with his female friend or alone with a female friend on the other side of a, you know, a sort of plexiglass divider. And then there could be other monkeys present, like as observers, like who are like watching what they’re doing or not. And then we also introduced challenges to them. Like, so basically my graduate student would come in and like, you know, threaten one of the monkeys and this elicits a lot of agitation and arousousal because you have to say how you Threaten monkeys you know look we’re just like big kind of not as hairy monkeys um to them and and that that makes to threaten them you look at them directly you look at them and you yeah So if you go to the zoo folks and you look directly at a monkey and you smile, that’s a threat. Andrew Huberman If you want to be friendly with the monkeys, lip smack. It’s an affiliation thing. It almost looked like we were blowing kisses at one another. You know, so we both looked away. Michael Platt That’s probably where it comes from. That’s right. That’s probably where it comes from. Andrew Huberman So you got a naturalistic experiment. So you got a natural experiment. Michael Platt And so rather than having one, you know, varying one thing, these monkeys engaged in like 27, 28 different kinds of behaviors, okay? They would forage, it would scratch, they’d groom each other, they’d threaten, they’d mount, they’d do everything that monkeys do, right? And then we also, you know, we were varying the context as well. And so that’s like blows the lid off of the complexity in a typical experiment. And what did we find? We found that neurons in both these areas, they were indistinguishable, were modulated. They were affected. Their firing rates, their activity was affected by the behaviors that the animals engaged in and what the other animals engage in too. Also, who’s around? Who’s watching me? Is it like male X or female Y? And what was really surprising, so first of all, you see these signals, they’re basically the same. These two parts of the brain are supposed to be very, very different. And the average neuron cared about, you know, something like seven things rather than, you know. Like a grandmother cell, which was kind of one idea for how the brain encoded things. Like there’s one neuron and it only responds to your grandmother, right? Something like that. Jennifer Aniston cells. Jennifer Aniston cells, very famous. Barack Obama cells. Barack Obama cells. And now there’s this question about whether or not they’re in a relationship. Andrew Huberman So that’s why I brought it. But that was actually in the paper. There were neurons in the cortex that responded to Jennifer Aniston specifically. Jennifer Aniston cells. Barack Obama specifically. I’m guessing there are Donald Trump neurons. There’s probably quite a few. Right. And I’m guessing there were Biden neurons. Maybe. Maybe. So you’re saying that two very distinct brain areas can respond very similarly to the same things. And that – so that’s one interesting finding. And the second interesting finding, as I understand, is that neurons are paying attention not just to what you’re looking at or the monkey is looking at, but also who’s looking at them, Michael Platt Who else is around, what the goal is. So individual neurons are multitasking. They’re multitasking. Got it. Or as we say multiplexing, but it’s really the same thing as multitasking. And that raises a lot of really interesting questions. Why? Why are these signals all over the place? Which it seems to be the case, right? And one idea that’s out there is that because, you know, let’s say it’s a visual area, those visual neurons might need to know the context in which something is happening in order to appropriately, Like that stimulus, right? Because it matters. The meaning of that stimulus is another (Time 1:08:20)
  • Social Checkbook
    • Monkeys and humans track social interactions like grooming or texting, maintaining a mental account of reciprocity.
    • This “social checkbook” reflects an underlying currency influencing relationship dynamics. Transcript: Michael Platt The cortex seems to be maybe a little bit, I don’t want to say equipotential, but it’s very plastic, it’s very flexible, and very adaptive. So this was a really cool finding, I thought. And, you know, we could decode from the population of neurons exactly what each of the animals was doing and who was around and who was watching, right? I mean, to me it was very gratifying. But the thing that was most exciting to me, the most exciting, I think that finding is really cool for neuroscientists, but for the primatologist, the anthropologist in me, the finding That was most exciting was that we discovered the account, the mental account for our social relationships. Okay. So for monkeys, a large fraction of the way that they build and maintain relationships is through grooming each other. So when they go and they pick through each other’s fur, and that’s how you make friends. That’s how you make allies. And what has been observed going back to when monkeys were first being watched is that they tend to be really equitable. They’re like, if I invest two minutes in you, you will eventually invest two minutes back in me. It might not happen right away, but we’re going to balance out. It’s going to come even. And that raised the idea, which most people thought was ridiculous, that, well, they’re actually tracking and keeping notes on all this. They’ve got a ledger for their and withdrawals in this social relationship. So to make it more salient for the listeners, like think of it as like when you’re texting, and you text a friend and they text you back, and then you text them and you text them again and You text them again, and you’re like, am I getting ghosted? What the heck’s going on here? Why are you not texting? You start to feel that sense of urgency betrayal like you know I’m not going to text you no I’m going to wait I’m going to wait until you text me back it’s the same kind of thing we have this Sense of and in fact when we think about now all the stuff that’s going on socio-politically you know in terms of equitable relationships I think that this bears on that. So we did something that had never been done before, which is we tracked every single grooming interaction that ever happened between these monkeys over months because we could. We had cameras on them and we used computer vision to do all that tracking. And yeah, they were perfectly equitable. But sometimes it would take minutes to balance it, sometimes it would take weeks. Like you owe me, you owe me. And then it would come back. What we found is that in the brain, in both of these brain areas, we’re carrying that mental account that precisely tracked who owed whom what. Amazing. How much grooming they, you know, that blew my mind. It’s like, because we all feel that, right? It’s like one of the most salient things there is in our lives. I’d like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, BetterHelp. Andrew Huberman BetterHelp offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online. Now, I personally have been doing therapy weekly for well over 30 years. Initially, I didn’t have a choice. It was a condition of being allowed to stay in school. But pretty soon I realized that therapy is an extremely important component to one’s overall health. There are essentially three things that great therapy provides. First of all, it provides a good rapport with somebody that you can trust and talk to about pretty much any issue with. Second of all, it can provide support in the form of emotional support and directed guidance. And third, expert therapy can provide useful insights. BetterHelp makes it very easy to find an expert therapist with whom you resonate with and that can provide you those three benefits that come from effective therapy. Also, because BetterHelp allows for therapy to be done entirely online, it’s super time efficient and easy to fit into a busy schedule. There’s no commuting to a therapist’s office or sitting in a waiting room, no traffic, no parking issues, et cetera. If you’d like to try BetterHelp, you can go to betterhelp.com/Huberman to get 10% off your first month. Again, that’s betterhelp.com/Huberman. (Time 1:16:55)
  • Oxytocin’s Effects
    • Oxytocin, a neurohormone, promotes relaxation, reduces vigilance to threats, and increases social synchrony.
    • In males, it flattens hierarchies; in females, it can increase aggression towards males, potentially due to infant protection. Transcript: Andrew Huberman Folks, it’s a neurohormone, so it’s somewhere in between a neuromodulator and a hormone. Let’s set all that aside, all the mechanistic stuff. And I’d love to know your knowledge about what changing levels of oxytocin does to perception, to behavior, humans. Michael Platt So, yeah, oxytocin, I mean, we’ve been interested in it for a long time because, as you said, it seems to be a dial that can turn up or turn down certain aspects of social behavior and other Aspects of mental and emotional function. It’s important to point out that oxytocin and its sister neurohormone vasopressin, arginine vasopressin, which is sort of maybe a little more important in males than in females, And females oxytocin a little more important, but they’re in both and they’ve been around a long time. They’ve actually, you know, there’s a very early invertebrate evolution. In mammals, oxytocin has the primary role, right, of helping to build bonds between mom and baby. So oxytocin is released during childbirth, it’s released when mom is nursing. And it seems that in humans and some other social, you know, really, really social creatures, it’s now been co-opted to kind of have a similar kind of role in the relationships you have With other people who are not your offspring or your pair mate, right? Because oxytocin, for example, is released when you orgasm. And so then that’s thought to be why that sort of of pillow talk afterward is more engaging and people feel things at that time that they might have, that they’re different from what they Would have felt. It fosters attachment. Fosters attachment. That’s a good way of putting it. So oxytocin levels are hard to measure, right? You can measure at a distance in the periphery, in the blood, but it’s not exactly like one-to correlated with what’s going on in the brain. And in general, we don’t want to put like a, you know, a pump or a little thing in your brain that we could measure how much is in there. So we can look at instead what is often done is to look at what happens if you introduce oxytocin, more oxytocin than you normally have like into the brain. You can’t inject it or anything like that. And the way that it’s typically applied is to squirt up your nose or inhale it intranasally. So it then is taken up by the nerves that are in your sinuses and whatnot, and then goes into the brain. That was what it was thought to. I think that we were the first to show that that’s actually how it works. We did all the work in monkeys where it’s… All these things are just sort of easier to do, and the behavior is a little bit less complex. So our readouts are, I think, a bit more straightforward. In the human studies, there’s a lot of variation. It’s controversial because there’s a lot of like some crap studies and there’s just a lot of variability in the effects across studies. I think some of that’s just because you ask people to squirt it up their own noses. And so there’s a lot of that introduces variation in just how good they were at getting it in the right place. With the monkeys, what we did instead is we used what’s called a nebulizer or aerosolizer. I had noticed when my kid had pneumonia and I took him to the ER, they put this mask on him and they missed this albuterol, which opened up his airways. Oh, we could do that with oxytocin too. So that’s what we did with the monkeys. It makes sure they get a really good dose, and then we showed that that gets right into the brain. Okay, now that puts us in a position to ask questions of what does it do. One of the first things that oxytocin does is it relaxes you. So just overall, you know, you were talking about autonomic function. It’s a relaxer. It’s an anxiolytic. So it, and in monkeys, what that does is it reduces their vigilance to sort of any threats. So they’re just a lot more chill. So that’s sort of a primary thing. And then we’ve looked at how it affects their behavior in males and females separately, because as I said before, they sort of… First of all, males and females have different strategies and behaviors and the expression of where oxytocin receptors are in the brain, etc., and vasopressin receptors are a little Bit different. And in male monkeys, it’s super interesting because, you know, we’ve been talking about how, you know, dominance and they’re really like recent macaques, it’s a really steep hierarchy. And one of the things we found right away is that you give oxytocin and it just flattens the hierarchy. So the dominant male monkeys become super chill and friendly and the subordinate ones become a bit bolder. Perhaps because, you know, if I dose, if I dosed my own or I’ve dosed you with oxytocin would change your behavior, which would change my behavior. So it reverberates across individuals. So it flattens the hierarchy. They spend more time making eye contact. They pay more attention to the other individual. And we’ve shown that. It’s Burning Man. Yeah, it’s true. I’ve never been to Burning Man. I’ve never either. But this is what I hear. No, I think that’s the right point. And I’ll circle back to that. We also showed that in a task-based situation where a monkey can choose, we gave monkeys choices of whether they could give a reward to themselves, to another monkey, to a bottle that Could collect reward, in case they just like to see juice dripping out. And they would become more pro-social. So they’re much more likely to give a reward to another monkey. They’re more altruistic, as we talked about earlier. So that’s like it looks like a real pro-social kind of thing, right, which I think is super interesting. In females, it’s a little bit different. Females become kind of nicer to each other and we see the greater eye contact, et cetera, but they become more aggressive toward males. And we speculate, I think, it’s the hypothesis that because oxytocin is released when you’ve got an infant, basically, for females, males are a bigger threat then. Because in many primate societies and other mammals, males sometimes can be infanticidal because if they kill off a female’s infant, then that will bring that female into receptivity For mating much more quickly. And so that’s sort of the evolutionary… Brutal. Yeah, it is brutal, the evolutionary rationale behind that. So that’s kind of our supposition. The other thing that I thought was really interesting as well is we find a greater or an increase in the synchronization of behavior. So when I do, you know, this idea of mirroring, which has been talked about in business context for a long time, (Time 1:57:40)
  • Tribalism and Unity
    • Humans possess a tribal nature, readily forming in-groups and out-groups even based on arbitrary distinctions.
    • Deep conversation and shared goals can bridge divides by shifting attention to commonalities over differences. Transcript: Andrew Huberman I feel like unless there’s a organized effort to try and create a bridge, it ain’t going to happen. I just feel like there’s, I don’t want to take us too far off course, but maybe this is a good segue into the neuroscience of decision making and value-based decision making, which is So much of the work that you’ve done. I feel like there’s this property of the human brain that there’s evidence for. I’ve seen a beautiful neuron paper showing that confirmation of our beliefs leads to a reward-based, activation of a reward-based mechanism. Basically, we’re getting a little bit of dopamine for confirming our biases essentially about others. And then, of course, if we then experience more affiliative behavior from our group, we feel more protected. And then there’s a tendency to do more of that. And I feel like with the knowledge that we have about dopamine incentive schemes, group selection behavior, there ought to be a program that could be established that isn’t hug it out, But that is designed to, again, that word exploit is so loaded, to leverage the same neural circuits that led to the divide to try and bridge this divide. And what it has to do though is it has to break with the value system of both groups. I mean, let’s just be frank. We’re talking about the left and the right here. I don’t want to dance around the margins. And somehow acknowledge that there’s good and bad within both of those groups, which itself, as I say, is like a heretical statement. Like people are going to – I mean, there’s just so many assumptions made just on the basis of that. But create a new value-based system that is self-rewarding and allows for group selection to fill in the gap or at least come up with a third option. If not politically, then in terms of sociology. Yeah. Michael Platt So the solution is Independence Day, you know, that movie. So we, we need an alien invasion. So there’s an out group that we can all, you know, identify with each other as, okay, we have to come together to fight, you know, because I think that’s really at the root of this, which Is that because of group selection, humans are sort of very tribal by nature. We are wired to connect, to glue together with the people who are in our tribe. But that means almost by definition there’s another tribe, right? So that we are over here and we are defending ourselves against them. Now, it’s not like complete, right? People have been engaging in long-distance trade for, you know, 100,000 years plus. You know, there was interbreeding between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals and Denisovans. So there’s, you know, some flexibility in those rules. But in general, yeah, I mean, to have an in-group, that means you have to have an out-group. And if we want to take the left and right and put them together, in some ways, it’s like the easiest way to do that is if we had a third out-group that we needed to unite against, such as drones Over New Jersey or aliens or who (Time 2:21:10)
  • Mechanics of Decision-Making
    • Decision-making involves weighing evidence against past experiences and values to determine the highest expected return.
    • The brain forecasts outcomes and updates value based on the accuracy of prior predictions. Transcript: Andrew Huberman Should I not do something? Let’s say I have some general sense of what the potential payoff is within a range, the potential payoff of not doing it within a range. And I always think of like some like kind of tension or pressure as it relates to time. Like for instance, I’ve been considering buying a house. I really like the house. It’s a bit of a reach for me for a number of reasons. And I’m trying to make this decision, right? And I’m trying to gauge whether or not other people are looking at this house also. What do we know about how we start to establish an internal representation of that? And I give that example as just one example. This could really translate to any number of different scenarios about whether or not to get married or not, whether or not to stay in a relationship or not, whether or not to move, whether Or not to have another kid, and on and on and on. What are the core mechanics of value-based decision making as it relates to outcomes and time? Michael Platt Yeah, so I think we understand this system pretty well at this point. So the last 25, 30 years have been enormously productive. So we have a good sketch of the circuitry that does this. And essentially what happens is you’re confronting a situation. And it doesn’t really matter whether it seems to be the same process, it doesn’t matter whether you’re trying to decide between eating a donut or an apple or buying this house versus Renting an apartment or marrying this person, you know, proposing or not. It’s sort of all the same system. And what happens is you come to the situation and your brain takes in evidence about the alternatives. What are the options that are available to me? What do I know about them from their stimulus properties and from maybe prior encounters or just other information? And it takes that evidence and it weighs it against stored information about things you’d done in the past, other decisions you’d made, and then begins to assign value, computes the Expected value of those different options in terms of what it will return to you. And then essentially, that is the basis along which that decision gets made. So it’s a soft max function, as we say, so it’s not like a hard deterministic one. So there’s some statistical noise in there. For some, you know, we could talk about what that reason might be. You make a choice, and whenever you make a choice in any behavior that you’re engaging in, your brain is making a forecast of what’s going to happen next as a result of that. And your brain then determines, computes, that things go exactly as predicted, right? Is it better than predicted, or is it worse than predicted? And then that signal gets fed back into the system to update it so that it hopefully performs that job better in the future. So like, oh, actually, it went way better than expected. You should assign that a higher value and do that thing. Again, this process of weighing up the evidence takes time. And that’s why we have this speed accuracy tradeoff in decision making where we observe that the faster you go, the more mistakes you tend to make. Been there. Exactly. We’ve all made split second decisions that we regretted later. Oh, yeah. Or slightly sleep deprived. Sleep deprived. Exactly. The more time you take, the more evidence you can accumulate. And when you have to recognize that the data your brain is taking in from the environment is noisy, right? It’s not perfect. It’s noisy because of the environment. It’s noisy because the wetware of the brain is statistical and biological. So you can make the wrong choice by virtue of the noise dominating the signal. And that happens when you go too quickly, right? And one of the things that’s – so there’s a good mantra from that, you know, which is if you want to make really good decisions or if it’s really important, you kind of have to decide ahead Of time. Like, do I need to be accurate or do I need to be fast? And if accuracy is important, you need to slow down, take your time, take as much time as needed to get the most information that you can. And even in the moment, that doing like simple strategies like breathing or having a mantra that says like, you know, it’s not what matters. You know, every little decision does not what counts, but it’s the long run. That helps to turn it. We talked about arousal a lot here, and that turns down arousal. One of the things you think of arousal as doing, when you keep talking about volume knobs, it’s like a volume knob for the stuff that’s coming into your brain that could be signal or noise. So it can turn up noise too. So you could count as evidence toward the value of an option, something that is not actually evidence, and then you make the wrong decision. So by turning down arousal, slowing down, you’re relying more on evidence than on noise. Does increasing arousal increase (Time 2:31:04)
  • Monkey Marketing
    • Monkeys, like humans, are influenced by celebrity endorsements.
    • In an experiment, monkeys preferred brands associated with high-status or “sexy” monkeys. Transcript: Andrew Huberman Could you tell us about this experiment? And I swore I wasn’t going to say the words highly processed foods during this episode, but I think we got to talk about monkeys and Doritos. Michael Platt Ah, all right. I thought this could have gone, there’s a number of different, and I will, I do want to bring up one study that I think people find interesting that gets at this difference between what We think we know and feel and what our brains are actually telling us. So we talked about how monkeys and people, their brains are, I don’t want to say hardwired, but they’re tuned, tuned to value social information, in particular kinds of social information, Like information about high status individuals, right? And information about sexy individuals, attractive individuals, right? And it’s baked into the same circuitry or attention circuitry or reward circuitry. And that, once we observed that, of course, it led me to wonder, well, okay, there’s this really weird phenomenon in humans that in marketing, right, that we use celebrity, you know, Status, celebrity and sex sell to people. Like, why should they ever care about, you know, Brad Pitt likes this thing or Jennifer Aniston likes smart water? What in the world? You’re never going to meet them. Do they really know a lot about, you know, water or whatever? What’s the point of all that? George Clooney selling Nespresso. Yeah, who cares, right? But now when you think about it in the context of, like, oh, our brains are wired, tuned to attend to and process more deeply and value information about others that are essentially high Status, celebrity, sexy, you know, whereas, like George Clooney’s all of those things put together. Now that starts to make some sense. And so we thought, well, given that monkeys are humans, monkeys and humans are so alike in this regard, I bet we could run an advertising campaign on monkeys that’s based on sex and celebrity. So that’s what we did. We just basically had monkeys, you know, they’re just sitting there in their home colony. And we had a, you know, television monitor, computer monitor in there that would display like, you know, the Doritos logo next to, you know, high status monkey A and maybe the Cheetos Logo next to low status monkey DB or, you know, Coke next to like sexy monkey butt and, you know, Pepsi next to, you know, the front end of, you know, or backside of monkey that’s not so sexy. Okay, so you just do that, just do it, just pairing. And so it’s just association, simple association. And then what we did is we then gave the monkeys choices between brand logos that had either been endorsed by, you know, essentially celebrity monkeys, sexy monkeys, or peon monkeys, Right? And they got the same reward no matter what. No matter what they chose, they always got the same banana pellet. But the monkeys favored the brands that had been paired with celebrity and sexy monkeys, just like you see in people. You (Time 2:45:40)
  • Meme Coin Psychology
    • Meme coins exploit our tendency to value things based on reputation and social proof.
    • This leverages our innate wiring to copy others’ decisions, especially under conditions of arousal or uncertainty. Transcript: Andrew Huberman When it comes to changing the context and thereby the variables that shape our decision making. But I’m always struck by the way that it comes in below our conscious detection. This might be, this is the appropriate time to ask about meme coins. Because we all grow up learning about the US dollar or euro or whatever backed by something. Backed by the Fed, but also backed by real world physical objects of gold. That’s what we’re told anyway. And this is why just printing money is never the solution, right? Because meme coins born out of the kind of larger theme of cryptocurrency and Bitcoin are an interesting derivative of cryptocurrency whereby you’re pairing reputation of a person, Or in some cases a Shibu Uno dog, right? With a currency that has no intrinsic value except for the person’s reputation. Plus whatever backing, whatever value backing it’s obtained when people decide to purchase that coin. So I don’t know how many listeners track cryptocurrency, and I am by no means an expert on this. But one thing that people get excited about is how much money is flowing into a coin, not just the value of the coin on a given day. So essentially how much has been invested in coin as something of potential value. So when we hear about Hak tua girl coin, the Hak tua coin, or there’s a Trump coin now, I think. There’s a Melania coin. There’s a Doge coin that was developed long before the idea of a department of Doge, the Shibu and a coin. Is this all just exploiting, again, there comes that word, leveraging this proximity between reputation and value? Michael Platt So I think that’s partially it, but it may be even simpler than that, which is it’s leveraging, it’s harnessing our wiring to attend to what other people are doing and what they’re getting Or losing. So we care a lot about, you know, when we’re in a group, the behaviors of other people. So let’s think about how we learn something, the value of something. If you’re a simple animal, you learn from direct experience, and that’s reinforcement learning driven, the dopamine system, et cetera. You can also learn from what you didn’t choose, counterfactual effective learning. And then in groups, you have this rich source of information of what other people are doing. Like I could watch you try that food, and if you die from eating it, then I won’t eat it, right? So we’re deeply wired to pay attention to the decisions that other people are making. And if they look good or if they – then we start to copy what they’re doing. And you see this in – it’s not just these meme coins but like meme stocks, like GameStop. Andrew Huberman This is very similar to the FTX phenomenon slash debacle, where celebrities joined in and people had trust in these celebrities, admiration of these celebrities, and invested a lot Of money in what turned out to be, you know, in the end, a failure. So how often is this happening in advertising? Like if we really step back and we go like, is the BMW really the better choice compared to the Range Rover? Like, are we really basing our decisions on the thing that we’re purchasing as much as we think? Michael Platt No, I don’t think so at all. And there’s a few things we could kind of unpack there. I think in terms of meme coins, meme stocks, there’s probably two things, a confluence of two things going on. So one is this sort of celebrity endorser. And we have studied that also as well. We talked about the monkey stuff, but we looked at, we did eye tracking studies of people making choices amongst products and brands that had been endorsed either by celebrities or Not, just paired with them. And one of the things we found is that when people chose a product or a brand that was sort of unfamiliar to them, if it had been endorsed by a celebrity, their pupils didn’t dilate. Normally they would dilate because that’s like overcoming your default and mental effort and arousal goes up because it’s sort of surprising. And so the pupil staying silent is an indicator of kind of enhanced confidence and trust, if you will, that I’m not making a mistake, I’m putting a lot of words here, but like, you know, That that was the impact in a very subliminal way of that celebrity endorser. (Time 3:02:31)