How Relationships Shape Your Brain | Dr. Allan Schore

welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine my guest today is Dr Alan Shaw Dr Alan Shaw is a clinician psychoanalyst and he is the world expert in how childhood attachment patterns impact our adult relationships including romantic relationships friendships and professional relationships as well as our relationship to ourselves Dr sh is on the faculty in the department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California Los Angeles School of Medicine he is also the author of several important books including right brain Psychotherapy and development of the unconscious mind today's discussion with Dr Shaw is an extremely important one for everyone to hear to understand themselves and to understand the people in their lives why well we all go through the first 24 months of age you wouldn't be listening to this if you hadn't and during that first 24 months of age your brain develops in a particular way depending on how you interacted with your primary caretaker namely your mother but also your father or other primary caretakers in that first 24 months your right brain and your left brain mediate very specific but different processes for instance today you'll learn from Dr Shore that your right brain circuitry that is Pacific circuitries on the right hand side of your brain are involved in developing a very specific type of resonance with your primary caretaker that transitions from states of calm and quiessence that you both share simultaneously to states that are considered up states of excitement of enthusiasm of being wide-eyed and the transitioning back and forth between those States as Dr Shaw explains is critical to our emotional development and how we form attachments later so if you've heard for instance of avoidant attachment or or anxious attachment or secure attachment today you'll understand why those particular attachment Styles develop how they translate from early life to your adolescence teen years and adulthood and in fact how those childhood attachment patterns which of course we can't control for ourselves but we can control for our children how we can modify them through very specific protocols in order to achieve better relations with both others and with ourselves it's indeed a very special conversation and to my knowledge unlike any other discussion about relationships Neuroscience or psychology that certainly I have heard before and I fully expect that for you it will be as well before we begin I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford it is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast our first sponsor is 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sale of the year eight sleep currently ships to the USA Canada UK select countries in the EU and Australia again that's 8sleep.com huberman and now for my discussion with Dr Allan Shaw Dr Alan Shaw welcome nice to be here to kick things off I have a simple question which is what percentage of our thinking and our Behavior do you think is governed by our conscious mind versus our unconscious mind you understand that I was trained in psychoanalysis and I'm a psychodynamic psychotherapist in addition to a scientist neuroscientist so the unconscious has been something that I have been aware of and have been writing about and it's a central part of what I'm writing about to this day essentially as we're going to see I'm suggesting that the right brain is the unconscious mind so when you ask what how much of things really are conscious and how much are UNC conscious I'm also looking at that neurobiologically in terms of how much of activity is going on in the right brain the right brain is always processing information always especially emotional information at levels beneath conscious awareness especially when you're in in in an emotional interaction so how much really are things that conscious I would say that when it comes to the basic motivations of why we do what we do 95 to 90% of that is is unconscious and there has been data to show that that is the case that most although we think that our conscious mind literally is making all of these decisions underneath at at all points in time the unconscious is operating used to be thought that the unconscious only comes forth in dreams at night well we now know that this right brain is reading unconscious Communications between us Communications is it safe to be with you do you understand what I'm saying really the critical ones always operating and much more important than we had thought itself let's start thinking about and talking about this right brain versus left brain thing and what I'd like to know is when we come into this world how much lateralization as we call it um how much right versus left brain specialization is there at the time when we exit the womb when we take our first breath the answer to that is is is pretty clear at this point in time and incidentally some of these questions about the unconscious are provided by neurobiology but essentially here's what we know there was discoveries that were being made in the 80s and the 90s about the human brain growth spurt the human brain growth spurt occurs from the last trimester of pregnancy through the second until the third year of Life all of that time is a period of right hemisphere dominance and actually there have been six major studies in Neuroscience Laboratories around the world that have shown that the right hemisphere is dominant during that period of time in fact there recent study in Mexico where they looked at 2 to 3 months 6 to 8 months 9 to 12 months at each point in time they noticed that the right hemisphere was accelerating its growth the left was not so the right is dominant very early in fact there's evidence to to show that even in utero there is a right lateralization now remember the lateralization is part of all systems and what is lateralized is not only the cortical areas but the subcortical areas Etc so if you take let's say the amydala there's a difference between the right amigdala and the left amydala and again the the right hemisphere so the answer to that is very clearly now the left hemisphere does not come into a growth spurt until the end of the SE second year and into the third year up until that point which means everything about attachment is about right brain Dynamics does that mean that everything about attachment is occurring in the first you know uh 24 months yes absolutely and it's occurring during that brain growth spurt while the right hemisphere so essentially what you have now is that in the baby's brain that baby's brain is now in a right brain growth spurt and the mother now is shaping that baby's right brain through the attachment mechanism through her regulation of that brain so she helped shaping that brain For Better or For Worse and incidentally that means also not only secure attachments but also the matter because it's for better or worse it's also the early evolution of insecure attachments and we'll talk about what those insecure attach all of those really are being shaped by the right what's more there's evidence to show that it goes right hemisphere then it goes left hemisphere and then it goes back into left and back and right along the along the lifespan so although you have a tremendous growth spur more than any other time in the first two two and a half three years of life think now about adolescence where you have another growth spurt is adolescence marked by a right brain growth spurt it's marked by the initially right and then it goes left so essentially with puberty and with the onset of testosterone and and androgens and estrogens it shifts now into another growth Spirit at that point in time uh which means just for the record now the attachment relationship which is essentially going to be about how we regulate our emotion because I'll be talking about attachment is about the communication of emotions right brain to right brain in the first two years of life and about the regulation of emotions in that same period of time Etc but ultimately that leads to the strategies that we have for aect regulation for a an attachment is essentially aect regulation affc communication and affect regulation so now what you're looking at if you have a mother and an infant they are communicating with each other right brain to right brain and how are they doing it by face voice and gesture the mother is now reading the expressions of the baby's face the visual the auditory the pro of the voice and then the tactiles so she's picking up these kinds of communications that are coming out of that baby tactile gestural Visual and she's now picking up those Communications now she's resonating with those Communications and then she is going to regulate those Communications and that's essentially what it's about in the end what we have is strategies of affect regulation how we regulate affect for the rest of our lives depends upon the attachment relationship of the first two years which is a right brain to right brain connection now there have been hundreds thousands of studies on attachment as you're well aware of at this point in time but the key to it literally I be I began this in 1994 with my first book a regulation and the origin of the self the neurobiology of emotional development okay remember BBY was studying attachment in the 60s but the problem of emotion really was not picked up and early on when they were looking at attachment they were looking at behaviors and they were looking at cognition so if you know the attachment literature remember the strange situation yeah just to remind listeners I've talked about this on previous podcast I'll provide a link to that segment but a strange situation can briefly be described as parent and uh usually mother and child come into the clinic um they deliberately leave the baby with a caretaker um this is sort of a pseudo daycare type situation mother leaves and then there's a lot of attention paid to how the infant or young child toddler whatever age they were looking at reacts are they nervous are they able to engage in play um and then they look at the return of the mother and how they react to that and there was this classification of behaviors along the lines of um secure attached insecure attached um there was a uh a categorization of kind of uh an amalgam of different things these so-called dbab that were uh kind of um a bunch of other things and this is where um we hear a lot nowadays about uh secure insecure and anxious and avoidant uh adult relationship Styles there's been a lot written about that and talked about that uh we don't have time to go into all that in detail but this is what Dr sha is referring to I'm really intrigued by this idea that there's a right brain left brain uh dominance that takes place throughout the lifespan and has it been carefully mapped into adulthood such that we can say as a function of chronological age um you know when somebody hits their early 30s that they're more right brain or left brain dominant or is it more um developmental Milestones as opposed to chronological age I think it's developmental Milestones there you know I'm thinking uh that um remember Eric Ericson talking about different stages of life and how you have a high Roy here literally because the attachment is a hierarchy it starts subcortical and then it goes to cortical so so what he said was that there are changes along the line and that um it it it fits with that so the attaching relationship is there at later points in time and really what it does it guides us through our relationships with other people it certainly guides us through strategies of what to do with stress and that way that we deal with that stress is now going to depend upon how the mother is regulating that baby stress during a CR itical period now the the term critical period is a CR is an important one here too because again at at the first two years of life it's the right brain is is in that critical period there but that leads to strategies of aect regulation of how we deal with stress but also how we deal with novel situations and again all of it has to do with emotion now I jumped there because I I talked about there was attachment models move from Behavior to uh cognition to emotion and essentially the first book that I wrote was on the neurobiology of emotional development and in 1994 when I came out with that book that was about the same time that Antonio damasio came out with his book and really it was not until the mid90s partly because of the neural Imaging which was coming during you remember the decade of the brain that uh emotion really now became a matter that science Wasing looking at for the first time the point that I'm making here is that attachment is not psychological it's psychobiological and there was always this Rift between the psychological and the biological but when you're talking about emotions you're not only talking about psychological events you're talking about physiological events that are associated with those events for example the physiology of the stress response a physiology of the sympathetic nervous system which is energy expending and the parasympathetic nervous system which is energy conserving so the mother is a regulator of that and the way that she is a regulator of that baby is that she's tracking that baby's arousal levels she's tracking that baby's emotions as they change in time moment to moment and then she's synchronizing with that and that allows her now to be able to regulate it so we're going from the recognizing that baby's emotions synchronizing with those emotions and then being an aect regulator so the mother who is securely attached now is a good affect regulator of that baby she not only is an affect regulator of the negative states of the baby because negative States and negative aects are adaptive by definition baby cries mother nurses baby and there that's a signal she sending there literally and the mother then intuitively knows intuitively knows she's not using her left brain to figure out what to do with that baby she's doing it intuitively and intuition is a right brain function and she's regulating that baby implicitly now let's go back over implicit to explicit okay you're seeing a lot now about the shift from explicit to implicit something that is implicit goes on at levels beneath awareness so when she is intuitively knowing what to do that right now this baby is is down regulating too much and she wants to bring that baby up should now use her tone of voice literally to raise that baby up into a more excited state or if the baby is disregulated sympathetic hyperarousal she knows how to downregulate that and she'll downregulate that by her facial expression by the tone of her voice now now her tone of her voice is now trying to soften and to quiet down so Essen what attachment is is the regulator of arousal of emotional arousal and that emotional arousal also includes the autonomic nervous system so what we have here is the regulation attachment of the lyic system the emotion processing lyic system positive and negative and the autonomic nervous system so they are limbic autonomic circuits and those circuits are in the right brain now on this matter as it turns out the right brain has a control system of attachment now since the right brain is there first before the left because there's no speech at two years she's regulating this baby at two months 6 months 12 months all of it is occurring non-verbal she's doing this implicitly not explicitly the left hemisphere processes explicit stimuli conscious stimuli rational stimuli that's not there everything is being done implicitly beneath levels of awareness and uh again that allows it to be the regulation so attachment Theory my attachment Theory regulation theory is essentially attachment is interactive regulation Stay With Me Now ultimately what we have are two forms of of of Regulation what we're doing is we're regulating the self right you I mean it's it's the subjective self which is in the right hemisphere the left is objective self the left is verbal conscious she's regulating the right Hemisphere and she's doing that again by tracking the baby's emotional states as I said but but again what the child learns now from that is that her right brain is becoming more and more complex from the first year to the second year and it's going to turn out some of these functions that are more complex are being also stimulated by the mother and ultimately by the end of the second year that baby can regulate its emotional states by itself in its right brain but we have two forms of Regulation you can regulate your states by Auto regulation by yourself in other words you're not with other human beings at this point in time you have a an efficient right brain which can regulate and incidentally what we're talking about here is the regulation of the amydala by the right orbital frontal cortex the right orbital frontal CX is the highest level of the right hemisphere it's also has the most sophistic ated and the latest evolving parts of the brain are in the right frontal cortex not the left the right orbital frontal not the left dorsal lateral cortex is the key to this so what we learn from attachment here again is how to both in a secure attachment how to auto regulate your emotions when you're apart from people in other words you go to a quiet place at this point in time you're regulating yourself down so to speak and you're getting nice regulation of the amydala by the right overal front cortex or interactive regulation which is now you go to another human being we go to another human being under times of stress in an optimal situation we also go to another human being to share Joy States and remember I said that the mother is upregulating Joy States and down regulating negative States so in a secure attack you have somebody now who can do both in certain forms of insecure attachment that's not going to happen the avoidant attachment is always autoregulating his States so uh just so I'm clear in avoidant attachment the baby which is now let's say 2 and a half years old um three years old that's already a toddler that's a toddler excuse me um the toddler is auto regulating more often than seeking another to help uh sort of do coordinated regulation yeah what I'm what I'm saying is a secure attachment and and let's s of only backup step on that the key to attachment is psychobiological Attunement you know the phrase notice psychobiological Attunement that the mother is regulating not only the psychological aspect but literally is as regulating the physiological aspect of that which means that she's regulating the autonomic nervous system think about porous social engagement system what we have here is the capacity by insecure attachment who have and then the second part of the the attachment is repair now let me go back psychobiological Attunement sometimes she Mis attunes sometimes she misreads the baby States for one reason or another what happen in a good enough caregiving is that the mother who has Mis attuned now re returns to that baby now resynchronizes with that baby now reconnects right brains to right brains with that baby and that repair is a key here you have misattunement and repair so the key to a secure attachment is not only psychobiological Attunement but it's also also the repair of the misattunement and it that allows the baby now to EXP understand that situation and being able to use that now to order a case that's a secure but if she misat tunes for example and doesn't repair let's say or she's not that good at psychobiological attuning let's say as an avoidant mother because avoidant personalities are uncomfortable with real closeness another term for an avoidant personality is a dismissive personality and what they they are dismissing is the need for interactive regulation so they're always Auto regulating it or you have another time in which you have another form of attachment an insecure anxious attachment where that person is always interactively regulating or is always going to others to help them regulate but can't Auto regulate I think this is a really important thing to hover on for a moment just um given some context about um hundreds of thousands of questions that I get about avoidant versus secure versus uh anxious attach and and you stated it all incredibly clearly but I want to make sure that we uh double click on this as they say um the idea that if a child and mother did not coordinate their um autonomic the word synchronize synchronize um did not synchronize their autonomic regulation in the proper way that there would be a non in Secure attachment I'm using that language for a specific reason um makes total sense but this idea that if the child which soon the baby which is a toddler at three or so um is avoidant then they're going to have to learn to Auto regulate and they're going to seek others to help them regulate less than a secure attached and the anxious attached baby toddler adolescent adult will do just the the opposite they're going to have a hard time self soothing but they are going to feel let's say these might be the kind of people that don't well tolerate um a text message not getting responded to at a very short latency for instance and we all and we all yes depending on context we have this right but um I find this to be incredibly important which is why I wanted to go back through it because I think nowadays we hear so much about anxious and securely attached avoiding Etc in the of adult romantic relationships but I hope that people are realizing the truly incredible importance of your work which is that the same circuitry and mechanisms that are used to establish infant mother attachment are repurposed later in life for adult relationships I I think that when we hear that it makes sense but I don't think that most people know that they assume somehow that there's circuitry in our brain and body for adult romantic attack M that is distinct from our attachment circuitry that we had with our parent and I think your work speaks very loudly um that they are in fact the exact same all of this is happening in the right brain all of it and incidentally attachment relationship is retained as an autobiographical memory in the first two years of life even before there's a left hemisphere and that under later stress situation that will be the key there incidentally the attachment whether it's secure or insecure is also the key to positive and negative transferences that's where it's communicated um let me go back and say a little bit more about one other form of attachment and that you mentioned the type D attachment the the D babies dis disorganized babies so you have secure you have two types of organized insecurely avoiding and the anxious and then you have a disorganized disoriented one now ultimately that person under stress is not able to Auto regulate or to interact regulate so what they will do at that point now now I'm now thinking about let's say PTSD various uh borderline personality disorder that person now literally can't go to the other for order regulation or inative regulation that person now will use a a defense literally to shut down the ATT attachment system and that's exactly what dissociation is dissociation just shuts down the attachment so in the anxious attachment you have a continual activation of the attachment system which means a continual activation of the right hemisphere all of the time and in the insecure dismissive attachment you have a deactivation of the attachment system which would be a deactivation of the right brain so in the end a secure attachment is an efficient one but it's an efficient one that can switch back and forth between that not only that it also at a later point in time when the left comes online it can also communicate much better with the left hemisphere that you know then without that regulation theory is essentially a theory of the development of the self in an optimal situation but it also talks about the psychopath ogenesis of the self the early origins of psychiatric disorders and personality disorders and I'm thinking about not only schizophrenia and depression but I'm now thinking about um uh narcissistic personality disorders borderline personality disorders maybe we'll come back to more on that and then ultimately the repair of the self so regulation theory is about the development of the self the psychopath ogenesis of the self and then the repair of the self because these attachment situations are now going to play out under all periods of stress the right hemisphere is dominant for the stress response the right hemisphere is dominant for the sympathetic nervous system the energy expending and the right hemisphere is dominant for the parasympathetic nervous system so again all of that will play out at later points under stress and when those systems break down that's when the patient will will will form symptomatologies and come into therapy and in therapy the the therapist now the key I'm jumping here no this is great because there's a right brain to right brain interaction between the mother and the infant there's also a right brain to right brain interaction between the therapist and the patient and the key to to both of them is regulation person is coming in in a disregulated state the key to to that is regulation and the key to any form of therapy whatever the form of it is again is interactive regulation and it's a therapeutic relationship the thing which is the best indicator of whether somebody will do well out of therapy and whether a clinician will do well out of therapy is how well they can deal with the therapeutic relationship and a really good therapist literally knows how to bring back those attachment things there because now the person is starting to feel safety and trusted and in Cally attachment is about safety and Trust which is very much autonomic but again here um the key to uh to therapy is being able to form a therapeutic relationship with the patient so the key here is can the therapist form co-create a therapeutic relationship with an avoidant patient with a secure patient with anxious patient or the borderline patient as you can imagine the toughest thing is going to be able to do with the borderline patient with the schizophrenic patient so what you have here is that the attachment Dynamics are laying out so in the very first session what's happening the therapist is listening to the verbalizations of the patient in order to diagnose and understand the symptomatology but the therapist is also listening beneath the words and the patient is tracking the attachment relationship underneath it tracking the arousal and the arousal disregulation underneath that tracking it in his own body so to speak Etc and again that is a different type of listening again the therapist is listening to a left brain but more or less the therapist is listening to the right brain and the question is how does a therapist do that and in order just for the record for the therapist to be able to get to the attachment Dynamics which are right lateralized the therapist has got to switch out of the left into the right and there's a term for that the term for that is surrender surrender you cannot consciously purposely put yourself into the right you've got to let go you've got to let go think let it be so to speak I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor ag1 ag1 is an 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is it to allow the patient to have some sort of catharsis some release of this like at what point does the therapists intervene and try and coordinate and show the the patient a different a different way to think about and feel about the topic matter what I'm suggesting here is that essentially the therapist is listening left brain to Left Brain but the therapist also is always listening beneath the words Etc and he's listening to the right brain to right brain Communications and the patient now who is depressed is coming out with rip brain Communications there's sadness in the voice the face is clearly disregulated and essentially as the therapist is tracking that the the emotional arousal whether it's into hypoarousal and depression or hyperarousal in you know into anxiety the first thing there is to synchronize with that patient so that my physiology is sinking with their physiology and and now through the right insula inter receptively I now literally am feeling in my body what the patient is feeling in their body I Now understand that patient from the inside out and incidentally what I'm picking up in my body about the disregulation of that patient may be very different than the verbal report that that patient is giving at that time but the key here literally just like the mother is synchronizing with that baby's crescendos and the decrescendos of that autonomic state of those emotional state I'm picking up those points where they are shifting into and out of an emotional state I'm synchronizing with that and then ultimately when I'm in sync with that kind of thing then at that point purely implicitly I'm now starting to slow the tone of my voice if I want to reduce that arousal down or I'm up regulating the voice at that point in time I am now interactively regulating and we are now synchronized together so essentially what's going to happen is that as we synchronize as they're going to disregulation we're now synchronizing together as we're going down into into regulation so the therapist can um literally and somatically um show the patient what Auto regulation is like or what coordinated regulation is like and you'll see it on my face face voice gesture you'll see it on my face you'll see it in the tone of my voice you'll see it in my gestures those three sensory modalities are now going back and forth between us so the key of the first session literally is not only to diagnose really it's to start to begin to synchronize with that patient and to form a Therapeutic Alliance with that patient and at the end of the first session the patient may say I don't know why but I'm feeling better and I have some idea that you can understand but it's got to be more than that what I am feeling literally so often nowadays I think we hear that um adult romantic relationships can provide a a healing of some of the failures of childhood attachment um and there's also a phrase thrown around a lot that um we need to learn to parent ourselves um this is more of a pop psychology uh online social media thing you know that that people need to learn to mother and father themselves at some level to self soothe and to you know who knows what that means I'm not going to try and Define it it's not operationally defined so the question I have is um to what extent do you think the process that you just described with a therapist can start to rewire some of the um the capacity to Auto regulate or coordinated regulate essentially here um what you have is over time partly because of this synchron first of all let me let me let me spell synchrony with the capital S what I mean by that is in the Last 5 Years a huge amount of information has come out about this idea about interpersonal synchrony the term synchrony comes from the Greek sync meaning the same chrony time same time so that literally two people literally are synchronized in the same we are feeling something in the same moment and we are feeling it spontaneously between ourselves we are feeling that kind of situation so again here the key to the mother really even more than the auto regulation the key is interactive regulation number one number two it's occurring on an implicit level the mother literally is doing this without any conscious awareness she's doing this intuitively the right hemisphere is intuitive and it's imagistic it's not rational and logical the key to any disorder whatever it is is the regulation of a particular State the regulation of Rage the regulation of loss the regulation the disregulation of a shame a disgust so essentially what you have is the regulation of all of these emotions but that regulation I want to point out is all implicit and here's where the skill of being with patience over a long periods of time is the key here because the key to making changes in the patient is not what you say to the patient or what you do to the patient it's how to be with the patient you understand the difference how to be with that patient especially while that person's being is in a disregulated State Now by definition when they're coming in in the first session they are in a disregulated state so again it's implicit is not explicit if explicit regulation is is an intellectual understanding of my symptoms implicit is an unconscious understanding at a physiological level at a psychobiological level of that and in synchrony is Right un is the mechanism underneath empathy now we know empathy literally has to be there but empathy is a right brain function and there is a difference I said there's a difference in the hemispheres there's a difference between emotional empathy where I am feeling what you are feeling and we are sharing the same feeling and I don't have to think about that literally I know at that point in time we are in the same place there's a difference between emotional empathy on the right and cognitive empathy on the left cognitive empathy is an understanding that makes no changes because essentially what we're attempting to do is make the changes in the right now the changes in the right are going to be in the right Axis they're going to be the orbital frontal cortex which is the executive regulator of the right brain the dorsal lateral cortex is the executive regulator of the left brain the orbital frontal cortex now starts to form new connections with the singulate the insula and the amydala and that's where you're now going to see the changes but again the changes are due to the regulation so you'll see the person now starting to come into more regulated States and the key is synchrony so what's happening here there's a strong Therapeutic Alliance safety and trust and and in that situation now the more synchrony that is there between the two the more interactive regulation there is being between the two and first there will be synchrony between the patient and the therapist then there will be synchrony and interact regulation between that person and maybe other people maybe a wife a partner and ultimately in the symptomatology will change because remember the symptomatology is disregulation and the the whole key is to change it to regulation it's fascinating there are a couple questions I have before we move forward about um mother infant attachment as opposed to Father infant attachment so that's one and I'll ask these again in a moment but I I think you'll see where I'm going here and then I'm fascinated by the idea that these circuits get established early in life then are repurposed for adult relationships they can be modified in the way that you just described but that they cross um gender and uh gender lines so for instance um a female baby can form these patterns of attachment um with their mother female caretaker but then assuming that baby grows up to be a heterosexual woman and she has a attachments to men then these things can be reactivated across gender lines right so this formation of the circuitry is not gender specific although it sounds like it's important that it be the mother to child in some way you keep saying mother child as opposed to caretaker so to just spell them out one by one first question are there any data about the formation of the these circuits in the baby where the mother is either not available if it's an adopt Ed mother um if it's a child raised by extended family I mean there's so many different configurations but you get the point all right here here's what I'm suggesting first of all there has been some um conflict on this but um after 30 years on this um I I I believe that there is a primary attachment figure and the primary attachment figure is the person who is the interactive regulator of that baby when that baby is under stress between age zero and two yeah or let me say it even another way the primary attachment figure is the person who provides the right brain for that baby when that baby's right brain is disregulated could be Dad could be mom could be yes it's true women are better at reading non-verbal cues than men are but it could be and incidentally we now have some evidence that showing that men do have right brains for a second there I wasn't sure if you were joking but I don't know maybe that's reflective of a natury right brain all right now that now that being the case What's Happening Here is that in the first year or two the mother's right brain she is the person who is the right brain in which in most cultures is is a woman but does not have to be it could be a stay-at-home dad who literally has a good right brain and maybe a couple are figuring out that literally you he'd be better in that position but it needs that right brain but other than that what happens here when when it goes now into the second year toward the end of second year and the father comes online got me at that point in time the father now becomes a primary attachment figure also but he has some differences the way he's dealing with that baby he's usually more arousing with that baby and that the play is more arousing with that baby so more um activation of the sympathetic autonomic so so sort of more up let's call it um Up Up level play exactly you're dealing with more up regulation and and and being able to tolerate more hyper Rous States because in the second year one of the things that the father will do with the infant is uh with toddler infant first year toddler second year Ruff and Tumble pay for example Ruff and Tumble play so the father is that so the father literally is now teaching the child literally how to take risks but the father is now moving more towards autonomy and Independence the mother was there at the beginning about interactive regulation that so the father is playing that role and I've also suggested that just as the mother is shaping that baby's right brain in the first year the father is now shaping that baby's left brain towards the end of the first year second and into the third year that he's shaping that baby's his left brain to that baby's left brain that being the case he may also earlier on have had good exper experiences with that baby early on in life and a good example of that would be a father who is tender tender yet at the same time is instrumental and is teaching things about the world so one brain is shaped by the mother figure the brother by the father figure what about under situations where uh there's really just one primary caretaker this is increasingly common nowadays and in some countries like in certain Scandinavian countries people opt to do this um and elsewhere of course but this isn't always a divorce situation sometimes people decide to have children on their own you know I think what's happening in that kind of situation is the person is is initially performing is initially providing the right brain and then that person let's is now providing the left brain so if let's say as a single woman with a child her right brain is there on on the git but then in the second year and incidentally there may be father figures or family members who also can step into that but essentially her left brain is is there also um remember uh we we we both have right brains and left brains but again that's that's a different kinds of skill in a left brain which would be you know the the more autonomous situation what are your thoughts about some of the modern exploration of compounds that can fac facilitate more right brain synchrony between therapist and patient um I've done a few episodes about MDMA uh assisted Psychotherapy these of course were just recently uh not approved by the FDA so these are not legal nonetheless there are interesting clinical studies showing that um these are imp pathogens um one could imagine that they could be useful in the proper context to um improve patient um uh therapist right brain synchrony and accelerate some of this process but it seems like it would also require uh both the patient and the therapist taking the compound and that seems like it would have all sorts of ethical issues yeah yeah remember it's the relationship in the end that is the key there um I'm think I I'm was also somewhat aware of that that literature and you use the word empathogen you know which which is not not quite straight out empathic but mimicking those kind of situations there um my thought is that um that might be more efficacious if it were specifically involving right brain Dynamics with a person who knew how to work with those right brain you what you what you're getting there are very early forms of the behaviors which are subcortical remember the attachment is also regulating the subcortical areas and those are the key ones and incidentally we are paying too much attention to the cortical area we literally have to shift because the subcortical areas are the foundations of the human and everything is built on top of that I'll come back to inudo in a second if I don't get on that in fact I have some people who have worked with me have also been using right brain type Psychotherapy in that with those patients and I think that that will be um um really interesting possibilities of seeing changes where you have the relationship you know in addition in addition to that and also some understanding about how the rip brain works because one of the problems that you have where there there is still some resistance this the idea that the rip brain is just a simpler version of the complex left hemisphere but that's not the case this right brain is working completely differently so I'm thinking that um in that case better situation before I forget this I want to just uh throw one of piece in I said that the right brain is in a growth spur from the last trimester in the last five years 10 years there has been a real interest in in utero development and evidence to show that you're even seeing lateralization in the fetus and so and there's even evidence now scientific evidence to show that the early memories in utero are stored in the right amydala so they're down there so to speak it's so we're not paying more and more attention to what is happening there because at Birth literally what you have here is the deeper parts of the right brain are evolving in Uno the insula and the and the right amigdala the center amydala and that's setting up and you also have synchronization across the placenta whereby they are regulating each other's autonomic nervous systems can adrenaline pass across the placenta I should know this I know adrenaline doesn't cross the blood brain barrier but the brain makes its own adrenaline but do do we know if adrenaline crosses the placental barrier first of all we most of the studies have been on cortisol right and high levels of cortisol they're going to cross it so if you have let's say the amydala which is in a is in a critical period of growth the right Amiga and the cortisol levels are very high that's really going to not be an optimal situation for that amydala to evolve because you're going to have a continuous stress response there and that's going to have and and essentially what that means also that if the mother is in a very stressed State during a utero some of that literally now is going to impact the lower areas of the brain so um as as far as adrenaline goes uh I'm not sure on that I don't see why not uh although um hormones certainly cross you know we're looking at not only changes in neuromodulators especially incidentally the key here that we're trying to regulate are the neuromodulators excuse me dopamine reward noradrenaline adrenaline it's those which also early in life literally form plast neuroplastic so they will form circus that's what we're attempting to to regulate here to downregulate very high levels of neur adrenaline and upregulate you know uh dopamine etc etc I'd like to take a quick break and thank one of our sponsors function I recently became a function member after searching for the most comprehensive approach to lab testing while I've long been a fan of blood testing I really wanted to find a more in-depth program for analyzing blood urine and saliva to get a full picture of my heart health my hormone status my immune system regulation my metabolic function my vitamin and mineral status and other critical areas of my overall health and vitality function not only provides testing of over 100 biomarkers key to physical and mental health but it also analyzes these results and provides insights from talk doctors on your results for example in one of my first tests with function I learned that I had two high levels of mercury in my blood this was totally surprising to me I had no idea prior to taking the test function not only helped me detect this but offered medical doctor informed insights on how to best reduce those mercury levels which included limiting my tuna consumption because I'd been eating a lot of tuna while also making an effort to eat more leafy greens and supplementing with Knack and acetylcysteine both of which can support glutathione production and detoxification and worked to reduce my mercury levels comprehensive lab testing like this is so important for health and while I've been doing it for years I've always found it to be overly complicated and expensive I've been so impressed by function both at the level of ease of use that is getting the test done as well as how comprehensive and how actionable the tests are that I recently joined their advisor board and I'm thrilled that they're sponsoring the podcast if you'd like to try function go to function health.com huberman function currently has a weight list of over 250,000 people but they're offering Early Access to hubman lab listeners again that's function health.com huberman to get early access to function as I recall in your book uh WR brain Psychotherapy there was a description beautiful description of um you know these up States and then these uh more uh calming State coordination between mother and child and I started to uh I actually read this book um when I was living in Tanga I would walk on the road I don't recommend this there are no sidewalks inen and I would read the the physical copy and I I recall very distinctly think thinking about this image of the of the baby and the mother and you know the baby is a little bit you know hyperaroused is is upset and so the mother would make you know sort of um sounds not necessarily words like these kinds of things or humming or or you know bouncing lullabies these sorts of things that's the pro that the pro and then the uh the related release of things like serotonin perhaps oxytocin as well we can talk more about those but then also how critical it is uh for the mother to be able to regulate the baby's um transition to up States like looking at the baby as it comes out of a nap and saying good you know good morning and really wide eyes lots of gesturing lots of gesticulating that is you know um bringing the voice level up and the baby going you know really waking up in a in a kind of a steeper slope of of arousal and how important that was and then that being slightly more related and this makes perfect sense to norepinephrine adrenaline at low healthy levels and perhaps dopamine as well is is that the right way to think about this and if so is that what's going on when we form adult friendships adult relationships are we oscillating back and forth between the ability to hang out and relax and and soothe each other and the ability to kind of get excited about something is this the basis of all relationships and relating yes yes um the key here is emotional regulation again and again it's implicit emotion regulation um one of the tenets uh Central tenets of my ideas here is that first of all there has been too much of an emphasis on the downregulation of negative States you remember the original attachment Theory the secure base the baby would come back in a in a stress State she would downregulate the the negative States but really attachment is about the down regulation of negative States and the UPR regulation of positive States still at this point in time the importance of positive States in The Human Experience are overlooked positive emotions Joy enthusiasm excitement positive States literally are the key and there are monal aspects to that as you just point out for example dopamine etc etc and this goes for therapy also in therapy it's not only just the down regulation and the sharing the down regulation but it's also sharing the upregulation of positive States because that's you know that's that's that's a critical piece of it also but there still is that bias to look one way now in the right brain book I'm also talking about two types of of Love quiet love and and excited love this was the famous uh psychoanalyst Donald wincott who was a pediatrician who was one of the great psychoanalysts of the 20th century and he made the distinction between quiet love which would again be the downregulation of noradrenaline and excited which is into a parasympathetic state so you're going from a hyp sympathetic State into a parasympathetic State quiet love and then excited love which would be also passionate love which is the higher arousal State out of it so to speak and they are both important and ultimately they both need to be integrated and you may have a situation whereby one can do one but ultimately they have to come together let me make this important point in the end we have negative emotions for adaptive reasons it's there let's say Shame Shame is meant to dose down very high levels of arousal and it's if one can't do that very high levels of arousal let's say narcissistic personality disorders you need to be able to so we need to have access to both positive and negative emotion but the real key to a secure attachment is the a ability to integrate both positive and negative emotions so with a really good SEC securely attached uh mother when that baby is in a down state literally she can literally ride down with that baby and synchronize and when it's an Upstate she can she can really ride up with that state in the case of narcissistic personality disorders let's say for example I'm jumping here we've got a an insecure attachment it can be an avoidant attachment or the other one depends what kind there are two different types of narcissistic personality disorders you can have anxiously attached narcissis no but you can have two different types of narcissistic personality disorders a vulnerable attachment and an egotistical attachment you said a vulnerable attachment vulnerable attachment is again an anxious attachment these people constantly need praise yeah yes sound familiar but but also e egotistical attachment but my my point out of that essentially here is the stresses in life are there and that the negative stresses are there but we can learn from those negative stresses also Etc and ultimately we what we need to do is to be able to know how to integrate if we can't integrate the positive and the negative will end up with splitting you know the term yeah because I believe that's a primary uh uh feature of borderline personality disorder which I think we should also touch on yeah yeah so U my understanding about splitting is that it's the uh I love you I hate you phenomenon brought on by um not just an internal switch um which is sometimes seen in like bipolar uh disorder but rather somebody with a borderline personality disorder will um see something like um and be like very upset like suddenly like the fact that um a glass is empty of a drink meant that they didn't think enough to to like refill a glass or something whereas a few minutes before it was perfectly fine it was it was not an issue right there there needs to be a trigger and then they split is that right yeah yeah so essentially you know the splitting usually the splitting goes out externally that person is all bad I am all good so now you have that splitting ET you can't see anything of a goodness in that person at this point in time does it sometimes go the other way that person's all good I'm bad it could also be that all good but you also have internally splitting you have an internal split between a good self and a bad self and internally there's an internal object relation that we all have as we internalize these external relationships so that there's a good self and a bad self literally and that they cannot be integrated so to speak and that that part of me I hate that part of me versus I love that part of me Al in terms of borderline usually what you see at the very beginning is that there's an over idealization of the positive values of that therapist and then there is some there are some then stressors and Mis attunements and ruptures that are repair and now all of a sudden what was totally good now becomes totally bad incidentally that could be if there is not a strong Therapeutic Alliance the point at which the person will drop out are these uh people with borderline personality is I don't know if you still call it a disorder nowadays that gets a little bit into the let's call it borderline um with borderline um do they exhibit the same sort of splitting um idealization and then the idea that somebody is terrible and they want nothing to do with them in the context of work relationship friendships does it extend out into other domains of life or is it unique to certain uh types of relationships I think it's a way of seeing the world remember and the way of seeing the world essentially is very different from the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere the right way hemisphere sees the world through emotional relationships and that uh so that can become a trait that can be really a hard and fast trade let me put it another way um in the case of narcissistic personality disorder the baby is all good the caregiver primary caregiver is always thinking very positive about that about that infant but when that infant now all of a sudden becomes depressed the interactive regulation stops at that point in time and the caregiver doesn't want anything to do with that no the so at that point in time now everything is unconscious if you and I are together and there is a misattunement between us what possibility let's say in a dismissive attachment is all of a sudden I will disengage we got too close and at that point in time maybe I'm acting out my early attachment Dynamics because what the baby is doing is expecting what what the mother will do next and at that point in time there's a misattunement like that and so in the case of a dismissive personality that person will emotionally disengage okay become very abstract at that point in time and at that point in time I can't feel you I hear what you're saying and so at all points in time you have this situation of coming closer and moving apart coming closer and moving apart and this will be acted out in the therapeutic relationship also with and um and so that every time the person is the anxious person is stressed they'll come in closer to you now now they're more demanding about what they need from you look at the tone of my voice while the insecure avoiding now is not going to deactivate it and at that point in time my voice will now get flat you can't even hear the effective tone of my voice so I'm telling you that we always pick up at the level of our own physiology how emotionally close or distant that person is at this point in time especially at points of stress whether I'm coming in or I'm moving out let me go back to this all of this is occurring at an implicit level which is why you said something about reparenting Etc too much is on a conscious level there if you really want to make these changes in a personality they have to be changes in the right brain and that's why all therapy now is looking into emotion All Therapy no matter what form of therapy it's laying on top of the therapeutic relationship and emotion per se I'm pausing cuz I'm just taking all this in and thinking about what are the ways that people can start to tap into this right brain health or lack of health and ways to repair their right brain circuitry so to speak um without a therapist or is that just simply impossible no it's not impossible no it's not impossible we we all grow and incidentally our right brains do grow but again [Music] um the key here I'm suggesting the whole idea about interpersonal neurobiology it was the editor of the nordon Ser interpersonal which is the two-person situation there has been too much of an emphasis on auto regulation and not enough emphasis on interactive regulation the real key to changing a right brain is finding people you can be close with finding people you can be open with finding people you can be vulnerable with that literally you can show your shortcomings and opening yourself up to those people as they open up to you it's literally to form that right brain toght brain communication system with someone else I think I just got it I think if I'm not mistaken what you're describing is interactive dynamics that create or uh elaborate on circuitry that exists in all of us but that for some people might be atrophied because of the lack of proper nourishment emotional nourishment early in life but that we can engage these uh these circuits these right brain circuits but then when we're not around these people there must be something the right brain circuitry that provides a sort of a um a soothing function so that we we must know at an implicit level that like we can do this like we know how to attach in healthy ways to people we have a close friend we can rely on we have maybe friends plural we we uh maybe repaired a relationship with a sibling this kind of thing so it's not that these circuits need to constantly be engaged every moment with the with the Barista with the you know but that that we somehow at an unconscious level uh it must be that we come to realize that um that this circuitry has has re-elaborated or is elaborated in a way that that we know quote unquote we can do it you know remember part of the problem is being able to take in to take these things in here but the key to emotion incidentally let me let me throw out an important another important term in terms of let's say a therapy situation I've said essentially therapy is is about literally reworking emotion and the most the key to to mental health and physical health is also a right brain uh a right brain emotional situation here the key here is that there are heighten effective moments in a therapy session I'm going to go therapy then I'm going to come back to your question we've now formed the Therapeutic Alliance the stronger the therapeutic alliances between us more empathy between us so to speak the more we can share I'm now going to start to drop some of my defenses because the defenses are there to block aect negative affect and begin now to take a chance now to open myself up you know to somebody else's but in a therapy session somewhere around the middle of that session the person comes in out of the world in a left brain State somewhere in the middle of the session they start moving into affect and now the person is starting to talk in a more effective level and now talking about a memory or some sad situation or something that just happened in a relationship with a couple now you even start hearing my voices now the voice tone change and these moments which only May last believe it or not 50 60 seconds are heightened affec of moments these are moments when all of a sudden we are both in the right and we are both synchronized and the affective now is is out there so to speak and that's the possibility now to get this change in these H effective moments so to be in an interpersonal relationship with someone and to co-create with that person a hid and affective moment in both of us which we are sharing at that point in time by taking the risk to be open at that point in time also these are the moments in life that you really go into your autobiographical memory I remember my occasion with that person I can bring back the whole context because remember the right brain acts with images images so I can bring back that image now and I can remember the closeness that I felt at that point in time Etc these are put into bright brain so we we are always putting into our autobiographical memory these hiding effective moments so to have those shared effective moments with other people these are really whereby you're making changes in the right and these are much more important I want to suggest than you know intellectually now there have been certain F I'm now going to I'm going to move into a a little bit of a different place here what I'm suggesting is that these right brain to right brain Communications are always going on but certain people literally can't read them as well other people can and they can't read the face of voice and they're they can't synchronize well can I stop you and ask one question which is let's say that let's take this conversation for instance I'm listening to your words very carefully if I make an effort to listen especially carefully to what somebody is saying the content of their words is there a competition between left and right brain such that I'm now not getting as much right brain listening yeah okay this is this to me feels like the the surrender aspect whereas I can I and I do this during these interviews uh SL um discussions where I'll sit back sometimes and I'm still listening but I widen my gaze I don't look around but I widen my gaze and I'm I'm trying to just feel something coming in I'm not a therapist obviously um no one would ever suspect that I was but I only do it for a few seconds and then I re-engage and I used to think that it was like a like a relaxation of sorts but inevitably I feel like it's a different way to the conversation takes a different direction is is that more or less what you're talking about yeah that's a colossal shift I meanly the cor is you you can shift from the left into the right about 100 100 milliseconds so essentially you can't be in you have to be in one Hemisphere or the other so so if I'm listening very carefully to like exactly what you said and I'm and I'm tracking everything you said like I'm in a like in a courtroom situation then my right brain is suppressed okay is that right good feed good feed now watch where I go here okay the right hemisphere is dominant for attention Okay I mean this baby and this mother literally she's focusing her attention on that baby's face tone was but there are two different types of attention strong neuros Neuroscience to show this the left brain operates by narrow attention narrowly focused attention atton as the best example of narrowly focused attention is you are following my words one after the other but there's another type of attention which is used by the right brain which is called wide ranging attention which comes right out of Freud which he also called maybe you remember this evenly suspended attention I haven't heard that but that's beautiful it's the same thing which is much wider than that and that form of attention is the the form of attention that the right brain has because the attention at that point in time is not only of what's coming from the outside but also attention to what's happening in the inside my own inside the changes in my own physiology at that point in time also so yes there are these two for different forms of attention and essentially the only way someone who was just narrow all the time let's let's take a personality who just lives in the left hemisphere a hyperlinear person exactly hyper logical hyper rational cannot really see the big picture but literally that kind of a situation so essentially that kind of a person is always looking at the narrow aspects of it and cannot see the broader context the broader context because there's a context that's being set up right now between you and I there's also a context that's being set up and that context also has to it a kind of a feeling of safety and Trust as we literally just go off wherever our you know our thoughts are with some idea that literally you'll be able to follow that and you'll come back with me at the same time so the context the emotional atmosphere between us changes when you go left into the right like that point here is that it used to be thought that you the only way you could understand the brain was by looking more intally into one brain if you understood how one brain worked and everything was int psychic but then there's the interpersonal part of it and so essentially we're moving now from a onep person int psychic psychology to a two person interpersonal psychology you see what I mean by two person I got the mother here got the baby there I got the patient here I got the therapist there and between them literally are going back and forth at all periods of time right brain to right brain Communications underneath the conversation so neuroimaging hyperscanning neuroimaging your familiar with hyperscanning another Paradigm shifting thing that is occurring now in neuroimaging for the first time we can now scan two people n IRS EEG whatever you want it while they are in the middle of a basic interpersonal interaction aable interaction between the two of them these Studies have now been done and what they did was that they found is that the two brains especially when they into emotional states and when they are looking at each other face to face and they're concentrating literally on how to empathically be with that person Etc emotions so to speak they they find that the the right brain of one will synchronize with the right brain of the other and the part of the right brain that synchronizes with the other is the right temporal parietal Junction a lot of evidence now on the right temporal parietal Junction I said right brain to right brain so now the eyes are coming and remember the eyes are I mean direct eye connection really is the most powerful form of communication I always remind people these are two little bits of brain outside your cranial vault as weird as that might seem they are two bits of brain your retina is central nervous system and you're you're looking at that's about as close as you can get to looking at somebody's brain State as anything well you know this the eyes are being controlled by the autonomic nervous system so you got the you have an autonomic nervous system the ordonomic nervous system synchrony here so to speak but uh but essentially uh what's occurring at this point in time face voice gesture the face is processed in the posterior parts of the right hemisphere that face processing right hemisphere face processing the right the posterior parts of the right hemisphere the sensory areas of the right hemisphere process the voice The Melody of the voice the tone of the voice that's different than the semantics of the voice so this is procity this is this is pro this is what the Italians do so well right right and the and the and the posterior parts of the right hemisphere also will process gesture and tactile okay all of that comes together is integrated together in the right temporal parietal Junction so when two people literally are empathically synchronizing with each other when we are sharing the same emotional state the the patient says at this point in time my God it's rage I never realized it was anger and at that point in time the empathic therapist who's synchronizing we are both literally now in that right temporal parietal Junction but the right temporal parietal Junction is what sends the communications and receives the communications got me here so essentially that's where our linguage is and we are now literally in a right brain to right brain communication and what they found was during a real Psychotherapy situation where the patient comes in and they're there because they have interpersonal relationships problems and emotional problems and they're face to face in their eye to eye and they're tracking each other's like that you'll find that synchronization so the the synchronization between my right Temple parietal and your right Temple parietal is a right brain to right brain communication that rip rain to ripe rain communication is always occurring in that kind of a context and therefore the most important new change in psychoanalysis is that the unconscious just is more than just happening at dreams it's happening at all points because the unconscious we now know is a relational unconscious it communicates with another relational unconscious right brain to right brain and this has really changed so much now in our understanding about what Psychotherapy is about also andly I want to point out the major change mechanism in Psychotherapy now is not inside it's not cognitive Insight it's more the ability to have an emotionally Laden conversation with another human being and to make emotional connections with another human being which is why the therapeutic relationship really is the factor of the change and that's very different than the old days was your unconscious is here the analyst is there I'm now going to interpret what you're doing as you are sinking down into the right and now going but I'm going to stay up left that interpret it that's why there was a real limitation to that and that's why psychoanalysis really changed now now also to a face-to-face contact not just the C the couch also fascinating and makes total sense based on the newer Imaging tools um revealing synchrony Etc I have two questions um that can be asked in parallel music and dogs why music and dogs well some of what you're describing um reminds me of the um State shift that occurred when I hear particular pieces of music for which um I'm not paying attention to the lyrics or in some cases the lyrics matter I'm listening but they don't make any sense like if they were read out as a paragraph it wouldn't make any sense but it feels like there's some fundamental truth there so this is I I could State specific musical preferences but it's highly individual so for some people it's classical music for other people it's music that contains lyrics but there's this feeling like yes like there's a truth there and I feel that truth even though the content of the words let's take couldn't help myself like a Bob Dylan song for instance he's certainly could be considered a poet right you know and if you read the lyrics Just as a paragraph you'd be like this is nonsense but the way that it sung the meaning behind it the tamber in the voice the proy ETC and presumably the emotion that he was feeling at the time when the music was recorded communicates with us and we enter a synchronous State and then in parallel to this I mentioned dogs where um sure they have a for they have a left brain and a right brain um but I think with animals generally um if they're domestic animals and we have a very close relationship to them we we can really feel a resonance with them and presumably them with us and um for anyone that's experienced it you know they some people might be chuckling now but it's nothing short of profound right the extent to which we really feel like they see us and we see them and there's a bond yeah clearly not the same magnitude as a parent child Bond but nonetheless so music and dogs do you think it's tapping in to this same right temporal parietal well I I I think that it's it's first of all the the right temporal parietal Junction is the posterior and the right orbital frontal is the cortex so the whole right brain there so to speak okay so we're going we're basically going from anterior to posterior just there structures the whole way back the orbital frontal is the regulation part of the the the temporal parietal Junction is the communication part of it so the whole key is the communication of emotion and the regulation of emotion where is the surrender switch the surrender is the colosal switch out of the left into the right so not so much paying attention to the content of the words the logic behind them The Logical flaws that might exist the analytic part but rather how the words sound how the words feel literally yes and clearly one of the uh first of all there has been a lot of Neuroscience done on music and incidentally most of that is right brain showing right brain activation in music uh the key here even more than that it's it's particular music to me it has a particular meaning to me your subjectivity and a lot shows that uh music is essentially a mechanism of aect Regulation but I want to suggest to view that pets are also a mechanism of affc Regulation dogs everywhere smiling absolutely you know and and but maybe by the same things I want to suggest I think that the communication between dogs and I've had four dogs myself is that literally it's tactile it's the touch of that animal it's the pro of the voice because literally that dog understands the prity of the voice and also uh you to some extent I think they they can read our our faces but more than that there's one other sense which I haven't brought up which is part of human relationship and that's smell okay and this is overlooked in human relationship but in real intimate contacts between human beings the smell is really a key there you not think about sexual arousal so dogs are really very strong on our smell Etc but if attachment is a reunion after a separation you come home home there's that dog sitting there literally and immediately you're down regulating the day you have now taken off the whole left osphere and our whole stresses of all of that and you're now shifting left into right and we use the mechanisms that is available to do that and music is one of the ways to do that so in some sense music is an auto regulation although music can be live music and then it's more than that so that's the case or playing music with others this is something I'm incapable of because have no musical ability but playing music with others you can see the when we talk about the chemistry of a band it's so incredible to witness that and then to feel it in Mass with thousands maybe of other people yeah there have been studies to show that during a performance uh there is a synchrony there are synchronized States between the performer and and the audience and it's certainly they're all you can have thousands of people literally in that same synchronized State at that point in time here you mentioned uh earlier um Steven porges work um and uh we know that brain and body are connected in both directions and I should know this but uh I don't know if the right brain has preferential um communication with the parasympathetic or sympathetic or other aspects of well Vegas is parasympathetic but I think it's probably both I think the more we discover about about the Vegas it's likely to be mixed sympathetic parasympathetic but I'll catch some heat for that but that's okay but is the you know bodily sensing is a a real thing like there there are ways that our diaphragm and our and our our core relax when we're happy I mean all of this is is obvious to to anyone um but I'm just curious um how right brain uh links up with bodily States the right brain is more connected into the body than the left brain um incidentally I'm going to do you know the name Ian mcgilchrist yes I know the name and many people have commented on our YouTube channel that I need to talk to Ian um um that's all that I have gotten that far but i' I've been busy um get him get him uh great Ian we'll we'll send you an invite yeah I mean the there there has been ongoing dialogue between us for some time but Ian talks about that the right brain literally is much more Connect into the body and incidentally is also more is more dominant for will unconscious will is more important than conscious will which you kind of at the very beginning we were talking about the left versus the right yeah so I'm curious as to you know how people can start to sense these uh right brain left brain shifts we talked about how um paying a little less attention to the content of words and a little bit more to how a conversation is feeling independent of the word content might be part of it um we hear a lot these days about you know how body posture matters you know that you know like if people are closed up with their arms crossed I don't know but sometimes I'm just a little chilly so I'll cross my arms and sometimes I'll cross my arms and lean in and I know that I'm in a much more attuned state so I don't put too much weight on that but maybe I should put more weight on that what are your thoughts yeah there's a classical work on uh by the an analyst by the name of Manuel hammer and he was talking about how to reach the affect and what he suggested is that there are certain moments in the session when literally my body in order to pick up the communications of the patient I lean back I'm not leaning forward into I lean back and let the atmosphere literally come over me so to speak I love this I'm just forgive me for interrupting but I love this because people especially on social media they they take a piece of information like you know if you're lean back you're disengaged you're Lean Forward you're engaged but you could also just turn it right around and say if you're leaned forward you're impending and then the person doesn't have space and so it becomes a frankly becomes a bunch of BS but but notice here what I'm talking about what the therapist is attempting to do is to make an emotional connection an empathic connection and in order to make an empathic connection you're you're leaning back you're leaning back and literally as you lean back all of a sudden you're able to pick up things and hear things that you didn't see see before so to speak and frequently what happens when when you're in an emotional connection like that images will come to your mind images which which really represent the emotional experience that the other is having and at that point in time also what you'll find is that just as you're picking up that person's image he's picking up your person image and what Hammer says is that we have what we have here is something that's alike an affective Wireless between between the two because it's going back and forth between the two of us just like a right brain to right brain communication affected by Freud said the human unconscious acts like a receptor and it picks up the communications of the unconscious of another human being flud said literally human beings can pick up the unconscious without go without it going through the conscious mind so again in that kind of a context you know that all that all makes makes sense the other thing I want to say about all of these behaviors that are going on now when there is an emotional communication the key is spontaneous behaviors spontaneous not thought out behaviors spontaneous behaviors when there are spontaneous behaviors there's more trust in them being SP you know in the first place but there's not a mind that is attempting to present anything and when you have two people revealing their spontaneous behaviors to each other even if they're not sure how they're going to be affected that also is a matter for synchrony in order for there to be synchrony there has to be spontaneous two-way Communications turn-taking Communications and incidentally as we talk about this conversation what is set up in the attachment between the mother and the infant the infant makes a cry the mother response is that they are now taking turns there's turn taking behavior and in a good relationship what you find is more or less smooth turn-taking behaviors and incidentally you and I who have never met before are not doing too badly in these spontaneous turn-taking behaviors between us I appreciate you saying that I feel the same way text messaging has become a dominant mode of communication the these days um I've hosted a few guests expert in emotions in the brain um Lisa Feldman Barrett for instance and and others and she and others have talked about how the emogif of emotions you know just like a smiley face or a crying face or oh goodness or your mind blown these things are convenient as is shorthand text lack of punctuation Etc but today's conversation also you know highlights the extent ENT to which text messaging is pretty much devoid of most everything that you're talking about a green bubble or a blue bubble seen or not seen you know read or not read uh depending on how you you set your settings um the latency the turn-taking it's com sometimes people layer in multiple conversations and you're going back and forth about a couple of different things and then then like your your food order comes I mean sure the human brain can handle this but this seems either not good neutral that is or bad for um building in reinforcing communication I it actually concerns me but of course I'm Now 49 so I can say things like now that I'm 49 I can say things like that you know but it concerns me because I think that you can imagine the young brain and older brain essentially uh not being good at interpersonal Dynamics because of text message I agree I agree um first of all um let me mention that one of uh Ian's ideas is that essentially uh um the left hemisphere is becoming more and more dominant today in in in not only in this country and that he sees that as really as a huge problem because the title of his book is the master and his Emissary and the Emissary which is the left brain betrays the master so he sees that one of the problems we're dealing with right now is that there's the left hemisphere is there and that these right hemispheres even metaphors are you know are problematic so I have a rule I I don't argue over text um I don't I don't like to argue over text I don't like to argue period but I don't you know I'll pick up the phone I'm of the generation where we called one another um I I find text to be completely devoid of what I'm really seeking in terms of connection um and I think that there's an entire I know there's an entire generation of people that grew up communicating mainly through um short message Jonathan hate and the author of The anxious generation has has been encouraging young kids to put away their phones and get out and interact more encouraging parents to let their kids be more what they call free range kids and do this kind of thing arguing that there's far fewer dangers in the physical world than there are in the online world for young brains he makes a convincing argument um for those of us that are um seeking to have U better connection um maybe even do some healing of the right brain circuitry that you talking about today do you think that um there's a hierarchy of Effectiveness such that you know like um text would be perhaps at the bottom uh voice memo maybe next level up I'm thinking here a phone call um you know there was a time when we wrote handwritten letters and those felt very meaningful sure I kept handwritten letters from people that I cared about and that cared about me the handwritten letters are proves that it doesn't have to be a real-time exchange but there's something about handwriting a typewritten letter would by today's standards would also be a significant thing but you know that there really seems to be something special about um a letter um a face Toof face right in in terms of literally the point of the letter and the attempt of the letter literally was to to to make a connection I can remember in my childhood going away to camper and we would write letters back and forth and it it the words that were being used there were literally about making a connection and filling you in which also meant that I had to reflect about myself and what was happening with me and how I felt about that and how and I was sharing all of that uh you know W with with another person that has really gone in into into into the background and things have become much more impersonal but I want to point out that for a certain type of Personality texting fits perfectly these there people that walk around with left brains that are hypertrophied um people you know living living in the left living in the left that's right inally before I just want to point out there are other ways literally of feeding the right brain brain of what it needs and one of the other ways also is going out into the world is traveling is being in nature you know sharing those kinds of things also those are also uh in addition to the you know to the inperson situations here but um yeah we're seeing changes here we're seeing changes here and I'm not so sure uh too many of these are are good let me throw out um I made a little list of the areas which are now being studied which are showing that clearly this is right brain dominance in these activities yeah please share stop me at any point essentially the argument that I'm making in the in this new book on human nature is that the highest levels of human nature are in the right brain so essentially intuition now remember intuition is there for all kinds of professions that one of the things that a fireman G gains over time is literally how to redef fire so intuition purely right brain and and intuition literally is is drawing on Body Sensations also Etc imagery creativity lot of evidence showing creativity the ability to processing something novel and something something new metaphors imagination studies humor music poetry art morality comp passion spirituality and The Best For Last Love that's a spectacular list making the the right brain circuitry at at least among uh the most exciting circuits um certainly important circuits I threw an ad for the next book I love right brain Psychotherapy love love love it I own a hard cover copy um I've owned it for a couple years now um I highly recommend it we'll put links to your your books in the show note caption get the development of the unconscious mind also okay we'll do what are some activities that allow us to quote unquote drop into our right brain circuitry a bit more um one that immediately leap to mind as you mentioned nature and interacting with nature and we were talking about music is uh walking um and earlier we talked about you educated us on rather this notion of wide range attention um this evenly suspended attention that is associated with the right brain this kind of widening of gaze as opposed to narrow gaze and narrow attention that is associated with left brain circuitry when we're out in nature and when we're amb ambulating when we're walking provided we're not looking at our phone one hopes or looking for something specific like a bird that we've spotted we tend to be in panoramic Vision uh I'm a vision scientist so I can't help myself you know what we call magnos Cellar Vision these like big pixels I'm aware yeah taking it all in it's more spherical than um kind of a a cone of attention I would imagine that might be more right brain Associated um what are some things that you if you um suggest to your patients like hey you know until our next session you know do you encourage them to journal free associate journal to listen to music to uh to take walks um or do you you restrict the the activation of this right brain circuitry to the session and then let it just show up as it were yeah yeah so so you let it them sort of just default to to to what what's happening yeah yeah um two uh two two points here first of all on on uh therapy um I think there's been too much of an emphasis on technique in therapy um and really what the r brain research is is showing I is that um um it's it's the right brain process that's the key here more than technique and so um that being the case um due to my own training Psychotherapy has shown to be more effective in making long-term changes uh and even changes after the treatment is over than other forms of therapy like CBT so I think there's been too much on that on the matter of other experiences the r brain is also dominant for processing novel information anytime something new comes up the ride picks it up first and you get a burst of nor adrenaline out of that also so the pursuit of continuing to have a curious mind and an open mind um I think is part of that and seeking new experiences in different parts of the world if I mean there's there's an economic piece to that also but with new challenges br bring up new challenges that we have and to essentially if possible feed curiosity curiosity um Einstein even said something essentially that along those lines there so new experiences with new people new challenges new places to see new you know a travel I think is uh you know one of those and it turned out to be one of the Great fortunate gifts that came from all of this um you know I I was a therapist only for about 45 years and I came into this late I wrote this book in late and literally it's led me into new relationships and new friends who starts making friends at 45 and 50 years old but again Novelties um and sharing that you know I think is is is also another way of doing that plus um you you said this I'll repeat it exercise exercise is a key here um I'm I happen to be interested in energy and in mitochondria and uh um there's a uh scientist navio at San Diego who has written on this and he's talking about the healing process and part of the healing process literally is exercise that's fundamental to healing of whatever physical and mental and also restorative sleep so taking care of our body um one of the things that U we learn early in our in our uh experiences mostly taught through the body is literally how to take care of our bodies and as you're well aware of um you don't see that um in certain pathologies and you also have certain and I'm talking about more than just self-destructive like cutting the But ultimately the the ability to be able to to look Inward and to be able to reflect back upon the self um and to be able to see um even what we want to see and don't want to see now I I I want to just make a quick reference to defenses because um defenses are can be adaptive and maladaptive and they're important and they're there for example we have defenses against overwhelming a dissociation is defense against over overwhelming a but we also have defense like repression which is part of all human beings and repression can be normal and adaptive or it can be maladaptive and it's maladaptive literally when it's when it's when the repression is very strong essentially what you have there is that the left hemisphere is just shutting out anything coming over from the right that's what repression the left hemisphere just shutting that all out so part of this is becoming more aware of those defenses that we have also and I want to make this point also there are certain parts of ourselves which we cannot see we can only see them when we're getting feedback from somebody who knows us and can see those things in us and even if at the time they're uncomfortable but we need that feedback from somebody we trust to be able to see which is why this ability literally to completely change one's psychology is highly problematic because remember what you're attempting to do is to change the right brain which is why Intimate Relationships close relationships um with whom we can share things is really a key there also we are everybody has blind spots and um the way out of that again is is is trusting enough to take in uh negative feedback you know at times also my own feeling is that when something hits me let's say a disappointment hits me and uh one of the things I learned early about my own emotion because in order to study emotion you have to study your own emotion Etc that for me literally when something comes I just let it come and move wherever it's going to go lit and feel it just at at at all of its intensity and strength and even after sharing it literally letting it penetrate down so to speak and ultimately at some point it'll come back into another shape in a form but our emotions are adaptive and again I want to point out one of the major fallacies is that negative emotions are bad and positive emotions are good positive emotions are good manic emotions Etc negative emotions are bad loss you know we are wired for all of these emotions because they have adaptive value and we need to be able to be familiar with all of those different types of emotions you know that that come our way in our lives I have a friend he's a songwriter and he told me that he has this process whereby he writes music every day um but he starts his day by painting or drawing I think he sold some paintings and drawings but that's not not his main vocation but he told me that he he draws in paints as a way to sort of um Grease the gears to songwriting and then I learned that Joanie Mitchell did this too or something similar um and I can't help but Wonder uh whether or not they've uh unconsciously tapped into a mode of bringing right brain circuitry up in terms of its activity yeah um neither of them are known as painters or or uh artists um but of course musical artists and quite accomplished ones at that um is that um tool or technique Mak sense yeah it does essentially it's it's creativity you know which again is the ability to see something novel in a in in a new way to look at the same thing but through new eyes so I I think those are ways of literally artists know literally how to get surrender out of the left and get into the right and you're seeing these mechanisms of surrender but let me share into something else more autobiographical about what you're saying um when I decided to uh I knew that I was going to write something uh you know at a certain point in time and so for 10 years I went into a period of self-study and and literally I went to a library Cal State Library near me and I just went through the stacks you remember it was like to go through the stacks and I started to move into psychology into neurology into into chemistry but then I found myself doing something else I went back to the piano I took piano as as a you know as a teenager it led nowhere but as an adult I went back to the piano we have a piano in the house that was came from my my in-laws because I wanted to know something in my fingers I didn't want to know something in my logic I knew that the way that I usually would understand things would would be rationally and logically but I wanted to be able to play and be able to play again purely so that it was in my fingers and I also wanted to be able to visualize so I got to a point now where I started to be able to now to be able to see a cell and I could visualize mitochondrial moving now up into the dendrites at the cell membr so that visualization capacity as well as the musical capacity was my intuitive way of starting now more and more to get me to lean into the right to be able to learn how to be in the right amazing I I love this and and I'll refrain from sharing my um you know personal uh use of such uh sort of I guess we call them Avenues into the right um but I want to make clear I understand you're in the stacks of books in the library that feels and sounds like a like a cognitive Endeavor a left brain Endeavor but then it just came to you I want to play the piano or um through the the research uh that you were doing this a 10year self research Amazing by the way I'm like so struck by that then did it just come to you in a Flash like I want to play the piano again and was it because it playing the piano contrasted so much with looking through the stacks or they or they were aligned no it just it just those for me that was exploration it was exploration it was all new information and I found that I could Master more than the field that I was trained in let me give you one other experience is that is a lot of evidence to show the AHA experience is right brain also so there are times when literally insights will come quickly and suddenly and they'll seem to come out of nowhere and all of a sudden the Muse is there so that was an aha experience and when I thought about it it just made all kinds of sense I mean there was a purpose to it because again I I needed to get past um doing that let me tell you something else that I decided to do very early on as I was setting off into this 10year period I decided never to memorize anything tell me more it's a lot of effort that gets nowhere literally what I wanted to do as I wanted to understand it in the way that I could understand it so there's a lot of ways wasted time in memorization and that being the case as you can imagine I have a rather enormous memory I know where things are I know where they are I know how to get them I know what's important and I know how to put it into a place where I can get I know where that article is and incidentally when I'm working initial originally I would write everything down and the writing had an effect of putting that more into my memory even now when I'm studying I'll take papers I'll Xerox them and I'll read them at my desk I will not read and study right off the computer in other words I was learning my own technique of learning so important I often get asked you know what's your note taking process how do you prepare a solo EP I do these long solos that you know I have only a few pages of notes but I could describe it but the process is so specific to the way that I learn across the whatever 6 8 10 weeks that it takes me to prepare for one of those sometimes more that um it wouldn't really translate like it doesn't matter no yeah but there's but there's a process of int introspection there about literally how do I learn and you know and how can I how can I literally absorb the information so that it goes in deep the left hemisphere essentially is a Surface hemisphere the right hemisphere is the one of depth so to speak and what goes into the right for example if you have an experience an emotional experience that's really important that goes deep into your autobiographical memory that's much deeper than you're attempting to to memorize something you know at that point in at any point in time given the extreme importance of this right brain circuitry and of this um autonomic um synchrony between mother and typically mother primary caretaker that is and infant what are some things that are known from the literature as critically important about that stage in terms of um you know amount of time spent with uh the child um you know often times parents are working they are nannies or any number of different things there are a lot of different structures nowadays for families and balancing work and family but is there anything known about how to I hate to use the word optimize but maximize the health of the relationship yeah I don't think that this culture compared to other cultures really provides for that kind of time I think that people are stressed uh because of that and now I'm going to talk about maternal leave and paternal leave in other rich countries um um the paternal leave is three months and uh maternal leave is 6 months or more in Scandinavia so uh these other countries have figured out this time of life is critical that if you really want to affect a personality and help shape that personality to be a moral person or you know to have values Etc the time literally that to put in is the earliest years that's when it's there so to speak and without that kind of leave policy in this country most people go back to work at six weeks six weeks is at the beginning of the critical period of the right brain the autonomic nervous system is in a critical period at 6 to 8 weeks the amygdala is coming into a critical period the basil lateral amydala the insula and the singular are in a critical period at that point in time this is before the child has formed an attachment and as or a separation so I see this as literally and um as I'm well aware of there's now talking about this more and more in fact the recent debate there was discussion of this uh also about this this problem the London School of Economics had a a study about what is the best predictor the best childhood predictor of adult satisfaction in life and the best predictor was emotion and the second was the child's conduct and the third and last was the child's IQ we have things upside down here we are focusing too much on Executive of functions that come online at the third year and again what I'm suggesting to you is that the whole foundations of our personality are starting in Udo through the second and the third year and then you know with the father Etc that's where we literally should be putting the money and the money should be there so that it provides the time every other culture has figured this out the uh UNICEF took a poll in 2021 of 36 countries rich countries we came in last in emotional well-being childhood well-being shame it is a shame uh what's wonderful however is that you're highlighting these issues um so many people are hearing about this and um you know I encourage anyone everyone listening to really take in The Ordering of uh importance of of what Dr Shore just shared that IQ third on the list emotion regulation um number one conduct conduct yeah so the the idea that we need to train our kids up as little memorizing computers um is the clearly the wrong idea clearly there's important information that needs to be committed to memory to be a functional human being but that we're missing not just critical knowledge transfer but critical emotional transfer yeah and for that reason and for so many other reasons I really want to thank you for coming in today and having this conversation it's unlike any conversation I've had on this podcast it for several reasons not the least of which is that you have this incredible knowledge of the neurobiology which for me is a delight and I'm sure for the listeners too but also the clinical experience which is so rich and it's clear you've also uh done your own work and exploring these ideas and and you've been here for for and participated in the evolution of this whole right brain left brain thing you know the Advent of neuroimaging and how that's really shed new light and I just love love love the way that you uh you braid all this together in terms of actionable things with patient and therapist but also just in terms of one's understanding of self I I'm certain people are going to take this knowledge um into their lives and into the world and it's been really enriching for me and I'm certain it's going to be immensely enriching for them so thank you for the work you do than thank you for taking the time to come here today and I'm excited about your new book so keep us informed as to when that comes out maybe we'll have you back on for another discussion if you're willing and just um you know just thank you so much for entering this this uh left brain right brain dance and dynamic it's been thoroughly enjoyful absolute pleasure for me too Andrew absolute pleasure thank you thank you thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr Alan Shaw to learn more about his work and to find links to his books please see the links in the show note captions if you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's a terrific zeroc cost way to support us another terrific zeroc cost way to support us is to follow the podcast on both Spotify and apple and on both Spotify and apple you can leave us up to a five-star review please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode that's the best way to support this podcast if you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you like me to consider for the huberman Lab podcast please put those in the comments on YouTube I do read all the comments for those of you that haven't heard I have a new book coming out it's my very first book it's entitled protocols an operating manual for the human body this is a book that I've been working on for more than 5 years and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience and it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to Stress Control protocols related to focus and motivation and of course I provide the science scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included the book is now available by pre-sale at protocols book.com there you can find links to various vendors you can pick the one that you like best again the book is called protocols an operating manual for the human body if you're not already following me on social media I am hubman lab on all social media platforms so that's Instagram X 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me for today's discussion with Dr Allan Shaw and last but certainly not least thank you for your interest in science [Music]