Episode 294 Ralph Adolphs
In a Nutshell
Emotions are functional control states positioned between rigid reflexes and flexible planning that prioritize behavior, scale in intensity, and persist over time. The amygdala is not a fear center but part of broader networks handling different fear types—external threats versus internal panic like suffocation. Deliberate cold exposure and meditation train autonomic regulation that generalizes to emotional control, with task-switching costs being trainable through practices like brief silence periods.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
Andrew Huberman describes an experience where someone honked at him while parking. After doing an ice bath, his immediate anger response was flattened. He explains there was an immediate automatic downregulation of his autonomic emotional response to this psychological stressor. The response was trained and generalized from the ice bath experience. While acknowledging this is an experiment of one and not a published study, he suggests there's a direct autonomic training component in terms of the strength and automaticity of emotional regulation. The goal is to reach a state where emotions can be regulated automatically without overthinking, becoming smooth and effortless.
Andrew Huberman introduces the Huberman Lab podcast and welcomes Dr. Ralph Adolphs, professor of psychology, neuroscience, and biology at Caltech University and a world expert in the neurobiology of emotions. The discussion covers what emotions are, how they grow and shrink in the brain and body, why some emotions recruit behavior and decision-making while others don't, where and how emotions are mapped in the body, and dispels common myths about brain-body storage of emotions from the past.
Huberman expresses gratitude for Adolphs' work combining grounding in neural circuits with psychological issues while taking into account animal data. He notes that Adolphs has long pushed back against the tendency to stimulate a brain area, observe behavior, and immediately conclude that specific brain region is responsible for that function.
Adolphs explains that one impetus for his work and forthcoming book with Princeton University Press (co-written with David Anderson) is to integrate findings from animal studies and social psychology, fields that typically don't communicate despite studying emotions through very different methodologies. The goal is to create a sense of what emotions are that satisfies both psychologists and lay people about human emotions while also addressing mechanisms that can be studied in mice or flies.
Adolphs defines emotions as functional states understood by what they do rather than how they happen to be constituted in the human brain, an octopus nervous system, or AI. He situates emotions as control of behavior in response to particular types of environmental challenges, positioned between reflexes (rigid, specific behaviors) and goal-directed volition and planning (extremely flexible behavior).
Using the example of encountering a bear or tiger, Adolphs explains that emotions provide flexible behavioral control that reflexes cannot accommodate. A reflex cannot account for whether a threat is far away or close, or whether it's a rattlesnake versus a tiger. Emotions allow for the necessary flexibility to deal with varied environmental challenges like running away from a bear.
Adolphs acknowledges the question "what is an emotion" is valid and well-posed. He references philosopher Paul Griffiths' 1997 book "What Emotions Really Are" which claimed emotions don't really exist. Different theories from researchers like Joe LeDoux, Lisa Feldman Barrett, and Paul Ekman appear quite different, leading some to conclude that even experts can't agree. However, Adolphs maintains that everybody knows what emotions are and science should provide a straight answer.
Adolphs proposes starting with uncontentious examples of emotions like anger, fear, and disgust. The next step is identifying what makes these examples instances of emotion—what features they share in common, similar to identifying what cars or birds have in common. He and David Anderson listed features of emotions in their book "The Neuroscience of Emotion" from a decade ago, and he elaborates with a longer list in his forthcoming book.
One key feature is priority—emotions can take over behavior, sharing this characteristic with reflexes. If confronted by a bear, you can't help but run away or take adaptive action. Herbert Simon pointed out in the 1950s or 1960s that emotions are interrupt mechanisms. Priority is necessary for survival—you need to be monitoring for predators, and when detected, emotions must take over or you're dead.
Valence is another feature that psychologists ubiquitously mention—the simplest dimension for organizing emotions, described by Charles Darwin in "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals" as the principle of antithesis. This involves approach or avoid, pleasant or unpleasant. Anger, disgust, and fear cluster together as more similar to each other than to happiness.
Adolphs addresses whether neutral emotions exist, referencing colleague Marcus Meister's review suggesting sensory systems encode for "yum, yuck, or meh." He notes that while anger and happiness clearly represent opposite ends of the spectrum, the question of apathy or a state of prioritization of doing nothing is worth considering. Priority is necessary for emotions, but valence may not be—there could be valence at a neutral region of the spectrum.
David Anderson's research highlights scalability and temporal persistence as essential features. Scalability means emotions can scale in intensity—from anxiety to fear to panic as a threat becomes more imminent. This distinguishes emotions from reflexes, which are binary (all or nothing). Temporal persistence means an internal emotional state must last because environmental challenges like a bear persist—you need to remain afraid for some period since the threat might return.
David Anderson studied what neural circuits and neurotransmitter properties could implement persistence, including slow neurotransmitters like neuropeptides. University of Iowa colleagues conducted a study with amnesic patients showing temporal persistence of emotions independent of memory. Patients with medial temporal lobe/hippocampal damage watched sad movie clips and became sad. Five minutes later, despite having no declarative memory of the movie, they still felt sad but couldn't explain why—demonstrating that emotional persistence operates separately from memory.
Based on the criteria of priority, valence, scalability, and persistence, Adolphs affirms that animals have functional emotions. He notes that states in animals that would ordinarily be interpreted as emotions in pets meet these functional criteria.
Adolphs distinguishes between functional emotions and conscious experiences of emotions. While humans and animals likely have conscious experiences of emotions, tying emotion to conscious experience creates problems: it makes it difficult to study emotions in animals since conscious experiences can't be tested scientifically, and it conflates studying emotions with studying consciousness. He advocates separating the conscious experience from the emotion itself, similar to how vision researchers study vision without necessarily studying consciousness. This allows integrated science across species without tackling consciousness.
Huberman describes the experience of an emotion emerging but not yet in its maximal form—observing the emotion growing and recognizing the arousal state while understanding why it's happening, such as being in line at a store when someone ahead is taking too long.
When standing in line at the store and witnessing someone ahead behaving in an unnecessary and obnoxious manner, frustration builds while simultaneously observing the emotion as it occurs within oneself. There can be a sense of two consciousnesses running together, with one observing the self and the outside world simultaneously. At some point, the prioritization reaches a threshold where action occurs, sometimes as a deliberate decision and sometimes as an overwhelming compulsion.
Social media platforms frequently surface examples of people losing emotional control in public settings, such as complete meltdowns on airplanes. These displays are characterized as hypothalamic in nature, representing raw, unfiltered emotional expression.
Humans possess the ability to be conscious of and monitor their own emotions, which enables regulation to some extent. Emotion regulation, control, and monitoring are interconnected processes. This capacity appears unique to humans compared to other animals.
James Gross at Stanford initiated a significant field of study on emotion regulation in the 1990s. This area has grown substantially, with approximately one-quarter to one-third of submissions to the journal Affect and Science focusing on emotion regulation. Most emotional pathologies and difficulties stem not from the emotions themselves but from the ability or inability to control and regulate them.
Individuals in tier-one special operations and those engaged in high-risk, high-consequence activities, such as climber Alex Honnold, consistently report that emotions can cloud logical judgment. These individuals maintain emotional distance during professional or peak performance contexts while still experiencing emotions in personal contexts like marriage and family relationships. This approach may appear mechanical or robotic to observers.
Complete absence of emotional response produces devastating consequences. Research by Antonio Damasio, detailed in his book Descartes' Error published around 1994, demonstrated that individuals with massive frontal lobe lesions who no longer emotionally respond to stimuli cannot make complex life decisions, organize their lives, or feel motivated to pursue appropriate paths because they lack emotional differentiation between available options.
Lisa Feldman Barrett conducted foundational work on emotional granularity, which refers to the degree of precision with which individuals can conceptualize and be aware of their own emotions. Once awareness is achieved, various emotion regulation strategies, primarily cognitive reappraisal approaches, can be applied to exert some control over emotional responses.
Language is not required to achieve emotional granularity. Individuals vary in their cognitive styles, with some thinking primarily in words, others in pictures, and most using a combination. Different languages contain unique emotion words, such as schadenfreude from German, meaning joy at another's misfortune, and gigil, an emotion felt when something is unbearably cute. Although English lacks direct equivalents for these terms, the underlying concepts remain comprehensible without specific vocabulary.
Tiffany Watt Smith authored The Book of Human Emotions, a dictionary-style reference cataloging emotion words across different languages from A to Z. The universal nature of emotional concepts transcends specific linguistic labels.
Psychologists differ regarding whether allowing oneself to fully experience an emotion prevents it from intensifying, or whether focusing on an emotion causes it to grow. Neuroscience suggests both perspectives may hold validity depending on context.
In neuroscience, focusing attention on a stimulus recruits increasing numbers of brain circuits. When applied to emotional states triggered by interpersonal events, such as workplace interactions or online exchanges, individuals can enter self-reinforcing loops that become increasingly difficult to exit, similar to descending into a rabbit hole.
Cognitive reappraisal and other complex emotion regulation strategies can become counterproductive if over-applied. Repeatedly focusing on not wanting to feel sad, for instance, may intensify the sadness. Certain emotions appear more susceptible to entering these self-reinforcing loops. The skill is trainable, and the optimal approach involves interrupting the process at the earliest stage possible.
One effective strategy involves structuring one's environment to prevent entry into situations likely to trigger unwanted emotions such as anxiety, guilt, or sadness. Once within an emotional state, effective approaches tend to be idiosyncratic and require individual experimentation to determine what works.
Justin Feinstein, who operates a float clinic on Maui, introduced the practice of deliberate cold exposure. Initial experiences with ice baths produce intense discomfort, elevated heart rate, and increased breathing. With repeated practice, these physiological responses diminish, and entry into cold water produces immediate decreases in heart rate and breathing, accompanied by relaxation.
The autonomic regulation developed through ice bath practice can generalize to other stressors. An individual who previously experienced immediate anger responses when drivers honked during parking maneuvers reported experiencing flat emotional responses to the same stimuli after establishing an ice bath routine. This represents training of automatic downregulation of autonomic emotional responses to psychological stressors.
Wim Hof has been known for an extended period. Deliberate cold exposure produces reliable increases in adrenaline and norepinephrine, and often reductions in cortisol, which appears paradoxical. The practice is reliable, efficient, and safe when performed appropriately, avoiding open water or hyperventilation techniques.
Research indicates that deliberate cold exposure improves resilience to subsequent stressors. The practice provides an efficient method for buffering immediate stress and anger responses.
Training for a 100-mile ultramarathon involves experiencing periods of feeling completely depleted followed by recovery. The cognitive knowledge that such states are temporary enables integration of experience over extended time scales. This represents emotion regulation operating across much longer durations than typical laboratory contexts.
Ultrarunning culture emphasizes relentless forward momentum alongside relentless optimism in the face of adversity. Runners encountering others at mile 40, 50, or 60 consistently offer encouragement rather than discouragement. Approximately half the time, refusing to give up results in the experience leveling out and improving despite initial projections of impossibility.
Any healthy individual who genuinely desires to complete a 100-mile ultramarathon can accomplish this goal. The event spans approximately 30 hours, representing a duration that is challenging yet finite and achievable.
Individuals who have endured significant adversity and emerged improved demonstrate that memory of overcoming hardship can enhance capacity to approach subsequent challenges. This contrasts with cases where individuals carry forward psychological wounds, resulting in downward trajectories in psychological and sometimes physical health.
Severe but time-limited adversity can be overcome through belief in one's capability. Additional factors include gratitude and awe, which enable appreciation of existence itself. These emotional states require time to develop but represent valuable orientations to maintain.
Dacher Keltner defines awe as occurring when attention shifts from small to large spatial scales or vice versa. This principle extends to the temporal domain, where extended challenging experiences, such as 30-hour ultramarathons, reveal the elasticity of time perception and generate awe regarding the quantity of remaining life.
Awe represents a uniquely human emotion derived from metacognitive capacity to detach conscious experience from the immediate present and engage in mental time travel. This ability enables adopting others' perspectives spatially, reminiscing about the past, and imagining future scenarios. Animals remain more constrained to immediate sensory input, whereas humans can flexibly direct conscious content, enabling planning, fiction writing, and novel creation.
Studies of patients with selective bilateral amygdala lesions, particularly the famous patient SM, initially showed an inability to perceive fear in emotional facial expressions. Subsequent research demonstrated that SM also does not consciously experience fear when exposed to haunted houses, exotic pet stores with snakes and spiders, or horror movies. However, the conclusion that the amygdala is simply a center for fear is considered overly simplistic, as the amygdala is embedded in a broader network of structures with individual differences playing a role.
Paul Ekman had the biggest impact on modern emotion science of any single person. His claim to fame was demonstrating through work in New Guinea that people across all cultures universally recognize six basic emotions from facial expressions: happiness, surprise, fear, anger, disgust, and sadness, sometimes with contempt added. This foundational work led to AI companies and computer algorithms being predicated on the idea that emotions can be read from facial expressions.
A paper co-authored by Lisa Feldman Barrett titled "emotional facial expressions reconsidered" challenged Ekman's claims. The research concluded that you cannot tell how someone feels from their facial expression nearly as well as previously thought. The methodological problems include that Ekman's emotional facial expressions were posed by actors in extreme forms, not what people normally display. The typical task involves multiple choice matching of faces to emotion word lists, which demonstrates convention rather than genuine emotion recognition.
When people see real-world facial expressions and generate their own descriptive words rather than choosing from lists, much more variation and heterogeneity emerges. Dog owner studies demonstrate this principle: owners are convinced they can tell if their dog feels guilty, but control experiments show their accuracy is at chance levels. Conviction about reading emotions from facial expressions vastly outstrips actual accuracy.
In real-world situations, people don't stop at facial expressions when assessing emotions. They ask questions, probe further, and consider circumstances to disambiguate emotional states. Romantic partnerships demonstrate how people track subtle changes like frequency of speech or text exchanges, becoming exquisitely tuned to deviations from expected patterns rather than relying on overt emotional displays.
Recent studies show that analyzing text conversations allows accurate assessment of both stable personality traits and current mood states. Large language models like GPT or Claude can analyze diary-type written text and generate personality profiles using the Big Five dimensions (extraversion, conscientiousness, neuroticism) that match ground truth assessments as well as clinicians or close friends can achieve.
Lisa Feldman Barrett's recent work incorporates prediction as a key element, where mismatches between predicted circumstances and actual events carry important information. Dynamic facial expressions are crucial, as studied by researchers like Philippe Schyns and Rachael Jack in Scotland, who examined at what point the brain begins representing different emotions based on how faces change over time rather than static appearances.
The human face has significantly more muscles and control than other animals. Great apes have similar muscle sets, but monkeys and dogs cannot produce the same range of expressions. This enhanced facial control becomes particularly important when observing infants, whose early interactions depend heavily on facial expressions before they develop greater autonomy.
Patient SM could experience autonomic arousal, stress, and anxiety under certain conditions despite bilateral amygdala lesions. When exposed to carbon dioxide inhalation, which induces panic attacks in about half the population by creating suffocation sensations, SM and other amygdala patients experienced full-blown panic attacks. This demonstrates that interoceptive fear signals depend on brainstem circuits rather than the amygdala.
The research reveals distinct brain systems for different types of fear: external threats versus internal panic states like suffocation or heart attacks. This challenges folk psychology categories, suggesting that emotions like anger, fear, or disgust represent many varieties that are more finely differentiated than common language suggests.
A PNAS paper by Lowry Newman and colleagues asked people to indicate on body mannequins where they would feel different emotions, creating heat-map style representations. However, this study measured concepts of emotions rather than actual physiological changes, as participants were given emotion words without experiencing the emotions themselves.
The insula receives input from all bodily organs and represents changes in the body as conscious experience. This aligns with William James's 1884 theory that emotions result from perceiving bodily changes that occur first. The insula appears to be the substrate for conscious experience of emotions, pain, and other strong feelings, though this represents only the conscious aspect rather than the emotion state itself.
Personal experience with a kidney stone revealed unique adaptive behaviors - curling into a ball and rocking motions - that differ from typical pain withdrawal reflexes. Unlike external pain where escape is possible, internal pain like kidney stones cannot be escaped or rubbed, representing a distinctly different pain category that activates the insula strongly.
The first approach involves people's concepts of where emotions correspond to bodily changes, as studied by Newman. The second involves actual changes in the body represented in the insula, forming the substrate for conscious emotional experience. Whether the conceptual maps accurately reflect real physiological changes remains untested.
Current studies of bodily emotion changes use crude measurements with few electrodes tracking basic metrics like heart rate and blood pressure. Comprehensive high-dimensional readouts measuring changes across multiple organs simultaneously would be needed to determine whether specific emotion states correlate with complex patterns of bodily changes.
The brain and body are very tightly coupled with intricate connections. Lisa Feldman Barrett has published neuroimaging studies showing reliable signatures of brain activation for basic emotions like anger, fear, and sadness. These signatures are distributed, spread out, and complicated rather than localized to one brain region. Given the association between emotions and brain patterns, combined with the intimate brain-body connection, there is a reasonable hypothesis that high-dimensional signatures of bodily changes would be systematically associated with certain emotions.
Media and advertising are incentivized to get people to prioritize emotions to the point where they take over behavior—whether to click and buy something, vote a certain way, or form group preferences. The path to behavior goes through prioritization and attentional capture. Emotions are designed to capture attention, and once attention is captured, there is a captive audience that can be controlled more effectively.
All day long people are bombarded with signals. Subtle advertising doesn't work well, and A/B testing tends to lead to sex or violence because these are the stimuli most likely to grab attention. This pattern reveals that attention gravitates toward more primitive states associated with the hypothalamus. There are ethical and societal lines that prevent extreme content, but media trends move toward more primitive content.
A lot of processing occurs in subcortical structures, and much of what is understood about emotions involves these subcortical circuits operating below conscious awareness.
Abstract art and music can tap into neural circuits related to particular emotions across people, independent of unique personal experiences. For abstract art without faces, animals, or scene depictions, more than half of people might report feeling peace when viewing certain pieces. Music can similarly activate emotion-related structures like the insula and amygdala.
Anne Blood and Robert Zatorre conducted one of the earliest emotion studies in the mid-1990s using positron emission tomography (PET). They played music to participants and measured whether it produced chills or goosebumps. When the same auditory stimulus produced different emotional responses in different people, imaging showed activation in the insula, amygdala, and other emotion-related structures during chills.
John O'Doherty at Caltech decomposed abstract art into constituent visual features that could be fed into neural networks. This allowed prediction of whether art would be liked or found pleasant versus unpleasant based on visual composition features, demonstrating that generalizable emotional responses can be evoked even by abstract stimuli.
Emotions didn't evolve to appreciate abstract art but rather to detect threats like tigers and bears. The visual features that trigger emotions in the real world can also appear in abstract art to evoke similar responses. Research has identified particular features in abstract stimuli that trigger emotional states in humans.
Face processing involves both hardwired and innate components present at birth in an experience-independent way, combined with normal maturation, development, and experience. Rebecca Saxe at MIT has conducted functional neuroimaging studies on babies shown faces to examine how the face-processing system develops.
The visual word form area provides a key example of this mixture. Regions specialized for word and letter recognition couldn't have evolved through natural selection since written language emerged too recently in human history. However, preverbal infants show that the connectivity of this region is already wired in ways that predispose it to support word recognition computations once reading experience begins.
Single neurons can be found that respond selectively to almost anything, but these individual neurons don't meaningfully contribute to understanding brain function because downstream processing integrates input from tens of thousands of neurons. At the population level, recording from thousands of neurons shows there is information from which smiles versus frowns can be decoded.
Work with Ueli Rutishauser, Shuo Wang, and colleagues recording from epilepsy patients has demonstrated this population-level information exists. The brain must contain information distinguishing frowns from smiles because people can make this distinction, but this information exists at the ensemble level rather than through single-neuron tuning.
The visual system processes information hierarchically from simple features like center-surround organization to oriented bars to more complex representations. At birth, face processing systems are crude and become more refined and granular through experience. The same hierarchical construction applies to emotional processing.
When encountering a bear or tiger, retinal input consists of pixels and blobby shapes, but progressively more abstract representations must be constructed. Deep convolutional neural networks demonstrate this same process of building abstract representations from pixel-wise input, achieving invariant recognition regardless of position, distance, or lighting conditions.
Emotions require abstraction, which makes them flexible. David Anderson and Ralph Adolphs describe emotions using a fan-in fan-out architecture. Fear states can be reached through many different inputs—seeing, smelling, or hearing a bear, hearing a twig snap, or someone yelling about a bear. Unlike rigid reflexes with single inputs and outputs, emotions allow diverse behavioral responses that are context-dependent.
Reflexes require separate pathways for each specific threat, which would be inefficient. The fan-in fan-out architecture allows convergence of multiple threat-related cues onto a central emotional state, then divergence to flexible behavioral outputs.
Some highly functional people who care for families and coworkers are not hyper-attuned to others' emotional nuances, while some less functional, more labile individuals are highly sensitive to everyone's emotional states. There can be advantages to not being constantly tuned to subtle social cues.
Emotional regulation involves variability and flexibility rather than single strategies. James Gross initially focused on mechanisms like suppression, reappraisal, and acceptance, but current understanding emphasizes the ability to have multiple options and switch between emotion regulation responses.
Emotional regulation is interpersonal—regulating others' emotions, picking up on others' emotions, and influencing others' emotions in bidirectional interactions. Emotional intelligence involves reading these dynamics automatically and in context-dependent ways. What's most adaptive depends on circumstances, and successful approaches require variety and the ability to switch strategies based on context.
Physiological heart rate variability provides an analogy: training should develop a wide range rather than just achieving low heart rate. Similarly, emotional adaptability comes from having a big range of emotions and switching between them contextually.
Emotional granularity—the ability to differentiate and be aware of emotional variety—pioneered by Lisa Feldman Barrett, connects to emotion regulation flexibility. Fine-grained emotional differentiation combined with metacognitive oversight enables selecting the most adaptive response path among many options.
Research on autism examines how different positions on the spectrum affect emotional and social processing capabilities.
My lab studies autism amongst other things. And you certainly would have the case that as a spectrum, yes indeed, you would have mathematicians, engineers, lots of people who are very successful who are on the spectrum to some extent. And I think, coming back to what you were saying, it's sort of liberating or simplifying. If you had to really effortly, cognitively think about how to regulate your social behavior and make all the right moves and not offend anybody, you were worried about that all the time. It would be overwhelming. And I think it is overwhelming for many people with autism that you need to somehow internalize it and it has to be relatively effortless and automatic. It has to become automatic at some level and then you can move through life fairly smoothly in a socially very complex way. And that's what's difficult for many people with autism that they lack that part. They can compensate to some extent, but the cognitive load starts really being an impediment because if you have to track everything, you have to remember, okay, I should make eye contact, I have to remember turn taking, if you have to cognitively remember all those things, it's just overwhelming. So, you have to be able to somehow have it be automatic at some level.
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Let's talk about autism. And I'll just put the mention up front because this is a topic that sometimes gets people triggered. Let's leave out for the time being, not because it isn't important. It is important. Let's leave out severe cases of autism where people need lifelong care. They can't care for themselves and let's talk about the rest of the spectrum. Already in that statement, I'm sure I violated some of the newer nomenclature. But let's just liberate ourselves a little bit. Come at this from a place of benevolence and trying to understand social dynamics, social processing in the brain. So, we're not talking about people with severe stereotypes who just need lifelong care even, etc. We're talking about the rest of the category.
Something like this former colleague of mine in San Diego a little bit on the spectrum. For all I know he would have been one of our participants maybe I mean a delightful person, happy marriage, happy family, everyone in his lab adored him and brilliant scientist and by my read highly functional in all aspects of life but definitely not tuned in to what other people are thinking or doing and context mattered, right? I mean, he understood what not to do in a broad sense, but you know, he was free of this burden that you described.
There's a lot of emphasis nowadays on kids who have autism of the sort that we're describing and the need, we're told, to train them to make eye contact and read faces. So, this lands square in your work. Maybe you could just fill out a bit of what's now known, what's thought, what's not known.
It's a great topic. I mean the way that I personally have approached it is not with a primary interest in autism. I don't have a family member who has autism. I'm not don't have any personal experience. It's really been just like with the amygdala lesion patient. It's my main motivation has been to just understand the mind cognition emotion in general and with respect to autism by understanding individual differences. Everybody's different from everybody else. And autism is one particular dimension that we just have a lot of tools to look at that is, you know, social interaction, social awareness, ability to read other people's emotions. And so that dimension of social variability maps onto one of the facets of autism spectrum disorder. And so that's why we've looked at both people who do not have any diagnosis of autism. There's still there's a range of autistic like traits that you can quantify with questionnaires that are well regarded. And then once you get to a DSM5 diagnosis, you have more and more severe cases of autism with respect to social functioning that again you can quantify using tools like the etc. But it's a spectrum that I personally look at as a particularly interesting and important dimension of individual differences in social interactions with other people in my lab that have different motivations. They have family members with autism for instance. So they're personally interested in autism as a psychiatric category.
Coming to your question, there's a lot of really interesting work and a lot of opportunities now that we've been actually using in our lab as well to look at the question of processing about faces, eye contact, etc. I mean right now how much eye contact are you making with me? How much eye contact am I making with you? It is extremely variable. I mean the eyes move around. They carry a lot of information. You know, socially there's a gigantic range there. It's data that are now fairly easy to quantify and collect in hundreds or thousands of people using their webcams. And so we have a study going on where people watch for example a zoom video other people interacting talking and we use the webcam on their laptop to record where they are looking on the screen when they have that zoom video going on. So we can quantify along across large numbers of people and the basic finding has been that people who are further along have high who score higher on this dimension of the autism spectrum of social interaction with just questionnaire based measures or a psychiatric diagnosis make less eye contact and as well as other features. So we're looking at contact with the person who's talking distraction to other things. We have experimental features where there's a person talking, they're making eye contact, there's like TV or something that goes on in the background and we can quantify to what extent is your visual attention, your gaze that we can quantify from the webcam captured by somebody looking, somebody talking, somebody smiling or laughing, the TV going on in the background as a distractor. And we can put all of that into a big model and ask what is it that normally drives visual attention and what is it that distinguishes people with autism and where they would look. And the basic answer is that the social features like eyes or who's talking have less of a weight on where autistic people would look than the distractors, but they tend to be more distracted. And that that is we've been doing this study every month now for a year that seems to be a temporally stable personality traitlike feature of autism spectrum disorder. So it fluctuates to some extent and we're trying to quantify does it interact with whether you've slept badly the night before or you're stressed or other things that can change. Those do have an effect. But the answer seems to be it's fairly temporally stable and it's almost like a signature for individuals. There's some people that are real face lookers and they look at faces a lot and there's some people that look at faces hardly at all and that seems to be stable across time and like a basic personality trait.
In this population of people diagnosed across the board for everybody. If I just take the general population on average it's the case that those people who would have a diagnosis of autism or who score higher on autistic traits even if they don't have a diagnosis look less at faces. But across everybody, it's the case that some people look a lot at faces, some people don't. And that that's temporally stable. So in general, right now, if you quantify it from this podcast, how often do I make eye contact or look at you? And then you ask, you know, like in a classroom or in a lab meeting, how often do I make eye contact? It would be similar proportion that I'm just like not a face looker or eye looker and you might be. It's like a stable personality trait and it's associated coarsely with this dimension in autism spectrum disorder. But of course the million dollar question is what else is it associated with? Is it predictive of career success? Is it predictive of anything else? And so we don't know. We're measuring everything else and getting lots of questionnaires on these people to ask what what are the associations and is there any causal hypothesis that we would come up with that if you don't look at faces a lot there's some consequences if you look at faces a lot there are other consequences if that were the case we're not there yet that would make very interesting predictions which mean well maybe I should be looking at your face all the time and you the podcast would get a million hits or who knows what.
Well, that's I mean that that's another big question which which we're looking at in these longitudinal studies which is a question of to what extent can you change who you are and you know your emote we were talking about emotion regulation. You can regulate your emotions. You can have this metacognitive insight. You can have some control. Can you change if you're extrovert or neurotic? Can you change your personality? And the answer seems to be to some extent. For some variables more than others but we're trying to quantify that. So we have this big longitudinal data set where we give people tons and tons of questionnaires about their personality, about their mood, about lots of things and are asking to what extent over time do they get pushed around and that can change and which ones stay constant and constitutes sort of the core of their personality that's unchangeable. But I think it's a super interesting question. What parts of you can change and what parts of you cannot?
Yeah, I think about this all the time. I feel like some people, this is pseudoscientific what I'm about to describe. They seem to have very high autonomic what I call like art RPM. I have a it's more of a former colleague because I haven't been working in that field for a while but you ever see Bon Rosska from Basil give a talk like he moves a lot. He's very electric. He's also very thin and he moves and and his brain he's exceedingly smart has a high basil metabolic rate. High basil metabolic rate and like a hummingbird. But he moves a lot. Right. And then other people they move less. I think about this all the time because I'm fascinated by and I love dogs. I go to this AKC meet the breeds thing every year. I don't go every year. They do it every year, but I highly recommend people go even if you don't want a dog because you get to see all the different genetic variation, which of course relates to body size, but also temperament and and just bulldogs are probably more on the on the slow mellow side compared to Yorkshire terriers that are more very little spontaneous movement. I think it's one of the reasons why people feel comfortable approaching a bulldog, whereas like a, you know, pit bulls are always kind of like winding around and moving, but some dogs it may relate to other things, cuteness and what, but some people just seem to have a lot of spontaneous movement. Other people are more stable in their bodily movements. And it does seem to relate to kind of how excitable they are or not excitable they are. So you can imagine like if you're if you're humming at a higher RPM, you can like more prone to action forcing. It's a super interesting observation because the question of course is to what extent does it relate to how their mind is working, right? I mean, as we're talking now and as you were just talking, you're, you know, we're moving our hands, we're moving our body, we're moving our face, you know, not just sitting there speaking. So, to some extent, all of these bodily movements are interfaced with thought.
If I had to sit completely still and not, you know, move, it would be pretty hard to have this conversation, right? So, to some extent, bodily movements actually help us structure our thoughts. It's not just like a large language model. It's not just language going on. It interfaces with the body and it punctuates thoughts to some extent. So I think it's super interesting and it's it's certainly the case that the way that somebody moves their body does say something about how they're thinking as well.
Yeah, I've been reading my audio book and I asked them the sound technicians to allow me to stand while I read it. Much easier to read an audio book and to put in flexion. You actually can lean in when you want to emphasize something and you can, you know, point to the words for a moment, but then when you need to work through a passage that needs to be very finely structured with little emotion because that happens too if you clasp your hands and do it. So our friend Eddie Chang tells me that the hand representations in the brain are very close to the language center. So these were probably our first tools of language or at least they co-evolved.
Well, your mouth and your hands are the most dextrous and over represented in the brain. you can, you know, control the world with them and you can move from the most. Yeah. When, you know, when the co pandemic started 2020, we weren't allowed to to go on campus at all. So, we sat around in our apartments. I sat at home, we had lab meetings on Zoom, only Zoom and lectures. All the classes were on Zoom. Prior to that and then then Zoom took off and now it's most meetings are hybrid. But before that point, everything was face to face. I would stand up and lecture. We would talk face to face and suddenly switching to just seeing a bunch of often little just black squares right for the for the whole classroom there on Zoom. That was a hard switch. That lack of an interactive nature which is something that we're looking at now. I think it's going to be super cool. I have a graduate student just starting this. The experiment is this. I would see your face on a screen and that's it. I would see a video of you. I would zoom with you right now and we could be having this podcast over Zoom. I actually thought we were going to have this over Zoom. So I'm very happy it's not over Zoom actually better in person and then then you're here if you're in person, right? And it feels different. It feels different. And so we we're sort of trying to parameterize that degree of social realness of social interaction. And then we're doing that with people with autism asking where does it change and how difficult is it for people with autism to interact with another person? Is it equally difficult over Zoom? Is it equally difficult over Zoom if you have the selfie camera turned off? the other person can't see you and you know that and so we're trying to look at the the degree of actual social interaction as a relevant dimension and I think it makes a huge difference. I mean it feels completely different being face to face that if you're on Zoom let alone if I just watch a video that's not actually aligned in time.
The way I described the kind of higher or lower RPM before made it perhaps made it sound like one or the other was better. But I think sometimes about like Alex Honold who again who was a guest on this podcast and there have been claims that his amygdala doesn't react as much. Anyway, we could we could talk about that. I think Alex kind of like maybe chuckles a little bit at those studies cuz he does experience anxiety and fear just not in the context of this like highly trained situation he's put himself in every single day for so long. But I do have to wonder whether people who go out on long runs, for instance, there's not a lot of talking going on. Or Alex, he's devoting his physical and mental energetic resources toward climbing and figuring out these how to navigate high-risk, high consequence situations, totally just in flow. You're just like totally absorbed in what you're doing. If you're doing a type climbing once he he's got it, but like to work out the puzzle of like with ropes first of how to maneuver so that he can actually free solo it is is a remarkable thing. But I almost get the impression that if people speak less that they're able to devote more mental and physical resources to the thing they're doing. I never ran ultras, but I recall like running, you know, I used to run for like a long 8 to 10 mile run on Sundays used to be a thing. Now it's getting shorter and shorter run. I have to go get it back. But come back from those and there's a fatigue component that confounds what I'm about to say. But one is a lot less reactive when you spent a bunch of time just in your own head and you've learned to tolerate the voice in your own head. I find that I'm much calmer after I've spent a bunch of time alone because I've I've gone through that kind of initial stage of the mind fluttering and then you want to communicate with people and I'll lock up my phone in a box these days to do real work and I come out of it and things come my way and they're sort of out there and over there and unless they really demand my attention they kind of just don't grab me. Whereas I think when we're highly engaged with in in our own mental dialogue it's almost like we're trying to converse with the world. So I think there's real value to doing these solo treks and to devoting time to getting past that need to engage with the world. I think it's very very useful.
Yeah. I mean I'm sure it's idiosyncratic. It'll vary. But I think that particular aspect that you mentioned that you can just be comfortable in your own mind and that that's beneficial. I think that's a big part it's a big part of lots of training techniques and big part of lots of meditative techniques that you just but again it's very individual. It's not just sort of onesizefits-all, but the ability to not just be driven by sensory input and be comfortable with your own mind. It's not that you're doing nothing at all. You're training you're training your own mind to be comfortable. And I think the consequence of that is then subsequently when you encounter challenges in the world, you're actually better equipped to deal with those and better equipped to regulate your emotion. But when you're just at peace with yourself, if you're not doing nothing, your brain is being trained all the time and it's being trained in a useful way. And I think the ability to detach and decouple from the constant challenges and sensory information that's normally coming in, it's like sleep allows the brain to actually train itself and focus on particular internal regulation strategies that are then subsequently useful for dealing with the world later. Could we say that one form of potentially useful emotional intelligence or social intelligence training is to just spend some time in your own head either moving or not moving. You could do it meditating or you could do it running but to just resist the temptation to get pulled out into the world and just get good at just sitting with these things that we call emotions and thoughts. I think so, especially it's again it's going to be individual and it's going to vary but I think so especially if you can get some kind of metacognitive or reflective awareness and work on what is going on in your mind and ultimately it's training control. It's training control of your emotions and training control of your thoughts. And if you're constantly bombarded and just dealing with stuff coming in, you don't have time to do that. It's called social media.
Exactly. Yes. Of which I have none. And so if you're just by yourself, you know, if you're running or if you're meditating or if you're trained up, if you're in an ice bath, I think you actually get a particular type of internal training that you just don't have the leisure to get if you're bombarded by social media, for instance. Yes. You know, every beginning of my lab meeting now, people have their laptops open and their phones out. We put them down and we actually have five minutes of silence, a sort of meditative silence for to people to clear their minds at the beginning of Yeah. Five minute or three minutes. At the beginning of every lab meeting, we have a short meditative session. I put a picture up of some beautiful pe on the north shore of Kawaii and people in case people want to look at that, but many people just close their eyes. People can do whatever they want. It's but the idea is to clear your mind and focus and relax and get into a frame of mind where you're actually now most receptive to listen to the research presentation that's coming up because you you know you come in and your mind is all over the place and you know there's an email here and the phone is going and you just your mind is buzzing. So quieting that, finding some focus and then being able to engage subsequently much better with the real world, listening to the talk. I think that's that helps and we do that every lab meeting Mondays at noon seems to work for people.
How long have you implemented this? We started it in 2020 when George Floyd was killed specifically to remember George Floyd. So it was a there was a very specific starting point because many people were upset and we figured we needed some kind of remembrance or just a moment of silence to to acknowledge things and then it morphed into you know you can remember whatever you like. you can just relax and then it sort of morphed into this idea. Well, you know, let's just have a moment of silence and just like recalibrate from the busy world and everything that's just been going on to now, you know, I mean, it's good to do on average every day in any case, but certainly right now before we launch into the research presentation at a lab meeting. So, we sort of morphed from a moment of silence to remember somebody to a short meditation essentially.
I love it. that my neuroscience colleagues are doing ice baths, training for 100 mile races, and doing the question is, is it helping my am I getting more nature papers as a consequence of any of these? That's a different metric. That's a different metric. You seem like a happy vital person and and you're writing books and you're doing public education here. In addition to all of that, I'd like to actually stay on this meditation thing for a moment. Rick Rubin, famed music producer, came on this podcast. He also happens to be a friend of mine. And right as we sat down, he said, "Um, can we do some coherence breathing first?" He plays it's like a tone. You do some inhale, exhale, and you know, he he likes these transition breathing exercises are great. Yeah, these transition tools and and they will increase your heart rate variability and these kinds of things. But I think that one of the most interesting and understudied things in our field is task switching. Whether it's emotional task switching or cognitive task switching like we assume the brain operates in step functions like oh I'm out on the street I navigate traffic I park my car and I come in and I podcast and what you're doing at the beginning of this lab meaning in on the one hand is a meditation but it's you're pivoting the brain circuits toward what comes next. Yeah. I don't think we talk enough as neuroscientists about the fact that the brain doesn't just immediately switch over that you're carrying residual activity from whatever you were doing before. Yes. There's a there's a cost to that, a well-known cost. So, as soon as you switch into something, there's a cost
Switching between tasks carries a measurable cost from the previous activity, resulting in slower and more difficult performance on subsequent trials. This switching cost demonstrates that transitioning between activities requires effort. Several theories explain why switching is difficult: some residue or inertia carries over from the prior task, or the brain requires reconfiguration between the previous activity and the new task. These processes require effort, and the ability to switch quickly is a skill being studied extensively through human brain recordings and considered for AI design.
The skill of switching between tasks, anticipating when to switch, and knowing how to switch is enormously important. While people might assume emotional intelligence training involves studying faces or making more eye contact, the evidence points toward different approaches. Former Tier One SEAL team operator DJ Shipley described his routine for transitioning from work to home, rehearsing exactly where he would place his bag to scoop up his daughter, treating the transition like an operation. This systematic approach allows him to drop everything from the day and be at his best when entering the home environment.
Task switching is largely trainable, and meditative exercises specifically train this ability. Meditation represents a significant switch from being constantly bombarded by external stimuli to putting all of that aside and being internally focused. Richie Davidson's research on Tibetan monks and long-term meditators who have accumulated 10,000 hours of practice, as well as studies on shorter regular meditative exercises, demonstrates measurable health benefits for non-experts. The benefits extend to basic physiology, emotion granularity, emotion regulation, and control of thought when being externally oriented versus meditating.
A proposed experiment would examine the cost of task switching with or without inserting five minutes of silence between tasks. Since transitions are inherently choppy, introducing a period of silence might reduce the time needed to switch brain modes. Current research involves task switching studies in epilepsy patients using single unit recordings to observe how neural representations change during task transitions, though these studies do not yet include meditative training interventions.
Short meditations, at least initially, can be viewed as another version of the ice bath experience. When lab meetings begin with three minutes of silence, participants find it very stressful, and the instruction to simply not do anything for one to five minutes represents significant behavioral inhibition. This difficulty is trainable, though social perception aspects exist, such as when glass-walled conference rooms allow others to observe the silent periods.
At the Naval Academy in Annapolis, approximately 4,000 accomplished students demonstrate trained behavioral control. When a bell sounds in the cafeteria, conversation stops completely despite thousands of people present. Similarly, when entering auditoriums, the transition from talking to silence occurs as a step function. Students have no phone access during the day except for one hour, and zero social media presence is maintained.
A complete absence from social media platforms including X, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn is maintained, with the rationale being that existing email volume already exceeds 100% capacity. Time on social media can be tracked by using a separate phone designated only for posting and brief reading before exiting.
During a significant health challenge involving diagnosis, treatment, and recovery, emotional regulation played a central role. Initial diagnosis triggered a mixture of fear, sadness, and worry, requiring both individual and interpersonal emotion regulation, particularly between spouses. The process involved moving beyond immediate negative emotions toward experiencing awe, gratitude, and acceptance. This shift created a metacognitive perspective on one's lifespan, time allocation, and priorities.
A health crisis prompted training for a 100-mile ultramarathon despite therapy side effects including joint pain and fatigue. The experience reinforced gratitude and awe at the existence of consciousness and the world itself. From a neuroscience perspective, death is understood inversely to the common view: rather than the world losing the individual, the individual loses the world as neural construction of reality gradually diminishes. This understanding emphasizes maximizing remaining time.
The researcher's work demonstrates integration between personal practices targeting autonomic nervous system regulation and emotion regulation alongside rigorous neural circuit studies. Well-controlled laboratory studies examining fundamental mechanisms have broad applicability, and scientists who combine personal application with systematic research provide valuable models for translating findings to practical use.
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