Neuroscientist Andrew Huberman on the Essential Role of Sleep in Learning New Skills

Doesn't nicotine as well? Nicotine has some sort of a nootropic benefit to it. Not encouraging people to smoke, but you know, you can take it in various forms, particularly gum. I know people take it in gum just for the nootropic benefit of it. Yeah, I'm not encouraging people to take anything, but there's a very, very famous Nobel Prize winning neuroscientist who I went to his office to visit him in New York and he chewed seven pieces of nikoret during that half hour meeting. And I was like, what is going on here? And he said, well, first of all, it increases plasticity. And second of all, he has the belief, and this is not a clinical study, but he thinks that it can also hold off certain forms of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. Didn't Bertrand Russell, wasn't he like a famous smoker? Like it wouldn't even. I don't know. I think he wouldn't even go on a plane unless there was a smoking section because he couldn't imagine not having his pipe for a certain amount of time. Well, creatives, you know, when I think when smoking became less in vogue, I think creatives really suffered because it's very clear that so nikoret is nicotine and the acetylcholine binds to the nicotinic receptor. So when you take nicotine in cigarette form or in nikoret form, you're actually increasing the release of acetyl with the action of acetylcholine in the brain. Yeah, I don't smoke cigarettes, but I have. And the only time I have is before shows because I have friends that are comedians that would smoke and I'd be like, give me one of them things. Let me see what's going on. And I smoked, I was like, whoa, dude, you get high off these things. This is crazy. Particularly if you don't smoke cigarettes, you get this really weird high. Well, your receptors have never seen that level of nicotine before and they like that. It's exciting. Yeah. And so for those moments, you know, your acetylcholine is like a spotlight. It brings your vision literally into this more kind of portrait mode where you can see more like a narrow window of what's going on. There are behavioral ways to access this too. Before a fight, you know, somebody's really ramped up. Their world is not, they're not seeing everything. They're probably, I've never done the walk of course, but probably walking out to the octagon. They're not seeing Alba, the color of the hat or the woman in the corner. You know, they're not relaxed. They're hyped up. But that's a trigger for plasticity because the brain needs some way to cue this plasticity prostitute. Let itself know, because it's a self-learning organ, let itself know that something's really different. That's adrenaline. Something's changed. Then there's focus. What's changed? So in the jiu-jitsu example you gave earlier, it's the ability to focus on what the sequence is, what happens when, and okay, I did that correctly or I didn't do that correctly, but that's duration, path and outcome again. And having acetylcholine and noradrenaline up, that sets the plasticity trigger. However, that doesn't guarantee that those synapses are gonna change. It does not mean that you're necessarily gonna learn. Oh no. What guarantees that that process will be converted into literally the change in the connections between neurons, sometimes new neurons, but mostly the change in the strength of the connection so that eventually you don't have to do duration, path, outcome. You can just be reflexive about it, is states of deep sleep and any state where you're not doing duration, path, outcome. So we know from two recent studies, some of this was done by my lab, but by other labs as well, in humans, which I think is important to distinguish between mouse and human where we can. A lot of the changes in these brain structures occurs after learning during deep sleep, in particular slow wave sleep. But it also occurs during periods of naps and shallow sleep or even just periods where people deliberately decompress, where they're not focusing on any one thing in particular. So if we were gonna kind of operationalize this process, it would be focus intensely, have an intense period of urgency, and then access the deepest rest you can where you're not thinking about anything, where space and time becomes very fluid. So stress in that case, post exercise or learning session would actually hinder your ability to grow and get better. Absolutely. And elite performers like elite military, elite athletes, I'm sure you're familiar with this, they understand that the ability to toggle back and forth between these high alert, high attentional states and deep rest is not just the key to performing what you can already do, it's also the ability to get better over time. Yeah. Yeah.