Essentials: How Emotions & Social Factors Impact Learning | Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now for my discussion with Doctor. Mary Helen Immordino Yang. Doctor. Immordino Yang. Good to be here. Great to have you. I've heard you talk before about inspiration and awe. Inspiration and awe seem to me kind of rather high level emotional experiences compared to say fear or happiness. What is the role of inspiration and awe and story in how we learn and experience life starting at a young age? Yeah, I mean, I think what you've noticed is actually fundamental to the conundrum of being a human, is that our most high level complex brain states, mind states are also fundamentally hooking themselves into the most basic biological machinery that keeps us alive. Our beliefs, experiences, our interpretations of the meaning of things, which that's where the story comes in. The stories that we conjure about, you know, collectively with other people, culturally, in spaces inside our own selves also, those stories become kind of the through line that organizes the way in which we construct our own experience, consciousness even, I would say. When we hook into those very basic survival systems by recruiting them into these narratives about the nature of reality, the power of the meaning we make, what happens is we get this amazingly both fundamental and high level state simultaneously where we feel expansive. We feel, like it's all so incredibly beautiful. And we are, I would argue, actually ramping into or catching into the very basic survival mechanisms that make us conscious, that make us alive. And that's in essence the power of being a human. That's the power of our intelligence at this late stage in our evolution. I've heard you say before, and I love this quote, and I want to make sure that you get attribution for this, not me, that we basically have a brain to control our body. Could you comment on this notion of the brain being the organ that's responsible for controlling the body and what that dialogue is like? So the first thing I'll say is that I learned that idea from working with Antonio DiMaggio. And he taught me first that, this notion that the... That it's the feeling of the body. It's it's an organism's ability to represent or map the state of the interior and exterior of the body that becomes the substrate for consciousness and for the mind. The work that I've been doing, it's basically addressing exactly the question that you're asking, which is how is it that we construct a narrative, construct a conscious feeling into something that feels like a narrative, that feels like a belief state or an emotion state or an experience? And what is the role of embodiment in that? What …