Essentials: Neuralink & Technologies to Enhance Human Brains | Dr. Matt MacDougall

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. Matthew McDougall. Doctor. McDougall, welcome. Good to be here. Just to kick things off, as a neurosurgeon and as a neuroscientist, could you share with us your vision of the brain as an organ as it relates to what's possible there? Surgeons tend to view the world a little bit differently than most because they like to fix and they like to mend, and in your case, have the potential to add things into the brain that don't exist there already. So how do you think about and conceptualize the brain as an organ? And what do you think is really possible with the brain that most of us don't already probably think about. The brain really is a collection of functional modules pinned together, duct taped together in this bone box attached to your head. And sometimes you see very interesting failure modes. So one of the most memorable patients I ever had was very early on in my training. I was down at UC San Diego and saw, a very young guy who had just been in a car accident. We had operated on him. And, you know, as is so often the case in neurosurgery, we had saved his life, potentially at the cost of quality of life. When he woke from surgery with bilateral frontal lobe damage, he had essentially no impulse control left. And so we were called back by his, you know, 80 year old recovery room nurse saying, You've got to come see your patient right away. Something's wrong. And we walk in to see him and he points at his elderly nurse and says, She won't have sex with me. And, you know, it was apparent at that moment, his frontal lobes were gone. And that person is never going to have reasonable human behavior again. It's one of the most tragic ways to have a brain malfunction, but you know, anything a brain does, anything from control of hormone levels in your body, to vision, to sensation, to, you know, the most obvious thing, which is muscle movement of any kind from eye movement to moving your bicep, all that comes out of the brain. All of it can go wrong, any part of it or all of it. So yeah, working with the brain is the substance of the brain as a surgeon, very high stakes. But once in a while you get a chance to really help. You get a chance to fix something that seems unfixable, and you have, you know, Lazarus like miracles, not too uncommonly. So it's extremely satisfying as a career. Could you share with us one of the more satisfying experiences? Sure. Or what qualifies …