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I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.
For today's podcast, we're going to talk about the parts list of the nervous system.
Now, that might sound boring, but these are the bits and pieces that together make up everything about your experience of life, from what you think about to what you feel, what you imagine, and what you accomplish from the day you're born until the day you die.
By the end of this podcast, I promise you're going to understand a lot more about how you work and how to apply that knowledge.
So let's talk about the nervous system.
The reason I say your nervous system and not your brain is because your brain is actually just one piece of this larger, more important thing, frankly, that we call the nervous system.
The nervous system includes your brain and your spinal cord, but also all the connections between your brain and your spinal cord and the organs of your body.
It also includes, very importantly, all the connections between your organs back to your spinal cord and brain.
So the way to think about how you function at every level from the moment you're born until the day you die, everything you think and remember and feel and imagine is that your nervous system is this continuous loop of communication between the brain, spinal cord and body and body, spinal cord and brain.
In fact, we really can't even separate them.
It's one continuous loop.
The way to think about how the nervous system works is that our experiences, our memories, everything is sort of like the keys on a piano being played in a particular order.
Right?
If I play the keys on a piano in a particular order and with a particular intensity, that's a given song.
We could make that analogous to a given experience.
Our brain is really a map of our experience.
We come into the world and our brain has a kind of bias towards learning particular kinds of things.
It's ready to receive information and learn that information.