2025-01-09
40 分钟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.
Let's continue our discussion about neuroplasticity, this incredible feature of our nervous system that allows it to change itself in response to experience and even in ways that we consciously and deliberately decide to change it.
Most people don't know how to access neuroplasticity, and so that's what this entire month of the Huberman Lab podcast has been about.
We've explored neuroplasticity from a variety of different perspectives.
We talked about representational plasticity.
We talked about the importance of focus and reward.
We talked about this amazing and somewhat surprising aspect of the vestibular system, how altering our relationship to gravity, and in addition to that, making errors as we try and learn can open up windows to plasticity.
But we have not really talked so much about directing the plasticity toward particular outcomes.
And thus far, we really haven't talked yet about how to undo things that we don't want.
And so today we are going to explore that aspect of neuroplasticity, and we are going to do that in the context of.
Of a very important and somewhat sensitive topic, which is pain and in some cases, injury to the nervous system.
We, as always here on this podcast, are going to discuss some of the science.
We get into mechanism, but we also really get at principles.
Principles are far more important than any one experiment or one description of mechanism, and certainly far more important than any one protocol, because principles allow you to think about your nervous system and work with it in ways that best serve you.
So let's start our discussion about pain and the somatosensory system.
The somatosensory system is, as the name implies, involved in understanding touch, physical feeling on our body.
And the simplest way to think about the somatosensory system is that we have little sensors.
And those sensors come in the form of neurons, nerve cells that reside in our skin.
And in the deeper layers below the skin, we have some that correspond to, and we should say, respond to mechanical touch.