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.
My name is Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.
So let's talk about emotions.
Emotions are a fascinating and vital aspect of our life experience.
It's fair to say that emotions make up most of what we think of as our experience of life.
Even the things we do, our behaviors, and the places we go and the people we end up encountering in our life,
all of that really funnels into our emotional perception of what those things mean.
Whether or not they made us happy or sad or depressed or lonely, or were awe inspiring.
Now, one thing that is absolutely true is that everyone's perception of emotion is slightly different.
Meaning your idea of happy is very likely different than my idea of what a state of happiness is.
And we know this also for color vision.
For instance,
even though the cells in your eye
and my eye that perceive the color red are identical right down to the genes that they express,
we can be certain,
based on experimental evidence and what are called psychophysical studies,
that your idea of the most intense red is going to be very different than my idea of the most intense red.
If we were given a selection of 10 different reds and asked which one is most intense,