2025-02-13
44 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.
This podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
Today we're going to explore hormones.
What they are, how they work, what leads to masculinization or feminization of the brain and body.
What we're trying to do today is really get to the biology, the physiology, the endocrinology, and the behavior.
Hormones, by definition, are a substance, a chemical that's released in one area of the body, typically from something we call a gland, although they can also be released from neurons, but they're released often from glands that travel and have effects both on that gland, but also on other organs and tissues in the body.
And that differentiates hormones from things like neurotransmitters, which tend to act more locally.
Examples of tissues that produce hormones would be the thyroid, the testes, the ovaries, et cetera.
And then, of course, there are areas of the brain like the hypothalamus and the pituitary, which are closely related to one another and release hormones that cause the release of yet other hormones out in the body.
So let's start with development.
Sperm meets egg.
Everything that happens before that is a topic of the next episode.
But sperm meets egg, this is mammalian reproduction.
And that egg starts to duplicate.
It starts to make more of itself, it makes more cells.
And eventually some of those cells become skin, some of those cells become brain, some of those cells become muscle, some of those cells become fingers, all the stuff that makes up the brain and body plan.
In addition, there are hormones that come both from the mother and from the developing baby, the developing fetus, that impact whether or not the brain will be what they call organized masculine or organized feminine.
And as I say this, I want you to try and discard with the cultural connotations or your psychological connotations of what masculinization and feminization are, because we're only centering on the biology.
So typically, people have either two X chromosomes and the traditional language around that is that person is female, right?