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.
Today we are going to discuss light and the many powerful uses of light to optimize our health.
One of the reasons why light has such powerful effects on so many different aspects of our biology is that it can be translated into electrical signals in our brain and body,
into hormone signals in our brain and body,
and indeed into what we call cascades of biological pathways,
meaning light can actually change the genes that the cells of your body's express.
And that is true throughout the lifespan.
Light is electromagnetic energy.
It can cause reactions in cells of your body.
It can cause reactions in fruit, for instance, right?
You see a piece of fruit and it's not ripe, but it gets a lot of sunlight and it ripens.
That's
because the electromagnetic energy of sunlight had an impact on that plant or that tree or even on the fruit directly.
Now the second thing that you need to understand about the physics of light is that light has many different wavelengths.
And the simplest way to conceptualize this is to imagine that cover of that Pink Floyd album where there's a prism,
you have a white beam of light going into that prism,
and then the prism splits that beam of light into what looks like a rainbow.
So you've got your reds, your orange, your greens, your blues, your purples, et cetera.