2026-08-06
34 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.
Today, we are going to discuss your brain chemistry and how to control
and optimize your brain chemistry for all aspects of mental health, physical health, and performance.
The important thing to know is that your brain and your spinal cord and the rest of your so-called
nervous system control all the organs of your body and that all the organs
of your body feed back meaning they communicate through chemicals and other means to your nervous system.
And vitally important is the fact that which neural circuits are active and which neural circuits
are likely to be less active at any given moment depends on two major categories of chemicals.
It depends on hormones and it depends...
On so-called neuromodulators.
And the four neuromodulators that we're going to talk about today that are of the utmost
importance for your goals are dopamine, epinephrine, also called adrenaline, serotonin, and acetylcholine.
There are many features of how neuromodulators work,
but for sake of today's discussion, we only need to focus on two of those features,
and those are fast-acting features and longer, slower features, or what we call baseline features.
Now, perhaps surprisingly, I'd like to focus on the slow actions of the neuromodulators first,
because those slow actions of the neuromodulators are happening in you and in me and in everyone right now.
And they set the backdrop, the context in which the various tools to manipulate dopamine, epinephrine, serotonin,