How Your Brain Works & Changes
发布时间 2021-01-04 16:00:44 来源
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. For today's podcast, we're going to talk about the parts list of the nervous system. Now that might sound boring, but these are the bits and pieces that together make up everything about your experience of life. From what you think about, to what you feel, what you imagine, and what you accomplish. From the day you're born, until the day you die.
欢迎来到 Huberman 实验室播客，在这里我们讨论科学和基于科学的日常生活工具。我是 Andrew Huberman，斯坦福大学医学院的神经生物学和眼科学教授。在今天的播客中，我们将讨论神经系统的组成部分。虽然这听起来可能有些乏味，但这些部分共同构成了你生活体验的一切。从你的思考、感受、想象到成就，从你出生的那天起，直到你生命的终点。
That parts list is really incredible because it has a history associated with it that really provides a window into all sorts of things like engineering, warfare, religion, and philosophy. So I'm going to share with you the parts list that makes up who you are through the lens of some of those other aspects of life and other aspects of the history of the discovery of the nervous system. By the end of this podcast, I promise you're going to understand a lot more about how you work and how to apply that knowledge.
那份零件清单真是不可思议，因为它有一段历史，可以让我们了解到工程、战争、宗教和哲学等各个方面。因此，我将通过这些生活的其他方面以及发现神经系统的历史，和你分享构成你自身的零件清单。到这个播客结束时，我保证你会对自身运作有更多的理解，并知道如何应用这些知识。
There's going to be a little bit of story. There's going to be a lot of discussion about the people who made these particular discoveries. There'll be a little bit of technical language. There's no way to avoid that. But at the end, you're going to have in hand what will be the equivalent of an entire semester of learning about the nervous system and how you work. So a few important points before we get started. I am not a medical doctor. That means I don't prescribe anything. I'm a professor. So sometimes I'll profess things. In fact, I profess a lot of things.
将会有一点故事。会有很多关于那些做出这些特殊发现的人的讨论。将会有一些专业术语，这是无法避免的。但最终，你将掌握相当于一整个学期关于神经系统及其工作方式的知识。所以在开始之前，有几点重要的说明。我不是一名医生，这意味着我不会开药。我是一名教授，所以有时候我会讲授一些内容，事实上，我会讲授很多内容。
We are going to talk about some basic functioning of the nervous system, parts, etc. But we're also going to talk about how to apply that knowledge. That said, your health care, your well-being is your responsibility. So anytime we talk about tools, please filter it through that responsibility. Talk to a health care professional if you're going to explore any new tools or practices and be smart in your pursuit of these new tools.
我们将讨论神经系统的一些基本功能、组成部分等。此外，我们还会谈论如何应用这些知识。话虽如此，你的健康和幸福是你的责任。因此，每当我们谈及一些工具时，请在承担该责任的前提下进行筛选。如果你打算尝试任何新的工具或做法，请咨询医疗专业人士，并在追求这些新工具时保持理智。
I also want to emphasize that this podcast and the other things I do on social media are my personal goal of bringing zero cost to consumer information to the general public. It is separate from my role at Stanford University. In that spirit, I really want to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. The first one is Athletic Greens, which is an all-in-one drink. It's a green drink that has vitamins, minerals, probiotics, prebiotics. I've been using Athletic Greens since 2012, so I'm really delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast. The reason I like it is because I like vitamins and minerals.
我要强调一点，这个播客和我在社交媒体上做的其他事情，都是我个人的目标，就是为大众提供免费的信息。这与我在斯坦福大学的角色是分开的。在这个精神下，我真的想感谢今天播客的赞助商。第一个是Athletic Greens，这是一种综合性饮品，是一种含有维生素、矿物质、益生菌和益生元的绿色饮品。我从2012年就开始使用Athletic Greens，所以我很高兴他们能赞助这个播客。我喜欢它的原因是我喜欢维生素和矿物质。
I think they're important to my health. It can be overwhelming to know what to take in that landscape. By taking one thing that also happens to taste really good, I get all the vitamins, minerals, etc. that I need. There's also a lot of data out there now about the importance of the gut microbiome for immune health and for the gut brain access, all these things. The probiotics and prebiotics are important to me for that reason. If you want to try Athletic Greens, you can go to athleticgreens.com.
我认为它们对我的健康很重要。面对众多的选择，掌握该怎么选可能让人感到不知所措。但我只需选择一种味道很好、能提供我所需全部维生素和矿物质的产品。现在有很多数据表明肠道微生物群对免疫健康和肠脑连接的重要性。因此，益生菌和益生元对我来说很重要。如果你想尝试 Athletic Greens，可以访问 athleticgreens.com。
I put in the code word Huberman at checkout. If you do that, they'll send you a year supply of vitamin D3 and K2. There's a lot in the news lately about the importance of vitamin D3. We can all get vitamin D3 from sunlight, but many of us aren't getting enough sunlight. Vitamin D3 has been shown to be relevant to the immune system and the hormone systems, etc. Once again, that's athleticgreens.com slash Huberman. Enter Huberman at checkout and you get the year supply of D3 and K2 along with your athletic greens.
在结账时输入代码“Huberman”。如果你这样做，他们会送你一年的维生素D3和K2。最近有很多新闻都在报道维生素D3的重要性。我们可以通过阳光获得维生素D3，但很多人没有得到足够的阳光。研究表明，维生素D3与免疫系统和激素系统等有重要关联。再次提醒，访问athleticgreens.com/Huberman，并在结账时输入“Huberman”，就可以获得一年份的D3和K2以及你的运动绿粉。
This podcast is also brought to us by Inside Tracker, which is a health monitoring company. It uses blood tests and saliva tests to look at things like DNA and metabolic markers and monitors your hormones, a huge number of different parameters of health that really can only be measured accurately through blood and saliva tests. I use Inside Tracker because I'm a big believer in data. There's a lot of aspects to our biology that can only be accurately measured by way of blood test and saliva test.
这个播客也由 Inside Tracker 赞助，这是一家健康监测公司。它通过血液检测和唾液检测来分析 DNA、代谢标志物以及监测你的激素等，覆盖了许多健康参数，而这些数据只有通过血液和唾液检测才能精确测量。我使用 Inside Tracker 因为我非常相信数据。我们的生物学有许多方面只有通过血液和唾液检测才能准确测量。
The thing that's really nice about Inside Tracker is that rather than just giving you a bunch of numbers back of the levels of these things in your body, it gives you through a really simple platform information about what to do with all those levels of hormones and metabolic markers, etc. It also has a feature which is particularly interesting, which it measures your inner age, which is more a measure of your biological age as opposed to your chronological age. All that information is organized so that you can make changes in your nutritional regimes or your exercise regimes and watch how those markers change over time.
Inside Tracker 的一个很大的优点在于，它不仅仅给你一些身体内各种指标的数值，而是通过一个非常简单的平台，告诉你如何利用这些激素和代谢标志等水平的信息。它还有一个特别有趣的功能，就是测量你的“内在年龄”，这是你生理年龄的一种衡量方式，而不是简单的按照你出生的年数来算。所有这些信息都经过整理，让你可以根据这些数据来调整你的饮食和运动计划，并观察这些指标随时间的变化。
If you want to try Inside Tracker, you can go to insidetracker.com slash Huberman and they'll give you 25% off at checkout. Let's talk about the nervous system. The reason I say you're nervous system and not your brain is because your brain is actually just one piece of this larger, more important thing, frankly, that we call the nervous system. The nervous system includes your brain and your spinal cord, but also all the connections between your brain and your spinal cord and the organs of your body. It also includes, very importantly, all the connections between your organs back to your spinal cord and brain. The way to think about how you function at every level from the moment you're born until the day you die, everything you think and remember and feel and imagine is that your nervous system is this continuous loop of communication between the brain, spinal cord and body, and body, spinal cord and brain. In fact, we really can't even separate them. It's one continuous loop. You may have heard of something called a Mobius strip. A Mobius strip is almost like one of these impossible figures that no matter which angle you look at it from, you can't tell where it starts and where it ends. That's really how your nervous system is built. That's the structure that allows you to, for instance, deploy immune cells, to release cells that will go kill infection when you're in the presence of infection.
如果你想试试 Inside Tracker，可以访问 insidetracker.com/Huberman，并在结账时获得 25% 的折扣。让我们谈谈神经系统。我之所以说是你的神经系统而不是你的大脑，是因为大脑实际上只是这个我们称为神经系统的庞大而重要的东西中的一部分。神经系统包括你的大脑和脊髓，还有你大脑和脊髓与身体各器官之间的所有连接。非常重要的是，它还包括从器官回到脊髓和大脑的连接。要理解你从出生到去世后的每个层面的功能，其实是你的神经系统在大脑、脊髓和身体之间，以及身体、脊髓和大脑之间的一个连续的沟通循环中。事实上，我们真的无法分开它们，因为它们都是一个持续的环路。你可能听说过一种叫做莫比乌斯带的东西。莫比乌斯带就像是一个无论你从哪个角度观察也无法看出起点和终点的不可能图形。这正是你的神经系统的构造。这种结构能让你，例如在感染出现时，释放免疫细胞来杀灭感染。
Most people just think about that as a function of the immune system, but actually it's your nervous system that tells organs like you're spleen to release killer cells that go and hunt down those bacterial and viral invaders and gobble them up. If you have a stomach ape, for instance, sure, you feel that in your stomach, but it's really your nervous system that's causing the stomach ache. The ache aspect of it is a nervous system feature. So when we want to talk about experience or we want to talk about how to change the self in any way, we really need to think about the nervous system first. It is fair to say that the nervous system governs all other biological systems of the body, and it's also influenced by those other biological systems. So if we're talking about the nervous system, we need to get a little specific about what we mean. It's not just this big loop of wires. In fact, there's an interesting story about that because at the turn of the sort of 1800s to 1900s, it actually was believed that our nervous system was just one giant cell. But two guys, the names aren't super important, but in fairness to their important discovery, Ramoneka Hall, a Spaniard, Camilo Golgi, an Italian guy, figured out how to label or stain the nervous system in a way that revealed, oh my goodness, we're actually made up of trillions of these little cells, nerve cells, that are called neurons. And that's what a neuron is. It's just a nerve cell. They also saw that those nerve cells weren't touching one another. They're actually separated by little gaps, and those little gaps you may have heard of before, they're called synapses. Those synapses are where the chemicals from one neuron are kind of spit out or vomited into, and then the next nerve cell detects those chemicals and then passes electricity down its length to the next nerve cell and so forth.
大多数人只是把这个看作是免疫系统的一部分，但实际上是你的神经系统告诉像脾脏这样的器官释放杀手细胞，这些细胞会猎杀和吞噬细菌和病毒入侵者。举个例子，如果你胃痛，你的确是感觉到胃在疼，但实际上是神经系统导致了这种疼痛。疼痛这个方面是神经系统的特征。所以，当我们想谈论体验或者想改变自我时，我们确实需要首先考虑神经系统。可以说，神经系统支配着身体的所有其他生物系统，并且也受到这些生物系统的影响。所以，如果我们要谈论神经系统，就需要明确一些细节。它不只是一个巨大的线路环路。事实上，有一个有趣的故事，因为在19世纪末到20世纪初时，人们相信我们的神经系统只是一个巨大的细胞。但两个科学家——名字其实没那么重要，不过为了他们的重要发现提一下——一位西班牙人叫拉蒙·卡哈尔，另一位意大利人叫卡米洛·高尔基，找到了给神经系统染色的方法，揭示出“天哪，我们实际上是由万亿个小细胞组成的”，这些神经细胞称为神经元。神经元就是一种神经细胞。他们还发现，这些神经细胞彼此并不接触，它们之间实际上有小空隙，这些空隙你可能听说过，叫做突触。突触是一个神经元的化学物质被“吐出”到其中，然后下一个神经细胞检测到这些化学物质，并将电信号传递到下一个神经细胞，以此类推。
So really the way to think about your body and your thoughts and your mind is that you are a flow of electricity. There's nothing mystical about this. You're a flow of electricity between these different nerve cells, and depending on which nerve cells are active, you might be lifting your arm or lowering your arm. You might be seeing something and perceiving that it's red, or you might be seeing something and perceiving that it's green, all depending on which nerve cells are electrically active at a given moment. The example of perceiving red or perceiving green is a particularly good example because so often our experience of the world makes it seem as if these things that are happening outside us are actually happening inside us, but the language of the nervous system is just electricity. It's just like a Morse code of some sort, or the syllables and words and consonants and vowels of language. It just depends on how they're assembled, what order. And so that brings us to the issue of how the nervous system works. The way to think about how the nervous system works is that our experiences, our memories, everything is sort of like the keys on a piano being played in a particular order. Right? If I play the keys on a piano in a particular order and with a particular intensity, that's a given song. We could make that analogous to a given experience. It's not really that the key A-sharp or E-flat is the song. It's just one component of the song.
所以，其实我们应该这样看待我们的身体、思想和大脑：它们就像电流一样流动。这不是神秘的事情。你体内的电流流经不同的神经细胞，根据哪些神经细胞被激活，你可能会抬起或放下手臂，或者看到某物并感知它是红色的，或者看到某物并感知它是绿色的。这完全取决于在特定时刻哪些神经细胞是活跃的。感知红色或绿色是一个很好的例子，因为我们常常觉得外界发生的事情实际上是在我们内部发生，但神经系统的语言实际上就是电流，就像某种莫尔斯电码，或者语言中的音节、词语、辅音和元音一样，关键在于它们的排列顺序。这引出了神经系统如何运作的问题。可以这样理解神经系统的工作方式：我们的体验、记忆等就像是用特定顺序敲击钢琴键。对吧？如果我以特定的顺序和强度演奏钢琴键，那就形成了一首特定的曲子。我们可以将其类比为一次特定的体验。键 A-sharp 或 E-flat 并不是整首曲子，只是其中的一个组成部分。
So when you hear that, for instance, there's a brain area called the hippocampus, which there is that's involved in memory. Well, it's involved in memory, but it's not that memories are stored there as sentences. They're stored there as patterns of electricity and neurons that when repeated give you the sense that you're experiencing the thing again. In fact, deja vu, the sense that what you're experiencing is so familiar and like something that you've experienced previously, is merely that the neurons that were active in one circumstance are now becoming active in the same circumstance again. And so it's really just like hearing the same song, maybe not played on a piano, but next time on a classical guitar, there's something similar about that song, even though it's being played on two different instruments. So I think it's important that people understand the parts of their nervous system, and that it includes so much more than just the brain, and that there are these things, neurons and synapses, but really that it's the electrical activity of these neurons that dictates our experience.
所以，当你听到像海马体这样的脑区参与记忆功能时，这确实是事实。但它的作用不是以句子的形式存储记忆，而是以电信号和神经元的模式存储记忆。当这些模式重复时，会让你感觉到正在再次体验那个事情。事实上，似曾相识 (deja vu) 就是你觉得经历过的事情非常熟悉，因为在某种情况下活跃的神经元在同样的情况下再次活跃。就像是一首歌，不是用钢琴弹奏，而是用古典吉他演奏，虽然用的是不同的乐器，但那首歌有某种相似性。所以我认为，人们应该了解他们的神经系统，它不仅仅是大脑，还包括很多其他部分，比如神经元和突触。实际上，是这些神经元的电活动决定了我们的体验。
So if the early 1900s were when these neurons were discovered, certainly a lot has happened since then. And in that time between the early 1900s and now, there's some important events that actually happened in history that give us insight or gave us insight into how the nervous system works. One of the more surprising ones was actually warfare. So as most everybody knows, in warfare, people get shot and people often die, but many people get shot and they don't die. And in World War I, there were some changes in artillery, in bullets, that made for a situation where bullets would enter the body and brain at very discreet locations and would go out the other side of the body. And also make a very small hole at that exit location. And in doing so, produced a lot of naturally occurring lesions of the nervous system.
所以，如果说20世纪初是我们发现这些神经元的时候，那么从那时起确实发生了很多事情。在从20世纪初到现在的这段时间里，一些重要的历史事件让我们对神经系统的运作有了更多的了解。其中一个比较出人意料的因素是战争。众所周知，战争中人们会中枪并常常丧命，但也有许多人虽然中枪却并没有死。在第一次世界大战期间，炮火和子弹有了一些变化，导致子弹会从非常精确的位置进入身体和大脑，并从身体的另一侧射出。在射出的位置形成一个很小的孔。这种情况产生了很多天然形成的神经系统损伤。
Now you say, okay, well, how does that relate to neuroscience? Well, unlike previous years where a lot of the artillery would create these big sort of holes as the bullets would blow out of the brain or body. I know this is rather gruesome. When the holes were very discreet, they entered at one point and left at another point. They would take out or destroy very discreet bits of neural tissue of the nervous system. So people were coming back from war with holes in their brain and in other parts of their nervous system that were limited to very specific locations. In addition to that, there was some advancement in the cleaning of wounds that happened, so many more people were surviving.
现在你可能会问，这与神经科学有什么关系呢？好吧，与以往不同的是，过去的炮火往往会在大脑或身体上留下巨大的创口，子弹会在大脑或身体上爆破留下大洞。我知道这听起来很可怕。而当时这些创口非常小而精确，子弹从一个点进入，另一个点离开，只会摧毁或损坏神经系统中特定小块的神经组织。所以很多士兵在战后回来的时候，他们的大脑或神经系统的其他部分都有非常明确位置的损伤。此外，当时在伤口清理方面也有所进步，因此存活者大幅增加。
What this meant was that neurologists now had a collection of patients that would come back and they'd have holes in very specific locations of their brain. And they'd say things like, well, I can recognize faces, but I can't recognize who those faces belong to. I know it's a face, but I don't know who it belongs to. And after that person eventually died, the neurologist would figure out, ah, I've had 10 patients that all told me that they couldn't recognize faces and they all had these bases. They all had these bullet holes that went through a particular region of the brain. And that's how we know a lot about how particular brain regions like the hippocampus work.
这段话的意思是，神经学家如今有一批病人，他们的大脑某些特定部位有损伤。这些病人会说一些类似的话，比如“我能认出是脸，但我不知道这些脸属于谁。我知道这是张脸，但我不知道它属于谁。”当这些病人去世后，神经学家发现，有10个病人都曾表示不能识别面孔，他们的大脑在一个特定区域都有损伤。通过这样的观察，我们了解了大脑中特定区域（比如海马体）是如何工作的。
In fact, some of the more amazing examples of this where people would come back and they, for instance, would speak in complete gibberish. Whereas previously they could speak normally. And even though they were speaking in complete gibberish, they could understand language perfectly. That's how we know that speech and language are actually controlled by separate portions of the nervous system. And there are many examples like that. People that couldn't recognize the faces of famous people.
事实上，有一些非常令人惊讶的例子，比如有些人恢复意识后，说话变得语无伦次，而之前他们是能够正常说话的。尽管他们说话颠三倒四，但却完全能理解语言。这就是我们知道言语和语言实际上是由神经系统中的不同部分控制的原因。还有很多类似的例子，比如有些人无法识别名人的面孔。
Or, and that actually brings us to an interesting example in modern times. Many, many years later in the early 2000s, there was actually a paper that was published in the journal Nature, Excellent Journal, showing that in a human being, a perfectly healthy human being, there was a neuron that would become active, electrically active only when the person viewed the picture of Jennifer Aniston, the actress. So literally a neuron that represented Jennifer Aniston, so-called Jennifer Aniston cells. Neuroscientists know about these Jennifer Aniston cells. If you can recognize Jennifer Aniston's face, you have Jennifer Aniston neurons. And presumably you also have neurons that can recognize the faces of other famous and non-famous people.
或者，这实际上把我们带到了一个现代的有趣例子。多年以后，在2000年代初，一篇论文在《自然》期刊上发表，这可是个非常优秀的期刊。论文显示，在一个完全健康的人体内，有一个神经元会在这个人看到女演员詹妮弗·安妮斯顿的照片时变得活跃，只有在那时会电性活跃。换句话说，这个神经元专门代表詹妮弗·安妮斯顿，被称为“詹妮弗·安妮斯顿细胞”。神经科学家对此很了解。如果你能认出詹妮弗·安妮斯顿的脸，那你就有詹妮弗·安妮斯顿神经元。同样地，你应该也有神经元能够识别其他知名或不知名人物的脸。
So that indicates that our brain is really a map of our experience. We come into the world and our brain has a kind of bias towards learning particular kinds of things. It's ready to receive information and learn that information. But the brain is really a map of experience. So let's talk about what experience really is. What does it mean for your brain to work? Well, I think it's fair to say that the nervous system really does five things, maybe six. The first one is sensation. So this is important to understand for any and all of you that want to change your nervous system or to apply tools to make your nervous system work better. Sensation is a non-negotiable element of your nervous system. You have neurons in your eye that perceive certain colors of light and certain directions of movement. You have neurons in your skin that perceive particular kinds of touch, like light touch or firm touch or painful touch. You have neurons in your ears that perceive certain sounds. Your entire experience of life is filtered by these sensory receptors if you want to know what the name is.
这表明我们的脑实际上是我们体验的地图。我们来到这个世界时，大脑对学习特定事物有一种偏向性。它准备好接收信息并学习这些信息。但大脑实际上是一张体验的地图。那么让我们来谈谈什么是真正的体验。你的大脑如何运作呢？我认为可以说，神经系统确实有五个功能，也许是六个。第一个是感知。这对于任何想改变神经系统或用工具来改善神经系统功能的人来说都很重要。感知是神经系统的一个不可或缺的要素。你的眼睛里有一些神经元可以感知特定颜色的光和运动方向。你的皮肤中有神经元能感知特定类型的触觉，比如轻触、重压触摸或疼痛触摸。你的耳朵里有神经元能感知特定的声音。你的全部生活体验都是通过这些被称为感知器的感受器过滤的。
So this always raises an interesting question. People ask, well, is there much more out there? Is there a lot more happening in the world that I'm not experiencing or that humans aren't experiencing? And the answer, of course, is yes. There are many species on this planet that are perceiving things that we will never perceive unless we apply technology. The best example I could think of at the top of my head would be something like infrared vision. There are snakes out there, pit vipers and so forth, that can sense heat emissions from other animals. They don't actually see their shape. They sense their heat shape and their heat emissions. Humans can't do that unless, of course, they put on infrared goggles or something that would allow them to detect those heat emissions.
这总是引发一个有趣的问题。人们会问，还有更多我们未曾体验的事物存在吗？是不是有很多事情在世界上正在发生，而我或人类并没有感知到？答案当然是肯定的。地球上有很多物种可以感知到我们永远无法感知的事物，除非我们借助科技。一个很好的例子就是红外线视觉。有些蛇类，如蝮蛇等，可以感知其他动物的热量发出。它们并不是真的看到动物的形状，而是感知到它们的热量形状和热量发射。人类无法做到这一点，除非戴上红外线护目镜或其他能够探测这些热量的设备。
There are turtles and certain species of birds that migrate long distances that can detect magnetic fields because they have neurons. Again, it's the nervous system that allows them to do this. So they have neurons in their nose and in their head that allow them to migrate along magnetic fields in order to, as amazing as this sounds, go from one particular location in the ocean, thousands of miles away to all aggregate on one particular beach at a particular time of year so that they can mate, lay eggs, and then wander back off into the sea to die. And then their young will eventually hatch. Those little cute little turtles will shuffle to the ocean, swim off, and go do the exact same thing. They don't migrate that distance by vision. They don't do it by smell. They do it by sensing magnetic fields. Okay. And many other species do these incredible things. We don't, humans are not magnetic sensing organisms. We can't do that because we don't have receptors that sense magnetic fields. There are some data that maybe some humans can sense magnetic fields, but you should be very skeptical of anyone that's convinced that they can do that with any degree of robustness or accuracy because even the people that can do this aren't necessarily aware that they can. Maybe a topic for a future podcast.
有些海龟和某些鸟类会长距离迁徙，它们能够察觉到磁场，因为它们有神经元。这是它们的神经系统让它们做到这一点。它们在鼻子和头部的神经元帮助它们沿着磁场迁徙。这听起来真让人惊讶，它们能够从海洋中的某个特定地点，移动数千英里，在一年中特定的时间，聚集到同一个海滩上，以便交配、产卵，然后回到海里，最终死去。它们的后代会孵化出来，这些小海龟会爬向海洋，游走，并重复同样的旅程。它们不是通过视觉或嗅觉来迁徙的，而是通过感知磁场。还有很多其他物种也做着同样不可思议的事情。人类则不是能够感知磁场的生物。我们无法做到这一点，因为我们没有感知磁场的受体。有一些数据表明可能某些人类能够感知磁场，但对于任何宣称自己能精确做到这一点的人你都应该持怀疑态度，因为即使那些能够做到的人也未必意识到自己有这种能力。也许这是一个可以在未来的播客中讨论的话题。
So we have sensation, then we have perception. Perception is our ability to take what we're sensing and focus on it and make sense of it to explore it, to remember it. So really perceptions are just whichever sensations we happen to be paying attention to at any moment. And you can do this right now. You can experience perception and the difference between perception and sensation very easily. If for instance, I tell you to pay attention to the contact of your feet, the bottoms of your feet with whatever surface they happen to be in contact with. Maybe it's shoes. Maybe it's the floor. If your feet are up, maybe it's air. The moment you place your, what we call the spotlight of attention or the spotlight of perception on your feet, you are now perceiving what was happening there, what was being sensed there. The sensation was happening all along, however.
所以我们有感觉，然后我们有知觉。知觉是我们将感受到的信息进行专注并理解的能力，以便探索和记忆它。因此，知觉实际上就是我们在任何时刻关注的感觉。你现在就可以体验这种差别，很容易就能区分知觉和感觉。比如说，如果我让你注意脚底接触的表面，无论是鞋子、地板还是如果你的脚抬起来了，可能是空气。当你把注意力或知觉的聚光灯放在你的脚上时，你就开始感受那种原本一直存在的感觉。感觉一直在那里，只是你现在开始去感知它。
So while sensation is not negotiable, you can't change your receptors unless you adopt some new technology. Perception is under the control of your attention. And the way to think about attention is it's like a spotlight. Except it's not one spotlight. You actually have two attentional spotlights. Anyone that tells you you can't multitask, tell them they're wrong. And if they disagree with you, tell them to contact me. Because in old-world primates of which humans are, we are able to do what's called covert attention. We can place a spotlight of attention on something. For instance, something we're reading or looking at or someone that we're listening to. And we can place a second spotlight of attention on something we're eating and how it tastes or our child running around in the room or my dog. You can split your attention into two locations.
所以，尽管感觉是无法改变的，如果不采用新技术，你不能改变自己的感受器，但知觉是可以通过注意力来控制的。可以把注意力想象成聚光灯。不过，这并不是单一的聚光灯。实际上，你有两个注意力的聚光灯。有人告诉你不能同时处理多项任务时，你可以反驳他们，因为他们错了。如果他们不同意，可以让他们来找我沟通。因为在人类这样的旧大陆灵长类动物中，我们能做到所谓的“隐性注意”。我们可以把注意力的一个聚光灯放在某件事上，比如我们正在阅读、观看或倾听的东西。同时，还可以把另一个聚光灯放在吃的东西和味道上，或者在房间里跑来跑去的孩子，或者我的狗身上。你可以把注意力分散在两个地方。
But of course, you can also bring your attention. That is your perception to one particular location. You can dilate your attention, kind of like making a spotlight more diffuse, or you can make it more concentrated. This is very important to understand if you're going to think about tools to improve your nervous system, whether or not that tool is in the form of a chemical that you decide to take, maybe a supplement to increase some chemical in your brain. If that's your choice, or a brain machine device, or you're going to try and learn something better by engaging in some focus or motivated pursuit for some period of time each day. Attention is something that is absolutely under your control in particular when you're rested. And we'll get back to this. But when you are rested, and we'll define rest very clearly, you're able to direct your attention in very deliberate ways. And that's because we have something in our nervous system, which is sort of like a two-way street. And that two-way street is a communication between the aspects of our nervous system that are reflexive and the aspects of our nervous system that are deliberate.
当然，您也可以专注于某个特定的位置。您可以扩展您的注意力，就像让一个聚光灯的光线变得更散，也可以让它变得更集中。理解这一点非常重要，尤其是在您考虑如何改善自己的神经系统时。不论您选择的工具是化学物质，比如增加大脑中某种化学物质的补充剂，还是大脑机器设备，或者通过每天一段时间的专注学习来提升自己，注意力是完全可以由您控制的，尤其是在您休息好的时候。我们会再回到这一点。当您得到充分休息时，我们会更明确地定义“休息”，您就能够以非常有意图的方式集中注意力。这是因为我们的神经系统中存在一种类似“双向通道”的东西，这种通道连接了神经系统中的反射部分和有意部分。
So we all know what it's like to be reflexive. You go through life, you're walking. If you already know how to walk, you don't think about your walking, you just walk. And that's because the nervous system wants to pass off as much as it can to reflexive action. That's called bottom-up processing. It really just means that information is flowing in through your senses, regardless of what you're perceiving, that information is flowing up and it's directing your activity. But at any moment, for instance, let's say a car screeches in front of you around the corner and you suddenly pause, you are now moving into deliberate action. You would start looking around in a very deliberate way. The nervous system can be reflexive in its action, or it can be deliberate. If reflexive action tends to be what we call bottom-up, deliberate action and deliberate perceptions and deliberate thoughts are top-down. They require some effort and some focus, but that's the point. You can decide to focus your attention and energy on anything you want. You can decide to focus your behavior in any way you want, but it will always feel like it requires some effort and some strain, whereas when you're in reflexive mode, just walking and talking and eating and doing your thing, it's going to feel very easy. That's because your nervous system basically wired up to be able to do most things easily without much metabolic demand, without consuming much energy. But the moment you try and do something very specific, you're going to feel a sort of mental friction. It's going to be challenging.
我们都知道反射行为是什么样的。生活中，你在走路。如果你已经学会了走路，你不需要去想走路这件事，你就是自然地走。这是因为神经系统希望尽可能多地将动作转交给反射行为。这被称为“自下而上的处理”。这意味着信息通过你的感官流入，不管你正在感知什么，这些信息都在流动并指导你的活动。但在任何时刻，比如说，一辆车在你面前紧急刹车转弯，你会突然停下，此时你进入了有意识的行为。你会开始很有意识地四处查看。神经系统的动作可以是反射性的，也可以是有意的。如果反射性行为倾向于我们所谓的“自下而上”，那么有意的行为、感知和思考则是“自上而下”的。它们需要付出一些努力和专注，但这正是重点。你可以选择将注意力和能量集中在任何你想要的事情上。你可以以任何想要的方式来决定自己的行为，但这总会让人感到需要一些努力和压力。而当你处于反射模式时，比如走路、说话、吃东西、做自己的事情，这会感觉非常轻松。这是因为你的神经系统基本上被设计得可以轻松完成大部分事情，不需要太多消耗，而一旦你尝试做一些非常具体的事情，就会感到某种精神上的摩擦，这是具有挑战性的。
So we've got sensations, perceptions, and then we've got things that we call feelings/emotions. And these get a little complicated because almost all of us, I would hope all of us, are familiar with things like happiness and sadness or boredom or frustration. Scientists argue like crazy neuroscientists and psychologists and philosophers for that matter argue like crazy about what these are and how they work. Certainly emotions and feelings are the product of the nervous system. They involve the activity of neurons. But as I mentioned earlier, neurons are electrically active, but they also release chemicals. And there's a certain category of chemicals that has a very profound influence on our emotional states. They're called neuromodulators.
我们有感觉、知觉，然后还有所谓的情感/情绪。这些概念有点复杂，因为几乎所有人，希望是所有人，都对快乐、悲伤、无聊或沮丧等情绪很熟悉。科学家们，尤其是疯狂神经科学家、心理学家和哲学家们，就这些情绪是什么以及如何运作进行激烈的讨论。情感和感觉无疑是神经系统的产物，涉及神经元的活动。正如我之前提到的，神经元有电活动，但它们也会释放化学物质。而有一类化学物质对我们的情绪状态有着非常深刻的影响，称为神经调节物质。
And those neuromodulators have names that probably you've heard of before, things like dopamine and serotonin and acetylcholine, epinephrine. Neuromodulators are really interesting because they bias which neurons are likely to be active and which ones are likely to be inactive. A simple way to think about neuromodulators is they are sort of like playlists that you would have on any kind of device where you're going to play particular categories of music. So for instance, dopamine, which is often discussed as the molecule of reward or joy, is involved in reward and it does tend to create a sort of upbeat mood when released in appropriate amounts in the brain.
这些神经调节物质的名称可能你之前已经听说过，比如多巴胺、血清素、乙酰胆碱和肾上腺素。神经调节物质非常有趣，因为它们影响哪些神经元更可能活跃，哪些神经元可能不活跃。简单来说，神经调节物质就像你在某种设备上播放特定类型音乐的播放列表。例如，多巴胺经常被讨论为一种与奖励或快乐有关的分子，它参与奖励机制，并且当它在大脑中适量释放时，会倾向于营造一种愉悦的情绪。
But the reason it does that is because it makes certain neurons and neural circuits as we call them more active and others less active. So serotonin, for instance, is a molecule that when released tends to make us feel really good with what we have, our sort of internal landscape and the resources that we have. Whereas dopamine, more than being a molecule of reward, is really more a molecule of motivation toward things that are outside us and that we want to pursue. And we can look at healthy conditions or situations like being in pursuit of a goal where every time we accomplish something en route to that goal, a little bit of dopamine is released and we feel more motivation.
它这样做的原因是因为它使某些神经元和神经回路更活跃，而另一些则不那么活跃。例如，血清素是一种分子，当它释放出来时，会让我们对自己的内心世界和现有资源感到非常满意。而多巴胺，与其说是一种奖励分子，倒不如说更是一种激励我们追求外部事物的分子。当我们设定目标并不断朝着目标迈进，每次实现一点目标时，就会释放出少量多巴胺，使我们感到更有动力。
That happens. We can also look at the extreme example of something like mania where somebody is so relentlessly in pursuit of external things like money and relationships that they're sort of in this delusional state of thinking that they have the resources that they need in order to pursue all these things. When in fact they don't. So these neuromodulators can exist in normal levels, low levels, high levels, and that actually gives us a window into a very important aspect of neuroscience history that all of us are impacted by today, which is the discovery of antidepressants and so-called antipsychotics. In the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, it was discovered that there are compounds, chemicals, that can increase or decrease serotonin, that can increase or decrease dopamine. And that led to the development of most of what we call antidepressants. Now, the trick here or the problem is that most of these drugs, especially in the 1950s and 60s, they would reduce serotonin, but they would also reduce dopamine or they would increase serotonin. But they would also increase some other neuromodulator or chemical.
这很常见。我们可以看一下极端的例子，比如狂躁。有些人在追求金钱和人际关系等外部事物时异常执着，以至于进入了一种错觉状态，认为自己拥有追求这些事物所需的资源，而实际上他们并没有。所以，这些神经调节物质可以存在于正常、低或高水平，这为我们提供了一个了解神经科学历史的重要窗口，这个窗口也影响着我们每一个人的生活，那就是抗抑郁剂和所谓的抗精神病药的发现。在1950年代、60年代和70年代，人们发现有一些化合物或化学物质可以增加或减少血清素，以及增加或减少多巴胺。这导致了我们现在所说的大多数抗抑郁药的发展。这里的问题或难题在于，当时的多数药物，尤其是在1950年代和60年代，可能会减少血清素，也可能减少多巴胺，或者增加血清素，但同时也可能增加一些其他神经调节物质或化学物质。
And that's because all these chemical systems in the body, but the neuromodulators in particular have a lot of receptors. Now, these are different than the receptors we were talking about earlier. The receptors I'm talking about now are sort of like parking spots where dopamine is released and if it attaches to a receptor, say, on the heart, it might make the heartbeat faster because there's a certain kind of receptor on the heart, whereas if dopamine is released, and goes and attaches to muscle, it might have a completely different effect on muscle, and in fact, it does. So different receptors on different organs of the body are the ways that these neuromodulators can have all these different effects on different aspects of our biology. This is most salient in the example of some of the antidepressants that have sexual side effects or that blunt appetite or that blunt motivation.
这主要是因为人体内所有的化学系统，特别是神经调节物质，拥有大量的受体。我要说的这些受体与我们之前谈到的有所不同。现在谈论的受体有点像多巴胺释放后的“停车位”。如果多巴胺附着在心脏的受体上，它可能会使心跳加速，因为心脏上有特定类型的受体。而如果多巴胺附着在肌肉上，它可能会对肌肉产生完全不同的影响，实际上，它确实如此。因此，不同器官上的不同受体是这些神经调节物质在我们的生物体中产生各种不同作用的方式。这在一些具有性副作用、降低食欲或降低动机的抗抑郁药物的例子中尤为明显。
Many of these, which increase serotonin, can be very beneficial for people. It can elevate their mood, it can make them feel better, but they also, if the doses are too high or if that particular drug isn't right for somebody, that person experiences challenges with motivation or appetite or libido because serotonin is binding to receptors in the areas of the brain that control those other things as well. So we talked about sensation, we talked about perception, when we talk about feelings, we have to consider these neuromodulators, and we have to consider also that feelings and emotions are contextual. In some cultures, showing a lot of joy or a lot of sadness is entirely appropriate. In other cultures, it's considered inappropriate. So I don't think it's fair to say that there is a sadness circuit or area of the brain or a happiness circuit or area of the brain.
这些增加血清素的物质对人们可能非常有益。它们可以提升情绪，让人感觉更好，但如果剂量过高或这种特定药物不适合某人，那个人可能会面临动机、食欲或性欲方面的问题，因为血清素也会结合到控制这些方面的大脑区域的受体上。我们谈到了感觉和感知，当谈到情感时，我们必须考虑这些神经调节物质，并认识到情感受情境影响。在一些文化中，表现出极大的快乐或悲伤是完全合适的，而在其他文化中，这可能被视为不合适。因此，我认为不能简单地说大脑中有一个特定的悲伤区域或快乐区域。
However, it is fair to say that certain chemicals and certain brain circuits tend to be active when we are in motivated states tend to be active when we are in non-motivated lazy states tend to be active when we are focused and tend to be active when we are not focused. I want to emphasize also that emotions are something that we generally feel are not under our control. We feel like the kind of guys are up within us and they just kind of happen to us. And that's because they are somewhat reflexive. We don't really set out with a deliberate thought to be happier, deliberate thought to be sad. We tend to experience them in kind of a passive, reflexive way.
然而，可以说，当我们处于积极的状态时，某些化学物质和大脑回路往往会活跃起来，而在我们处于懒散的非积极状态时，它们也同样活跃。我们专注时和不专注时，某些大脑活动也是如此。我还想强调，情绪是我们通常感觉无法控制的事情。我们感觉情绪就像是我们内心自发产生的东西，它们就这样发生了。这是因为情绪有些像反射行为。我们并不会有意识地想着要让自己变得更快乐或者更悲伤，情绪通常以一种被动的、反射性的方式体验着。
And that brings us to the next thing, which are thoughts. Fots are really interesting because in many ways they are like perceptions except that they draw on not just what's happening in the present, but also things we remember from the past and things that we anticipate about the future. The other thing about thoughts that's really interesting is that thoughts can be both reflexive. They can just be occurring all the time, sort of like pop up windows on a poorly filtered web browser, or they can be deliberate. We can decide to have a thought. In fact, right now you could decide to have a thought just like you would decide to write something out on a piece of paper.
这就引出了下一个话题：思维。思维非常有趣，因为在很多方面，它们就像感知，区别在于它们不仅依赖于当下发生的事情，还涉及到我们对过去的记忆和对未来的预期。思维的另一个有趣之处在于，它们可以是自发的。这些思维就像过滤不佳的网页浏览器上的弹出窗口，无时无刻不在冒出来。同时，它们也可以是有意识的——我们可以有意识地去想一个问题。事实上，你现在就可以决定产生一个想法，就像你决定在纸上写下什么一样。
You could decide that you are listening to a podcast that you are in a particular location. You are not just paying attention to what's happening. You are directing your thought process. A lot of people don't understand or at least appreciate that the thought patterns and the neural circuits that underlie thoughts can actually be controlled in this deliberate way. And then finally there are actions. Actions or behaviors are perhaps the most important aspect to our nervous system. Because first of all, our behaviors are actually the only thing that are going to create any fossil record of our existence.
你可以决定你在某个特定地点收听一个播客。这时，你不仅仅是在关注正在发生的事情，而是在引导自己的思维过程。很多人并不了解，或者至少不够重视，其实通过这种有意的方式，我们是可以控制思维模式和神经回路的。最后要提到的是行动。行动或行为可能是我们神经系统中最重要的方面。因为首先，我们的行为实际上是唯一能够为我们的存在留下化石记录的东西。
After we die, the nervous system deteriorates. Our skeleton will remain. But it's in the moment of experiencing something very joyful or something very sad. It can feel so all encompassing that we actually think that it has some meaning beyond that moment. But actually for humans, and I think for all species, the sensations, the perceptions and the thoughts and the feelings that we have in our lifespan. None of that is actually carried forward except the ones that we take and we convert into actions such as writing, actions such as words, actions such as engineering new things.
当我们死后，神经系统会逐渐退化，但我们的骨骼会留存。然而，在经历某些非常快乐或非常悲伤的时刻时，这种感觉可能如此包罗万象，以至于我们认为它在那一刻之外还有某种意义。其实对于人类而言，我认为对所有物种都是如此，我们一生中的感受、认知、想法和情感都不会延续下去，除非是那些被转化为行动的部分，比如写作、言语以及创造新事物的行为。
And so the fossil record of our species and each one of us is really through action. And that in part is why so much of our nervous system is devoted to converting sensation, perceptions, feelings and thoughts into actions. In fact, the great neuroscientist or physiologist, Sherrington won a Nobel Prize for his work in mapping some of the circuitry, the connections between nerve cells that give rise to movement. And he said movement is the final common pathway. The other way to think about it is that one of the reasons that our central nervous system, our brain and spinal cord include this stuff in our skull but also connects so heavily to the body is because most everything that we experience, including our thoughts and feelings, was really designed to either impact our behavior or not.
我们的物种化石记录以及每个人的个人记录实际上都是通过行动展现的。这也是为什么我们大量的神经系统功能是为了将感知、感觉、思维转化为行动。事实上，著名的神经科学家或生理学家谢灵顿因为他在绘制神经元之间连接的部分电路图以驱动运动方面的工作获得了诺贝尔奖。他曾说过，运动是最终的共同路径。换句话说，我们的中枢神经系统也就是大脑和脊髓之所以包括我们头骨内的部分，并大量连接到身体，这是因为我们所经历的大多数事物，包括思想和感受，实际上都是为了影响我们的行为或者选择不影响。
And the fact that thoughts allow us to reach into the past and anticipate the future and not just experience what's happening in the moment, gave rise to an incredible capacity for us to engage in behavior, that are not just for the moment. They're based on things that we know from the past and that we would like to see in the future. And this aspect to our nervous system of creating movement occurs through some very simple pathways. The reflexive pathway basically includes areas of the brainstem we call central pattern generators.
我们的思想让我们能够回顾过去和预想未来，而不仅仅是体验当下发生的事情，这一事实赋予了我们一种非凡的能力，使我们能够进行不局限于当下的行为。这些行为基于我们从过去了解的事情以及我们希望在未来看到的事物。而我们的神经系统通过一些非常简单的通路来实现这种行为的产生。其中，反射通路主要包括我们称为中枢模式发生器的大脑干区域。
When you walk, provided you already know how to walk, you are basically walking because you have these central pattern generators, groups of neurons that generate the potential of the brainstem. There are groups of neurons that generate right foot, right foot, right foot, left foot kind of movement. However, when you decide to move in a particular deliberate way that requires a little more attention, you start to engage areas of your brain for top-down processing where your forebrain works from the top down to control those central pattern generators so that maybe it's right foot, right foot, right foot, right foot, left foot, if maybe you're hiking along some rocks or something and you have to engage in that kind of movement.
当你行走时，如果你已经知道如何行走，基本上是因为你有中央模式发生器，这些是产生脑干潜力的一组神经元。有些神经元控制右脚、右脚、右脚、左脚这样的运动。不过，当你决定以一种特定的、有意识的方式移动，并且需要更多注意力时，你会开始调动大脑中从上到下处理信息的区域，前脑通过自上而下的方式控制这些中央模式发生器。例如，当你在岩石上徒步行走时，你可能需要以右脚、右脚、右脚、右脚、左脚的方式移动，以适应这种环境。
So movement is just like thoughts can be either reflexive or deliberate. And when we talk about deliberate, I want to be very specific about how your brain works in the deliberate way because it gives rise to a very important feature of the nervous system that we're going to talk about next, which is your ability to change your nervous system.
所以，运动就像思维一样，可以是反射性的，也可以是有意识的。当我们谈论有意识的时候，我想特别说明一下你的大脑是如何在有意识模式下工作的，因为这涉及到神经系统的一个非常重要的特性——即你改变神经系统的能力。
And what I'd like to center on for a second is this notion of what does it mean for the nervous system to do something deliberately. Well, when you do something deliberately, you pay attention, you are bringing your perception to an analysis of three things. Duration, how long something is going to take or should be done. Path, what you should be doing, an outcome. If you do something for a given length of time, what's going to happen.
我想要稍微关注一下这个概念：神经系统有意地做一件事情意味着什么。当你有意地做某事时，你是在注意，你是在从三个方面分析事情。首先是持续时间，即某件事情将要花费多长时间或者应该完成的时间。其次是路径，即你应该怎么去做。最后是结果，如果你在一个特定的时间长度内做某件事情，会发生什么。
Now, when you're walking down the street or you're eating or you're just talking reflexively, you're not doing this what I call DPO, duration path outcome type of deliberate function in your brain and nervous system. But the moment you decide to learn something or to resist speaking or to speak up when you would rather be quiet, anytime you're deliberately forcing yourself over a threshold, you're engaging these brain circuits and these nervous system circuits that suddenly make it feel as if something is challenging. Something has changed.
现在，当你走在街上、吃东西或无意识地聊天时，你并没有使用我称之为"DPO"的这种大脑和神经系统的刻意功能。DPO指的是时长、路径和结果。然而，一旦你决定去学习某些东西、克制自己不说话或者在想安静时却决定发言时，每当你刻意强迫自己去突破某个界限时，你就开启了这些大脑和神经系统的回路。此时，你会突然感到事情似乎变得有挑战性，有些东西发生了变化。
Well, what's changed? What's changed is that when you engage in this duration path and outcome type of thinking or behavior or way of being, you start to recruit these neuromodulators that are released from particular areas of your brain and also it turns out from your body and they start queuing to your nervous system. Something's different now about what I'm doing. Something's different about what I'm feeling.
好的，发生了什么变化呢？变化在于，当你参与这种关于持续时间、过程和结果类型的思考、行为或生活方式时，你开始激活神经调节物质。这些物质从你大脑的特定区域以及身体中释放出来，并开始对你的神经系统发出信号。我现在做的事情有什么不同。我现在的感觉有什么不同。
Let's give an example where perhaps somebody says something that's triggering to you. You don't like it and you know you shouldn't respond. You feel like, I shouldn't respond. I shouldn't respond. I shouldn't respond. You're actively suppressing your behavior through top down processing. Your forebrain is actually preventing you from saying the thing that you know you shouldn't say or that maybe you should wait to say or say in a different form. This feels like agitation and stress because you're actually suppressing a circuit.
让我们举个例子，比如有人说了一些让你感到不快的话。你不喜欢这些话，并且知道你不应该回应。你心里不断告诉自己：我不应该回应，我不应该回应。我不应该回应。你通过大脑的自上而下处理来主动压抑自己的反应。你的前额叶实际上在阻止你说出那些你知道不该说的话，或者那些你应该等一等再说的话，或者话的其他表达方式。这种压抑会让你感到烦躁和紧张，因为你实际上是在压制一个行为回路。
We actually can see examples of what happens when you're not doing this well. Some of the examples come from children. If you look at young children, they don't have the forebrain circuitry to engage in this top down processing until they reach age 22, even 25. But in young children, you see this in a really robust way. You'll see they'll be rocking back and forth. It's hard for them to sit still because those central pattern generators are constantly going in the background, whereas adults can sit still.
我们可以看到一些例子，说明当你没有做到这一点时会发生什么。其中一些例子来自儿童。如果你观察小孩子，他们的大脑前额叶回路直到22岁甚至25岁才发育完全，因此无法进行高层次的处理。然而，在小孩子身上，这种现象非常明显。你会看到他们会前后摇动，静坐对他们来说很困难，因为那些中央模式生成器在不断地运行，而成年人则可以坐得住。
A kid sees a piece of candy that it wants and will just reach out and grab it, whereas an adult probably would ask if they could have a piece or wait until they were offered a piece in most cases. People that have damage to the certain areas of the frontal lobes don't have this kind of restriction. They'll just blur things out. They'll just say things. We all know people like this. Impulsivity is a lack of top down control, a lack of top down processing.
一个小孩看到了自己想要的一块糖，通常会直接伸手去拿，而成年人则更多情况下会先询问是否可以拿一块，或者等待别人给他们。大脑某些额叶区域受损的人缺乏这种约束，他们会随意说出一些话。我们都认识这样的人。冲动行为是一种缺乏自上而下控制和处理的表现。
The other thing that will turn off the forebrain and make it harder to top down processing is a couple of drinks containing alcohol. The removal of inhibition is actually removal of neural inhibition of nerve cells suppressing the activity of other nerve cells. When you look at people that have damage to their frontal lobes, or you look at puppies, or you look at young children, everything's a stimulus. Everything is a potential interaction for them, and they have a very hard time restricting their behavior and their speech.
还有一种会关闭大脑前额叶、使自上而下处理变得更加困难的情况，就是摄入含有酒精的饮料。当抑制作用被解除时，其实是神经细胞之间的抑制被解除，也就是说一些神经细胞不再压制其他神经细胞的活动。当你观察那些前额叶受损的人、或小狗、或幼童时，你会发现对他们来说，一切都是刺激，他们会随时与周围互动，很难控制自己的行为和言语。
A lot of the motor system is designed to just work in a reflexive way, and then when we decide we want to learn something or do something or not do something, we have to engage in this top down restriction. It feels like agitation because it's accompanied by the release of a neuromodulator called norepinephrine, which in the body we call adrenaline, and it actually makes us feel agitated.
我们身体的许多运动系统是以反射的方式运作的。当我们决定想要学习一些东西、做某事或不做某事时，我们必须进行自上而下的约束。这种感觉就像焦虑，因为这种过程伴随着一种叫做去甲肾上腺素的神经调节物质的释放，在体内我们称之为肾上腺素，它实际上让我们感到不安。
For those of you that are trying to learn something new or to learn to suppress your responses or be more deliberate and careful in your responses, that is going to feel challenging for a particular reason. It's going to feel challenging because the chemicals in your body that are released in association with that effort are designed to make you feel agitated. That low-level tremor that sometimes people feel when they're really, really angry is actually a chemically induced low-level tremor.
对于那些试图学习新事物、学会控制自己的反应或者在回应时更加慎重的人来说，这通常会感到困难。这种困难感的原因在于，当你努力尝试时，身体会释放一些化学物质，这些化学物质会让你感到烦躁。这种微微的颤抖感，有时在人们非常生气时会感受到，其实是由化学物质引起的低水平颤抖。
It's what I call limbic friction. There's an area of your brain that's involved in our more primitive reflexive responses called the limbic system. The frontal cortex is in a friction. It's in a tug of war with that system all the time. Unless you have damage to the frontal lobe or you've had too much to drink or something, in which case you tend to just say and do whatever. This is really important to understand because if you want to understand neural plasticity, you want to understand how to shape your behavior, how to shape your thinking, how to change how you're able to perform in any context. The most important thing to understand is that it requires top-down processing. It requires this feeling of agitation.
这就是我所说的“边缘摩擦”。你大脑中有一个区域，负责我们更原始的反射性反应，叫做边缘系统。而额叶皮质则与这个系统不断摩擦，它们总在进行拉锯战。除非你的额叶受到了损伤，或者是喝得太多之类的情况，否则你往往会随意说做事情。这非常重要，因为如果你想理解神经可塑性，想明白如何塑造自己的行为、思维，或改变在任何情况下的表现，最重要的是理解这需要自上而下的处理。这需要一种激动不安的感觉。
In fact, I would say that agitation and strain is the entry point to neuroplasticity. Let's take a look at what neuroplasticity is. Let's explore it not as the way it's normally talked about in modern culture. In neuroplasticity, plasticity is great. What exactly do people mean? Plasticity itself is just a process by which neurons can change their connections in the way they work so that you can go from things being very challenging and deliberate, requiring a lot of effort and strain to them being reflexive. Typically, when we hear about plasticity, we're thinking about positive or what I call adaptive plasticity.
其实，我认为烦躁和紧张是神经可塑性的入门点。我们来看一下什么是神经可塑性。让我们不按现代文化中通常的方式来探索它。在神经可塑性中，可塑性是个很好的概念。那么人们具体指的是什么呢？可塑性本身是一个过程，通过这个过程，神经元可以改变它们的连接方式，从而让一些事情从非常具有挑战性、需要大量努力和紧张，变得自然而然。通常，当我们听到可塑性这个词时，我们想到的都是正面的，或者我称之为自适应的可塑性。
A lot of plasticity can be induced, for instance, by brain damage, but that's generally not the kind of plasticity that we want. When I say plasticity, unless I say otherwise, I mean adaptive plasticity. In particular, most of the neuroplasticity that people want is self-directed plasticity. Because if there's one truism to neuroplasticity, it's that from birth until about age 25, the brain is incredibly plastic. Kids are learning all sorts of things, but they can learn it passively. They don't have to work too hard or focus too hard, although focus helps to learn new things, acquire new languages, acquire new skills.
大量的可塑性可以通过例如脑损伤来诱导，但这通常并不是我们想要的那种可塑性。当我提到可塑性时，除非另有说明，我指的是适应性可塑性。特别是，大多数人希望的是自我引导的可塑性。如果有一条关于神经可塑性的真理，那就是从出生到大约25岁，大脑具有惊人的可塑性。孩子们学习各种各样的东西，他们可以被动地学习，不必花费太多精力或高度专注，尽管专注有助于学习新事物、掌握新语言和获得新技能。
But if you're an adult and you want to change your neural circuitry at the level of emotions or behavior or thoughts or anything, really, you absolutely need to ask two important questions. One, what particular aspect of my nervous system am I trying to change, meaning am I trying to change my emotions or my perceptions, my sensations, and which ones are available for me to change? And then the second question is, how are you going to go about that? What is the structure of a regimen to engage neuroplasticity? And it turns out that the answer to that second question is governed by how awake or how sleepy we are.
如果你是成年人，并且希望在情感、行为或思维等方面改变你的神经回路，你绝对需要问自己两个重要问题。第一，我想改变神经系统的哪个具体方面？是想改变我的情感、感知、感觉，还是其中的哪一个？哪些方面是我可以改变的？然后第二个问题是，你要如何实现这个改变？怎样制定一个计划来激活神经可塑性？结果发现，第二个问题的答案取决于我们是清醒状态还是困倦状态。
So let's talk about that next. Neuroplasticity is the ability for these connections in the brain and body to change in response to experience. And what's so incredible about the human nervous system in particular is that we can direct our own neural changes. We can decide that we want to change our brain. In other words, our brain can change itself and our nervous system can change itself. And the same can't be said for other organs in the body.
那么接下来我们来谈谈这个。神经可塑性是指大脑和身体中的连接可以根据经验发生变化的能力。特别令人惊叹的是，人类的神经系统可以自主引导这些神经变化。我们可以决定想要改变大脑。换句话说，我们的大脑和神经系统可以自我改变。而身体中的其他器官并不具备这种能力。
Even though our other organs in the body have some ability to change, they can't direct it. They can't think and decide, oh, you know, your gut doesn't say, oh, you know, I want to be able to digest spicy foods better. So I'm going to rearrange the connections to be able to do that. Whereas your brain can decide that you want to learn a language or you want to be less emotionally reactive or more emotionally engaged. And you can undergo a series of steps that will allow your brain to make those changes so that eventually it becomes reflexive for you to do that, which is absolutely incredible.
尽管我们体内的其他器官有一定的变化能力，但它们无法自主引导这些变化。比如，肠胃不会自己决定说：“哦，我想更好地消化辛辣食物，所以我会调整结构来实现这个目标。” 而大脑则不同，它可以决定你想学习一种语言，或是想变得情绪反应减少或更加投入。你可以采取一系列措施来让大脑产生这些变化，最终这些行为对你来说就会变成反射性的。这简直令人难以置信。
For a long time, it was thought that neuroplasticity was the unique gift of young animals and humans, that it could only occur when we're young. And in fact, the young brain is incredibly plastic. Children can learn three languages without an accent reflexively. Whereas adults, it's very challenging. It takes a lot more effort and strain, a lot more of that duration path outcome kind of thinking in order to achieve those plastic changes.
很长一段时间，人们认为神经可塑性是年轻动物和人类特有的能力，它只有在我们年轻时才会发生。事实上，年轻的大脑确实非常具有可塑性。儿童可以在不带口音的情况下自然而然地学习三种语言，而成年人则很困难。成年人需要投入更多的努力和精力，需要更多地思考学习的步骤、过程和结果，才能实现这种大脑可塑性的变化。
We now know, however, that the adult brain can change in response to experience. Nobel prizes were given for the understanding that the young brain can change very dramatically. I think one of the most extreme examples would be for people that are born blind from birth. They use the area of their brain that normally would be used for visualizing objects and colors and things outside of them for braille reading. In brain imaging studies, it's been shown that people who are blind from birth, when they braille read, the area of the brain that would normally light up, if you will, for vision lights up for braille reading.
我们现在知道，成年人的大脑可以根据经历而改变。诺贝尔奖曾表彰对年轻大脑能显著变化的理解。我认为一个最极端的例子是那些天生失明的人。他们会使用通常用于观察物体和颜色的大脑区域来阅读盲文。在大脑成像研究中显示，天生失明的人在阅读盲文时，本来应该用于视觉的大脑区域会被激活用于盲文阅读。
So that real estate is reallocated for an entirely different function. If someone has made blind in adulthood, it's unlikely that their entire visual brain will be taken over by the areas of the brain they're responsible for touch. However, there's some evidence that areas of the brain that are involved in hearing and touch can kind of migrate into that area. And there's a lot of interest now in trying to figure out how more plasticity can be induced in adulthood, more positive plasticity. And in order to understand that process, we really have to understand something that might at first seem totally divorced from neuroplasticity, but actually lies at the center of neuroplasticity.
这样，房屋资源可以重新分配，用于完全不同的功能。如果一个人在成年后失明，他们的整个视觉大脑不太可能被负责触觉的大脑区域完全接管。然而，有一些证据表明，负责听觉和触觉的大脑区域可能会在一定程度上迁移到视觉区域。现在，有很多人对如何在成年期诱导更多积极的神经可塑性很感兴趣。为了理解这一过程，我们必须了解一些乍看之下似乎与神经可塑性完全无关，但实际上是神经可塑性核心的东西。
And for any of you that are interested in changing your nervous system so that something that you want can go from being very hard or seem almost impossible and out of reach to being very reflexive, this is especially important to pay attention to. Plasticity in the adult human nervous system is gated, meaning it is controlled by neuromodulators. These things that we talked about earlier, dopamine, serotonin, and one in particular called acetylcholine, are what open up plasticity. They literally unveil plasticity and allow brief periods of time in which whatever information, whatever thing we're sensing or perceiving or thinking, whatever emotions we feel can literally be mapped in the brain such that later it will become much easier for us to experience and feel that thing.
如果你对改变自己的神经系统感兴趣，希望让某件事情从非常困难或看似几乎不可能变得非常顺利，这段内容尤其值得关注。成年人的神经系统具有可塑性，但这种可塑性是“有门槛”的，也就是说，它由神经调节物质控制。我们之前提到的多巴胺、血清素，尤其是一种叫做乙酰胆碱的物质，都是打开这种可塑性的关键。它们可以激活神经系统的可塑性，让我们在一段短暂的时间内，能够将我们感知、体验或思考的内容，包括情感等，映射到大脑中。这样，以后我们就会更容易体验和感受这些内容。
Now, this has a dark side and a positive side. The dark side is it's actually very easy to get neuroplasticity as an adult through traumatic or terrible or challenging experiences. But the important question is to say, why is that? And the reason that's the case is because when something very bad happens, there's the release of two sets of neuromodulators in the brain, epinephrine, which tends to make us feel alert and agitated, which is associated with most bad circumstances. And acetylcholine, which tends to create an even more intense and focused perceptual spotlight. Remember earlier, we were talking about perception and how it's kind of like a spotlight.
现在，这件事情有黑暗面和积极面。黑暗的一面是，成年人很容易通过创伤性、可怕或具有挑战性的经历获得神经可塑性。但重要的问题是，为什么会这样？原因是，当发生非常糟糕的事情时，大脑中会释放两种神经调节物质，肾上腺素和乙酰胆碱。肾上腺素通常让我们感到警觉和烦躁，它与大多数不良情况有关。乙酰胆碱则倾向于让我们的感知更加集中和强烈。请记得我们之前谈到的感知，就像一个聚光灯一样。
Acetylcholine makes that light particularly bright and particularly restricted to one region of our experience. And it does that by making certain neurons in our brain and body active much more than all the rest. So acetylcholine is sort of like a highlighter marker upon which neuroplasticity then comes in later and says, wait, which neurons were active in this particularly alerting phase of whatever day or night, whenever this thing happened to happen. So the way it works is this. You can think of epinephrine as creating this alertness and this kind of unbelievable level of increased attention compared to what you were experiencing before. And you can think of acetylcholine as being the molecule that highlights whatever it happens during that period of heightened alertness.
乙酰胆碱使那种光特别明亮，并且特别集中在我们经历的某个区域。而它之所以能做到这一点，是通过让我们大脑和身体中的某些神经元比其他的更为活跃。因此，可以把乙酰胆碱比作一种荧光笔，它为神经可塑性提供了基础，后者随后会分析：在这个特殊的警觉阶段，哪些神经元变得活跃。简单来说，可以把肾上腺素看作是创造了这种警觉状态的物质，它能让你的注意力比之前大幅提升。而乙酰胆碱则是那种高亮某个时刻发生事情的分子。
So just to be clear, it's epinephrine creates the alertness that's coming from a subset of neurons in the brainstem if you're interested. And acetylcholine coming from an area of the forebrain is tagging or marking the neurons that are particularly active during this heightened level of alertness. Now that marks the cells, the neurons and the synapses for strengthening, for becoming more likely to be active in the future, even without us thinking about it. Okay. In bad circumstances, this all happens without us having to do much. When we want something to happen, however, we want to learn a new language, we want to learn a new skill, we want to become more motivated. What do we know for certain? We know that that process of getting neuroplasticity so that we have more focus, more motivation absolutely requires the release of epinephrine. We have to have alertness in order to have focus. And we have to have focus in order to direct those plastic changes to particular parts of our nervous system.
好的，简单来说，清楚解释一下，是肾上腺素引起了来自脑干中一部分神经元的警觉状态，如果你对此感兴趣的话。而来自前脑区域的乙酰胆碱会标记那些在这种高度警觉状态下特别活跃的神经元。这个标记过程使这些细胞、神经元和突触变得更加强化，更有可能在未来活跃，即使我们没有主动思考。在不好的情况下，这一切都会自动发生。然而，当我们想要达成某个目标时，比如学习新语言、掌握新技能或者提升动力，我们确定知道的是，这个获得神经可塑性的过程，以便拥有更多专注和动力，绝对需要肾上腺素的释放。我们需要有警觉状态才能专注，而要将这些可塑性变化集中于神经系统的特定部分，又需要高度专注。
Now this has immense implications in thinking about the various tools, whether or not those are chemical tools or machine tools, or just self-induced regimens of how long or how intensely you're going to focus in order to get neuroplasticity. But there's another side to it. The dirty secret of neuroplasticity is that no neuroplasticity occurs during the thing you're trying to learn, during the terrible event, during the great event, during the thing that you're really trying to shape and learn, nothing is actually changing between the neurons that is going to last. All the neuroplasticity, the strengthening of the synapses, the addition in some cases of new nerve cells, or at least connections between nerve cells, all of that occurs at a very different phase of life, which is when we're in sleep and non-sleep, deep rest. And so neuroplasticity, which is the kind of holy grail of human experience of, you know, this is the new year and everyone's thinking New Year's resolutions.
这段话的意思是，现在我们在思考各种工具时——无论是化学工具还是机器工具，或者只是通过自我调整决定多长时间或多努力地集中注意力以获得神经可塑性——这会引发巨大的思考。但事情还有另一面。神经可塑性的“秘密”是，在你努力学习某件事、经历某个重大或糟糕事件时，其实并没有任何持久的神经变化发生。所有的神经可塑性，例如突触的强化，有时甚至是新神经细胞的增加，或者至少是神经细胞间连接的增加，这些都发生在生活的另一个阶段，也就是我们在睡眠和非睡眠的深度休息时。因此，神经可塑性是一种人类体验中的“圣杯”，尤其是在新年来临之际，大家都在考虑新年决心的时候。
And right now, perhaps everything's organized and people are highly motivated, but what happens in March or April or May? Well, that all depends on how much attention and focus one can continually bring to whatever it is they're trying to learn. So much so that agitation and a feeling of strain are actually required for this process of neuroplasticity to get triggered, but the actual rewiring occurs during periods of sleep and non-sleep, deep rest. There's a study published last year that's particularly relevant here that I want to share was not done by my laboratory that showed that 20 minutes of deep rest, this is not deep sleep, but essentially doing something very hard at a time, something very hard and very intense and then taking 20 minutes afterward, immediately afterwards, to deliberately turn off the deliberate focused thinking and engagement actually accelerated neuroplasticity.
当然，现在一切可能都很有条理，人们也高度积极，但到了三月、四月或五月，又会怎样呢？这完全取决于一个人能持续地在他们试图学习的事情上投入多少注意力和专注力。实际上，烦躁和紧张感是触发神经可塑性的必要条件，但实际的神经重塑在睡眠和非睡眠的深度休息期间发生。去年发表的一项研究对此非常相关，我想分享一下，这不是我所在实验室进行的研究。研究表明，经过20分钟的深度休息——这不是深度睡眠——而是在做某件非常困难和非常密集的事情之后，立即花20分钟故意关闭集中思考和参与，这实际上加速了神经可塑性。
There's another study that's just incredible. And we're going to go into this in a future episode of the podcast, Not Too Long From Now, that showed that if people are learning a particular skill, it could be a language skill or a motor skill, and they hear a tone just playing in the background. The tone is playing periodically in the background, like just a bell. In deep sleep, if that bell is played, learning is much faster for the thing that they were learning while they were awake. It somehow cues the nervous system in sleep. It doesn't even have to be in dreaming. That something that happened in the waking phase was especially important. So much so that that bell is sort of a Pavlovian cue. It's sort of a reminder to the sleeping brain, oh, you need to remember what it is that you were learning at that particular time of day. And the learning rates and the rates of retention, meaning how much people can remember from the thing they learned, are significantly higher under those conditions.
有一个实验证明十分神奇。我们将在未来不久的一期播客中详细讨论这个实验。研究发现，如果人们在学习某种技能——无论是语言还是运动技能——期间，背景中会间歇性播放一种音调，就像铃声一样。在深度睡眠中，如果再次播放该铃声，白天学习的东西速度会大大加快。这样做似乎在睡眠期间触发了神经系统的某种反应，不必处于做梦阶段，只要这个声音在白天某个时间段内被播放过，就能让在苏醒期的事件变得尤为重要。铃声就像巴甫洛夫的条件刺激，是提醒睡眠中的大脑记住你在那时学到的东西。在这种情况下，学习速度和记忆保持率，即人们能记住多少所学内容，都显著提升。
So I'm going to talk about how to apply all this knowledge in a little bit more in this podcast episode, but also in future episodes. But it really speaks to the really key importance of sleep and focus. These two opposite ends of our attentional state. When we're in sleep, these DPOs, duration, path, and outcome analysis are impossible. We just can't do that. We are only in relation to what's happening inside of us. So sleep is key. Also key are periods of non-sleep, deep rest, where we're turning off our analysis of duration, path, and outcome. In particular for the thing that we were just trying to learn. And we're in this kind of liminal state where our attention is kind of drifting all over. It turns out that's very important for the consolidation, for the changes between the nerve cells that will allow what we were trying to learn to go from being deliberate and hard and stressful and a strain to easy and reflexive.
我要在这集播客里详细讲讲如何应用这些知识，以及在未来的节目中继续探讨。但这也涉及到睡眠和专注的极端重要性。这是我们注意力状态的两个极端。当我们在睡眠中时，那些持续时间、路径和结果分析是无法进行的。我们只能与自己内部发生的事情相关联。因此，睡眠是关键。另一个关键是非睡眠的深度休息时期，在这段时间里，我们关闭了对刚刚学习的内容的持续时间、路径和结果的分析。我们进入一种介于清醒与睡眠之间的状态，注意力随意游荡。事实证明，这对记忆巩固非常重要，神经细胞之间的变化可以让我们所学习的内容从刻意、困难、压力大和紧张变得轻松和自动化。
This also points to how different people, including many modern clinicians, are thinking about how to prevent bad circumstances, traumas, from routing their way into our nervous system permanently. It says that you might want to interfere with certain aspects of brain states that are away from the bad thing that happened. The brain states that happened the next day or the next month or the next year. And also I want to make sure that I pay attention to the fact that for many of you, you're thinking about neuroplasticity, not just in changing your nervous system to add something new, but to also get rid of things that you don't like, that you want to forget bad experiences or at least remove the emotional tendency of a bad relationship or a bad relationship to something or some person or some event, learning to fear certain things less, to eliminate a phobia, to erase a trauma. The memories themselves don't get erased. I'm sorry to say that the memories don't themselves get erased, but the emotional load of memories can be reduced.
这也指出了包括许多现代临床医生在内的不同人群是如何思考预防不良情况或创伤永久进入我们的神经系统。它说你可能想干预某些与不良事件无关的大脑状态，比如事件发生后的第二天、下个月或明年。我还想确保关注这样一个事实：对于很多人来说，他们考虑神经可塑性不仅是为了在神经系统中增加新东西，同时也是为了去除不喜欢的东西，比如想要忘记不好的经历，或者至少减少与某段不良关系或某个事件相关的情感倾向，学习减少对某些事物的恐惧，消除恐惧症或抹去创伤。这些记忆本身无法被抹去，很遗憾地说，记忆本身不会被抹去，但记忆的情感负担可以降低。
And there are a number of different ways that that can happen, but they all require this thing that we're calling neuroplasticity. We're going to have a large number of discussions about neuroplasticity and depth. But the most important thing to understand is that it is indeed a two phase process. What governs the transition between alert and focused and these deep rest and deep sleep states is a system in our brain and body, a certain aspect of the nervous system, called the autonomic nervous system. And it is immensely important to understand how this autonomic nervous system works. It has names like the sympathetic nervous system and parasympathetic nervous system, which frankly are complicated names because they're a little bit misleading. Sympathetic is the one that's associated with more alertness. Parasympathetic is the one that's associated with more calmness. And it gets really misleading because the sympathetic nervous system sounds like sympathy and then people think it's related to calm.
有很多不同的方式可以实现这一点，但它们都需要一种我们称为神经可塑性的东西。我们将深入讨论神经可塑性。最重要的是要理解它实际上是一个两阶段的过程。我们的脑部和身体中有一个系统，也就是神经系统的某个方面，称为自主神经系统，它调控着从警觉和专注状态向深度休息和深度睡眠状态的转变。了解这个自主神经系统的工作原理非常重要。它包含一些名称，如交感神经系统和副交感神经系统，这些名称实际上有些复杂而且略显误导。交感神经系统是与更高警觉性相关的，而副交感神经系统则与更平静状态相关。但交感神经系统的名字容易让人误会，以为它与同情心有关，从而与平静相联系。
I'm going to call it the alertness system and the calmness system because even though sympathetic and parasympathetic are sometimes used, people really get confused. So the way to think about the autonomic nervous system and the reason it's important for every aspect of your life, but in particular for neuroplasticity and engaging in these focused states and then these defocused states, is that it works sort of like a seesaw. Every 24 hours, we're all familiar with the fact that when we wake up in the morning, we might be a little bit groggy, but then generally we're more alert. And then as evening comes around, we tend to become a little more relaxed and sleepy. And eventually at some point at night, we go to sleep. So we go from alert to deeply calm. And as we do that, we go from an ability to engage in these very focused duration path outcome types of analyses to states in sleep that are completely divorced from duration path and outcome, in which everything is completely random and untethered in terms of our sensations, perceptions and feelings and so forth.
我称之为“警觉系统”和“平静系统”，因为尽管有时会使用交感神经和副交感神经两个术语，但很多人感到困惑。理解自主神经系统的方法，以及它对你生活每个方面的重要性，尤其是对神经可塑性及专注与放松状态的切换，是因为它的运作方式有点像跷跷板。每天24小时，我们都知道早上醒来的时候可能有些昏沉，但通常会变得比较警觉。随着晚上到来，我们往往会变得更加放松和困倦，最终在晚上某个时刻进入睡眠。所以我们从警觉状态逐渐进入深度平静状态。在这个过程中，我们从能够进行专注、分析目标、路径、结果的状态，过渡到睡眠中与时间、路径和结果完全无关的状态，在这个状态中，我们的感官、知觉和情绪等都是完全随机和不受约束的。
So every 24 hours, we have a phase of our day that is optimal for thinking and focusing and learning and neuroplasticity and doing all sorts of things. We have energy as well. And at another phase of our day, we're tired and we have no ability to focus. We have no ability to engage in duration path outcome types of analyses. And it's interesting that both phases are important for shaping our nervous system in the ways that we want. So if we want to engage in all plasticity and we want to get the most out of our nervous system, we each have to master that both the transition between wakefulness and sleep and the transition between sleep and wakefulness. Now, so much has been made of the importance of sleep. And it is critically important for wound healing, for learning, as I just mentioned, for consolidating learning, for learning. For all aspects of our immune system, it is the one period of time in which we're not doing these duration path and outcomes types of analyses. And it is critically important to all aspects of our health, including our longevity. Much less has been made, however, of how to get better at sleeping, how to get better at the process that involves falling asleep, staying asleep, and accessing these states of mind and body that involve total paralysis. Most people don't know this, but you're actually paralyzed during much of your sleep so that you can't act out your dreams, presumably. But also where your brain is in a total idle state where it's not controlling anything, it's just left to kind of free run. And there are certain things that we can all do in order to master that transition in order to get better at sleeping. And it involves much more than just how much we sleep. We're all being told, of course, that we need to sleep more, but there's also the issue of sleep quality, accessing those deep states of non-DPO thinking, accessing the right timing of sleep.
每天24小时中，我们有一段时间是最佳的思考、专注、学习以及促进神经可塑性的时段。这段时间我们精力充沛。然而，在另一个时段，我们会感到疲倦，难以集中注意力，无法进行持续路径结果类型的分析。有趣的是，这两种状态在我们塑造神经系统时都很重要。如果我们想激发神经可塑性，从我们的神经系统中获益，就需要掌握清醒与睡眠之间、睡眠与清醒之间的过渡。如今，人们非常强调睡眠的重要性。正如我提到的，睡眠对于伤口愈合、学习、巩固知识以及增强免疫系统至关重要。这段时间我们不再进行持续路径结果类型的分析，对健康和寿命都非常重要。然而，如何改善我们的睡眠质量，却很少被讨论。很多人不知道，在大部分睡眠时间里，我们的身体实际上处于瘫痪状态，以防止我们在梦中动作。此外，大脑也处于完全闲置状态，不再控制其他部分，而是任其自由运行。为了改善睡眠过渡，有一些方法可以帮助我们提升睡眠质量，这不仅仅是关于睡眠时间长短的问题。我们常被告知需要更多睡眠，但同样重要的是睡眠质量，比如进入非持续路径思维的深层状态以及掌握合适的睡眠时间。
Not a lot has been discussed publicly as far as I'm aware of when to time your sleep. I think we all can appreciate that sleeping for half an hour throughout the day so that you get a total of eight hours of sleep every 24-hour cycle is probably very different and not optimal compared to a solid bowl. Although there are people that have tried this. I think it's been written about in various books. Not many people can stick to that schedule. Incidentally, I think it's called the Uberman schedule, not to be confused with the Huberman schedule because first of all, my schedule doesn't look anything like that. And second of all, I would never attempt such a sleeping regime.
据我所知，关于如何安排睡眠时间的公开讨论并不多。我认为大家都明白，将每天八小时的睡眠分散到一天中，以每次半小时的方式进行，与一整段的睡眠有很大区别，而且不是最佳选择。尽管有些人尝试过这种做法，我想这在一些书籍中也有所提及，但很少有人能坚持这种作息。顺便提一下，我认为这种方法叫做Uberman计划，不要与Huberman计划混淆。首先，我的作息方式与这种方法完全不同；其次，我也绝不会尝试这样的睡眠计划。
The other thing that is really important to understand is that we have not explored as a culture the rhythms that occur in our waking field. So much has been focused on the value of sleep and the importance of sleep, which is great. But I don't think that most people are paying attention to what's happening in their waking states and when their brain is optimized for focus, when their brain is optimized for these DPOs, these duration path outcome types of engagements for learning and for changing. And when their brain is probably better suited for more reflexive thinking and behaviors.
另一件非常重要的事情是，我们这个文化还没有充分探索我们清醒状态下的节律。我们过多地关注了睡眠的价值和重要性，这固然是好事。但我认为大多数人并没有注意到在清醒状态下发生的事情——比如什么时候大脑最佳状态是专注于学习和改变的过程中结果路径这些事情，以及什么时候大脑可能更适合进行反思性的思考和行为。
And it turns out that there's a vast amount of scientific data which points to the existence of what are called all-tradian rhythms. You may have heard of circadian rhythms. Circadian means circa about a day. So it's 24-hour rhythms because the earth spins once every 24 hours. All-tradian rhythms occur throughout the day and they require less time. They're shorter. The most important all-tradian rhythm for sake of this discussion is the 90 minute rhythm that we're going through all the time in our ability to attend and focus.
事实证明，有大量科学数据指向一种被称为全昼节律的存在。你可能听说过昼夜节律（circadian rhythms），它指的是大约一天的周期，因为地球每24小时自转一圈。全昼节律（all-tradian rhythms）在一天中不断发生，时间更短，周期更短。对于我们要讨论的问题，最重要的全昼节律是我们在注意力和专注力方面经历的90分钟节律。
And in sleep, our sleep is broken up into 90 minute segments. Early in the night we have more phase one and phase two, lighter sleep, and then we go into our deeper phase three and phase four sleep. And then we return to phase one, two, three, four. So all night you're going through these all-tradian rhythms of stage one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, it's repeating. Most people perhaps know that. Maybe they don't.
在睡眠中，我们的睡眠被分成90分钟的周期。夜晚早些时候，我们有更多的第一阶段和第二阶段的浅睡眠，然后进入更深的第三阶段和第四阶段的睡眠。之后，我们又回到第一、二、三、四阶段。整个晚上，你都会经历这样的阶段循环：一、二、三、四，再一、二、三、四，重复进行。大多数人可能知道这个过程，也可能不知道。
But when you wake up in the morning, these all-tradian rhythms continue. And it turns out that we are optimized for focus and attention within these 90 minute cycles so that at the beginning of one of these 90 minute cycles, maybe you sit down to learn something new or to engage in some new challenging behavior. For the first five or ten minutes of one of those cycles, it's well known that the brain and the neural circuits and the neuromodulators are not going to be optimally tuned to whatever it is you're trying to do.
当你早上醒来时，身体的全天节律继续运行。事实证明，我们在这90分钟的周期内更适合专注和注意力。因此，在这些90分钟周期的开始阶段，也许你会坐下来学习新东西或参与一些新的挑战。众所周知，在周期开始的前五到十分钟，大脑、神经回路和神经调节物质还不能最佳地适应你正在做的事情。
But as you drop deeper into that 90 minute cycle, your ability to focus and to engage in this DPO process and to direct neural plasticity and to learn is actually much greater. And then you eventually pop out of that at the end of the 90 minute cycle. So these cycles are occurring in sleep and these cycles are occurring in wakefulness. And all of those are governed by this seesaw of alertness to calmness that we call the autonomic nervous system.
在这个90分钟的周期中，当你深入其中时，你的专注能力以及参与DPO过程、引导神经可塑性和学习的能力实际上会更强大。周期结束时，你最终会“跳出”这个状态。这些周期在睡眠和清醒时都会发生，而这一切都受到我们称为自主神经系统的警觉与平静之间平衡的控制。
So if you want to master and control your nervous system, regardless of what tool you reach to, whether or not it's a pharmacologic tool or whether or not it's a behavioral tool or whether or not it's a brain-machine interface tool, it's vitally important to understand that your entire existence is occurring in these 90 minute cycles, whether or not you're asleep or awake. And so you really need to learn how to wedge into those 90 minute cycles.
因此，如果你想掌握和控制自己的神经系统，不论你使用什么工具，无论是药物工具、行为工具还是脑机接口工具，重要的是要理解你的整个存在是发生在这些90分钟的周期中，不管你是睡着还是醒着。所以，你需要学会如何切入这些90分钟的周期。
And for instance, it would be completely crazy and counterproductive to try and just learn information while in deep sleep by listening to that information because you're not able to access it. It would be perfectly good, however, to engage in a focus bout of learning each day. And now we know how long that focus bout of learning should be. It should be at least one 90-minute cycle. And the expectation should be that the early phase of that cycle is going to be challenging. It's going to hurt. It's not going to feel natural. It's not going to feel like flow. But that you can learn and the circuits of your brain that are involved in focus and motivation can learn to drop into a mode of more focus.
这段话的大意是：例如，在深度睡眠中通过听信息来学习是完全不切实际且事与愿违的，因为你无法在这种状态下获取信息。然而，每天进行专注的学习才是有效的。现在我们知道，这种学习的专注时间应该至少是一个90分钟的周期。你应该意识到，这个周期的初期可能会很有挑战性，并且让人感到痛苦、不自然，也不容易进入"心流"状态。不过，你的大脑中负责专注和激励的回路可以学会更好地投入专注的学习模式。
Get more neuroplasticity, in other words, by engaging these all-tradian cycles at the appropriate times of day. For instance, some people are very good learners early in the day and not so good in the afternoon. So you can start to explore this process even without any information about the underlying neurochemicals, by simply paying attention, not just to when you go to sleep and when you wake up each morning, how deep or how shallow your sleep felt to you subjectively.
通过在一天中适当的时段进行这些大约三小时的循环，你可以增强神经可塑性。换句话说，有些人早上学习效果很好，而下午效果不佳。因此，即使你不了解背后的神经化学物质，你也可以通过简单地关注自己的感觉来探索这个过程，包括什么时候入睡，早晨什么时候醒来，以及你主观上觉得睡眠有多深或多浅。
But also throughout the day, when your brain tends to be most anxious, because it turns out that has a correlate related to perception that we will talk about, you can ask yourself, when are you most focused, when you least anxious, when do you feel most motivated, when you feel most at least motivated? By understanding how the different aspects of your perception, sensation, feeling, thought and actions tend to want to be engaged or not want to be engaged, you develop a very good window into what's going to be required to shift your ability to focus or shift your ability to engage in creative type thinking at different times of day, should you choose.
但是在一天中，当你的大脑倾向于感到最焦虑时，你可以问自己：你什么时候最专注，什么时候最不焦虑，什么时候感到最有动力，什么时候感到最没有动力？通过了解你在感知、感觉、思考和行动上的不同方面是怎么倾向于参与或不参与的，你可以很好地预测在一天中的不同时间点，怎么调整自己的专注力或者创意思维能力。
And so that's where we're heading going forward. It all starts with mastering this seesaw that is the autonomic nervous system, that at a course level is a transition between wakefulness and sleep. But at a finer level, and just as important are the various cycles, these all trading 90 minute cycles that govern our life all the time, 24 hours a day, every day of our life. And so we're going to talk about how you can take control of the autonomic nervous system so that you can better access neural plasticity, better access sleep. Even take advantage of the phase that is the transition between sleep and waking to access things like creativity and so forth, all based on studies that have been published over the last 100 years, mainly within the last 10 years, and some that are very, very new, and that point to the use of specific tools that will allow you to get the most out of your nervous system.
所以，这就是我们未来要前进的方向。一切都始于掌握自主神经系统这座“跷跷板”，从整体上来说，它是清醒和睡眠之间的转换。但更细致地说，同样重要的是各种周期，这些都是90分钟的周期，不断地调节着我们每天24小时的生活。因此，我们将讨论如何掌控自主神经系统，以便更好地利用神经可塑性，更好地进入睡眠状态。甚至可以利用从睡眠到清醒的过渡阶段来获取创造力等能力，这些都基于过去100年中（主要是最近10年发布）的一些研究成果，以及一些非常新的研究，这些研究指出了一些具体工具的使用，这些工具将帮助你充分利用神经系统。
Today we covered a lot of information. It was sort of a whirlwind tour of everything from neurons and synapses to neural plasticity in the autonomic nervous system. We will revisit a lot of these themes going forward. So if all of that didn't sink in in one pass, please don't worry. We will come back to these themes over and over again. I wanted to equip you with language that we're all developing a kind of common base set of information going forward. And I hope the information is valuable to you and you're thinking about what is working well for you and is what's working less well and what's been exceedingly challenging and what's been easy for you in terms of your pursuit of particular behaviors or emotional states, where your challenges or the challenges of people that you know might reside.
今天我们学习了很多信息，就像是一次快速浏览，从神经元和突触到自主神经系统的神经可塑性。我们今后会多次重温这些主题。因此，如果一遍没有完全理解，请不要担心。我们会反复讨论这些主题。我希望通过这次课程，大家能够掌握一种共同的基础信息。希望这些信息对你有价值，也能帮助你思考哪些方面对你来说很顺利，哪些方面较为困难，哪些挑战非常严峻，哪些则比较容易。希望你在追求特定行为或情感状态时，能认清自己的挑战或者你认识的人的挑战。
As promised in our welcome video, the format of the Human and Lab podcast is to dive deep into individual topics for an entire month at a time. So for the entire month of January, we're going to explore this incredible state that is sleep and a related state which is non-sleep-depressed. And what they do for things like learning, resetting our emotional capacity. Everyone's probably familiar with the fact that when we're sleep deprived, we're so much less good at dealing with life circumstances.
正如我们在欢迎视频中承诺的那样，"Human and Lab" 播客的形式是每个月深入探讨一个主题。所以在整个一月份，我们将探索睡眠这个奇妙的状态，以及一种相关状态：非睡眠抑郁。我们会讨论它们如何影响学习、情绪重置等方面。大家可能都知道，睡眠不足会让我们在面对生活中的各种情况时表现得不那么好。
We're more emotionally labile. Why is that? How is that? But most importantly, we're going to talk about how to get better at sleeping and then how to access better sleep, even when your sleep timing or duration is compromised. We're also going to talk about the data that support this very interesting state called non-sleep-depressed, where one is neither sleep nor awake, but it turns out one can recover some of the neuromodulators and more importantly, the processes involved in sensation perception, feeling, thought and action.
我们在情感上更加不稳定。这是为什么呢？这又是如何发生的呢？但最重要的是，我们将讨论如何改善睡眠质量，以及在睡眠时间或时长受限时，如何获得更好的睡眠。我们还将讨论有关一种非常有趣的状态的数据，这种状态称为"非睡眠抑制"，人在这种状态下既不睡觉也不清醒，但事实证明，人们可以恢复一些神经调节物质，更重要的是，可以恢复与感知、感觉、思维和行动相关的过程。
It's sure to be a very rich discussion back and forth where I'm answering your questions and providing tools. And I'm certain you're also going to learn a lot of information about neuroscience and what makes up this incredible phase of your life where you think you're not conscious, but you're actually resetting and renewing yourself in order to perform better, feel better, etc. in the waking state. If you want to support the podcast, please click the like button and subscribe on YouTube. Leave us a comment if you have any feedback for us.
这一定会是一场非常丰富的讨论，我会回答你们的问题并提供一些工具。我相信你们也会学到很多关于神经科学的信息，以及关于这个让人难以置信的人生阶段的内容。在这个阶段，你可能以为自己没有意识，但其实是在重置和更新自己，以便在清醒状态下表现得更好、感觉更好等。如果你想支持播客，请点击点赞按钮，并在YouTube上订阅我们的频道。如果你有任何反馈，请给我们留言。
And on Apple, you can also leave a review and comments for us to improve the podcast experience for you. Please also check out our sponsors, and thank you so much. We'll see you on the next episode.
在苹果平台上，你也可以给我们留下评论和意见，帮助我们改进播客体验。也请查看我们的赞助商，非常感谢你们的支持。我们下期节目再见。