How to Focus to Change Your Brain | Huberman Lab Podcast #6
发布时间 2021-02-08 12:30:01 来源
Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. My name is 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. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public.
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。这个播客独立于我在斯坦福的教学和研究工作。然而，它是我希望向大众提供免费科学信息和相关工具的一部分努力。
In keeping with that theme, I want to thank the first sponsor of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Inside Tracker. Inside Tracker is a personalized nutrition platform that analyzes blood factors and DNA-related factors that helps you develop a personalized health plan. Many important factors related to our health and well-being can only be measured by a blood sample and by a DNA sample.
与这个主题相呼应，我想感谢今天播客的首位赞助商。我们的首位赞助商是Inside Tracker。Inside Tracker是一个个性化的营养平台，它通过分析血液因素和DNA相关因素，帮助您制定个人健康计划。许多与我们健康和福祉有关的重要因素只能通过血液样本和DNA样本进行测量。
I've been getting my blood work done for many years now and I use Inside Tracker because Inside Tracker makes it very easy to not only get the blood work done, someone can come to your house or you can go to a clinic for instance, but also to interpret the data that you get. Oftentimes when we get blood work done, there are all these numbers and all these levels of different hormones and metabolic factors and so forth, but one doesn't know what to do with that information.
多年来，我一直在进行血液检测，我选择使用Inside Tracker，因为Inside Tracker让检测变得非常简单。不仅可以让专人上门服务或者去诊所进行检测，还能帮助解读你得到的数据。通常，我们进行血液检测后，会看到各种数字和激素及代谢因子的水平，但却不知道如何利用这些信息。
Inside Tracker has a terrific dashboard platform where you go online and it makes analyzing all that easy and it also provides some very simple and straightforward directives in terms of exercise, nutrition, and other lifestyle factors that can help guide your health and improve your health. If you'd like to try Inside Tracker, you can go to insidetracker.com slash huberman and use the code hubermanitcheckout to get 25% off your order.
Inside Tracker有一个出色的仪表板平台，你可以在线上使用它来轻松分析所有健康数据，并且它还提供一些关于运动、营养和其他生活方式因素的简单直接的指导，帮助你引导和改善健康。如果你想尝试Inside Tracker，可以访问insidetracker.com/huberman，并在结账时使用代码hubermanitcheckout享受25%的折扣。
Today's episode is also brought to us by Headspace. Headspace is a meditation app that makes meditating easy. I've been meditating on and off for about three decades now and typically it's been more off than on. I think like a lot of people I find it hard to stick with a meditation practice. A few years ago I started using the Headspace app and when I did that I found that I was meditating really consistently.
今天的节目由 Headspace 赞助。Headspace 是一个使冥想变得简单的应用程序。我断断续续地冥想了大约三十年，但通常都是断多于续。我想和很多人一样，我发现坚持冥想很困难。几年前，我开始使用 Headspace 应用程序，自那时起我发现自己能更持续地进行冥想。
First of all, the meditations in Headspace are backed by quality scientific peer-reviewed studies. Second of all, the meditations allow the meditation to be easy and fun to access. I started first using them when I would travel because on JetBlue flights, which was the airline I was using, the meditations are offered as an alternative to watching a TV or a movie.
首先，Headspace 里的冥想内容都有经过高质量的科学同行评审研究的支持。其次，这些冥想让人们能够轻松有趣地进行。我第一次使用它们是在旅行时，因为我乘坐的捷蓝航空航班上提供了这些冥想，可以作为看电视或电影的替代选择。
And I found that I would arrive feeling much more refreshed than had I just sort of zoned out on the TV the whole time or even if I had slept. I now continue to use Headspace regularly pretty much every day for a short meditation and I've personally derived tremendous benefits from it. If you'd like to try Headspace, you can go to headspace.com slash special offer and they'll give you one month of all the meditations that they have available completely free.
我发现，与其一直盯着电视发呆甚至是小睡一会儿，我感觉到达时会精神焕发得多。现在，我几乎每天都用Headspace进行短时间的冥想，这让我受益匪浅。如果你也想试试Headspace，可以访问headspace.com/specialoffer，他们会提供一个月的免费冥想课程。
That's the best offer available right now from Headspace. So you can go to headspace.com slash special offer and you'll get one month completely free all the meditations they have. The third sponsor of today's podcast is Made For. Made For is a behavioral science company that is a subscription model in which you engage in specific activities each month for 10 months in order to bring about positive behavioral change and growth mindset.
这是目前Headspace提供的最佳优惠。所以你可以访问headspace.com/specialoffer，并获得一个月的免费冥想课程。今天播客的第三个赞助商是Made For。Made For是一家行为科学公司，采用订阅模式，在10个月的时间里每个月参与特定活动，以实现积极的行为改变和成长心态。
The company was founded by former Navy SEAL Patrick Dossett as well as Tom's founder Blake Mikoski. I'm the lead advisor of the Scientific Advisory Board at Made For and some of the other members of the advisory board include the head of the Chronobiology Unit at the National Institutes of Health, as well as psychiatrists from Harvard, UC Irvine, and many other individuals who are serious about science and help develop the Made For program.
这家公司是由前海豹突击队员Patrick Dossett和Tom's品牌创始人Blake Mikoski共同创立的。我是Made For科学顾问委员会的首席顾问，顾问委员会的其他成员包括美国国立卫生研究院的时间生物学研究负责人，以及来自哈佛大学、加州大学欧文分校的精神病学专家，还有很多对科学研究非常严谨的专业人士，他们共同帮助开发了Made For项目。
If you want to try Made For, you can go to getmadefor.com and if you enter Huberman at checkout, you'll get 15% off the program. Today we're talking about Neural Plasticity which is this incredible feature of our nervous systems that allows it to change in response to experience. Neural Plasticity is arguably one of the most important aspects of our biology. It holds the promise for each and all of us to think differently, to learn new things, to forget painful experiences, and to essentially adapt to anything that life brings us by becoming better.
如果你想试试 Made For，你可以访问 getmadefor.com，并在结账时输入 Huberman，即可享受15%的折扣。今天我们讨论的是神经可塑性，它是我们神经系统的一项惊人功能，可以根据经历进行改变。神经可塑性可以说是我们生物学中最重要的方面之一。它给我们每个人带来了希望，使我们能够以不同的方式思考、学习新事物、忘记痛苦的经历，并通过变得更好来适应生活中发生的任何事情。
Neural Plasticity has a long and important history and we're not going to review all of it in detail. Today what we are going to do is discuss what is Neural Plasticity as well as the different forms of Neural Plasticity. We're going to talk about how to access Neural Plasticity depending on how old you are and depending on the specific types of changes that you're trying to create. This is a topic for which there are lots of tools as well as lots of biological principles that we can discuss. So let's get started.
神经可塑性有着悠久而重要的历史，我们不会详细回顾所有的内容。今天，我们将讨论什么是神经可塑性以及神经可塑性的不同形式。我们会谈到如何根据你的年龄和你想创造的特定变化来利用神经可塑性。这是一个有很多工具和生物学原理可以讨论的话题。那么，我们开始吧。
Most people are familiar with the word Neural Plasticity. It's sometimes also called Neural Plasticity. Those are the same thing. So if I say Neural Plasticity or Neural Plasticity, I'm referring to the same process which is the brain and nervous systems ability to change itself. There are a lot of reasons why the nervous system would do this. It could do it in response to some traumatic event. It could, for instance, create a sense of fear around a particular place or a fear of automobiles or planes. It could also occur when something positive happens, like the birth of our first child or when our puppy does something amusing, or we see an incredible feat of performance in athleticism.
大多数人对“神经可塑性”这个词很熟悉，它有时也被称为“神经塑性”。这两个词是同一种东西。所以当我说神经可塑性或神经塑性时，我指的是同一过程，即大脑和神经系统自我改变的能力。神经系统这样做有很多原因。它可能是对一些创伤事件的反应。例如，它可能会让人对某个地方产生恐惧感，或者对汽车或飞机感到害怕。这种变化也可能发生在一些积极事件中，比如我们的第一个孩子出生，或者看到我们的狗狗做了有趣的事情，又或者当我们见证了一场令人惊叹的体育表演时。
The word Neural Plasticity means so many things to so many different people that I thought it would be important to just first put a little bit of organizational logic around what it is and how it happens. Because nowadays, if you were to go online and Google the word Neural Plasticity, you would find hundreds of thousands of references, scientific references, as well as a lot of falsehoods about what Neural Plasticity is and how to access it. As I mentioned before, we're going to talk about the science of it and we're going to talk about the tools that allow you to engage this incredible feature of your nervous system.
神经可塑性这个词对不同的人来说有很多不同的意义，因此我觉得有必要先给它下个定义，并解释一下它是如何发生的。因为现在，如果你上网搜索“神经可塑性”这个词，你会找到成千上万的参考资料，其中既有科学的，也有不少关于神经可塑性的误解。正如我之前提到的，我们会讨论神经可塑性的科学原理，并探讨一些工具，帮助你利用这种神奇的神经系统功能。
And that's the first point, which is that all of us were born with a nervous system that isn't just capable of change but was designed to change. When we enter the world, our nervous system is primed for learning. The brain and nervous system of a baby is wired very crudely. The connections are not precise. And we can see evidence of that in the fact that babies are kind of flopping there, like a little potato bug with limbs. They can't really do much in terms of coordinated movement. They certainly can't speak and they can't really do anything with precision.
这是第一点：我们每个人生来就有一个神经系统，这个系统不仅能改变，而且就是为改变而设计的。当我们来到这个世界时，我们的神经系统就已准备好学习。婴儿的大脑和神经系统连接得很粗糙，不够精确。这从婴儿的表现就可以看出来，他们看起来像是一只小土豆虫，四肢软软的，动作不协调。他们不能做复杂的动作，当然也不能说话，更不能精确地做事情。
And that's because we come into this world over connected. We have essentially wires, those wires have names like axons and dendrites, those are the different parts of the neurons discussed in episode one. But those little parts and those wires and connections are everywhere. Imagine a bunch of roads that are all connected to one another and kind of a mess. But there are no highways. They're all just small roads. That's essentially what the young nervous system is like. And then as we mature, as we go from day one of life to 10 years old, 20 years old, 30 years old, what happens is particular connections get reinforced and stronger and other connections are lost.
这就是因为我们来到这个世界时就已经有了过多的连接。我们身体里有相当于电线的东西，这些线有名字，比如轴突和树突，它们是第一集中讨论的神经元的不同部分。这些小部分、这些线和连接无处不在。想象一下，一堆相互连接的道路，但有点混乱，而没有高速公路，都是些小路。这基本上就是年轻的神经系统的样子。随着我们成长，从出生的第一天到10岁、20岁、30岁，某些特定的连接会得到加强和巩固，而其他连接则会消失。
So that's the first important principle that I want everyone to understand, which is that developmental plasticity. The neuroplasticity that occurs from the time we're born until about age 25 is mainly a process of removing connections that don't serve our goals well. Now of course certain events happen during that birth to 25 period in which positive events and negative events are really stamped down into our nervous system in a very dramatic fashion by what we call one trial learning. We experience something once and then our nervous system is forever changed by that experience.
所以，我希望大家理解的第一个重要原则是发育可塑性。神经可塑性指从出生到大约25岁这个阶段，主要是在去除那些对我们目标没有帮助的连接。当然，在这个从出生到25岁的时期，某些事件会非常明显地铭刻在我们的神经系统中，这种过程我们称之为“一次性学习”。也就是说，我们经历了一次某件事情，我们的神经系统就会因这一经历而永久改变。
Unless of course we go through some work to undo that experience. So I want to imagine in your mind that when you were brought into this world, you were essentially a widely connected web of connections that was really poor at doing any one thing. And that through your experience, what you were exposed to by your parents or other caretakers, through your social interactions, through your thoughts, through the languages that you learned, through the places you traveled or didn't travel, your nervous system became customized to your unique experience.
当然，除非我们付出努力去改变这种经历。因此，我希望你在脑海中想象，当你来到这个世界时，你本质上就像一个广泛连接的网络，但在某一方面的能力却很弱。而通过你的人生经历，包括父母或其他照顾者对你的影响、社交互动、思考方式、学习的语言，以及你去过或没去过的地方，你的神经系统逐渐根据你的独特经历进行了调整。
Now that's true for certain parts of your brain that are involved in what we call representations of the outside world. A lot of your brain is designed to represent the visual world or represent the auditory world or represent the gallery of smells that are possible in the world. However, there are aspects of your nervous system that were designed not to be plastic. They were wired so that plasticity or changes in those circuits is very unlikely. Those circuits include things like the ones that control your heartbeat, the ones that control your breathing, the ones that control your digestion.
在你的大脑中，有些部分负责我们所说的外部世界的表征。这些部分主要用于表现视觉世界、听觉世界或者是可能存在于世上的各种气味。然而，你的神经系统中还有一些方面被设计成非可塑性的。这些区域的连接方式使得它们很难发生变化，包括控制心跳、呼吸和消化的部分。
And thank goodness that those circuits were set up that way because if you want those circuits to be extremely reliable, you never want to have to think about whether or not your heart will beat or whether or not you will continue breathing or whether or not you'll be able to digest your food. So many nervous system features like digestion and breathing and heart rate are hard to change. Other aspects of our nervous system are actually quite easy to change.
幸好这些电路是这样设定的，因为如果你希望这些电路非常可靠，那么你一定不想去担心你的心脏是否会跳动，或者你是否还能继续呼吸，又或者你是否能消化食物。像消化、呼吸和心率这样的神经系统功能是很难改变的。而我们神经系统的其他方面其实是相对容易改变的。
And one of the great gifts of childhood, adolescents and young adulthood, is that we can learn through almost passive experience. We don't have to focus that hard in order to learn new things. In fact, children go from being able to speak no language whatsoever to being able to speak many, many words and comprise sentences, including words they've never heard before, which is remarkable. It means that the portions of the brain involved in speech and language are actually prime to learn and create new combinations. What this tells us is that the young brain is a plasticity machine.
童年、青少年和年轻成年期的一个巨大优点是，我们可以通过几乎被动的体验来学习。我们不需要特别专注就能学会新事物。事实上，孩子们从完全不会说任何语言到能够说出很多词汇，甚至能组成包含他们从未听过的单词的句子，这真是令人惊讶。这表明大脑中负责言语和语言的部分实际上非常适合学习和创造新的组合。这告诉我们，年轻的大脑具有高度的可塑性。
But then right about age 25 plus or minus a year or two, everything changes. After age 25 or so, in order to get changes in our nervous system, we have to engage in a completely different set of processes. In order to get those changes to occur and for them more importantly to stick around. And this is something that I think is vastly overlooked in the popular culture discussion about neuroplasticity.
在大约25岁上下（一两岁左右）时，一切都会发生改变。在25岁左右，为了在我们的神经系统中实现改变，我们必须参与一套完全不同的过程，以确保这些改变发生，并更重要的是让它们能够持续下来。我认为这一点在大众文化对神经可塑性（大脑自我改造能力）的讨论中被严重忽视了。
People always talk about fire together, wire together. Fire together, wire together is true. It is the statement of my colleague at Stanford, Carla Schatz. And it's an absolute truth about the way that the nervous system wires up early in development. But fire together, wire together doesn't apply in the same way after age 25. And so we have these little memes and these little quotes that circulate on the internet, like fire together, wire together, or there's a famous quote from the greatest neurologist of all time, Ramoni Kahal.
人们常说“一起燃烧，一起连接”。“一起燃烧，一起连接”是有道理的，这是我在斯坦福的同事卡拉·沙茨说的一句话。这是关于神经系统在早期发育时如何连接的一个绝对真理。然而，在25岁以后，“一起燃烧，一起连接”就不以同样的方式适用了。因此，我们在网上看到很多这样的流行语和小句子，比如“一起燃烧，一起连接”，或者像史上最伟大的神经学家拉蒙·卡哈尔的一句名言。
I think it goes something like, you know, should somebody wish to change their nervous system, they could be the sculptor of their nervous system in any way they want, something like that. And that sounds great. I mean, who wouldn't want to change their nervous system any way they want. But what's lost in those statements is how to actually accomplish that. And we're going to cover that today. But please understand that early in development your nervous system is connected very broadly in ways that make it very hard to do anything well.
我觉得这大概是说，如果有人想要改变他们的神经系统，他们可以像雕刻家一样随心所欲地塑造自己的神经系统。听起来很棒，对吧？谁不想以自己想要的方式改变神经系统呢？但是在这些话中，我们忽略了如何真正实现这一点。今天我们会讲到这一点。不过请理解，在早期发育阶段，你的神经系统以非常广泛的方式连接，这让你很难做到某件事情特别好。
From birth until about age 25, those connections get refined, mainly through the removal of connections that don't serve us. And the incredible strengthening of connections that relate to either powerful experiences or that allow us to do things like walk and talk and do math, et cetera. And then after age 25, if we want to change those connections, those super highways of connectivity, we have to engage in some very specific processes.
从出生到大约25岁，大脑中的连接主要通过去除对我们无用的连接进行精细化。这也包括对那些与重要经历相关的连接，或者那些帮助我们行走、说话、做数学运算等的连接进行极大增强。而在25岁之后，如果我们想改变这些高速连接，我们就必须进行一些非常具体的过程。
And those processes, as we'll soon learn, are gated, meaning you can't just decide to change your brain. You actually have to go through a series of steps to change your internal state in ways that will allow you to change your brain. I just want to acknowledge that Costello is snoring particularly loud today. Some of you seem very keen at picking up on his snoring. Others of you can't hear his snoring.
这些过程是有门槛的，我们很快就会了解到，这意味着你不能仅仅通过决定来改变你的大脑。实际上，你必须经历一系列步骤，以改变你的内在状态，从而能够改变你的大脑。我想提一下，Costello今天的鼾声特别大。一些人很敏锐地注意到了他的鼾声，而另一些人则听不见他的鼾声。
It's very low rumbling sound. And whether or not you can or you can't probably relate to the sensitivity of your hearing, we're actually going to talk about perfect pitch today and a range of auditory detection. And so if you can hear Costello snoring, enjoy if you can't enjoy. I want to talk about how the nervous system changes. What are these changes? Many of us have been captivated by the stories in the popular press about the addition of new neurons, this idea.
这是一个非常低沉的隆隆声。无论你的听觉是否敏感，我们今天其实要谈论完美音高和听觉侦测的范围。所以，如果你能听到科斯特洛的打鼾声，那就享受它吧；如果听不到，也可以放轻松。我想谈谈神经系统的变化。有哪些变化呢？许多人都被大众媒体中的故事吸引住了，特别是关于新神经元增加的这个观点。
Oh, if you go running or you exercise, your brain actually makes new neurons. Well, I'm going to give you the bad news first, which is that after puberty, so after about age 14 or 15, the human brain and nervous system adds very few if any new neurons. The idea that new neurons could be added to the brain is one that has a rich history in experimental science. It's clear that in rodents and in some non-human primates, new neurons, a process called neurogenesis, can occur in areas of the brain such as the olfactory bulb, which is of course involved in smell, as well as a region of our hippocampus, a center of the brain involved in memory called the dentate chyrus of the hippocampus.
哦，如果你去跑步或者锻炼，你的大脑实际上会产生新的神经元。不过，我要先告诉你一个坏消息，那就是在人类青春期之后，大约在14或15岁之后，大脑和神经系统几乎不会再增加新的神经元。能够在大脑中添加新神经元的想法在实验科学中有着悠久的历史。研究表明，在啮齿类动物和某些非人灵长类动物中，新的神经元可以在大脑的某些区域生成，这个过程被称为神经发生。这些区域包括与嗅觉有关的嗅球以及与记忆有关的海马体中的一个部位，称为海马齿状回。
And there is strong evidence that new neurons can be added to those structures throughout the lifespan. In humans, the evidence is a little bit more controversial. It's clear that we can add new neurons to our olfactory bulb. In fact, if any of you have ever had the unfortunate experience of being hit on the head too hard, the wires called axons from those olfactory neurons that live in your nose can get sheared off because they have to pass through a bony plate called the kerbiform plate. And the kerbiform plate can shear those axons and people can become what's called a no-smick. They won't be able to smell.
有强有力的证据表明，在整个生命过程中，新神经元可以不断加入到这些结构中。对于人类来说，这一证据稍微有些争议。但很明确的是，我们可以在嗅球中添加新的神经元。事实上，如果你们中的任何人不幸被重击头部，来自鼻子的嗅觉神经元的轴突（连接线）可能会被切断，因为这些轴突必须穿过一个叫作筛板的骨板。而筛板可能会剪断这些轴突，使人无法闻到味道，这种现象被称为“嗅觉丧失”。
But over time, those neurons, unlike most all central nervous system neurons, can grow those connections back and even reestablish new neurons being added to the olfactory bulb. They come from elsewhere deep in the brain and migrate through a pathway called the rostral migratory stream. You can google these words and look up some of the descriptions of this if you'd like to learn more. So, indeed, there's some evidence that the neurons responsible for smell can be replaced throughout the lifespan. Certainly, in very young individuals from birth till about age 15 or so.
随着时间的推移，那些神经元与大多数中枢神经系统的神经元不同，它们可以重新生长出连接，甚至还能在嗅球中建立新的神经元。这些新神经元来自大脑深处，通过一个叫做前脑迁移流的路径移动过来。如果你想了解更多，可以在网上搜索这些词汇并查找相关描述。因此，确实有一些证据表明负责嗅觉的神经元可以在整个生命过程中被替换。尤其是在从出生到大约15岁左右的年轻个体中，情况尤为明显。
Whether or not their new neurons added to the hippocampus, the memory center of the human brain isn't clear. Many years ago, Rusty Gage's lab at the Salt Institute did a really important study looking at terminally ill cancer patients and injecting them with a label, a die that is incorporated only into new neurons. And after these patients died, their brains were harvested, the brains were looked at, and there were new neurons there. There was evidence for new neurons. Those results, I think, stand over time. But what was not really discussed in the popular press discussion around those papers was that it was very few cells that were being added.
他们是否在海马体中新增了神经元，这个人脑的记忆中心，这一点尚不明确。许多年前，位于索尔克研究所的拉斯蒂·盖奇实验室进行了一项非常重要的研究，研究对象是晚期癌症患者，他们被注入了一种只会融入新神经元的标记染料。患者去世后，科学家们对他们的大脑进行了分析，发现确实有新神经元存在。这些结果，我认为，随着时间的推移仍然有效。然而，这些论文在报刊上的讨论中并没有提及的一个事实是，新增的细胞数量其实非常少。
And a number of papers have come along over the years, mainly from labs at UCSF, although from others as well, showing that if there are new neurons added to the adult brain, it's an infinitesimally small number of new neurons. So, that's the depressing part. We don't get new neurons. After we're born, we pretty much have the neurons that we're going to use our entire life. And yes, as we get older and we start to lose certain functions in our brain, we lose neurons. But all is not lost, so to speak, because there are other ways in which neural circuits can create new connections and add new functions, including new memory, new abilities, and new cognitive functions.
多年来，有一些论文发表，大多来自旧金山大学的实验室，还有一些来自其他地方的研究。研究显示，成年人大脑中新增的神经元数量极其微小。这是比较令人沮丧的一点。我们不会获得新的神经元。我们出生后，基本上就是靠这些神经元度过一生。随着年龄增长，我们会开始失去大脑的某些功能，这意味着失去一些神经元。但也不必太悲观，因为神经回路可以通过其他方式建立新连接和添加新功能，包括增强记忆能力、新技能以及新的认知功能。
And those are mainly through the process of making certain connections, which of course are those things we call synapses between neurons, making those connections stronger, so they're more reliable, they're more likely to engage, as well as removing connections. And the removal of connections is vital to say moving through a grieving process, or removing the emotional load of a traumatic experience. So, even though we can't add new neurons throughout our lifespan, at least not in very great numbers, it's clear that we can change our nervous system, that the nervous system is available for change, that if we create the right set of circumstances in our brain, chemical circumstances, and if we create the right environmental circumstances around us, our nervous system will shift into a mode in which change isn't just possible, but it's probable.
这些过程主要是通过建立特定的连接来实现的，当然，这些连接就是我们所说的神经元之间的突触。在这个过程中，我们可以加强这些连接，使其更可靠，更容易被激活，同时也会移除一些连接。连接的移除在某些情况下至关重要，比如在经历一个悲伤的过程，或者减轻创伤体验的情感负担时。尽管我们无法在一生中增加很多新的神经元，但显然我们的神经系统是可以改变的。只要在大脑中创造合适的化学环境，以及在我们周围建立合适的环境条件，神经系统就有可能从可能发生变化的状态转变为极有可能发生变化的状态。
As I mentioned before, the hallmark of the child nervous system is change. It wants to change. The whole thing, everything from the chemicals that are sloshing around in there to the fact that there's a lot of space between the neurons, a lot of people don't know this, but early in development, there's a lot of space between the neurons, and so the neurons can literally move around and sample different connections very easily, removing some and keeping others. As we get older, the so-called extracellular space is actually filled up by things called extracellular matrix and glial cells, glia means glue, those cells are involved in a bunch of different processes, but they start to fill in all the space, kind of like pouring concrete between rocks, and when that happens, it becomes much harder to change the connections that are there.
正如我之前提到的，儿童神经系统的特征就是变化。它渴望变化。整个系统从内部流动的化学物质到神经元之间的空隙都在不断变化。许多人可能不知道，在早期发育阶段，神经元之间有很多空隙，这使得神经元可以简单地移动并尝试不同的连接，很容易就去除一些连接并保留其他的。随着我们年龄增长，这种所谓的细胞外空隙逐渐被细胞外基质和胶质细胞填满，胶质细胞的“胶”意为粘合，这些细胞参与多种不同的过程，逐渐填满所有空隙，就像在石头间浇灌水泥一样。结果是，要改变现有的连接就变得困难得多。
One of the ways in which we can all get plasticity at any stage throughout the lifespan is through deficits and impairments in what we call our sensory apparatus, our eyes, our ears, our nose, our mouth, and there are some very dramatic and somewhat tragic examples of people, for instance, who have genetic mutations where they are born without a nose and without any olfactory structures in the brain, so they cannot smell. In that case, areas of the brain that normally would represent smell become overtaken by areas of the brain involved in other things like touch and hearing and sight. In individuals that are blind from birth, the so-called occipital cortex, the visual cortex in the back becomes overtaken by hearing. The neurons there will start to respond to sounds, as well as braille touch, and actually there's a one particularly tragic incident where a woman who was blind since birth, and because of neuroimaging studies, we knew her visual cortex was no longer visual.
我们可以在生命的任何阶段通过我们的感官器官出现缺陷和损伤来实现大脑的可塑性。感官器官包括眼睛、耳朵、鼻子和嘴巴。有些情况下，例如，一些人由于基因突变而出生时没有鼻子，也没有大脑中与嗅觉相关的结构，因此他们无法闻到气味。在他们身上，大脑中通常用于处理嗅觉的区域会被负责其他功能的区域占据，比如触觉、听觉和视觉。对于从出生起就失明的人，后脑的枕叶皮层，即视觉皮层，会被听觉所占据。那里的神经元开始对声音和盲文触摸作出反应。有一个十分悲惨的例子，一位女士从出生起就失明，由于神经影像学的研究，我们知道她的视觉皮层不再用于视觉。
It was responsible for braille reading and for hearing. She had a stroke that actually took out most of the function of her visual cortex, so then she was blind; she couldn't braille read or hear. She did recover some aspect of function. Now most people, they don't end up in that highly unfortunate situation, and what we know is that for instance, blind people who use their visual cortex for braille reading and for hearing have much better auditory acuity and touch acuity, meaning they can sense things with their fingers and they can sense things with their hearing that typical sighted folks wouldn't be able to. In fact, you will find a much greater incidence of perfect pitch in people that are blind. That tells us that the brain, and in particular this area, we call the neocortex, which is the outer part, is really designed to be a map of our own individual experience.
这段文字描述了一种情况：有位女士因中风失去了大部分视觉皮层的功能，导致她失明了，无法阅读盲文和听觉。然而，她恢复了一些功能。大多数人不会遇到如此不幸的情况。我们知道，盲人的视觉皮层可以用来阅读盲文和进行听觉，因此他们的听觉和触觉会更加敏锐，能用指尖和听觉感知到普通有视力的人感知不到的东西。事实上，盲人中有更高比例的人拥有绝对音高。这说明大脑，特别是外层的新皮层，实际上是为我们个人经历的具体感知而设计的地图。
I call experiments of impairment or loss where somebody is blind from birth or deaf from birth or maybe has a limb development impairment where they have a stump instead of an entire limb with a functioning hand. Their brain will represent the body plan that they have, not some other body plan. But the beauty of the situation is that the real estate up in the skull, that neocortex, the essence of it is to be a customized map of experience. Now, it is true, however, that if let's say I were to be blind when I'm 50, I'm 45 right now, I've always been sighted. If I was blind at 50, I'll probably have less opportunity to use my formerly visual cortex for things like braille reading and hearing because my brain has changed. It's just not the same brain I had when I was a baby. There's actually a principle of biology, not many people know this. It's actually a principle of neurology, which is called the Kennard Principle, which says, if you're going to have a brain injury, you want to have it early in life.
我称那些自出生起就有缺损或损伤的情况为残障实验，比如有些人生来失明或失聪，或者四肢发育不全，手部功能缺失。在这种情况下，他们的大脑会根据实际的身体情况来构建身体映像，而不会模拟其他完整的身体构造。但这种情况的美妙之处在于，大脑中的新皮质就像是一个量身定制的体验地图。不过，值得注意的是，如果我在50岁时失明（现在我45岁，并且一直是有视力的），那么我可能没有多少机会用之前用于视觉的大脑皮层来进行盲文阅读或听觉处理，因为我的大脑已经改变，不再是婴儿时的大脑了。实际上，有一个生物学原理，很多人并不知道，这是一个神经学上的原理，叫做肯纳德原理。它指出，如果要经历脑损伤，那么在生命早期发生会更好。
Of course, better to not have a brain injury at all. But if you're going to have it, you want to have it early in life. This is based on a tremendous number of experiments examining the amount of recovery and the rate of recovery in humans that had lesions to their brain, either early in life or later in life. So the Kennard Principle says, better to have injuries early in life. Now, that's reassuring for the young folks. It's not so reassuring for the older folks. But there are aspects of neuroplasticity that have nothing to do with impairments. I mean, earlier I said, we're all walking around with this map, this representation of the world around us, so we can see edges, we can see colors, except for folks that are colorblind, of course. And we also have a map of emotional experience. We have a map of whether or not certain people are trustworthy, certain people aren't trustworthy.
当然，最好是根本不要有脑损伤。但如果你注定要有脑损伤，尽量在年轻时发生。这是基于大量研究的结论，这些研究考察了在人类大脑早期或晚期受损时，恢复的程度和速度。因此，Kennard原则指出，早期受伤更好。这对年轻人来说是个安慰，但对老年人来说则不那么令人放心。不过，大脑的可塑性中有些方面与损伤无关。就像我之前说过的，我们都有一个关于周围世界的地图，这个表示让我们能看到边缘，看到颜色，当然色盲朋友除外。我们还有一幅情感体验的地图，比如哪些人值得信任，哪些人不值得信任。
A few years ago, I was at a course and a woman came up to me and she said, you know, I just have, I wasn't teaching the course. I was in the course. And she said, I just have to tell you that every time you speak, it really stresses me out. And I said, well, I've heard that before. But do you want to be more specific? And she said, yeah, your tone of voice reminds me of somebody that I had a really terrible experience with. I said, well, okay, well, I can't change my voice. But I really appreciate that you acknowledge that. And it also will help explain why you, you know, seem to cringe every time I speak, which I hadn't noticed until then. But after that, I did notice she had a very immediate and kind of visceral response to my speech, perhaps some of you are having that right now. But in any event, over the period of this two-week course, she would come back every once in a while and say, you know what, I think just by telling you that your voice was really difficult for me to listen to, it's actually becoming more tolerable to me.
几年前，我参加了一个课程。在课上，一位女士走过来对我说：“你知道吗，每次你开口说话时，我真的感到很有压力。”其实我不是这个课程的老师，只是和她一样的学员。我回答道：“嗯，我以前也听过这样的反馈。你能具体一点说吗？”她接着说：“是你的语调让我想起一个让我经历过非常糟糕的人。”我说：“好吧，我没办法改变我的声音，但我很感激你能告诉我这一点。这也解释了为什么每次我说话时，你似乎会表现出不适，直到你说了之后我才注意到。”此后，我确实注意到她对我的讲话有非常直接和本能的反应，也许你们中的一些人现在也有这样的感受。但无论如何，在为期两周的课程中，她偶尔会来找我，说：“你知道吗，自从我告诉你后，你的声音虽然让我觉得难以忍受，但现在其实开始变得更能接受了。”
And by the end, we actually became pretty good friends and we're still in touch. And so what this says is that the recognition of something, whether or not that's an emotional experience thing or a desire to learn something else is actually the first step in neural plasticity. And that's because our nervous system has two broad sets of functions. Some of those functions are reflexive, things like our breathing, our heart rate, our obvious ones. But other aspects are reflexive like our ability to walk. If I get up out of this chair and walk out of the door, I don't think about each step that I'm taking. And that's because I learned how to walk during development.
到最后，我们确实成了很好的朋友并且仍然保持联系。这告诉我们，对某件事情的认识，无论是情感体验还是学习其他知识的欲望，实际上是神经可塑性的第一步。这是因为我们的神经系统具有两大功能：一部分是反射性的，比如我们的呼吸和心跳等显而易见的功能。而另一些则是像走路这样的反射性能力。当我从椅子上站起来走出门时，我并不需要思考每一步怎么走，因为我在成长过程中已经学会了走路。
But when we decide that we're going to shift some sort of behavior or some reaction or some new piece of information that we want to learn is something that we want to bring into our consciousness. That awareness is a remarkable thing because it cues the brain and the rest of the nervous system that when we engage in those reflexive actions going forward, that those reflexive actions are no longer faded to be reflexive. Now if this sounds a little bit abstract, we're going to talk about protocols for how to do this. But the first step in neural plasticity is recognizing that you want to change something.
但是，当我们决定要改变某种行为、反应或是我们想要学习的新信息时，这种意识是一个了不起的事情，因为它会提醒大脑和其他神经系统，以后在进行这些行为时，它们不再只是自动的反应。如果这听起来有点抽象，我们接下来会讨论具体的方法。不过，神经可塑性的第一步是意识到你想要改变某些东西。
And you should immediately say, well, kids don't go into school and say, oh, I want to learn language or I want to learn social interactions. And that's the beauty of childhood. The whole brain has this switch flipped that is making change possible. But after that, we have to be deliberate. We have to know what it is exactly that we want to change. Or if we don't know exactly what it is that we want to change, we at least have to know that we want to change something about some specific experience. In this case, I believe that she came and told me that my voice was really awful for her to listen to, not to make me feel bad or for any other reason, except that she wanted it to not be the case.
你应该立刻想到，孩子们上学时并不会说：“哦，我想学语言”或者“我想学社交”。这就是童年美妙之处：大脑的某个开关被打开了，使改变成为可能。然而，在这之后，我们必须有意识地去改变。我们必须清楚知道我们想要改变什么。即使不知道具体要改变什么，也至少要明确想要对某种特定的经历进行改变。在这种情况下，我相信她告诉我，她听起来觉得我的声音很糟糕，并不是为了让我难过或出于其他原因，只是因为她希望事实并非如此。
And she knew I wasn't going to stop talking. So she decided to call it to her consciousness in mind as well. So that's important. If you want to learn something or you want to change your nervous system in any way, whether or not it's because of some impairment or because of something that you want to acquire, a cognitive skill, a motor skill, an emotional skill, the first thing is recognizing what that thing is. And that often can be the hardest thing to identify. But the brain has the self-recognition mechanisms.
她知道我不会停止讲话。因此，她决定在脑海中主动将这件事放在意识上。这一点很重要。如果你想学习某件事或想以某种方式改变你的神经系统，无论是因为某种缺陷还是因为你想获得某种认知、运动或情感技能，第一步就是识别那是什么。而这通常是最难识别的事情。但大脑具有自我识别机制。
And those self-recognition mechanisms are not vague, spiritual or mystical or even psychological concepts. They are neurochemicals. We're going to talk next about the neural chemicals that stamp down particular behaviors and thoughts and emotional patterns and tell the rest of the nervous system. This is something to pay attention to because this is in the direction of the change that I want to make. So I'll repeat that. There are specific chemicals that when we are consciously aware of a change we want to make or even just that we want to make some change, chemicals are released in the brain that allow us the opportunity to make those changes.
这些自我识别机制并不是模糊的、精神的或神秘的，甚至也不是心理概念。它们是神经化学物质。接下来，我们将讨论这些神经化学物质如何影响特定行为、思维和情感模式，并传递信息给神经系统的其他部分。我们需要关注这些，因为它们与我们想要做出的改变方向一致。简单地说，当我们意识到想要做出改变，或者只是有改变的意愿时，大脑会释放出特定的化学物质，这些化学物质赋予我们实现这些改变的可能性。
Now there are specific protocols that science tells us we have to follow if we want those changes to occur. But that self-recognition is not a kind of murky concept. What it is is it's our forebrain in particular, a prefrontal cortex signaling the rest of our nervous system that something that we're about to do here, feel or experience is worth paying attention to. So we'll pause there and then I'm going to move forward.
现在，科学告诉我们，如果我们希望这些改变发生，我们就必须遵循特定的步骤。不过，自我认知并不是一个模糊不清的概念。实际上，它是我们的前额叶皮层（大脑的一个部分）向我们其余的神经系统发出信号，告诉它我们即将做的某件事、感受到的某种感觉或经历的某种事情值得关注。我们先在这里停一下，然后我会继续讲下去。
One of the biggest lies in the universe that seems quite prominent right now is that every experience you have changes your brain. People love to say this. They love to say your brain is going to be different after this lecture or your brain is going to be different after today's class than it was two days ago. And that's absolutely not true. The nervous system doesn't just change because you experience something unless you're a very young child. The nervous system changes when certain neurochemicals are released and allow whatever neurons are active in the period in which those chemicals are swimming around to strengthen or weaken the connections of those neurons.
当前关于宇宙中其中一个最大的谎言就是：你的每一段经历都会改变你的大脑。人们喜欢这么说，他们会说听完这个讲座后你的大脑会不同，或者上完今天的课后你的大脑会与两天前有所不同。但这是完全不真实的。除非你是个非常年幼的孩子，否则仅仅因为经历了某件事，你的神经系统是不会改变的。神经系统的改变发生在特定的神经化学物质被释放的时候，这些化学物质会让那些在此期间活跃的神经元之间的连接得到加强或减弱。
Now this is best illustrated through a little bit of scientific history. The whole basis of neuroplasticity is essentially a scribe to two individuals although there were a lot more people that were involved in this work. Those two individuals go by the name David Hewyl and Torrance and Weasel. David Hewyl and Torrance and Weasel started off at Johns Hopkins, moved to Harvard Medical School. And in the 70s and 80s they did a series of experiments recording electrical activity in the brain. They were in the visual cortex meaning they put the electrodes in the visual cortex and they were exploring how vision works and how the visual brain organizes all the features of the visual world to give us these incredible things we call visual perceptions.
这可以通过一点科学史来最好地说明。神经可塑性的整个基础主要归功于两个人，尽管实际上有更多人参与了这项研究。这两位被称作大卫·休伯尔和托伦斯·韦塞尔。大卫·休伯尔和托伦斯·韦塞尔起初在约翰·霍普金斯大学开始工作，随后转到哈佛医学院。在70年代和80年代，他们进行了一系列实验，记录大脑中的电活动。他们主要研究视觉皮层，也就是将电极放置在视觉皮层中，探究视觉是如何运作的，以及视觉大脑是如何组织视觉世界的各种特征，以创造出我们所谓的视觉感知的惊人能力。
But Hewyl was a physician and he was very interested in what happens when for instance a child comes into the world and they have a cataract. The lens of their eye isn't clear but it's opaque or when a kid has a lazy eye or the eyes have what's called strabismus which is when the eyes either deviate outward or inward. These are very common things of childhood, especially in particular areas of the world. And what David and Torrance did is they figured out that there was a critical period in which if clear vision did not occur the visual brain would completely rewire itself basically to represent whatever bit of visual information was coming in.
休伊尔是一位医生，他对以下情况非常感兴趣：当一个孩子出生时，他们可能会有白内障，这时他们的眼睛晶状体不是清晰的，而是浑浊的；或者当一个孩子有弱视，或者眼睛出现内斜视或外斜视，这就是所谓的斜视。这些问题在儿童中很常见，尤其是在世界的一些特定地区。大卫和托兰斯发现，如果在一个关键时期内没有获得清晰的视力，视觉大脑就会完全重塑自身，以适应接收到的任何视觉信息。
So they did these experiments that kind of simulate a droopy eye or a deviating eye where they would close one eyelid and then what they found is that the visual brain would respond entirely to the open eye. There was sort of a takeover of the visual brain representing the open eye. Many experiments in many different sensory systems followed up on this. They're beautiful experiments for instance from Greg Reckon's own lab at UC Davis and Mike Merzenick's labs at UCSF showing that for instance if two fingers were taped together early in development so they weren't moving independently the representation of those two fingers would become fused in the brain so that the person couldn't actually distinguish the movements and the sensations of the two fingers separately.
他们进行了这样的实验，模拟一只眼睛下垂或偏离的情况，通过闭上一只眼睛的眼睑来观察效果。结果发现，视觉大脑会完全对睁开的那只眼睛作出反应。也就是说，视觉大脑似乎"接管"了睁开眼睛的视觉输入。许多不同感觉系统的实验也对这个现象进行了深入研究。比如，加州大学戴维斯分校的Greg Reckon实验室和加州大学旧金山分校的Mike Merzenick实验室进行了非常出色的实验。他们发现，如果在发育早期将两根手指绑在一起，使它们无法独立运动，大脑中这两根手指的表征会融合，导致人无法分辨两根手指的独立运动和感觉。
Pretty remarkable. All of this is to say that David and Torrance's work for which they won a Nobel Prize, they showed it with Roger Sparry. Their work showed that the brain is in fact a customized map of the outside world we said that already but that what it's doing is it's measuring the amount of activity for a given part of our body one eye or the other or our fingers this finger or that finger and all of those inputs are competing for space in the brain. Now this is fundamentally important because what it means is that if we are to change our nervous system in adulthood we need to think about not just what we're trying to get but what we're trying to give up.
相当了不起。总的来说，戴维和托伦斯的工作为他们赢得了诺贝尔奖，他们与罗杰·斯佩里一起展示了这项成果。他们的研究表明，大脑实际上是外部世界的一个定制地图。我们已经提到过这一点，但他们进一步证明，大脑是在测量与身体某个部分相关的活动量，比如某只眼睛或另一只眼睛，或者是我们的手指--这个手指或那个手指。这些输入在大脑中是竞争空间的。这一点非常重要，因为这意味着如果我们想在成年后改变我们的神经系统，我们不仅需要考虑自己想要得到什么，还需要考虑我们愿意放弃什么。
We can't actually add new connections without removing something else and that might seem like kind of a stinger but it actually turns out to be a great advantage. One of the key experiments that David and Torrance did was an experiment where they closed both eyes where they essentially removed all visual input early in development. Now this is slightly different than blindness because it was transient it was only for a short period of time but what they found is when they did that there was no change. However if they closed just one eye there was a huge change.
我们实际上不能增加新的连接而不移除其他东西，这听起来可能有点令人不快，但这实际上是一个很大的优势。David 和 Torrance 进行的一个关键实验是，他们在发育初期暂时闭上了两只眼睛，即基本上移除了所有的视觉输入。这与失明略有不同，因为这是暂时的，只持续了很短的时间。他们发现这样做后没有变化。然而，如果他们只闭上一只眼睛，则会有巨大的变化。
So when people tell you oh at the end of today's lecture or at the end of something your brain is going to be completely different that's simply not true. If you're older than 25 your brain will not change unless there's a selective shift in your attention or a selective shift in your experience that tells the brain it's time to change and those changes occur through the ways I talked about before strengthening and weakening of particular connections they have names like long term potentiation, long term depression which has nothing to do with emotional depression by the way, spike timing dependent plasticity. I throughout those names not to confuse you but for those of you that would like more in-depth exploration of those please you can go google those and look them up they're great Wikipedia pages for them and you can go down the paper trail.
所以，当有人告诉你在今天的讲座结束后，或者在某件事结束后，你的大脑会完全不同，这其实是不准确的。如果你超过25岁，除非你的注意力或经验发生选择性的转变，让大脑知道是时候改变了，否则你的大脑不会改变。这些变化是通过之前提到的方式发生的，比如特定连接的加强和减弱，这些有专业名称，如长时程增强、长时程抑制（顺便说一下，这与情绪上的抑郁无关），以及尖峰计时依赖的可塑性。我提到这些名称不是为了混淆你，而是为了那些想更深入了解的人，你可以在网上搜索这些词，维基百科上有很好的页面可以参考，你也可以追踪相关研究论文。
I might even touch on them in subsequent episodes but the important thing to understand is that if we want something to change we really need to bring an immense amount of attention to whatever it is that we want to change this is very much linked to the statement I made earlier about the it all starts with an awareness. Now why is that attention important? Well David and Torinston won their Nobel prize and they certainly deserve it they probably deserve two because they also figured out how vision works and I might be biased because they're my scientific great grandparents but I think everybody in the field of neuroscience agrees that Hubell and Weasel as they're called H&W for those in the game absolutely deserved a Nobel prize for their work because they really unveiled the mechanisms of brain change of plasticity.
我可能会在接下来的集数中谈到这一点，但最重要的是要明白，如果我们希望某件事情有所改变，我们确实需要把大量的注意力放在我们想要改变的事情上。这一点与我之前提到的“这一切都始于意识”的说法密切相关。那么，为什么注意力如此重要呢？因为大卫和托林斯顿（David 和 Torinston）赢得了诺贝尔奖，他们确实当之无愧，他们可能还值得再得一个，因为他们也揭示了视觉是如何运作的。我可能会有些偏见，因为他们算是我的科学曾祖父，但我想神经科学领域的所有人都同意，赫布尔和威塞尔（Hubel 和 Weisel），对业内人士来说是 H&W，他们绝对应得诺贝尔奖，因为他们真正揭示了大脑可塑性变化的机制。
David passed away a few years ago Torinston still lives in his late 90s he's still at the Rockefeller University he's sharp as a tack he's still jogged several miles a day he's really into art and a number of other things he's also a super nice guy Hubell was a really nice guy as well it's also he was a great frisbee player I discovered because he beat me in a game ultimate when he was like 80 which still has me a little bit hurt but anyway Hubell and Weasel did an amazing thing for science that will forever change the way that we think about the brain however they were quite wrong about this critical period thing.
大卫在几年前去世了。托林斯顿依然健在，已经九十多岁了，他还在洛克菲勒大学，他头脑仍然非常敏捷。尽管年纪这么大，他每天还能慢跑好几英里。他对艺术和其他一些事情非常感兴趣，而且他人也特别和善。赫布尔也是一个非常好的人，我还发现他是一位出色的飞盘玩家，因为当他八十岁时，他在一场极限飞盘比赛中打败了我，这让我至今有点受挫。但无论如何，赫布尔和韦塞尔为科学做出了惊人的贡献，他们的研究将永远改变我们对大脑的理解。不过，他们关于关键期的观点是错误的。
The critical period was this idea that if you were to deprive the nervous system of an input say closing one eye early in development and the rest of the visual cortex is taken over by the representation of the open eye that you could never change that unless you intervene too early and this actually formed the basis for why a kid that has a lazy eye or a cataract why even though there's some issues with anesthesia and young children why now we know that you want to get in there early and fix the cataract or fix the strabismus sort of them all just do however their idea that you had to do it early or else there was no opportunity to rescue the nervous system deficit later on turned out wasn't entirely true.
关键期是这样一个概念：如果在大脑发育的早期阶段剥夺某种输入，比如关闭一只眼睛，视皮层的其它部分就会被另一只眼睛的视觉信息占据。传统观点认为，除非在早期进行干预，否则这种情况无法改变。这也是为什么，对于懒惰眼或白内障的孩子，即使麻醉对小孩有风险，现在我们知道要尽早处理白内障或斜视。然而，这种“必须尽早干预，否则无法补救神经系统缺陷”的观点后来被发现并不完全正确。
In the early 90s a graduate student by the name of Greg Reckons own was in the laboratory of a guy named Mike Merzenick at UCSF and they set out to test this idea that if one wants to change their brain they need to do it early in life because the adult brain simply isn't plastic it's not available for these changes and they did a series of absolutely beautiful experiments by now I think we can say proving that the adult brain can change provided certain conditions are met. Now the experiments they did are tough they were tough on the experimenter and they were tough on the subject I'll just describe one let's say you were a subject in one of their experiments you would come into the lab and you'd sit down on a table and they would record from or image your brain and look at the representation of your fingers the digits as we call them and there would be a spinning drum literally a like a stone drum in front of you or metal drum they had little bumps.
在90年代初期，有一位名叫格雷格·里肯斯的研究生，在位于加州大学旧金山分校的迈克·默兹尼克实验室工作。他们着手检验一个观点：为了改变大脑，必须在人生早期进行，因为成年大脑没有可塑性，不容易发生变化。然而，他们一系列精美的实验最终证明，只要具备特定条件，成年大脑也能发生改变。实验过程艰难，无论是对实验人员还是实验对象而言。让我来描述其中一个实验：假设你是实验对象，你会来到实验室，坐在一张桌子上，他们会记录或成像你的大脑，观察你手指（我们称之为数字）的表征。面前会有一个旋转的鼓，实际上是一个石制或金属制的鼓，上面有小凸起。
Some of the bumps were spaced close together some of them were spaced far apart and they would do these experiments where they would expect their subjects to press a lever whenever for instance the bumps got closer together or further apart and these were very subtle differences so in order to do this you really have to pay attention to the distance between the bumps and these were not braille readers or anyone skilled in doing these kinds of experiments what they found was that as people paid more and more attention to the distance between these bumps and they would signal when there was a change by pressing a lever as they did that there was very rapid changes plasticity in the representation of the fingers and it could go in either direction you could get people very good at detecting the distance between bumps that the distance was getting smaller or the distance was getting greater.
有些凸起间隔得很近，有些则相距较远。他们进行了一些实验，要求参与者在凸起之间的距离变得更近或更远时，按下一个杠杆。这些距离的变化非常细微，因此参与者必须认真注意这些凸起之间的距离。这些参与者并不是盲文阅读者，也不是经过专业训练的人。实验结果显示，随着人们越来越关注这些凸起之间的距离变化，并在变化时通过按杠杆来做出反应，他们大脑中负责手指感觉的区域发生了快速的变化。这种变化既可以朝着改善人们感知距离变小的方向发展，也可以朝着使他们更好地感知距离变大的方向发展。
So people could get very good at these tasks that you're kind of hard to imagine how they would translate to the real world for a non-braille reader but what it told us is that these maps of touch were very much available for plasticity and these were fully adult subjects they're not taking any specific drugs they're not don't have any impairments that we were aware of and what it showed what it proved is that the adult brain is very plastic and they did some beautiful control experiments that are important for everyone to understand which is that sometimes they would bring people in and they would have them touch these bumps on this spinning drum but they would have the person pay attention to an auditory cue every time a tone would go off or there was a shift in the pitch of that tone they would have to signal that.
所以，人们可以非常擅长于这些任务，虽然对于不懂盲文的人来说，很难想象这些任务如何在现实世界中应用。但这告诉我们，这些触觉的地图对于可塑性非常开放，而参与实验的都是完全成年的个体，他们没有服用任何特定的药物，也没有我们所知的任何障碍。这证明了成年人的大脑具有很高的可塑性。他们还进行了几个很好的对照实验，这对大家理解非常重要。其中一个实验是，有时他们让参与者用手指触摸旋转鼓上的凸起，并且要求他们注意听觉提示，每当有音调响起或者音调变化时，他们就需要做出反应。
So the subject thought they were doing something related to touch and hearing and all that showed was that it wasn't just the mere action of touching these bumps they had to pay attention to the bumps themselves if they had were placing their attention on the auditory cue on the tone well then there was plasticity in the auditory portion of the brain but not on the touch portion of the brain and this really spits in the face of this thing that you hear so often which is every experience that you have is going to change the way your brain works absolutely not the experiences that you pay super careful attention to are what open up plasticity and it opens up plasticity to that specific experience.
所以，这个实验对象以为他们在进行与触觉和听觉相关的活动。但实验结果显示，仅仅触摸这些突起并不足够，他们必须专注于这些突起本身。如果他们把注意力集中在听觉提示上，比如某个音调上，那么大脑的听觉部分会发生可塑性变化，但触觉部分不会。这实际上反驳了一个常听到的说法——你所经历的每一件事情都会改变你大脑的运行方式。实际上，并不是这样的。只有那些你非常专注的体验，才会在大脑中打开可塑性，而这种可塑性仅限于你专注的特定体验。
So the question then is why and Merzenick and his graduate students and postdocs went on to address this question of why and it turns out the answer is a very straightforward neurochemical answer and inside of that answer is the opportunity for any of us to change our brain at any point throughout our lifespan essentially for anything that we want to learn that could be subtracting an emotion from an experience we've had it could be building a greater range of emotion it could be learning new information like learning a new language it could be learning new motor skill like dance or sport or it could be some combination of cognitive motor.
那么问题就是为什么呢？梅尔泽尼克和他的研究生及博士后继续研究这个“为什么”的问题，结果发现答案实际上是一个非常直接的神经化学答案。在这个答案中，蕴含着我们每个人在一生的任何阶段都有机会改变我们大脑的可能性。无论是我们想学习些什么，比如将一种情感从过去的经历中剔除，或者提升更广泛的情感范围，学习新知识如新的语言，学习新的运动技能如舞蹈或运动，甚至是一些认知和运动技能的结合，都是可以实现的。
So for instance air traffic controller has to do a lot with their mind in addition to a lot with their hands so it's not just cognitive it's not just motor but combined so we're going to talk about what that chemical is but to just give you an important hint that chemical is the same chemical of stress this is not a discussion about stress per se in a future podcast episode we'll talk all about stress and tools to deal with stress it's something my lab works on quite extensively and it's a topic that I enjoy discussing but this is a topic about brain change and what I just told you is that in order to change the brain you have to pay careful attention.
例如，空中交通管制员需要同时运用脑力和手部操作，因此这不仅仅是认知能力的运用，也不仅仅是动手能力的运用，而是两者的结合。我们即将讨论一种化学物质，给你一个重要的提示：这种化学物质其实与压力有关。不过，这里并不是讨论压力本身，我们将在未来的一期播客中详细讨论压力以及应对压力的方法，这是我的实验室一直在深入研究的主题，也是我喜欢讨论的内容。而今天的话题是关于大脑的变化，我刚刚告诉你，要改变大脑，你必须集中注意力。
And the immediate question should be well why well the answer is that when we pay careful attention there are two neurochemicals neuro modulators as they're called that are released from multiple sites in our brain that highlight the neural circuits that stand a chance of changing now it's not necessarily the case that they're going to change but it's the first gate that has to open in order for change to occur and the first neurochemical is epinephrine also adrenaline we call it adrenaline when it's released from the adrenal glands above our kidneys that's in the body we call epinephrine in the brain but they are chemically identical substances.
当我们仔细观察时，首先要问的问题是：为什么会这样？答案是，我们的大脑会释放出两种神经化学物质（也称为神经调节剂），它们能突出显示那些可能发生改变的神经回路。虽然这种改变不一定会发生，但这是改变的第一道关卡，必须先打开。而第一个神经化学物质是肾上腺素。在身体中，当它从肾上方的肾上腺释放时，我们称之为肾上腺素；在大脑中，我们称之为去甲肾上腺素。尽管名称不同，但它们在化学上是相同的物质。
Epinephrine is released from a region in the brain stem called locus serulius fancy name you don't need to know it unless you want to locus serulius sends out these little wires we call axons such that it hoses the entire brain essentially in this neurochemical epinephrine now it's not always hosing the brain with epinephrine it's only when we are in high states of alertness that this epinephrine is released but the way this circuit is designed it's very nonspecific it's essentially waking up the entire brain that's because the way that epinephrine works by binding particular receptors is to increase the likelihood that neurons will be active.
肾上腺素是从大脑干中的一个叫做蓝斑核的区域释放出来的。这个名字有点高大上，你不一定需要记住它，除非你想要了解。蓝斑核通过一些我们称之为轴突的小纤维，把肾上腺素喷洒到整个大脑中。不过，它并不是一直在向大脑释放肾上腺素，只有当我们处于高度警觉状态时，才会释放。由于这个回路的设计方式，它的影响非常广泛，几乎是唤醒整个大脑。这是因为肾上腺素通过与特定受体结合来提高神经元活跃的可能性。
So no alertness no neuroplasticity however alertness alone is not sufficient as we would say it's necessary but not sufficient for neuroplasticity we know this is true also from the work of hubon weasel where they looked at brain plasticity in response to certain experiences in subjects that were either awake or asleep and I hate to break it to you but you cannot just simply listen to things in your sleep and learn those materials later I'll talk about how you can do certain things in your sleep that you're unaware of that can enhance learning of things that you were aware of while you were awake but that is not the same as just listening to some music or listening to a tape while you sleep and expecting it to sink in so to speak.
因此，没有清醒就没有神经可塑性。然而，仅仅靠保持清醒是不够的，正如我们所说，它是神经可塑性所必需的，但不是充分条件。我们从Hubel和Wiesel的研究工作中也知道了这一点，他们研究了在清醒和睡眠状态下大脑对某些体验的反应性可塑性。很抱歉告诉你，不能指望只是在睡觉时听某些东西就能学会那些材料。稍后我会讲到一些方法，可以在你睡觉时无意识地做某些事情，从而增强你在清醒时有意识学习过的知识。但这并不等同于简单地在睡觉时听音乐或磁带，然后期望这些内容能够自动“吸收”。
Epinephrine is released when we pay attention and when we are alert, but the most important thing for getting plasticity is that there be epinephrine, which equates to alertness, plus the release of this neuromodulator acetylcholine. Now, acetylcholine is released from two sites in the brain; one is also in the brainstem and it's named different things in different animals. But in humans, the most rich site of acetylcholine neurons or neurons that make acetylcholine is the parabigeminal nucleus or the parabiguykyl region. There are a number of different names of these aggregates of neurons; you don't need to know the names. All you need to know is that you have an area in your brainstem and that area sends wires, these axons, up into the area of the brain that filters sensory input.
当我们专注和警觉时，身体会释放肾上腺素。但要实现大脑的可塑性，最重要的是需要肾上腺素——它代表警觉状态——以及一种叫乙酰胆碱的神经调节剂的释放。在大脑中，乙酰胆碱从两个地方释放出来。其中一个位于脑干，不同动物中名称不同。但在人类中，乙酰胆碱神经元或产生乙酰胆碱的神经元最丰富的地方是副丘核区域。这些神经元集合有很多不同的名字，但你不需要记住这些名字。你只需要知道在你的脑干中有一个区域，这个区域通过轴突将信号传递到大脑中负责过滤感官输入的区域。
So we have this area of the brain called the thalamus, and it is getting bombarded with all sorts of sensory input all the time. Costello snoring off to my right, the lights that are in the room, the presence of my computer to my left—all of that is coming in. But when I pay attention to something, like if I really hone in on Costello snoring, I create a cone of attention. What that cone of attention reflects is that acetylcholine is now amplifying the signal of sounds that Costello is making with his snoring and essentially making that signal greater than all the signals around it. What we call signal to noise goes up.
我们的脑中有一个被称为丘脑的区域，它一直在接收各种感觉信息。比如我右边传来的Costello的鼾声、房间里的灯光照明、我左边电脑的存在等，所有这些信息都在不停地涌入。但当我专注于某一件事，比如仔细聆听Costello的鼾声时，我就会形成一个注意的焦点。这种注意的焦点表明乙酰胆碱正在增强Costello鼾声的信号，从而使这个信号比周围其他信号更为突出。我们称之为信号与噪音比的提升。
So as a view with an engineering background will be familiar with signal to noise, those who do not have an engineering background don't worry about it. All it means is that one particular shout in the crowd comes through. Costello's snoring becomes more salient, more apparent relative to everything else going on. Acetylcholine acts as a spotlight, but epinephrine for alertness and acetylcholine spotlighting these inputs—those two things alone are not enough to get plasticity. There needs to be this third component, and the third component is acetylcholine released from an area of the forebrain called nucleus basalis.
对于有工程背景的人来说，对信噪比（signal to noise）应该很熟悉，而没有工程背景的人也不用担心。这只是意味着在人群中有一个特别的声音格外突出。Costello的打鼾声变得更显著，相对于周围的一切都更明显。乙酰胆碱起到了聚光灯的作用，而肾上腺素则提高警觉性，乙酰胆碱将这些输入聚焦——但仅这两个因素还不足以形成可塑性。还需要第三个成分，这个第三个成分是从前脑的一个叫基底核（nucleus basalis）的区域释放的乙酰胆碱。
If you really want to get technical, it's called nucleus basalis. For any of you that are budding physicians or going to medical school, you should know that if you have acetylcholine released from the brainstem, acetylcholine released from nucleus basalis, and epinephrine, you can change your brain. I can say that with confidence because Mercenic and Reckinsohn, as well as other members of the Mercenic lab, Michael Kilgard, and others did these incredible experiments where they stimulated the release of acetylcholine from nucleus basalis either with an electrode or with some other methods that we'll talk about.
如果要说得专业一点，它叫做基底核。对于那些正在成长为医生或者准备去医学院的人，你们应该知道，如果从脑干释放乙酰胆碱，从基底核释放乙酰胆碱，再加上去甲肾上腺素，你就可以改变你的大脑。我可以很自信地这么说，因为Mercenic和Reckinsohn，以及Mercenic实验室的其他成员，如Michael Kilgard等人，进行了这些了不起的实验。他们通过电极或者其他方法刺激基底核释放乙酰胆碱，取得了这些成果。
What they found was when you stimulate these three brain regions—like the brainstem source of acetylcholine and then the basal forebrain source of acetylcholine—when you have those three things, whatever you happen to be listening to, doing, or paying attention to immediately in one trial takes over the representation of a particular area of the brain. You essentially get rapid, massive learning in one shot, and this has been shown again and again and again in a variety of papers, also by a guy named Norm Weinberger from UC Irvine. It is now considered a fundamental principle of how the nervous system works.
他们发现，当你刺激这三个大脑区域时——比如脑干提供乙酰胆碱的来源，然后是前脑底部提供乙酰胆碱的来源——在这种情况下，无论你在听什么、做什么或者专注于什么，在一次试验中就会立即占据大脑某个特定区域的表征。你几乎能在一次尝试中实现快速而大量的学习，这已经在各种论文中多次验证过，其中一位研究者是来自加州大学欧文分校的诺姆·温伯格。这现在被认为是神经系统运作的一个基本原理。
So while Huberman and Weasel talked about critical periods in developmental plasticity, it's very clear from the work of Mercenic and Weinberger and others that if you get these three things—if you can access these three things of epinephrine and acetylcholine from these two sources—not only will the nervous system change, it has to change. It absolutely will change, and that is the most important thing for people to understand if they want to change their brain.
因此，尽管Huberman和Weasel谈到发育可塑性中的关键期，但从Mercenic、Weinberger及其他人的研究中可以清楚地看到，只要你获得这三种要素——即从这两个来源获得肾上腺素和乙酰胆碱——不仅神经系统会改变，而且必须改变。它绝对会改变。这是想要改变大脑的人必须理解的最重要的一点。
You cannot just passively experience things, and repetition can be important, but the way to use repetition to change your brain is fundamentally different. So now let's talk about how we would translate all the scientific information and history into some protocols that you can actually apply because I think that's what many of you are interested in. I'm willing to bet that most of you are not interested in lowering electrodes into your nucleus basalis, and frankly, neither am I.
你不能只是被动地体验事物，重复可能很重要，但利用重复来改变大脑的方式是完全不同的。那么现在让我们谈谈如何将所有科学信息和历史转化为一些你可以实际应用的步骤，因为我认为这正是你们许多人感兴趣的。我敢打赌，你们大多数人都不想把电极插入基底核，坦率地说，我也不感兴趣。
In episode one of the Huberman Lab podcast, I described the various ways that people can monitor and change their nervous system. Those ways include brain-machine interface, pharmacology, behavioral practices, and those behavioral practices, of course, can include some do's—do this—and some don'ts—don't do that, etc. In thinking about neuroplasticity, I want to have a very frank conversation about what one can do but also acknowledge this untapped capacity that I'm just not hearing about out there, which is one can also combine behavioral practices with pharmacology.
在Huberman Lab播客的第一集中，我描述了人们可以如何监测和改变他们的神经系统。这些方法包括脑机接口、药理学以及行为练习。当然，行为练习可能会有一些建议，比如应该做什么，不应该做什么等。在考虑神经可塑性时，我想坦率地谈谈一个人可以做些什么，同时也想指出一个未被广泛讨论的潜力，那就是可以将行为练习与药理学结合起来。
One can combine behavioral practices with brain-machine interface, and you don't have to do that. In fact, I'm not recommending you do anything in particular. As always, I'll say it again: I'm not a physician, so I don't prescribe anything; I'm a professor. So I profess a lot of things what you do with your health and your medical care is up to you you're responsible for your health and well-being so I'm not going to tell you what to do or what to take I'm going to describe what the literature tells us and suggests about ways to access plasticity.
可以将行为实践与脑机接口结合起来，不过这并不是必须的。我并不特别推荐你去做什么。正如我一贯所强调的：我不是医生，所以不会提出具体建议；我是一名教授，所以我发表很多观点。你的健康和医疗决定权在于你自己，你要对自己的健康和幸福负责。所以，我不会告诉你该做什么或该服用什么。我会描述文献中关于如何利用神经可塑性的研究和建议。
We know we need epinephrine that means alertness most people accomplish this through a cup of coffee and a good night's sleep so I will say you should master your sleep schedule and you should figure out how much sleep you need in order to achieve alertness when you sit down to learn all the tools and more science than probably you ever wanted to hear about sleep and how to get better at sleeping and timing your sleep etc. and naps and all of that is in episodes two three four and five of the human lab podcast so I encourage you to refer to those if your sleep is not where you would like it to be.
我们知道，我们需要提高警觉性（像肾上腺素带来的效果），大多数人通过喝咖啡和拥有良好的睡眠来实现这一点。因此，我建议你应该掌握自己的睡眠时间表，并了解自己需要多少睡眠才能在学习时达到最佳警觉状态。至于关于睡眠的各种工具和科学知识，可能比你想知道的还要多。在 "人类实验室" 播客的第二、三、四和五集里都有详细介绍，包括如何改善睡眠、安排睡眠时间、以及午睡等内容。如果你对自己的睡眠状况不满意，我鼓励你去收听这些内容。
Your ability to engage in deliberate focused alertness is in direct proportion to how well you are sleeping on a regular basis I think that's kind of an obvious one so get your sleep handled but once that's in place the question then is how do I access this alertness? Well, there are a number of ways some people use some pretty elaborate psychological gymnastics they will tell people that they're going to do something and create some accountability that could be really good or they'll post a picture of themselves online and they'll commit to learning a certain amount, a losing excuse me a certain amount of weight or something like this.
你能否进行专注和警觉状态与你平时的睡眠质量密切相关。我觉得这一点很明显，所以首先要确保睡眠充足。一旦睡眠问题解决了，接下来就是如何获得这种警觉状态了。有许多方法可以实现，有些人会使用相当复杂的心理策略，比如他们会告诉别人自己要做某件事以创建责任感，这可能非常有效。或者他们会在网上发布自己的照片，并做出一些承诺，比如学习一定的知识量或减掉一定的体重。
So they can use either shame-based practices to potentially embarrass themselves if they don't follow through they'll write checks to organizations that they hate and insist that they'll cash them if they don't actually follow through or they'll do it out of love you know they'll decide that they're going to run a marathon or learn a language or something because of somebody they love or they want to devote it to somebody. The truth is that from the standpoint of epinephrine and getting alert and activated it doesn't really matter epinephrine is a chemical and your brain does not distinguish between doing things out of love or hate anger or fear it really doesn't all of those promote autonomic arousal and the release of epinephrine.
他们可能会使用基于羞耻感的方法来激励自己，以避免因未能完成目标而感到尴尬。例如，他们会写支票给他们讨厌的组织，并坚持说如果不完成目标就兑现这些支票。或者，他们可能因为爱而行动，比如为了所爱的人决心跑马拉松或学习一门语言，或想把这些活动献给某个人。事实上，从肾上腺素对提高警觉和激活身体的角度来看，做事出于爱或恨、愤怒或恐惧并没有什么区别。肾上腺素是一种化学物质，你的大脑不会区分这些情感。所有这些情感都能促进自动唤醒并释放肾上腺素。
So I think for most people if you're feeling not motivated to make these changes the key thing is to identify not just one but probably a kit of reasons several reasons as to why you would want to make this particular change and being drawn toward a particular goal that you're excited about can be one also being motivated to not be completely afraid ashamed or humiliated for not falling through on a goal is another. So I want to briefly mention one little aside there because I've got a friend who's a physician he's a cardiologist who has a really interesting theory this is just theory but I think it will resonate with a lot of people which is that you've all heard of this molecule dopamine that gives us this sense of reward when we accomplish something.
所以，我认为，对于大多数人来说，如果你觉得没有动力去做出这些改变，关键是要找到不止一个，而是一系列的理由来推动自己想要做出这个特定的改变。吸引你去追求一个让你感到兴奋的目标可以成为一个理由，而不想因为未能实现目标而感到害怕、羞愧或沮丧则是另一个理由。我想简要提到一个小插曲，因为我有一个朋友是医生，他是心脏病专家，他有一个非常有趣的理论，虽然这只是个理论，但我想很多人会觉得有共鸣，那就是，你们都听说过多巴胺这种分子，当我们完成某些事情时，它会给予我们奖励的感觉。
Well, we also want to be able to access dopamine while we're working towards things enjoy the process as they say because it has all sorts of positive effects gives us energy etc. with my friend what he says is you know there's many instances where someone will come to him and say you know what I'm going to write a book and he says oh that's great I'm sure the book's going to be terrific and you really should write a book and then they never go do it and his theory is if you get so much dopamine from the reward of people saying oh yeah you're absolutely going to be able to do that you might not actually go after the reward of the accomplishment itself.
我们也希望在追求目标的过程中能获得多巴胺，享受这个过程，如人们常说的那样，因为这有各种积极的影响，比如让我们更有活力等等。我的朋友说，经常有人会来找他说：“你知道吗？我打算写一本书。”他会回答：“哦，这太好了！我相信这本书会很棒，你真的应该写一本书。”然而，这些人最终却从未真的去写。他的理论是，如果你从别人对你的肯定中获得了太多的多巴胺奖励，你可能就不再会追求实际完成目标所带来的奖励。
So beware these positive reinforcements also not saying people should flagellate themselves to the point of victory in whatever they're pursuing but motivation is a tricky one so I suggest that everyone ask themselves what is it that I want to accomplish and what is it that's driving me to accomplish this and come up with two or three things fear-based perhaps love-based perhaps or perhaps several of those in order to ensure alertness energy and attention for the task.
所以要注意，对积极强化措施要保持警惕。我并不是说人们要鞭策自己到达成目标的地步，而是说激励是一件复杂的事情。我建议大家问问自己，我想要实现什么？是什么驱动我去实现它？尝试找出两个或三个原因，可能是基于恐惧的，可能是基于爱的，或者几者兼有，以确保能够专注、有活力和注意力来完成任务。
And that brings us to the attention part now it's one thing to have an electrode embedded into your brain and increase the amount of aceto-choline it's another to exist in the real world outside the laboratory and have trouble focusing having trouble bringing your attention to a particular location in space for a particular event and there's a lot of discussion nowadays about smartphones and devices creating a sort of attention deficit almost at a clinical level for many people including adults I think that's largely true and what it means however is that we all are responsible for learning how to create depth of focus.
这就引出了我们要谈论的注意力问题。让脑中植入电极以增加乙酰胆碱的量是一回事，而在实际生活中，尤其是实验室外的环境里，很多人会面临集中注意力的困难，难以将注意力集中在特定空间里的特定事件上。如今，有很多讨论认为智能手机和各种设备使许多人，甚至是成年人，出现了一种几乎达到临床水平的注意力缺失。我认为这种观点大体上是对的。不过，这也意味着我们每个人都需要学会如何培养专注的深度。
There are some important neuroscience principles to get depth of focus I want to briefly talk about the pharmacology first because I always get asked about this people say what can I take to increase my levels of aceto-choline well there are things you can take nicotine is called nicotine because aceto-choline binds to the nicotinic receptor there are two kinds of aceto-choline receptors muscarinic and nicotinic but the nicotinic ones are involved in attention and alertness.
有一些重要的神经科学原理可以帮助我们提高注意力的深度。我想先简单谈一下药理学，因为人们总是会问我有什么可以提升乙酰胆碱水平的东西。确实有一些东西可以帮助，比如尼古丁。尼古丁的名字来源于乙酰胆碱，因为乙酰胆碱可以与尼古丁受体结合。乙酰胆碱受体有两种：毒蕈碱型受体和尼古丁型受体，而尼古丁型受体与注意力和警觉性有关。
I have colleagues these are not my you know kind of like bro science buddies I have those friends too these this is a no Nobel Prize winning colleague who chews nicorette while he works he used to be a smoker he quit smoking because a fear of lung cancer so like a smart choice but he missed the level of focus that he could bring to his work this is somebody who's out of a very long career and if you ever meet with him before she can't name him if you ever meet with him what you realize is he chews about five pieces of nicorette an hour which I am not suggesting people do but when I asked him why you're doing this he said well increases my alertness and focus and also his theory and I want to really underscore that it's theory not scientifically supported yet is that it offsets Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.
我有一些同事，他们并不是那种和我一起聊"兄弟科学"话题的伙伴，但我也有这样的朋友。这位同事是一位诺贝尔奖得主，他在工作时会嚼尼古丁香口胶。他之前是个吸烟者，但因为担心肺癌而戒烟，这无疑是个明智的决定。但他想念吸烟时带来的专注力。他是一位有着非常长职业生涯的人，如果你有机会见到他——不能透露他的名字——你会发现他每小时大约嚼五片尼古丁香口胶。我并不建议大家这样做，但当我问他为什么这样做时，他回答说，这能提高他的警觉性和专注力。他还有一个理论——我必须强调，这只是一个理论，还没有得到科学验证——就是他认为这可以预防帕金森症和阿尔茨海默症。
It is true that nucleus basalis is the primary site of degeneration in the brain in people that have dementia and Parkinson's and it's what leads to a lot of their inability to focus their attention not just deficits in plasticity so he might be onto something now I've tried chewing nicorette it makes me super jittery I don't like it because I can't focus very well it kind of takes me too far up the level of autonomic arousal I've got friends that dip nicorette all day some of whom are scientists writers and artists and musicians are familiar with the effects of nicotine from the era where a lot of people smoked.
确实，基底前脑是患有痴呆和帕金森病患者大脑中主要退化的部位，这导致他们很难集中注意力，不仅仅是神经可塑性的问题。因此，他的观点可能有一定道理。我尝试过嚼尼古丁口香糖，但它让我非常紧张，我不喜欢，因为我无法很好地集中注意力，这让我过度兴奋。我有一些朋友整天嚼这种口香糖，其中一些是科学家、作家、艺术家和音乐家，他们对尼古丁的影响很熟悉，因为在很多人吸烟的年代，他们已经体验过这样东西。
Unfortunately fewer people smoke now so if you're interested in the pharmacology there are supplements and things that can increase colonergic transmission in the brain I'm not suggesting you do this but if you're going to go down that route you want to be very careful how much you rely on those all the time because the essence of plasticity is to create a window of attention and focus that's distinct from the rest of your day that's what's going to create a mark in your brain and the potential for plasticity.
不幸的是，现在吸烟的人越来越少，所以如果你对药理学感兴趣，有一些补充剂和方法可以增强大脑中的胆碱能传递。我并不是建议你这样做，但如果你选择这条路，你需要非常小心，不要过于依赖这些方法。因为大脑塑性的关键在于创造一个与日常生活不同的专注和注意的窗口，这样才能在大脑中留下印记，产生塑性的潜力。
Things that increase acetylcholine besides nicotine or nicorette the nicotine can come from a variety of sources or things like alpha gpc or choline there are a number of these things I would encourage you to go to examine.com the website and just put in acetylcholine and it will give you a list of supplements as well as some of the dangers of these supplements that are associated with colineurgic transmission but I would be remiss and I would be lying if I didn't say that there are a lot of people out there who are using colineurgic drugs in order to increase their level of focus.
除了尼古丁或尼古丁代用品外，还有其他一些物质可以增加乙酰胆碱。这些物质的来源多种多样，比如α-GPC或胆碱。有很多这样的物质，我建议你访问examine.com，输入“乙酰胆碱”，这样你就能找到一份补充剂的列表，以及与胆碱能传递相关的一些风险。不过，我必须坦诚相告，有很多人确实在使用胆碱能药物来提高他们的专注力。
And since we're coming up on the Olympics I don't want to get anyone in trouble but I'm well aware that the fact that the sprinters are really into colineurgic drugs because not only is acetylcholine important for the focus that allows them to hear the gun and be first out the blocks on the sprints that's a lot of where the race is won hearing that gun and being quickest on reaction time so they take colineurgic agents for that as well as acetylcholine is the molecule that controls nerve to muscle contraction so your speed of reflexes is actually controlled by this nicotinate transmission as well.
由于奥运会即将来临，我不想让任何人陷入麻烦，但我很清楚短跑运动员对胆碱能药物非常感兴趣。乙酰胆碱不仅对集中注意力很重要，这种集中力让他们能清晰听到发令枪声并在起跑时领先，这在比赛中至关重要。而且乙酰胆碱还是控制神经与肌肉收缩的分子，所以您的反应速度实际上也受这种类似尼古丁的传输方式控制。 因此，他们服用胆碱能剂来提高反应速度。
So lots to think about in terms of acetylcholine in sport and mental acuity not just plasticity. Now for most of you, you probably don't want to chew Nicorette, definitely don't want to smoke cigarettes or take supplements for increasing acetylcholine. So what are some ways that you can increase acetylcholine? It's going to sound like a bit of a circular argument but you want to increase focus. How do you increase focus? You know people are so familiar with sitting down, reading a couple pages of a book and realizing that none of it sunk in. We're talking to someone and seeing their mouth move, maybe even nodding your head subconsciously, and none of it sinks in. This can be very damaging for school, work performance, and relationships, as many of you know.
在运动和心理敏锐度方面，很多人都会考虑乙酰胆碱，而不仅仅是神经可塑性。 对于大多数人来说，你可能不希望嚼尼古丁口香糖，肯定也不想吸烟或服用增加乙酰胆碱的补充剂。那么，有哪些方法可以增加体内的乙酰胆碱呢？听起来可能有点像个循环论证，但你需要提高专注力。如何提高专注力呢？很多人都有这样的经历：坐下来看了几页书，却发现什么都没记住；或者在和别人交谈时，看着对方的嘴巴在动，可能还下意识地点点头，但其实什么都没听进去。许多人都知道，这种情况会严重影响学业、工作表现和人际关系。
Costilo incidentally never seems to pay attention to anything I say while looking directly at me, which contradicts what I'm about to say, which is that the best way to get better at focusing is to use the mechanisms of focus that you were born with. The key principle here is that mental focus follows visual focus. We are all familiar with the fact that our visual system can be unfocused, blurry, or jumping around, or we can be very laser-focused on one location in space. What's interesting and vitally important to understanding how to access neural plasticity is that you can use your visual focus and you can increase your visual focus as a way of increasing your mental focus abilities more broadly.
偶尔，Costilo在看着我时似乎从不注意我说的话，这与我接下来要说的内容相矛盾，我将要说的是，提高专注力的最佳方法是利用你天生具备的专注机制。这里的关键原则是，心理集中力跟随视觉集中力。我们都知道，我们的视觉系统可能会模糊、不聚焦或者到处乱跳，或者我们也可以非常精准地集中在空间的一个点上。有趣且至关重要的一点是，通过理解如何利用这种机制来促进神经可塑性，你可以利用视觉专注度，并通过提高视觉专注度来广泛增强你的心理专注能力。
So I'm going to explain how to do that. Plasticity starts with alertness and, as I mentioned before, that alertness can come from a sense of love, a sense of joy, or a sense of fear. It doesn't matter; there are pharmacologic ways to access alertness too. The most common one is of course caffeine, which, if you watch the sleep episodes, you know reduces this molecule that makes you sleepy called adenosine. I drink plenty of caffeine; I'm a heavy user of caffeine. I don't think a user of caffeine; I think reasonable amounts, provided we can still fall asleep at night. Caffeine can be a relatively safe way to increase epinephrine.
好的，我来解释一下怎么做到这一点。可塑性从警觉性开始，就像我之前提到的，那种警觉可以来自于一种爱的感觉、快乐的感觉或是恐惧的感觉。这没有关系，还有药理学的方法可以提高警觉性。最常见的当然就是咖啡因。如果你看过关于睡眠的节目，你会知道咖啡因减少一种使你困倦的分子，叫做腺苷。我喝很多咖啡因，是咖啡因的重度用户。我不认为自己是咖啡因的用户，我觉得只要我们晚上还能入睡，那就算是合理的量。适量的咖啡因可以是增加肾上腺素的相对安全的方法。
Now many people are now also using Adderall. Adderall chemically looks a lot like amphetamine and basically it is amphetamine. It will increase epinephrine release from locust to release; it will wake up the brain and that's why a lot of people rely on it. It does have a heavy basis for use in certain clinical syndromes prescribed such as attention deficit. However, it also has a high probability of abuse, especially in those who are not prescribed it. Adderall will not increase focus; it increases alertness. It does not touch the acetylcholine system, and if those of you that are taking Adderall say, "Well, it really increases my focus overall," that's probably because your autonomic nervous system is just veering toward what we call parasympathetic. You're really just very sleepy, and so it's bringing your levels of alertness up.
现在，很多人开始使用Adderall。Adderall化学结构看起来像苯丙胺，实际上它就是苯丙胺。它可以增加肾上腺素的释放，从而唤醒大脑，这也是为什么许多人依赖它的原因。尽管这种药物在治疗一些临床综合症（例如多动症）时有明确的使用基础，但如果被没有处方的人滥用，也有很高的滥用风险。Adderall不会提高集中力，而是增加警觉性。它不作用于乙酰胆碱系统。如果你正在服用Adderall并且觉得它总体上提高了你的注意力，那可能只是因为你的自主神经系统更多地偏向副交感神经。实际上，你可能只是非常困，而Adderall只是提升了你的警觉水平。
As I mentioned, Adderall is very problematic for a number of people as it can be habit-forming. Learning on Adderall does not always translate to high performance off or on Adderall later times. The Adderall discussion is a broader one that perhaps we should have with a psychiatrist in the room at some point because it is a very widely abused drug at this point in time. The acetylcholine system and the focus that it brings is available, as I mentioned, through pharmacology but also through these behavioral practices. The behavioral practices that are anchored in visual focus are going to be the ones that are going to allow you to develop great depth and duration of focus.
正如我提到的，对于许多人来说，Adderall（专注达）的问题很大，因为它可能导致成瘾。在使用Adderall时学习的效果，并不总是能在后来不使用或继续使用Adderall的情况下表现出高水平的表现。关于Adderall的话题实际上是一个更广泛的问题，也许我们应该在某个时刻邀请精神科医生参与讨论，因为目前这是一种被广泛滥用的药物。 乙酰胆碱系统及其所带来的专注力，不仅可以通过药物获得，也可以通过一些行为练习来实现。我提到的那些以视觉专注为基础的行为练习，将能帮助你培养出持久而深刻的专注能力。
So let's think about visual focus for a second. When we focus on something visually, we have two options: we can either look at a very small region of space with a lot of detail and a lot of precision, or we can dilate our gaze and we can see big pieces of visual space with very little detail. It's a trade-off; we can't look at everything at high resolution. This is why we have these; the pupil more or less relates to the fovea of the eye, which is the area in which we have the most receptors, the highest density of receptors that perceive light. Our acuity is much better in the center of our visual field than in our periphery.
让我们来思考一下视觉焦点。当我们专注于视觉上的某个东西时，我们有两种选择：可以集中目光在一个非常小的区域，以获得更多的细节和精确度，或者可以放大我们的视野，看到更大的区域，但细节就会很少。这是一种权衡；我们无法以高分辨率看清所有东西。因此，我们有这些机制；瞳孔大致与眼睛里的中央凹相对应，这个区域是我们接收光线感受器最密集的地方。因此，我们在视觉中心的清晰度明显优于周边区域。
It's a simple experiment you can do right now if you're listening to this; you can still do it. You can hold your hands out in front of you; provided that you're cited, you should be able to see how many fingers you have in front of you. For me, it's five; still got all five fingers. Amazingly enough, if I move my hand off to the side now, I can't see them with precision. But as I move them back into the center of my visual field, I can see them with precision, and that's because the density, the number of pixels in the center of my visual field is much higher than it is in the periphery.
这是一项简单的实验，如果你正好在听这个，可以立刻试试。你可以把双手伸到面前，如果你的视力正常，你应该能看到面前有多少根手指。对我来说，是五根手指，还全部都在。神奇的是，如果我把手移到一侧，我就无法清晰地看到手指。当我把手移回到视野的中心时，我就能清晰地看到它们。这是因为视野中心的像素密度比周围的要高得多。
When we focus our eyes, we do a couple of things. First of all, we tend to do that in the center of our visual field, and our two eyes tend to align in what's called a vergence eye movement towards a common point. The other thing that happens is the lens of our eye moves so that our brain now no longer sees the entire visual world but is seeing a small cone of visual imagery. If that was the dog bumping into the wall for you, to make that small cone of visual imagery or soda straw view of the world has much higher acuity and higher resolution than if I were to look at everything. Now you say of course this makes perfect sense, but that's about visual attention, not mental attention. Well, it turns out that focus in the brain is anchored to our visual system. I'll talk about blind people in a moment, but assuming that somebody has sighted, the key is to learn how to focus better visually if you want to bring about higher levels of cognitive or mental focus, even if you're engaged in a physical task.
当我们聚焦视线时，我们会做几件事情。首先，我们通常将注意力集中在视野的中央，并且我们的两只眼睛会通过一种称为“辐辏眼动”的方式对齐，朝向一个共同的点。与此同时，我们眼睛的晶状体会调整，这样我们的脑海中不再看到整个视觉世界，而是看到一小部分视觉图像。这种“小圆锥形”的视觉图像或“吸管视图”相比看完整个世界，具有更高的敏锐度和分辨率。如果你觉得这有点难以理解，这是因为这个小范围的视觉聚焦有更高的清晰度。你可能会说这很合理，但这是关于视觉注意力，不是心理注意力。事实上，大脑的聚焦确实与我们的视觉系统紧密相连。假设一个人是有视觉能力的，那么如果你想提高认知或心理上的专注，即使是在进行体力活动时，关键是学会如何更好地在视觉上聚焦。我稍后会谈到盲人的情况。
Now, there's a remarkable phenomenon in animals where animals that have their eyes on the side of their head are scanning the entire visual environment all the time. They're not focused on anything. Think of grazing animals, your cows, your sheep, your birds, etc. But think about a bird picking up seeds on the beach or on concrete. That bird's head is up here; it's up about a foot off the ground, or if it's a small bird, about six inches off the ground. Its eyes are on the side of its head and yet it has this tiny beak that can quickly pick up these little seeds off the ground with immense precision. Now, if you try to do that by staring off to the sides of the room and picking up items in front of you with high precision at that tiny scale, little tiny objects, you will miss almost every time. They do it perfectly, and they don't smash their beak into the ground and damage it; they do it with beautiful movement acuity.
现在，有一种动物的现象非常奇妙，那就是那些眼睛长在头两侧的动物，它们一直在扫描整个视觉环境，而不是专注于某一处。想想那些食草动物，比如牛、羊、鸟等。但再想象一下，一只鸟在沙滩或混凝土地面上捡拾种子。那只鸟的头抬得很高，大约离地面有一英尺，或者如果是小鸟的话，大约离地面六英寸。它们的眼睛在头的两侧，但它们却能用一个很小的鸟喙，以极高的精准度迅速地捡起地上的小种子。假如你试着用余光看向房间的两侧，同时在面前的小范围内精准地捡起小物品，你几乎每次都会失误。但这些动物能完美地做到这一点，而且不会因为用喙猛撞地面而受伤，它们以优雅的动作敏捷性完成了这一切。
So how do they do it? How do they create this focus or this awareness of what's in front of them? It turns out as they lower their head, their eyes very briefly move inward in what's called a vergence eye movement. Now, their eyes can't actually translocate in their head; they're fixed in the skull just like yours and mine are. But when we move our eyes slightly inward, maybe you can tell I'm doing it like so, basically shortening or we're making the interpupillary distance, as it's called, smaller. Two things happen: not only do we develop a smaller visual window into the world, but we activate a set of neurons in our brainstem that trigger the release of both norepinephrine and epinephrine, and acetylcholine. Norepinephrine is kind of similar to epinephrine, so in other words, when our eyes are relaxed in our head, when we're just kind of looking in our entire visual environment, moving our head around, moving through space, we're in optic flow, things moving past us, or we're sitting still, we're looking broadly at our space, we're relaxed.
那么，他们是怎么做到的呢？他们如何创造出这种专注力或对眼前事物的意识呢？事实证明，当他们低下头时，他们的眼睛会短暂地向内移动，这被称为融合眼球运动。实际上，他们的眼睛不能在头骨里移动，就像你和我一样，它们是固定的。但当我们稍微向内移动眼睛时，就像我现在这样，也就是缩小了瞳距。这样会发生两件事：首先，我们的视觉范围变小了，其次，大脑中脑干的一组神经元被激活，释放出去甲肾上腺素、肾上腺素和乙酰胆碱。去甲肾上腺素和肾上腺素有些类似。换句话说，当我们的眼睛在头部放松时，无论是环顾四周、移动头部，还是在空间中移动，进入视觉流动，四周事物在我们身旁移动，我们静坐时宽广地观察四周，我们处于放松状态。
When our eyes move slightly inward toward a particular visual target, our visual world shrinks, our level of visual focus goes up, and we know that this relates to the release of acetylcholine and epinephrine at the relevant sites in the brain for plasticity. Now, what this means is that if you have a hard time focusing your mind for the sake of reading or listening, you need to practice, and you can practice focusing your visual system. Now, this works best if you practice focusing your visual system at the precise distance from the work that you intend to do for the sake of plasticity.
当我们的眼睛略微向内移动，专注于特定的视觉目标时，我们的视野会缩小，视觉专注度会提高。这与大脑中负责可塑性变化的部位释放乙酰胆碱和肾上腺素有关。 这意味着，如果你很难为了阅读或倾听而集中注意力，你需要练习。你可以通过练习集中视线来提高专注力。为了促进可塑性变化，最好是在打算进行的工作距离上练习视线集中。
So how would this look in the real world? Let's say I am trying to concentrate on something related to, I don't know, science. I'm reading a science paper, and I'm having a hard time; it's not absorbing. I might think that I'm only looking at the paper that I'm reading, I'm only looking at my screen, but actually my eyes are probably darting around a bit. Experiments have been done on this, or I'm gathering information from too many sources in the visual environment. Now, presumably because it's me, I've already had my coffee, I'm hydrated, I'm well-rested, I slept well, and I still experience these challenges in focusing. Spending just 60 to 120 seconds focusing my visual attention on a small window of my screen, meaning just on my screen with nothing on it but bringing my eyes to that particular location, increases not just my visual acuity for that location but it brings about an increase in activity in a bunch of other brain areas that are associated with gathering information from this location.
这在现实生活中会是什么样子呢？我们假设我正在努力专注于一些涉及科学的事情。我在读一篇科学论文，但怎么也读不进去。可能我以为我只是盯着论文看，盯着屏幕看，但实际上我的眼睛可能在四处游移。已有实验研究了这一现象，或者可能是因为环境中信息来源太多而分心。假设是我的话，我已经喝过咖啡，保持了良好的水分和休息，也睡得不错，但仍然在专注上遇到困难。只花60到120秒，把我的视觉注意力集中在屏幕上的一个小窗口上，这意味着把眼睛专注在屏幕的特定位置上，会不仅提高该位置的视觉敏锐度，还能激发大脑中其他与从该位置获取信息相关的区域的活动。
So put simply, if you want to improve your ability to focus, practice visual focus. Now, if you wear contacts or you have corrective lenses, that's fine; you of course would want to use those. You don’t want to take those off and use a blurry image. The finer the visual image and the more that you can hold your gaze to that visual image, the higher your levels of attention will be.
简单来说，如果你想提高注意力，就练习视觉专注。如果你戴隐形眼镜或矫正眼镜，那没关系，你当然应该继续使用。不要摘掉它们去看模糊的图像。视觉图像越清晰，并且你能越长时间地盯住它，你的注意力水平就会越高。
Many times on Instagram, I have been teased for not blinking very often. That's actually a practice thing; we blink more as we get tired, which as you hear it you'll probably just say duh. As we get tired, the neurons in the brain stem that are responsible for alertness and that hold the eyelids open start to falter and our eyelids start to close. This is why it's hard the words "I could barely keep my eyes open," which may be how you feel right now. But assuming that you're paying attention and you're alert, when you're very alert your eyes are wide, your eyes are open, and as you get tired your eyelids start to close.
在 Instagram 上，我经常被调侃说不常眨眼。其实这是因为练习的结果；当我们感到疲惫时，会眨更多眼，听到这你可能会觉得“不是很显然吗”。当我们疲惫时，大脑中负责保持注意力和睁开眼皮的神经元开始减弱，因此眼皮就会开始合上。这就是为什么“我几乎睁不开眼”这句话会那么形象地描述疲惫的感受了。但假设你正在专心并保持清醒，当你非常警觉时，眼睛会睁得大大的，而疲惫时眼皮会开始合上。
Blinks actually reset our perception of time and space. This is shown in a beautiful paper in curmbal gel; be sure to post the reference in the notes. Blinking, of course, is necessary to lubricate the eyes. People blink because their eyes might get dry, but if you can keep focused by blinking less and by focusing your eyes on a particular location, that's probably pretty creepy for you to experience as I'm doing this. But the more that you can do this, the more that you can maintain a kind of a cone or a tunnel of mental focus.
眨眼实际上会重置我们对时间和空间的感知。在一篇关于此主题的精彩论文中有提到；请确保在备注中添加引用。当然，眨眼是为了给眼睛润滑。人们眨眼是因为眼睛可能会干，但如果你能通过减少眨眼并将视线集中在某个特定位置来保持专注，那对你来说可能会感觉有些怪异，就像我现在这样做。不过，你越能这样做，就越能保持一种精神专注的“锥形”或“隧道”视角。
So I'm sort of revealing my practice, which is that I've worked very hard through blinking contests with my 14-year-old niece, who still beats me every time and it really bothers me. But also just through my own self-practice of learning to blink less and focus my visual attention on a smaller region of space. Now for me, that's important because I'm mainly learning things on a computer screen. If you're going to be doing sport, it's quite a bit different, and we can discuss how you might translate that to sport. In fact, in the next episode, I'm going to talk all about how plasticity and the focus mechanisms relate to learning of movement practices and coordinated movements as an entire discussion unto itself. But the same principle holds; we need alertness.
所以，我有点在分享我的这个练习方法，就是我通过和我14岁的侄女进行眨眼比赛来提高自己，虽然她每次都赢我，这让我很郁闷。但我也通过自己的练习去学着少眨眼，并专注于一个较小的视觉区域。对我来说，这很重要，因为我主要在电脑屏幕上学习新东西。如果你参与的是运动，那会有所不同，我们也可以讨论如何将这个方法应用于运动。事实上，在下一期节目中，我会详细谈论神经可塑性和聚焦机制如何与动作学习和协调运动的联系，而这本身就是一个完整的讨论课题。但不论如何，保持专注是个关键。
You can get that through mental tricks of motivation, fear, or love, whatever it is; pharmacology, please do it healthfully. You know caffeine, if that's in your practice. Certainly, want to be well hydrated; that increases it. Actually, it will increase alertness. Having a very full bladder will increase alertness, although you don't want your alertness to be so high that all you can think about is the fact you have to go urinate because that's very distracting. You don’t want your alertness to go through the roof; you need focus, and visual focus is the primary way in which we start to deploy these neurochemicals.
你可以通过一些心理技巧来获得动力，比如通过激发恐惧或者爱等情感，无论是哪种方式；如果使用药物，请确保以健康的方式进行。你知道咖啡因如果在你的日常用途中也可以，请确保身体保持良好的水分摄入，因为这能提高警觉性。实际上，保持良好的水分摄入会提高警觉性。同时，膀胱非常满时也会提高警觉性，但不要让你的警觉性高到只想着上厕所，因为那会很分散注意力。你需要的不是过高的警觉性，而是要集中注意力，视觉专注是开始调动这些神经化学物质的主要方式。
Now you may ask, well what about the experiment where people are, you know, feeling this rotating drum or listening to the auditory cue that doesn't involve vision at all? Ah, if you look at people who are learning things with their auditory system, they will often close their eyes, and that's not a coincidence. If somebody is listening very hard, please don't ask them to look you directly in the eye while also asking that they listen to you; that's actually one of the worst ways to get somebody to listen to you. If you say now listen to me and look me in the eye, the visual system will take over and they'll see your mouth move, but they're going to hear their thoughts more; they're going to hear what you're saying.
现在你可能会问，那么那些实验中，参与者在没有视觉参与的情况下，感受旋转的圆筒或听取声音提示的情况呢？如果你观察那些通过听觉系统学习的人，他们往往会闭上眼睛，这不是巧合。如果有人在认真听，请不要要求他们同时直视你的眼睛；这实际上是让别人听你说话的最糟糕方式之一。因为当你说“听我说并看着我的眼睛”时，视觉系统会占主导，他们会看到你的嘴巴在动，但思绪可能会更活跃，而不是专注听你说的话。
Closing the eyes is one of the best ways to create a cone of auditory attention. This is what low vision or no vision folks do; they have tremendous capacity to focus their attention in particular locations. Incidentally, does anyone know the two animals that have the best hearing in the world? The absolute best hearing, many orders of magnitude better than humans? Turns out it's the elephant; that might not surprise you, they have huge ears, and the moth, which probably will surprise you. I didn't even know that moths could hear, but now it explains why they’re so hard to catch.
闭上眼睛是增强听觉专注能力的最佳方法之一。这也是视力低下或失明的人常用的方法；他们能够在特定位置上集中注意力。顺便问一下，有谁知道世界上听力最好的两种动物是什么？它们的听力比人类强很多倍。答案是大象，这可能并不让你意外，因为它们耳朵很大。另一个是蛾子，这可能会让你吃惊。我以前甚至不知道蛾子能听见声音，但现在我明白了，这就是为什么它们很难被捉住的原因。
If you are not sighted, you learn how to do this with your hearing. If you're somebody who braille reads, you learn how to do this with your fingers. If you look at great piano players like Glenn Gould, you'll see they oftentimes will turn their head to the side. You think about some of the great musicians like Stevie Wonder that were blind; he would look away because he had no reason to look at the keys. But oftentimes, they'll orient an ear or one side of their head to the keys on the piano.
如果你看不见，你会通过听力来学习如何做到这一点。如果你是用触觉阅读盲文的人，你会通过手指来学习如何做到这一点。如果你观察像格伦·古尔德这样的伟大钢琴演奏者，你会发现他们常常会把头转向一侧。你可以想到一些伟大的音乐家，比如盲人的史蒂夫·汪达；他会看向别处，因为他没有必要看琴键。但很多时候，他们会把耳朵或头的一侧对准钢琴的琴键。
As I mentioned before, people who are non-sighted have better pitch. So we have these cones of attention that we can devote, and for most people, vision is the primary way to train up this focus ability and these cones of attention. You absolutely have to focus on the thing that you're trying to learn, and you will feel some agitation because of the epinephrine in your system if you're feeling agitation and it's challenging to focus and you're feeling like you're not doing it right chances aren't you're doing it right and you can practice this ability to stare for long periods of time without blinking. I know it's a little eerie for people to watch but if your goal is to learn how to control that visual window for sake of controlling your focus it can be an immensely powerful portal into these mechanisms of plasticity because we know it engages things like nucleus basales and these other brainstem mechanisms.
正如我之前提到的，视力障碍人士通常具有更好的音高感知能力。我们有可以专注的"注意力锥"，对于大多数人来说，视觉是训练这种专注能力和注意力锥的主要方式。你必须集中注意力在你想要学习的事物上，如果你感到烦躁，那是因为你体内的肾上腺素。如果感到烦躁并难以集中注意力，并觉得自己做得不对，很可能其实是做得对。你可以练习长时间盯着某个东西而不眨眼。我知道别人看着会觉得有点怪，但如果你的目标是学习如何控制视觉窗口，以便更好地控制你的注意力，这可以成为一个极为强大的通道，通向大脑的可塑性机制，因为我们知道这涉及到像基底核以及其他脑干机制。
I get a lot of questions about attention deficit hyperactivity ADHD and attention deficit disorder. Some people actually have clinically diagnosed ADD and ADHD and if you do you should certainly work with a good psychiatrist to try and figure out the right pharmacology and or behavioral practices for you. Many people, however, have given themselves a low grade ADHD or ADD because of the way that they move through their world. They are looking at their phone a lot of the time. It's actually very easy to anchor your attention to your phone for the following reason. First of all, it's very restricted in size so it's very easy to limit your visual attention to something about this big; it's one of the design features of the phone. The other is that just as you you've probably heard a picture is worth a thousand words well a movie is worth 10,000 pictures.
我经常被问到关于注意力缺陷多动障碍（ADHD）和注意力缺陷障碍（ADD）的问题。有些人确实经过临床诊断患有 ADD 或 ADHD，如果你是其中之一，你应该与优秀的精神科医生合作，找出适合你的药物治疗或行为治疗方法。然而，很多人由于生活习惯，把自己归类为轻度 ADHD 或 ADD。他们经常看手机。事实上，将注意力集中在手机上很容易。首先，手机的尺寸有限，视觉注意力很容易集中在这么小的范围内，这是手机设计的一大特点。其次，正如常说“一张图片胜过千言万语”，那么一段电影就相当于一万张图片。
Anytime we're looking at things that have motion visual motion our attentional system will naturally gravitate towards them, it towards those movies. It's actually much harder to read words on a page than it used to be for many people because we're used to seeing things spelled out for us in YouTube videos or videos where things move in a very dramatic way. It is true that the more that we look at those motion stimuli, the more that we're seeing movies of things and things that are very dramatic and very intense, the worse we're getting at attending to things like text on a page or to listening to something like a podcast and extracting the information. So much so that, you know, I think many people have asked me, you know why aren't you providing intense visuals for us to look at? Well frankly it's because a lot of people are consuming this content through pure auditory through this by listening and I want them to be able to digest all the material.
每当我们看到有动态视觉的东西时，我们的注意系统自然会被吸引过去，尤其是那些电影。其实，对于很多人来说，现在在纸上阅读文字比过去要困难得多，因为我们习惯于在YouTube视频或者其他动态剧烈的视频中看到信息被展现。确实，观看越多这种动态图像，尤其是那些戏剧化和强烈的影像，我们在关注纸上文字或收听播客并提取信息方面的能力就会越弱。以至于很多人问我，为什么不提供一些令人震撼的视觉内容呢？坦率地说，这是因为很多人通过纯听觉方式来消费这些内容，我希望他们能够消化所有的材料。
But in addition to that, if you think about the areas of life that dictate whether or not we become successful independent healthy individuals, most of those involve the kind of boring practices of digesting information on a page. Boring because it's not as exciting in the moment perhaps as watching a movie or something being spoon fed to us but the more attention that we can put to something even if it's fleeting and we feel like we're only getting little bits and pieces shards of the information as opposed to the entire thing that has a much more powerful effect in engaging this colonergic system for plasticity than does for instance watching a movie. And that's because when we watch a movie the entire thing can be great, it can be awesome, it can be this overriding experience.
但是除此之外，如果你考虑一下影响我们是否能成为成功、独立、健康的个体的生活领域，大多数都涉及到一种乏味的实践，那就是在纸上消化信息。这种实践之所以显得枯燥，是因为它在当下可能不像看电影或别人将信息直接提供给我们那么令人兴奋。然而，即便我们觉得这些注意力只是稍纵即逝、仿佛只是获取信息的小片段，而非整个信息，它对激活大脑中的胆碱能系统以促进可塑性仍有更强大的影响力，而这也是觀看电影无法比拟的。因为当我们看电影时，整部影片可能都很好看，让人觉得精彩，是一种完全沉浸的体验。
But I think for all those experiences, if you're somebody who's interested in building your brain and expanding your brain and getting better at various things and feeling better doing better, etc., one has to ask you how much of my neurochemical resources am I devoting to the passive experience of letting something just kind of overwhelm me and excite me versus something that I'm really trying to learn and take away.
我认为，对于那些注重提升大脑、开阔思维并在各方面提升自己、让自己感觉更好的人来说，我们需要问自己，我在多大程度上将神经化学资源用于被动地让某种事物淹没和刺激我，而不是用于真正努力去学习和汲取经验的事情上。
And now there's another, I enjoy movie content and TV content all the time. time I scroll Instagram often but we are limited in the extent to which we can grab a hold of these aceto colon release mechanisms or epinephrine and I think that we need to be careful that we don't devote all our aceto colon in epinephrine all our dopamine for that matter to these passive experiences of things that are not going to enrich us and better us so that's a little bit of an editorial on my part but the phone is rich with movies it's rich with information the real question is is the information rich in for us in ways that grow us and cultivate smarter more emotionally you know emotionally evolved or people or is it creating it how's what's it doing for our physical well being for that matter.
现在又有新的东西，我一直很喜欢看电影和电视节目，我常常刷Instagram。不过，我们在获取这些乙酰胆碱释放机制或肾上腺素的程度上是有限的。我认为我们需要小心，不要把我们的乙酰胆碱、肾上腺素，甚至多巴胺都投入到这些没有实际提升和丰富自己的被动体验上。这是我个人的一点看法。手机确实充满了电影和信息，但真正的问题是，这些信息是否以让我们成长、变得更聪明、更具情感智慧的方式丰富了我们，还是说它对我们的身体健康有什么影响。
So I don't want to tell people what to do or not to do but think carefully about how often you're focusing on something and how good you are or poor you are at focusing on something that's challenging. So once you get this epinephrine this alertness you get the aceto colon released and you can focus your attention then the question is for how long and in an earlier podcast I talked about these all trading cycles that last about 90 minutes the typical learning bout should be about 90 minutes.
我不想指示别人该做什么或不该做什么，但希望大家仔细思考一下：你多常把注意力集中在某件事情上，以及你在专注于具有挑战性的事情时表现得有多好或多差。一旦你有了肾上腺素带来的警觉性，体内就会释放乙酰胆碱，让你能够专注。那么，接下来的问题是，你能专注多长时间。在我之前的一期播客中，我提到了大约持续90分钟的交替周期，而典型的学习时段也应该大约是90分钟。
I think that learning bout will no doubt include five to ten minutes of warm-up period I think everyone should give themselves permission to not be fully focused in the early part of that bout but that in the middle of that bout for the middle hour or so you should be able to maintain focus for about an hour or so. So that for me means eliminating distractions that means turning off the wifi I put my phone in the other room if I find myself reflexively getting up to get the phone I will take the phone and lock it in the car outside if I find myself going to get it anyway.
我认为学习时一定要包括五到十分钟的热身时间。我觉得每个人都应该允许自己在学习初期不必完全专注，但在中间部分，大约一个小时左右，你应该能够保持专注。对我来说，这意味着要消除干扰，比如关闭 WiFi，把手机放在另一个房间。如果我发现自己忍不住想去拿手机，我就会把手机锁在车里，以防自己去拿。
I am guilty of giving away the phone for a period of time or even things more dramatic I've thrown it up on my roof before so I can't get to it till the end of the day that thing is pretty compelling and we come up with all sorts of reasons why we need it to be in contact with it but I encourage you to try experiencing what it is to be completely immersed in an activity where you feel the agitation that your attention is drifting but you continually bring it back.
我确实有过一段时间把手机送走的经历，甚至更夸张的是，我曾经把手机扔到屋顶上，这样直到一天结束才拿回来。这个东西真的是非常吸引人，我们总能找到各种理由需要它保持联系。不过，我鼓励你尝试一下完全投入到一项活动中的感觉，在这个过程中你可能会感到注意力涣散，但要不断地把注意力拉回来。
And that's an important point which is that attention drifts but we have to re-anchor it we have to keep grabbing it back and the way to do that if you're sighted is with your eyes that as your attention drifts in you look away you want to try and literally maintain visual focus on the thing that you're trying to learn feel free to blink of course but you can greatly increase your powers of focus and the rates of learning which is anchored in all the work of Merzen, Acubal and Weasel and others.
这是一个重要的点，即注意力会分散，但我们必须重新锚定它，我们必须不断地将它拉回来。如果你是视觉正常的人，做到这一点的方法是用你的眼睛。当你的注意力开始分散时，你应该尽量保持视觉上的专注，专注于你正在学习的东西。当然，你可以随意眨眼，但这样可以大大提高你的专注力和学习效率。这种方法是基于Merzen、Acubal和Weasel等人的研究成果。
Now that's the trigger for plasticity but the real secret is that neural plasticity doesn't occur during wakefulness it occurs during sleep we now know that if you focus very hard on something for about 90 minutes or so maybe you even do several bouts of that per day if you can do that some people can, some people can only do one focus bout of learning that night and the following nights while you sleep the neural circuits that were highlighted if you will with the cedar culling transmission will strengthen and other ones will be lost which is wonderful because that's the essence of plasticity.
现在，这就是引发神经可塑性的关键。但是，真正的秘密在于，神经可塑性不是在清醒状态下发生的，而是在睡眠中发生的。我们现已知道，如果你非常专注地学习某件事情，大约持续90分钟左右，也许你每天甚至可以多次这样专注地进行学习。有些人可以做到这一点，而有些人每天只能进行一次专注学习。当你晚上睡觉时，以及接下来的几个夜晚，你在专注学习时被激活的神经回路会被加强，而其他的回路则会被削弱。这非常棒，因为这正是可塑性的本质所在。
And what it means is that when you eventually wake up a couple days or a week later you will have acquired the knowledge forever unless you go through some process to actively unlearn it and we will talk about unlearning in a later episode. So mastering sleep is key in order to reinforce the learning that occurs but let's say you get a really poor night of sleep after a bout of learning chances are if you sleep the next night or the following night that learning will occur.
这段话的意思是，当你在几天或一周后醒来时，你会永久地获得这些知识，除非你主动去“遗忘”它，我们将在之后的节目中讨论如何“遗忘”。因此，掌握良好的睡眠对于巩固所学知识至关重要。但如果在学习之后有一个糟糕的晚上没睡好，那么如果你在接下来的一个晚上或之后补觉，那些知识依然会被吸收。
There's a stamp in the brain where this acetylcholine was released it actually marks those synapses neurochemically and metabolically so that those are synapses are more biased to change now if you don't ever get that deep sleep then you probably won't get those changes there's also a way in which you can bypass the need for deep sleep at least partially by engaging in what I call non-sleep deep rest these nsdr protocols.
大脑中有一个“印记”，当乙酰胆碱释放时，它会在神经化学和代谢上标记那些突触，使得这些突触更容易发生变化。如果你没有进入深度睡眠，你可能不会获得这些变化。不过，还有一种方法可以至少部分地绕过对深度睡眠的需求，那就是通过参与我称为“非睡眠深度休息”（NSDR）的方法。
But I just want to discuss the science of this. There was a paper that was published in Cell Reports last year that shows that if people did a spatial memory task—actually quite a difficult one—where they had to remember the sequence of lights lighting up. If there are just two or three lights in a particular sequence, it's easy, but as you get up to 15 or 16 lights, and think numbers in the sequence actually gets quite challenging. If immediately after—and it was immediately after the learning—the actual performance of this task, people took a 20-minute non-sleep deep rest protocol or took a shallow nap, so lying down, feet slightly elevated, perhaps just closing their eyes, no sensory input, the rates of learning were significantly higher for that information than were that to just had a good night sleep the following night.
我只是想讨论一下这一科学问题。去年在《Cell Reports》上发表的一篇论文显示，如果人们进行空间记忆任务——实际上是一个相当困难的任务——他们需要记住一系列依次亮起的灯光。如果只是两三个灯光的顺序，很容易，但当数量增加到15或16个时，记住这些数字的顺序就变得相当具有挑战性。如果在学习完这些之后——是立即在完成这些任务之后——人们进行了20分钟的不睡觉的深度休息，或者是短暂的小憩，比如躺下，把脚稍微抬高，可能只是闭上眼睛，没有任何感官输入，与那些仅仅在接下来晚上睡个好觉的人相比，这些人对信息的学习效果显著提高。
So you can actually accelerate learning with these NSDR protocols or with brief naps, 90 minutes or less. The key to plasticity in childhood is to be a child; the key to plasticity in adulthood is to engage alertness, engage focus, and then to engage non-sleep deep rest and deep sleep while you're in your typical bout of sleep. I always get asked how many bouts of learning can I perform. Well, I know people that train up these visual focus mechanisms to the point where they can do several 90-minute bouts throughout the day, as many as three or four, and some of them are also inserting non-sleep deep rest as well.
你可以通过这些NSDR（非睡眠深度休息）协议或短暂的小睡（90分钟或更短）来加速学习。在儿童时期，大脑的可塑性关键在于维持儿童的状态；而在成年时期，大脑的可塑性关键是保持警觉性和专注，然后在正常的睡眠过程中加入非睡眠的深度休息和深度睡眠。经常有人问我，可以进行多少次学习。我认识一些人，他们已经锻炼出非常强的视觉专注能力，一天中可以进行几次90分钟的学习，最多可以达到三到四次，他们也会加入非睡眠的深度休息。
Now that can get pretty tricky; a lot of people find that they can recover best from these intense bouts of focused learning by doing some motor activity. Get it where you get into self-generated optic flow, and that should make sense if you've ever heard me lecture about stress, which I've done a little bit in various podcasts. When we're in a mode of self-generated optic flow, like walking or running or cycling, and things are just floating past us on our retina, we're not really looking anywhere in particular, so this is the opposite of a tight window of focus. When we do that, there are areas of the brain, like the amygdala, which are involved in releasing epinephrine and creating alertness. At the extremes, it creates fear, but certainly alertness; those all shut down.
这可能会变得相当棘手；很多人发现，他们在进行高强度的专注学习后，可以通过一些运动活动来最好地恢复。当你的眼睛自主产生视觉流动时，这一点就会有道理了——如果你曾听过我在各种播客中关于压力的演讲，你应该能够理解。 当我们进行一些自发性的视觉流动活动时，比如走路、跑步或骑自行车，眼前的事物在视网膜上一一滑过，我们并没有专注地盯着某个特定的地方看，这与高度集中的注意力正相反。 当我们这样做时，大脑中涉及肾上腺素释放和提高警觉性的一些区域，比如杏仁核，就会关闭。在极端情况下，这会导致恐惧，但通常是让我们保持警觉；然而，这些活动都会被抑制。
So it's its own form of non-sleep deep rest. Some people find it much more pleasurable and practical to engage in a focused bout of learning and then go do some activity that involves what we would essentially call wordlessness, where you're not really thinking about much of anything. And so for those of you that listen to audiobooks or podcasts while you run, you may want to consider whether or not that's how you want to spend your time. I'd love it if you were listening to this podcast while you run or cycle, but I'm much more interested in you actually getting the benefits of neuroplasticity than just listening to me for sake of listening to me.
这是一种非睡眠深度休息的形式。有些人发现，进行一段集中学习后，再去做一些不需要思考太多的活动，更加愉快和实用。对于那些在跑步时听有声书或播客的人，你可能需要考虑一下这是不是你想要的方式。我很高兴你在跑步或骑行时听这个播客，但我更关心的是你能真正获得神经可塑性的好处，而不仅仅是为了听我而听我。
So for many people, letting the mind drift where it's not organized in thought after a period of very deliberate focused effort is the best way to accelerate learning and depth of learning. There are good scientific data to support these sorts of things, including the Cell Reports paper that I mentioned a few moments ago. I want to synthesize some of the information that we've covered up until now. This entire month is about neuroplasticity; today's episode has covered a lot but by no means has it covered all of the potential for neuroplasticity and protocols for plasticity.
对于很多人来说，在经过一段时间的专注努力之后，让思维自由发散、不再有条理地思考，反而是一种加速学习和加深学习的方法。有可靠的科学数据支持这种说法，包括我刚才提到的一篇《Cell Reports》论文。我想综合一下我们到目前为止讨论过的一些信息。这个月的主题都是关于神经可塑性，今天这一集涵盖了很多内容，但绝对不是神经可塑性和塑性协议的全部潜力。
We will get into all of it, but today I want to make sure that these key elements that form the backbone of neuroplasticity are really embedded in people's minds. First of all, plasticity occurs throughout the lifespan, early from birth until 25. Mere exposure to a sensory event can create plasticity; that could be a good thing or a bad thing. We're going to talk about unlearning the bad stuff, traumas, etc., in a subsequent episode this month. If you want to learn as an adult, you have to be alert. It might seem so obvious, but I think a lot of people don't think about when in their 24-hour cycle they're most alert.
我们会详细探讨所有内容，但今天我想确保构成神经可塑性的关键要素能真正印在人们的脑海中。首先，可塑性贯穿人的一生，从出生到25岁。简单的接触某种感官事件就能产生可塑性；这可能是好事也可能是坏事。在本月的后续节目中，我们会讨论如何消除不好的影响，比如创伤等。如果你想在成年后学习，就必须保持警觉。这似乎显而易见，但我觉得很多人没有考虑过自己在一整天中什么时候最为清醒。
There are four episodes devoted to that 24-hour cycle and the cycles of alertness and sleep. I encourage you to listen to those if you haven't had the opportunity to yet or just ask yourself when during the day do you typically tend to be most alert. That will afford you an advantage in learning specific things during that period of time. So don't give up that period of time for things that are meaningless, useless, or not aligned with your goals. That will be a terrible time to get into passive observance or just letting your time get soaked away by something that is a valuable asset.
有四集是专门讲解24小时周期以及清醒和睡眠的循环。我建议你去听一听这些内容，如果你还没有机会听过的话，或者你也可以问问自己，一天当中你大约在什么时候最为清醒。这将为你在这段时间学习特定内容提供优势。因此，不要将这段时间浪费在无意义、无用或不符合你目标的事情上。在这段时间进行被动观望或让时间被无价值的事情消耗掉，是非常不明智的。
That epinephrine released from your brain stem is going to occur more readily at particular phases of your 24-hour cycle than others. During the waking phase, of course, you should know when those are, and then you could start to think about the behavioral practices, maybe the pharmacologic practices like caffeine, hydration, etc., that will support heightened levels of alertness. Attention is something that can be learned, and attention is critical for creating that condition where whatever it is that you are engaging in will modify your brain in a way that you won't have to spend so much attention on it going forward. That's the essence of plasticity; that things will eventually become reflexive—the language that you're learning, the motor movement, the cognitive skill, the ability to suppress an emotional response or to engage in emotional response, depending on what your goals are and what's appropriate for you.
从你的脑干释放的肾上腺素在你24小时周期的某些阶段会更容易发生。显然，在清醒阶段，你应该知道那些时候，然后你可以开始思考一些行为上的实践，可能还有一些药物上的实践，比如咖啡因、补水等，这些都会帮助提高警觉水平。注意力是一种可以学习的东西，它对于创造一种条件至关重要，在这种条件下，无论你专注于什么，它都会以一种方式改变你的大脑，从而使今后不用花费那么多注意力。这就是神经可塑性的本质；事情最终会变得自动化——无论是你正在学习的语言、动作技能、认知能力，还是根据你的目标以及适合你的情况来抑制或表达情感的能力。
Increasing acetylcholine can be accomplished pharmacologically through nicotine; however, there are certain dangers for many people to do that, as well as a financial cost. Learning how to engage the cholinergic system through the use of the visual system, practicing how long you can maintain focus with blinks as you need them, but how long you can maintain visual focus on a target just on a piece of paper set a few feet away in the room or at the level of your computer screen. These are actually things that people do in communities where high levels of visual focus are necessary.
增加乙酰胆碱可以通过药物手段实现，比如使用尼古丁；然而，对于许多人来说，这种方法存在某些危险，而且也有经济成本。可以通过视觉系统来激活胆碱能系统，比如练习在眨眼时保持专注的时间，以及在房间里或电脑屏幕上放置一个目标物，练习能持续多久专注于这个目标物。这些实际上是一些需要高度视觉专注的社区中人们常做的事情。
Now the other way to get high levels of visual focus and alertness is to have a panic or to have a situation that's very very bad. You will be immediately focused on everything related to that situation, but that's unfortunate. What we're really talking about here is trying to harness the mechanisms of attention and get better at paying attention. You may want to do that with your auditory system, not with your visual system either because you're low vision or no vision or because you're trying to learn something that relates more to sounds than to what you see.
现在，提高视觉专注力和警觉性的另一种方法是经历恐慌或非常糟糕的情况。在这样的情况下，你会立刻集中注意力在与该情境相关的一切事物上，但这并不是我们希望的。我们真正想讨论的是如何利用注意力机制，更好地集中注意力。你可能希望通过听觉系统来实现这一点，而不是通过视觉系统。这可能是因为你的视觉较弱甚至没有视觉，或者是因为你尝试学习的内容与声音更相关，而不是与视觉相关。
But for most people, they're trying to learn information, cognitive information, or they're trying to learn how to hear the nuance in their partner's explanations of their emotionally challenging events, etc. And just remember, by the way, what I said earlier, which is that if you really want somebody to listen to you and really hear what you're saying and what's underlying it, you should not and cannot expect them to look directly at you while you do that. That's actually going to limit their ability to focus.
对于大多数人来说，他们正在尝试学习认知方面的信息，或者试图学会如何听出伴侣在解释情感挑战事件时的细微差别等。同时请记住，我之前提到过，如果你真的希望有人认真倾听你，并真正理解你所说的内容及其背后的含义，你不应该，也不能指望他们在你说话时直视你。这实际上会限制他们的专注能力。
Trying to rescue a few folks out there who might be in this struggle, I of course have never been in this struggle (and that was supposed to be a joke). I'm very familiar with that struggle, but I know that one can get better at listening, one can get better at learning, one can get better at all sorts of things by anchoring in these mechanisms. Now, of course, you can also combine protocols; you can decide to combine pharmacology with these learning practices. Many people in communities do that. Many people are doing that naturally by drinking their coffee right before they do their learning.
为了帮助那些可能陷入困境的人，我当然开玩笑地说自己从未经历过这些困境。事实上，我对这种困难非常熟悉。但我知道，人可以通过锚定在这些机制上来提高自己的倾听能力、学习能力，及其他各方面的能力。当然，你也可以结合不同的方法；比如在学习实践中结合药理学。许多社区中的人都这样做。很多人自然地会在学习前喝一杯咖啡，这也是一种结合。
But I would also encourage you to think about how long those learning bouts are. If you think you have ADD or ADHD, see a clinician. But you should also ask yourself, are you giving up the best period of focus that you have each day naturally to some other thing like social media or some other activity that doesn't serve you well? Or are you devoting that period to the opportunity to learn? You should also ask yourself whether or not you're trying to focus too much for too long during the day. I know some very high-performing individuals, very high performing in a variety of contexts, and none of them are focused all day long.
但我也建议你考虑一下，每次学习的时长有多长。如果你认为自己有注意力缺陷或多动症，应该去看医生。但你也应该问问自己，是否自然地把每天最佳的专注时间浪费在社交媒体或其他对自己没有帮助的活动上？还是将这段时间用于学习的机会？你还应该问问自己，是否一天中试图集中注意力的时间太长。我认识一些在各种领域表现极为优秀的人，但他们没有一个是整天都保持专注的。
Many of them take walks down the hallway, sometimes mumbling to themselves, or are not paying attention to anything else. They go for bike rides, they take walks; they are not trying to engage their mind at maximum focus all the time. Very few people do that because we learn best in these 90-minute bouts inside of one of these ultradian cycles. I should repeat again that within that 90-minute cycle, you should not expect yourself to focus for the entire period of one 90-minute cycle. The beginning and end are going to be a little bit flickering in and out of focus.
他们中很多人喜欢在走廊里散步，有时候会自言自语，或者对周围的事物不太注意。他们骑自行车、散步，并不是一直在最大程度地集中注意力。很少有人会这样做，因为我们在大约90分钟的超日节律周期中最能有效地学习。我需要再次强调，在这90分钟的周期内，你不应该期望自己能够全程集中注意力。在这段时间的开始和结束时，可能会有点分心。
How do you know when one of these 90-minute cycles is starting? Well, typically when you wake up is the beginning of the first 90-minute cycle, but it's not down to the minute. You'll be able to tap into your sense of these 90-minute cycles as you start to engage in these learning practices, should you choose. And then, of course, getting some non-sleep deep rest or just deliberate disengagement, such as walking or running or just sitting, eyes closed or eyes open, kind of mindlessly in a chair just letting your thoughts move around after a learning bout will accelerate the rate of plasticity. That's been shown in quality peer-reviewed research.
你怎么知道这些90分钟循环何时开始呢？通常情况下，当你醒来时，便是第一个90分钟循环的开始，但这个时间并不是精确到分钟的。只要你开始进行这些学习练习，你就能逐渐感受到这些90分钟循环。当然，在学习之后进行一些非睡眠的深度休息或刻意放松，比如散步、跑步，或者只是坐着，无论是闭着眼睛还是睁着眼睛，放空自己，让思绪随意漫游，这些都能加速大脑的可塑性。这一点已经在高质量的同行评议研究中得到证明。
Studies and then of course deep sleep and so what we can start to see is that plasticity is your natural right early in life but after about age 25 you have to do some work in order to access it but fortunately these beautiful experiments of hubo and measle and mersanick and wineburger and others point in the direction of what allows us to achieve plasticity it points to the neurochemicals and the circuits and we now have behavioral protocols that allow us to do that.
研究表明，深度睡眠对大脑的可塑性十分重要。早期人生阶段，可塑性是天然存在的。然而，25岁之后，我们需要采取一些措施才能获得这种可塑性。幸运的是，Hubo、Measle、Mersanick和Wineburger等人的精彩实验帮助我们找到了实现大脑可塑性的方法。他们揭示了相关的神经化学物质和神经回路。现如今，我们还拥有一些行为方案，可以帮助我们实现这一目标。
I also really want to emphasize that there's an entire other aspect of behavioral practices that will allow us to engage in plasticity that don't involve intense focus and emotionality but involve a lot of repetition. So there's another entire category of plasticity that involves doing what seemed like almost mundane things but doing them over and over again repeatedly and incorporating the reward system that involves dopamine.
我还想特别强调，有另一种行为实践能够使我们参与到神经可塑性当中，而不需要高度集中注意力和情感投入，而是通过大量重复。这是一种完全不同的可塑性类别，它涉及到做一些看似平凡的事情，但通过反复不断地进行，同时结合涉及多巴胺的奖励系统。
So today I talked about the kind of plasticity it comes from extreme focus you would get that extreme focus and alertness naturally through a harder difficult event that you didn't want that's the kind of stinger but your brain is designed to keep you safe so it wants to get one trial learning from things like touching a hot stove or engaging with a really horrible person you can get incredible plasticity of positive experiences of things that you want by engaging this high focus regime and then rest non sleep deep rest and sleep.
今天我讨论的是一种来自极度专注的塑性。通常，这种极度专注和警觉性会自然地来自于你不想要的困难事件，这种事件就像是刺痛的教训。但是，我们的大脑是为了保护我们而设计的，因此它希望通过一次性学习来避免触碰热炉子或与恶劣的人交往等情况。通过高度专注的状态，然后结合休息、不睡觉的深度休息和睡眠，你可以在积极的体验中获得惊人的塑性效果，从而获得你想要的结果。
There’s another aspect of plasticity which we will explore next episode as well as when we explore movement-based practices for enhancing plasticity and plasticity of movement itself and those are not of the high attention kind of high emotionality or the intensity of the experiences that I described today. Those are more about repetition and reward and repeat repetition reward repeat and they are used for a distinctly different category of behavioral change more of which relate to habits as opposed to learning of particular types of information that allow us to perform physically, cognitively or adjust our emotional system.
我们将在下一集探讨可塑性中的另一个方面，特别是当我们研究通过运动提升可塑性以及运动本身的可塑性时，这些并不是我今天描述的那种需要高度注意、情绪强烈或体验紧张的类型。这些更涉及到重复与奖励的循环——重复、奖励，然后再重复。它们用于一种不同类别的行为改变，更偏向于习惯的养成，而不是特定信息的学习，比如那些帮助我们在身体、认知或情绪系统上有所表现的内容。
So I'm going to stop there I'm sure there are a lot of questions please put your questions in the comment section below and please remember that this entire month we're going to be exploring neural plasticity so this discussion slash lecture I wish it was more of a back and forth but this is what the format offers us so please do put your questions in the comment section and I will address them in the other episodes coming soon on neural plasticity.
所以我就先讲到这里了。我相信大家一定有很多问题，请在下面的评论区提问。请记住，这整个月份我们都会探讨神经可塑性。我希望这次讨论/讲座能更多地进行互动，但这是我们现在能提供的形式。所以，请务必在评论区留下你们的问题，我会在接下来的关于神经可塑性的节目中解答。
As I say that I'm reminded that many of you are listening to this on Apple or Spotify and therefore there isn't an opportunity to leave comments aside from the rating section on Apple so if you have specific topics related to neural plasticity that you would like me to cover in the subsequent episodes this month please go to the YouTube subscribe but as well please put your question in the comment section for this episode and I'll be sure to read them and respond.
我这样说的时候，我想起很多人在 Apple 或 Spotify 上收听这期节目，因此除了在 Apple 的评分区，没有地方可以留言评论。所以，如果你有关于神经可塑性的话题希望我在本月接下来的节目中讨论，请到 YouTube 订阅，并在本集的视频评论区留下你的问题，我一定会阅读和回复。
Many of you have very graciously asked how you can help support the Huberman lab podcast that's way to do that is to subscribe on YouTube might want to also hit the notification button so that you don't miss any upcoming episodes leave a comment as well. If you go to Apple you can give us a five star rating and there's a place there where also you can leave a comment and if you prefer to listen on Spotify subscribe and download on Spotify in addition it's always helpful if you recommend the podcast to your friends and family and others who you think might benefit from the information.
许多朋友很热心地询问如何支持Huberman实验室播客。您可以通过以下方式帮助我们：在YouTube上订阅我们的频道，点击通知按钮，这样您就不会错过任何即将上线的节目，记得留下评论哦。如果您使用苹果设备，可以给我们打五星评价，并在相应位置留下评论。如果您更喜欢在Spotify上收听，请在那里订阅和下载。此外，您也可以将这个播客推荐给您的朋友、家人以及其他您认为可能会受益的人。
As well please check out our sponsors that's a great way to help us today and in previous episodes I've talked a number of times about supplements I'm very pleased that we're partnering with Thorn THOR and E supplements because Thorn has the very high levels of stringency in terms of product quality and precision about how much of given supplements are in the bottle which is vital and not all supplement companies have stood up to the test on that one.
请查看我们的赞助商，这对今天和我们的往期节目都是一种很好的支持方式。我多次谈到过补充剂，我非常高兴我们与Thorn（THOR）和E补充剂合作，因为Thorn在产品质量和成分含量的精准度方面要求非常严格，这是非常重要的，不是所有的补充剂公司都能达到这样的标准。
If you want to check out Thorn and go to Thorn that's THOR and E.com slash U slash Huberman and if you do that you'll get 20% off any supplements that you purchase.
如果你想访问Thorn网站，可以前往网址：THORN.com/U/Huberman，这样你购买任何补充剂都能享受20%的折扣。
I've also listed there a gallery of supplements that I take including magnesium glycinate. I know on previous episodes I talked about magnesium 3 and 8 as a sleep aid that I take. Magnesium glycinate and magnesium 3 and 8 are essentially interchangeable.
我还在那边列出了我服用的营养补充剂，其中包括甘氨酸镁。我知道在之前的节目中我提到过我服用的另一种促进睡眠的补充剂，叫做三种八酸镁。甘氨酸镁和三种八酸镁基本上是可以互换的。
Thanks so much for your time and attention and as always thank you for your interesting.
非常感谢您花时间和关注，一如既往地感谢您的兴趣。