Smash Notes

Back to #164 – Andrew Huberman: Sleep, Dreams, Creativity & the Limits of the Human Mind, with Andrew Huberman.

Why Does Fasting Make You More Alert?

On the show, being fasted increases alertness because fasting puts high levels of epinephrine in the system. People always think that going without food will leave them tired. Energy from food is used from glycogen after a long storage and conversion process, and the food itself consumes energy to digest. A lot of people feel better fasted.

The comparison is fasting or being thirsty before exhaustion arrives. The show says people presumably fasted for long periods throughout history and still had to stay up for two or three days. If a family member is sick, staying awake in the hospital can happen without any trouble. The alertness system is all mental.

Transcript

#164 – Andrew Huberman: Sleep, Dreams, Creativity & the Limits of the Human Mind ·

Lex Fridman Podcast

More from this episode

  1. Why Does Andrew Huberman Feel Alert After an All-nighter?Andrew Huberman says two forces decide sleepiness and wakefulness. The longer someone stays awake, the more adenosine accumulates in the brain.
  2. Why Does Lost Rapid Eye Movement Sleep Magnify Small Stuff?Andrew Huberman says depriving people of rapid eye movement sleep makes them selectively bad at uncoupling emotion from things that happened in the previous…
  3. Why Did Mice Get Fat Eating the Same Food?On the show, limiting calories to four, six, eight, or even ten hours of every 24-hour cycle, kept more or less with the light and with when the sun is out…
  4. Why Does Salt in Water Stop Fasting Shakes?Salt is great unless a person has hypertension, provided they drink enough water.
  5. Did Fish Oil Match Prozac for Depression?On the show, placebo-controlled double-blind studies have shown that getting at least a thousand milligrams of EPA can offset antidepressive symptoms as much…
  6. Why Do Morning Dreams Work Like Trauma Therapy?On the show, rapid eye movement dreams that dominate towards morning divorce emotion from prior experiences and extract general rules and themes.
  7. Why Did Octopi Start Cuddling on Ecstasy?On the show, a postdoc at Stanford put octopi on MDMA, also called ecstasy. She had a paper in Current Biology showing what the animals did next.
  8. Why Is the Drug Ecstasy So Unusual?On the show, ecstasy is a very unusual drug in a kit that also includes psilocybin and LSD.
  9. Why Call Dimethyltryptamine a Freight Train?DMT taps a brain state distinctly different from LSD and psilocybin.
  10. Why Mine Joe Rogan Videos for Blink Signals?On the show, Lex Fridman downloaded every Joe Rogan podcast as video from before Joe Rogan went with Spotify and kept the files as a private collection.
  11. What Was Hardest About Making Huberman Lab?On Huberman Lab, the hardest part turned out to be staying on a single topic for three or four more episodes before switching to a new topic.
  12. How Many Hours Does Andrew Huberman Prep a Podcast?Andrew Huberman puts at least 10 to 15 hours of passive listening preparation into each podcast. He says the active preparation might be five or six hours.

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