Essentials: Using Your Nervous System to Enhance Your Immune System

Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today we are discussing the immune system, and we are also discussing how the nervous system can be used to activate and control the immune system. The first topic we have to attack is the question of what is the immune system and how does it work. I'd like to just take a moment and do a sort of brief immune system 101, really simple, cover the basic elements of the immune system so that everyone listening or watching this can get a clear sense of how the immune system functions and what its basic

parts are. It's actually really simple because it is truly elegant in design. You have three main layers of defense for your health. And the first of those three is a physical barrier that we call your skin. And that might seem kind of obvious, but

Everything about you is contained in this compartment that is boundaried by your skin. If you've ever had a cut, you essentially have a breach of the boundary that is your immune system. Still in category one, your body and your external surface, you have openings to that surface. So what are those openings? Well, let's start at the top and work our way down.

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