Essentials: Science of Building Strong Social Bonds with Family, Friends & Romantic Partners
Listen to the original audio · Transcribed with NVIDIA Parakeet · Timestamps stay in sync with the live audio
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's episode is about the biology, psychology, and practices of social bonding. From the day we are born until the day we die, the quality of our social bonds dictates much of our quality of life.
It should therefore be no surprise that our brain, and indeed much of our entire nervous system, is wired for social bonds. Today we are going to talk about those brain and nervous system circuitries. We are also going to talk about the neurochemicals and hormones that underlie their function. And we are going to touch on a number of important and actionable tools that you can apply in everyday life, and I'm confident that you will come away from today's episode with tremendous knowledge about how you function. For instance, if you're an introvert or an extrovert, why is that?
Turns out there may be a neurochemical basis for that. Believe it or not, there's biology around that now, and it's excellent peer-reviewed work. Now, an important feature of biology generally, but in particular as it relates to social bonding, is that The neural circuits, meaning the brain areas and neurons and the hormones, things like oxytocin, which we'll talk about today, and the other chemicals in the brain and body that are responsible for the process we call social bonding, are not unique to particular social bonds. They are generic.
We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (37 minutes, 6,288 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.
No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 10 episodes for $5, and monthly plans are cheaper still.