Essentials: The Biology of Aggression, Mating & Arousal | Dr. David Anderson

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. And now for my discussion with Dr. David Anderson. David, great to be here and great to finally sit down and chat with you.

Great to be here too. Thank you so much. I want to start with something fairly basic, and that's the difference between emotions and states. How should we think about them and why might states be at least as useful a thing to think about, if not more useful? The short answer to your question is that I see emotions as a type of internal state in the sense that arousal is also a type of internal state, motivation's a type of internal state, sleep is a type of internal state.

They change the input to output transformation of the brain. When you're asleep, you don't hear something that you would hear if you were awake. So from that broad perspective, I see emotion as a class of state that controls behavior. The reason I think it's useful to think about it as a state is it puts the focus on it as a neurobiological process.

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