Essentials: Erasing Fears & Traumas Using Modern Neuroscience

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're going to talk about the neuroscience of fear. We are also going to talk about trauma and post traumatic stress disorders. I think it's fair to say that in the last ten years, the field of neuroscience has shed light on not just the neural circuits, meaning the areas of the brain that control the fear response and the ways that it does it, but some important ways to extinguish fears using behavioral therapies, drug therapies, and what we call brain machine interfaces.

Today we are going to talk about all of those, and you are going to come away with both an understanding of the biology of fear and trauma as well as many practical tools to confront fear and trauma. To give you a sense of where we are going, I'll just lay out the framework for today's podcast. First, I'm going to teach you about the biology of fear and trauma, literally the cells and circuits. and connections in the body and chemicals in the body that give rise to the so-called fear response and why sometimes, but not always, fear can turn into trauma. I will also describe the biology of how fear is unlearned, or what we call extinguished.

You're going to learn, for instance, that we can't just eliminate fears, we actually have to replace fears with a new positive event. So what is fear? Well, fear falls into a category of nervous system phenomenon that we can reliably call an emotion. I think it's fair to say that emotions include responses within our body, quickening of heart rate, changes in blood flow, things that we experience as a warming or a cooling of our skin, but that there's also a cognitive component. There are thoughts.

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