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. Nolan Williams. Thanks for joining today.

I'm really excited to have this conversation. I have a lot of questions about different compounds,

psychedelics in particular. Yeah. But before we get into that discussion, I want to ask you about

depression, broadly speaking. I heard you say in a wonderful talk that you gave that depression is perhaps

the most debilitating condition worldwide, yet in contrast to other medical conditions like cancer,

we actually have a fairly limited number of tools to approach depression, and yet the number of

tools and the potency of those

tools is growing. Depression is the most disabling condition worldwide. What's interesting about

depression is it's both a risk factor for other illnesses and it makes other medical and psychiatric

illnesses worse, right? So recently the American Heart

Association added depression is the fourth major risk factor for coronary artery disease, right?

So alongside the risk factors that we know, hypertension, high blood pressure, hyperlipidemia,

high cholesterol, and diabetes, you know, high blood sugar.

Those three have been on the list for a long time and depression into, you know, being added

to the list is the fourth one.

A lot of what we're doing in the lab actually is measuring kind of brain heart connections

and we can actually with transcranial magnetic stimulation, a form of brain stimulation,

we can actually

decelerate the heart rate. We can capture that heart rate deceleration over the mood regulatory

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