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. 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

rather than as a psychological process.

Many people equate emotion with feeling, which is a subjective sense that we can only

study in humans because to find out what someone's feeling, you have to ask them, and people are the

only animals that can talk that we can understand. That's how I think about emotion. It's the, if you think of an iceberg,

it's the part of the iceberg that's below the surface of the water. The feeling part is the tip.

What are some of the other features of states that represent below the tip of the iceberg?

Right. There have been people who have thought of emotions as having just really two dimensions,

an arousal dimension and a valence dimension. Ralph Adolph and I have tried to expand that a little bit

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