Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

Today we are going to discuss light and the many powerful uses of light to optimize our health.

We're going to discuss the use of light for optimizing skin health, appearance and longevity,

for wound healing, for optimizing hormone balance, and for regulating sleep, alertness, mood and even for offsetting dementia.

One of the reasons why light has such powerful effects on so many different aspects of our biology is that it can be translated into electrical signals in our brain and body,

into hormone signals in our brain and body, and indeed into what we call cascades of biological pathways, meaning light can actually change the genes that the cells of your body's existence.

And that is true throughout the lifespan.

Today I will discuss the mechanisms by which all of that occurs.

I promise to make it clear for those of you that don't have a biology background and if you do have a biology background, I'll try and provide sufficient depth so that it's still of interest to you.

And I promise to give you tools, very specific protocols that are extracted from the peer review literature that will allow you to use different so-called wavelengths,

which most of us think of as colors, of light in order to modulate your health in the ways that are most important to you.

For those of you that are thinking that the use of light to modulate health falls under the category of Wu-Science, Sudoscience or Biohacking.

Well, nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, in 1903, the Nobel Prize was given to Neils Finson. He was Icelandic. He lived in Denmark for the use of phototherapy for the treatment of lupus.

So there's more than 100 years of quality science emphasizing the use of light, and as you'll soon see the use of particular wavelengths or colors of light in order to modulate the activity of cells in the brain and body.

So while it is the case that many places and companies are selling therapies and products related to the use of flashing lights and colored lights, promising specific outcomes from everything from stem cell renewal to improvement of brain function,

and some of those don't have any basis in science.

There are phototherapies that do have a strong foundation in quality science.

And those are the studies and the protocols that we are going to discuss today. But I thought that people might appreciate knowing that over 100 years ago, people were thinking about the use of light for the treatment of various diseases and for improving health.

And indeed, many of those therapies are used today in high quality hospitals and research institutions and, of course, clinics and homes around the world.

One of the more exciting examples of phototherapy in the last few years is the beautiful work of Dr. Glenn Jeffrey at University of College London.

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