Andrew D. Huberman

Professor of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford University • Neuroscience Research and Education • Host of the Huberman Lab Podcast

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Book Recommendations:

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Recommended by Andrew D. Huberman

For the science of play and how to implement play: (also see Play It Away the book by @charliehoehn which is fantastic. https://t.co/Ca7sEphsov (from X)

Recommended by Andrew Huberman, Tim Ferriss, Tony Robbins, and Dr. Peter Gray. ACTUAL READER FEEDBACK “This book saved my life. Every tip is natural, just the way I want to treat my anxiety.” “Play It Away really hits on what ‘living in the moment’ is all about. Reading this book has been one of the most valuable investments I’ve made, both professionally and personally.” “I work in the mental health field, so I have read my weight in self-help books. I would highly recommend this to anyone wrestling with anxiety. Or really, just anyone.” “When reading Play It Away, I felt as though I was talking with a friend over a beer, rather than reading a book pointing out what I was doing wrong. Charlie relates to the reader in an extraordinary way and offers tangible advice that doesn't seem out of reach. This is certainly a different kind of self-help book that I will keep on my bookshelf for years to come.” “Living on the road for the better part of 7 years representing and speaking for Tony Robbins landed me in the hospital: adrenals burnt out, depressed, poor digestion, and miserable. It was pretty hard to be a ‘motivational speaker’ when I was actually dying on the inside. Charlie's book serves as a great reminder to enjoy life more, and also provides the necessary "how to" information and practical advice to enjoy life and be more productive. Highly recommend this book to anyone who is busy and wants to enjoy their life more.” “It might be because I see so much of myself in the author's story, but this book has already changed my life. It reminded me of all of the things that I used to fill my free time with that I completely abandoned, and it gave me concrete, actionable ways to re-integrate them into my life. I've already recommended this book to over a dozen good friends. It's a very solid read.” “I've been feeling 98% back to my former self 98% of the time. Sometimes I have a hard time believing the five months that I was crippled with anxiety even happened. My confidence is back and I'm having fun again.” “After reading your book, everything clicked for me. There are so many parts in it that I can relate to; the anxious feeling from coffee, lack of sleep, too much time spent on my laptop/iPhone, and so many other things. I can’t explain how nice it was to know that someone finally understood AND has solutions to change those feelings. The answers I’ve been searching for and asking doctors about for almost the last 3 years, you were able to summarize in one book.” “Play It Away is a gift. It’s totally changed how I think about my interactions with friends, women, and people I meet for the first time. I'm more open, playful, and happier overall since reading (and applying) this book.” “This book provides simple but profound advice on how to gift yourself with a stress-free, happier existence.” "What a truly inspiring and incredible read for anyone struggling with anxiety or depression. The author's style is so full of energy and bubbly, it made me want to go out and take my own adventure.” "Here's the cure to your stress!" —Tony Robbins, #1 Bestselling Author of Personal Power, 40 million copies sold “For all Type-A driven readers — especially those who struggle with the shut-off switch — this one is for you.” —Tim Ferriss, #1 New York Times Bestselling Author of The 4-Hour Workweek and The 4-Hour Body “Charlie's transformation through the rediscovery of his own innate play nature stands as an example available to all of us. Access your own unique play capacities and infuse them into your life! It works!” —Stuart Brown, M.D., Bestselling Author of Play

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Recommended by Andrew D. Huberman

@VickiSaali Amazing book. (from X)

A journalist's twenty-year obsession with the Manson murders brings shocking revelations about one of the most infamous crimes in American history: carelessness from police, misconduct by prosecutors, and even potential surveillance by intelligence agents. What really happened in 1969? In 1999, when Tom O'Neill was assigned a magazine piece about the thirtieth anniversary of the Manson murders, he worried there was nothing new to say. Weren't the facts indisputable? Charles Manson had ordered his young followers to commit seven brutal murders, and in his thrall, they'd gladly complied. But when O'Neill began reporting the story, he kept finding holes in the prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi's narrative, enshrined in the best-selling Helter Skelter. Before long, O'Neill had questions about everything from the motive to the manhunt. Though he'd never considered himself a conspiracy theorist, the Manson murders swallowed the next two decades of his career. He was obsessed. Searching but never speculative, CHAOS follows O'Neill's twenty-year effort to rebut the "official" story behind Manson. Who were his real friends in Hollywood, and how far would they go to hide their ties? Why didn't law enforcement, including Manson's own parole officer, act on their many chances to stop him? And how did he turn a group of peaceful hippies into remorseless killers? O'Neill's hunt for answers leads him from reclusive celebrities to seasoned spies, from San Francisco's summer of love to the shadowy sites of the CIA's mind-control experiments, on a trail rife with shady cover-ups and suspicious coincidences. Featuring hundreds of new interviews and dozens of never-before-seen documents from the LAPD, the FBI, and the CIA, CHAOS mounts an argument that could be, according to Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Steven Kay, strong enough to overturn the verdicts on the Manson murders. In those two dark nights in Los Angeles, O'Neill finds the story of California in the sixties: when charlatans mixed with prodigies, free love was as possible as brainwashing, and utopia-or dystopia-was just an acid trip away.

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Recommended by Andrew D. Huberman

P.S. I have no business affiliation to the book, but am delighted that the best of the best in our field are taking the time to communicate to the public, educate and share their knowledge. This book is a winner. (from X)

A pioneering neuroscientist offers a new way of understanding how emotions drive behavior Does your dog get sad when you leave for the day? Does your cat purr because she loves you? Do bears attack when they’re angry? You can’t very well ask them. In fact, scientists haven’t been able to reach a consensus on whether animals even have emotions like humans do, let alone how to study them. Yet studies of animal emotion are critical for understanding human emotion and mental illness. In The Nature of the Beast, pioneering neuroscientist David J. Anderson describes a new approach to solving this problem. He and his colleagues have figured out how to study the brain activity of animals as they navigate real-life scenarios, like fleeing a predator or competing for a mate. His research has revolutionized what we know about animal fear and aggression. Here, he explains what studying emotions and related internal brain states in animals can teach us about human behavior, offering new insights into why isolation makes us more aggressive, how sex and violence connect, and whether there’s a link between aggression and mental illness. Full of fascinating stories, The Nature of the Beast reconceptualizes how the brain regulates emotions–and explains why we have them at all.

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Recommended by Andrew D. Huberman

@davewolfusa It’s a great book with an excellent simple recipe for sauerkraut. Thank you @tferriss! (from X)

WHAT IF YOU COULD BECOME WORLD-CLASS IN ANYTHING IN 6 MONTHS OR LESS? The 4-Hour Chef isn’t just a cookbook. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure guide to the world of rapid learning. #1 New York Times bestselling author (and lifelong non-cook) Tim Ferriss takes you from Manhattan to Okinawa, and from Silicon Valley to Calcutta, unearthing the secrets of the world’s fastest learners and greatest chefs. Ferriss uses cooking to explain “meta-learning,” a step-by-step process that can be used to master anything, whether searing steak or shooting 3-pointers in basketball. That is the real “recipe” of The 4-Hour Chef. You'll train inside the kitchen for everything outside the kitchen. Featuring tips and tricks from chess prodigies, world-renowned chefs, pro athletes, master sommeliers, super models, and everyone in between, this “cookbook for people who don’t buy cookbooks” is a guide to mastering cooking and life. The 4-Hour Chef is a five-stop journey through the art and science of learning: 1. META-LEARNING. Before you learn to cook, you must learn to learn. META charts the path to doubling your learning potential. 2. THE DOMESTIC. DOM is where you learn the building blocks of cooking. These are the ABCs (techniques) that can take you from Dr, Seuss to Shakespeare. 3. THE WILD. Becoming a master student requires self-sufficiency in all things. WILD teaches you to hunt, forage, and survive. 4. THE SCIENTIST. SCI is the mad scientist and modernist painter wrapped into one. This is where you rediscover whimsy and wonder. 5. THE PROFESSIONAL. Swaraj, a term usually associated with Mahatma Gandhi, can be translated as “self-rule.” In PRO, we’ll look at how the best in the world become the best in the world, and how you can chart your own path far beyond this book.

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Recommended by Andrew D. Huberman

I get a lot of requests for neuroscience book recommendations. Liqun Luo’s Principles of Neurobiology is the best textbook out there. (Liqun is a Professor @Stanford and @HHMINEWS). (Note: I have no financial affiliation to the book, but did edit a few chapters). (from X)

Principles of Neurobiology,Second Edition presents the major concepts of neuroscience with an emphasis on how we know what we know. The text is organized around a series of key experiments to illustrate how scientific progress is made and helps upper-level undergraduate and graduate students discover the relevant primary literature. Written by a single author in a clear and consistent writing style, each topic builds in complexity from electrophysiology to molecular genetics to systems level in a highly integrative approach. Students can fully engage with the content via thematically linked chapters and will be able to read the book in its entirety in a semester-long course. Principles of Neurobiology is accompanied by a rich package of online student and instructor resources including animations, figures in PowerPoint, and a Question Bank for adopting instructors.

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Recommended by Andrew D. Huberman

@jacobrbeard @MrJamesNestor Yes! Also a great book! (from X)

A New York Times Bestseller A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2020 Named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR “A fascinating scientific, cultural, spiritual and evolutionary history of the way humans breathe—and how we’ve all been doing it wrong for a long, long time.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Big Magic and Eat Pray Love No matter what you eat, how much you exercise, how skinny or young or wise you are, none of it matters if you’re not breathing properly. There is nothing more essential to our health and well-being than breathing: take air in, let it out, repeat twenty-five thousand times a day. Yet, as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, with grave consequences. Journalist James Nestor travels the world to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. The answers aren’t found in pulmonology labs, as we might expect, but in the muddy digs of ancient burial sites, secret Soviet facilities, New Jersey choir schools, and the smoggy streets of São Paulo. Nestor tracks down men and women exploring the hidden science behind ancient breathing practices like Pranayama, Sudarshan Kriya, and Tummo and teams up with pulmonary tinkerers to scientifically test long-held beliefs about how we breathe. Modern research is showing us that making even slight adjustments to the way we inhale and exhale can jump-start athletic performance; rejuvenate internal organs; halt snoring, asthma, and autoimmune disease; and even straighten scoliotic spines. None of this should be possible, and yet it is. Drawing on thousands of years of medical texts and recent cutting-edge studies in pulmonology, psychology, biochemistry, and human physiology, Breath turns the conventional wisdom of what we thought we knew about our most basic biological function on its head. You will never breathe the same again.

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Recommended by Andrew D. Huberman

Many people ask for book suggestions. The Prince of Medicine is a deep, highly detailed dive into the origins of Medicine, focused mostly on Galen. It’s not a protocol book (!) but if you’re interested in how we arrived at Modern Medicine, it reveals that. I love this book. https://t.co/W0KiO8C5NW (from X)

Galen of Pergamum (A.D. 129 - ca. 216) began his remarkable career tending to wounded gladiators in provincial Asia Minor. Later in life he achieved great distinction as one of a small circle of court physicians to the family of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, at the very heart of Roman society. Susan Mattern's The Prince of Medicine offers the first authoritative biography in English of this brilliant, audacious, and profoundly influential figure. Like many Greek intellectuals living in the high Roman Empire, Galen was a prodigious polymath, writing on subjects as varied as ethics and eczema, grammar and gout. Indeed, he was (as he claimed) as highly regarded in his lifetime for his philosophical works as for his medical treatises. However, it is for medicine that he is most remembered today, and from the later Roman Empire through the Renaissance, medical education was based largely on his works. Even up to the twentieth century, he remained the single most influential figure in Western medicine. Yet he was a complicated individual, full of breathtaking arrogance, shameless self-promotion, and lacerating wit. He was fiercely competitive, once disemboweling a live monkey and challenging the physicians in attendance to correctly replace its organs. Relentless in his pursuit of anything that would cure the patient, he insisted on rigorous observation and, sometimes, daring experimentation. Even confronting one of history's most horrific events--a devastating outbreak of smallpox--he persevered, bearing patient witness to its predations, year after year. The Prince of Medicine gives us Galen as he lived his life, in the city of Rome at its apex of power and decadence, among his friends, his rivals, and his patients. It offers a deeply human and long-overdue portrait of one of ancient history's most significant and engaging figures.

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Recommended by Andrew D. Huberman

This is very interesting and (once again) was an idea raised some years ago by @tferriss in the book, The 4 Hour Body. Time to reread 4HB and tabulate the prescient statements. Journal Club anyone? https://t.co/vhhaso1mfc (from X)

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The game-changing author of The 4-Hour Workweek teaches you how to reach your peak physical potential with minimum effort. “A practical crash course in how to reinvent yourself.”—Kevin Kelly, Wired Is it possible to reach your genetic potential in 6 months? Sleep 2 hours per day and perform better than on 8 hours? Lose more fat than a marathoner by bingeing? Indeed, and much more. The 4-Hour Body is the result of an obsessive quest, spanning more than a decade, to hack the human body using data science. It contains the collective wisdom of hundreds of elite athletes, dozens of MDs, and thousands of hours of jaw-dropping personal experimentation. From Olympic training centers to black-market laboratories, from Silicon Valley to South Africa, Tim Ferriss fixated on one life-changing question: For all things physical, what are the tiniest changes that produce the biggest results? Thousands of tests later, this book contains the answers for both men and women. It’s the wisdom Tim used to gain 34 pounds of muscle in 28 days, without steroids, and in four hours of total gym time. From the gym to the bedroom, it’s all here, and it all works. You will learn (in less than 30 minutes each): • How to lose those last 5-10 pounds (or 100+ pounds) with odd combinations of food and safe chemical cocktails • How to prevent fat gain while bingeing over the weekend or the holidays • How to sleep 2 hours per day and feel fully rested • How to produce 15-minute female orgasms • How to triple testosterone and double sperm count • How to go from running 5 kilometers to 50 kilometers in 12 weeks • How to reverse “permanent” injuries • How to pay for a beach vacation with one hospital visit And that's just the tip of the iceberg. There are more than 50 topics covered, all with real-world experiments, many including more than 200 test subjects. You don't need better genetics or more exercise. You need immediate results that compel you to continue. That’s exactly what The 4-Hour Body delivers.

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Recommended by Andrew D. Huberman

@Psypreneur @StanfordMed @KarlDeisseroth It’s , hands down, the best book about the mind and consciousness and mental health and illness and the future of brain science you’ll find. Karl is a superb scientist and writer. It’s really special. (from X)

Revised and Updated, Featuring a New Case Study How do successful companies create products people can’t put down? Why do some products capture widespread attention while others flop? What makes us engage with certain products out of sheer habit? Is there a pattern underlying how technologies hook us?Nir Eyal answers these questions (and many more) by explaining the Hook Model—a four-step process embedded into the products of many successful companies to subtly encourage customer behavior. Through consecutive “hook cycles,” these products reach their ultimate goal of bringing users back again and again without depending on costly advertising or aggressive messaging. Hooked is based on Eyal’s years of research, consulting, and practical experience. He wrote the book he wished had been available to him as a start-up founder—not abstract theory, but a how-to guide for building better products. Hooked is written for product managers, designers, marketers, start-up founders, and anyone who seeks to understand how products influence our behavior. Eyal provides readers with: • Practical insights to create user habits that stick. • Actionable steps for building products people love. • Fascinating examples from the iPhone to Twitter, Pinterest to the Bible App, and many other habit-forming products.