Andrew Huberman· PhD
The reason I selected the things I'm about to tell you, is because I ran them by two colleagues, one who is a neurologist and psychiatrist, practicing, the other who is a neurosurgeon, and is very familiar with the vagus. And what I did is I said, "Listen, there's all this stuff out there. You can hear all sorts of interesting things on YouTube and elsewhere about ways to calm down by engaging the vagus. Which of these..." And I basically described five. "Which of these typical five practices do you think actually triggers activation of the specific nerve fibers that would trigger a parasympathetic response?" And what was interesting, is that both of them said, "Actually, there are three of them that absolutely trigger activation of the parasympathetic response, and we know because we've recorded from those neural pathways. And so it's obvious that they work."