Andrew Huberman· PhD
There's a little nucleus, a little collection of nerve cells in your brain that's called the super chisa nucleus, the SCN. Uh, and it is sitting in a funny place for the rest of the structures in the nervous system that get direct retinal input. It's sitting in the hypothalamus which you can think about as sort of the great coordinator of drives and the source of all our pleasures and all our problems or most our problems. >> Yes, >> it really is. But it's sort of, you know, deep in your brain, things that drive you to do things. If you're freezing cold, you put on a coat, you you shiver. All these things are coordinated by the hypothalamus. So this pathway that we're talking about from the retina and from these peculiar cells that are encoding light intensity are sending signals directly into a center that's surrounded by all of these centers that control autonomic nervous system and uh your hormonal systems.