Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain

High-Level Overview

Andrew Huberman talks with Dr. Allan Schore, a psychoanalyst, psychotherapist and neuroscientist on the faculty of UCLA's Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, and author of books including Right Brain Psychotherapy and The Development of the Unconscious Mind. Schore's central claim is that the right hemisphere, which dominates brain growth from the last trimester of pregnancy through the second and third years of life, is essentially the unconscious mind, and that it is shaped by the moment-to-moment emotional exchanges between a baby and its primary caregiver. Those early right brain to right brain interactions set our strategies for handling emotion and stress, and the same circuits are later repurposed for friendships, romantic relationships, work and therapy.

The conversation is rich, dense and often surprising, mixing neurobiology with decades of clinical experience. Huberman calls it unlike any other discussion he's had on relationships. It moves from attachment styles and how they form, to what makes therapy work, to the two kinds of attention, brain-to-brain synchrony, music, dogs and text messaging, and finally to practical ways to strengthen right brain circuitry and a pointed critique of how little time American parents get with infants.

The Discussion Explores:

• Why Schore sees the right brain as the unconscious mind, and how much of our motivation runs beneath awareness
• The right brain growth spurt in the first two to three years and how the caregiver shapes it
• Attachment as regulation of emotion and the autonomic nervous system, including attunement and repair
• How secure, avoidant, anxious and disorganized attachment form, and how they show up in adult relationships
• Therapy as right brain to right brain regulation, "surrender" and synchrony
• Mothers, fathers and single caretakers; quiet love and excited love; splitting and personality disorders
• Two kinds of attention, brain-to-brain synchrony, music, dogs, body language and texting
• Ways to feed the right brain, from close relationships and novelty to exercise, and why parental leave matters

Deep Dive into Main Ideas

The Right Brain as the Unconscious Mind

Huberman opens by asking how much of our thinking and behavior is conscious. Schore, trained in psychoanalysis, answers neurobiologically: "I'm suggesting that the right brain is the unconscious mind". The right brain is always processing information, especially emotional information during interactions, below conscious awareness. When it comes to the basic motivations for why we do what we do, he estimates that 90 to 95% is unconscious, and he says data support this. The unconscious, he stresses, isn't just active in dreams; the right brain is constantly reading signals like whether it's safe to be with someone.

The developmental evidence is striking. The human brain growth spurt runs from the last trimester of pregnancy into the second or third year of life, and Schore cites six major studies showing right hemisphere dominance during this time, including a recent study from Mexico tracking infants at two to three, six to eight and nine to twelve months. The left hemisphere doesn't enter its growth spurt until the end of the second year. So everything about early attachment is about right brain dynamics, and Schore describes dominance shifting between hemispheres across the lifespan, with adolescence bringing another growth spurt that starts in the right and moves left.

Attachment Is Psychobiological Regulation

Schore explains that attachment research began with John Bowlby and the "strange situation test, which focused on behavior and cognition. His 1994 book Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self helped shift attention to emotion, around the same time as Antonio Damasio's work and the neuroimaging boom of the decade of the brain". His key point: "attachment is not psychological, it's psychobiological". Emotions come with physiology, including the energy-expending sympathetic and energy-conserving parasympathetic nervous systems.

A caregiver communicates with a baby right brain to right brain through face, voice (prosody) and gesture, including touch. She tracks the baby's arousal moment to moment, synchronizes with it, and then regulates it, using her voice to lift a baby who is too low or softening her face and voice to calm one who is dysregulated. She does this intuitively and implicitly, not by reasoning with her left brain. Attachment, in Schore's regulation theory, is interactive regulation of the limbic system and the autonomic nervous system. By the end of the second year, a securely attached child's right orbitofrontal cortex, which Schore calls the highest level of the right hemisphere, can regulate the amygdala on its own. That gives two forms of regulation: autoregulation when alone, and interactive regulation with others, both for soothing stress and for sharing joy.

Attunement, Repair and the Attachment Styles

Secure attachment depends on psychobiological attunement, but also on repair. Every caregiver sometimes misreads the baby. In good-enough caregiving, the caregiver notices, re-attunes and reconnects, and those cycles of misattunement and repair help the baby learn to regulate itself. When attunement is weak or repair doesn't happen, insecure patterns form. An avoidant, or dismissive, style dismisses the need for interactive regulation and relies almost entirely on autoregulation; avoidant caregivers are uncomfortable with real closeness. An anxious style is the reverse: always seeking others to help regulate, but struggling to self-soothe. Huberman offers the example of someone who can't tolerate a slow reply to a text.

Disorganized, or "D", attachment is the most troubling: under stress, the person can neither autoregulate nor seek help, so they shut down the attachment system through dissociation. Schore links this to conditions like PTSD and borderline personality disorder. Huberman highlights what he sees as the most important and least understood point of Schore's work: the same circuits built in infant-caregiver attachment are repurposed for adult relationships, all in the right brain. The attachment relationship is stored as autobiographical memory from before language, and it resurfaces under stress, in romance and in therapy.

Therapy, Surrender and Synchrony

Because the right hemisphere dominates the stress response and both branches of the autonomic nervous system, early attachment patterns replay whenever life gets hard, and symptoms appear when they break down. Therapy, Schore says, is another right brain to right brain relationship, and the strength of the therapeutic relationship is the best indicator of whether it will help. A good therapist listens to the patient's words with the left brain but, more importantly, listens beneath the words with the right, tracking shifts in arousal. To do that, the therapist must shift out of the left hemisphere: "The term for that is surrender". You can't force it; you have to let go.

In practice, the therapist first synchronizes, feeling in their own body (through the right insula) what the patient is feeling, which may differ from what the patient reports. Then, implicitly, they slow or lift their voice, face and gestures to bring the patient's state down or up together. Patients sometimes leave a first session saying they don't know why, but they feel better. The change mechanism, Schore argues, is not what you say or do to a patient: "It's how to be with the patient". He distinguishes emotional empathy (right brain, feeling the same thing together) from cognitive empathy (left brain understanding), which he says doesn't produce change. Interpersonal synchrony, being in the same state at the same time, is the mechanism underneath empathy, and over time it builds new connections between the orbitofrontal cortex and the cingulate, insula and amygdala. He says his approach produces more lasting change than therapies like CBT, and that "the major change mechanism in psychotherapy now is not insight", but emotionally laden connection.

Mothers, Fathers, Single Parents and MDMA

The primary attachment figure, Schore says, is whoever provides the right brain for a baby when the baby's own right brain is dysregulated, usually the mother but not necessarily; a stay-at-home father can fill that role. Toward the end of the second year, the father typically becomes another primary attachment figure, often through more arousing, rough-and-tumble play that teaches risk-taking, autonomy and tolerance of high-arousal states. Schore suggests the mother figure shapes the right brain and the father figure the left, and a single parent can provide both, with help from other family members.

Asked about MDMA-assisted therapy, which the FDA recently declined to approve, Schore says the relationship remains the key, and such compounds might work best with therapists trained in right brain dynamics. He adds that lateralization is visible even in the fetus, that early memories in utero appear to be stored in the right amygdala, and that high maternal cortisol can cross the placenta and affect the developing right amygdala.

Quiet Love, Excited Love and Integrating Emotions

Schore argues attachment research has overemphasized calming negative states and overlooked amplifying positive ones like joy and excitement. Huberman recalls a passage from Right Brain Psychotherapy about a mother humming to calm her baby and greeting it with wide eyes after a nap. Schore cites the pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott's distinction between quiet love (a calm, parasympathetic state) and excited, passionate love (a high-arousal state); both matter and must be integrated. Negative emotions are adaptive too; shame, for example, helps bring down very high arousal. Secure attachment is the ability to integrate positive and negative emotions. When that fails, people split: someone becomes all good or all bad. Schore describes this in borderline personality disorder, which often starts with idealizing a therapist and flips after a rupture, and discusses vulnerable and grandiose forms of narcissism. In relationships, avoidant people disengage when things get too close (Schore demonstrates how the voice goes flat), while anxious people press in with more demands.

The Real Key: Close, Vulnerable Relationships

Can people rewire this without a therapist? Yes, Schore says, and he argues there has been too much emphasis on autoregulation and not enough on interactive regulation. "The real key to changing a right brain is finding people you can be close with", people you can be open and vulnerable with and show your shortcomings to, as they do with you. He highlights "heightened affective moments", brief stretches, sometimes only 50 or 60 seconds, when two people are both in the right brain, synchronized and sharing emotion. These moments get written into autobiographical memory as images, and they drive change far more than intellectual understanding.

Two Kinds of Attention and Brain-to-Brain Synchrony

Huberman describes sometimes widening his gaze during interviews and feeling the conversation shift. Schore says the switch between hemispheres can happen in about a hundred milliseconds. The left brain uses narrowly focused attention, like following words one after another in a courtroom; the right brain uses wide-ranging attention, which Freud called evenly suspended attention, taking in both the outside world and your own inner physiology. Hyperlogical, hyper-rational people who live in the left brain miss the broader emotional context.

New hyperscanning research, which images two brains at once during a real interaction, shows that when people engage face to face with emotion and empathy, their right temporoparietal junctions synchronize, including between therapist and patient. The right temporoparietal junction integrates face, voice and gesture and handles communication, while the right orbitofrontal cortex handles regulation. Music and pets, Schore says, are both mechanisms of emotion regulation. Coming home to a dog shifts you from left to right through touch, tone of voice and even smell, which he calls an overlooked part of human intimacy. Studies show performers and audiences can synchronize, too. Schore cites psychoanalyst Emmanuel Hammer's practice of leaning back rather than forward to let the emotional atmosphere come over him, and stresses that spontaneous, smooth turn-taking, first learned between mother and infant, is a sign of synchrony.

Text Messaging and a Left-Brain Culture

Huberman worries that texting strips out nearly everything that makes these connections work, and says he won't argue over text. Schore agrees and cites Iain McGilchrist's book The Master and His Emissary, which argues the left hemisphere is becoming dangerously dominant in modern culture. Huberman mentions Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation and wonders about a hierarchy from text to voice memo to phone call to handwritten letter. Schore recalls camp letters written to truly connect, and notes that texting suits left-brain-dominant personalities.

Feeding the Right Brain

Schore lists abilities research ties to right brain dominance: intuition (like a firefighter learning to read a fire), imagery, creativity, metaphor, imagination, humor, music, poetry, art, morality, compassion, spirituality and love. To strengthen the right brain, he recommends close relationships, novelty and curiosity (the right brain processes new information first), travel, nature, exercise and restorative sleep. He also urges becoming aware of defenses, like repression, which is the left hemisphere shutting out the right, and accepting feedback from trusted people about blind spots. He argues that "one of the major fallacies is that negative emotions are bad and positive emotions are good"; all emotions are adaptive, and he lets disappointments move through him fully.

Huberman mentions a songwriter friend who paints before writing music, and Schore shares his own story: during a 10-year period of self-study before writing his first book, he wandered library stacks across psychology, neurology and chemistry, returned to the piano to know something "in my fingers rather than in logic, practiced visualizing cells and mitochondria, and decided never to memorize anything", focusing instead on deep understanding. Aha moments, he notes, are also right brain experiences.

Why the First Years Deserve More Time

Schore's closing argument is about policy. Other wealthy countries offer months of parental leave, while most American parents return to work at about six weeks. "Six weeks is at the beginning of the critical period of the right brain", when the autonomic nervous system, amygdala, insula and cingulate are entering critical periods. He cites a London School of Economics study finding that the best childhood predictor of adult life satisfaction was emotional health, then conduct, with IQ last, and a 2021 UNICEF ranking of 36 wealthy countries that placed the US last in child well-being. "We have things upside down here", he says, focusing on executive functions that come online around age three instead of the emotional foundations laid before then.

Conclusion

Schore's work reframes relationships as a lifelong conversation between right brains, rooted in the first two years of life, when a caregiver's attunement and repair teach a baby how to calm down, light up and connect. Those same circuits govern how we handle stress, love, conflict and therapy as adults, which is why insight alone rarely changes much and why synchrony, empathy and emotionally honest moments with trusted people do. The practical takeaways are to listen beneath the words, shift into wider attention, favor face-to-face connection over text, seek novelty, music, nature and movement, and allow yourself to be vulnerable with others. And for society, Schore argues, the most important investment is giving parents time with their infants during the right brain's critical window.

This is a summary of "Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain" from Huberman Lab, giving you the GIST so you can decide if you want the REST. Listen to the full episode.