How Hormones & Status Shape Our Values & Decisions

High-Level Overview

Andrew Huberman sits down with Dr. Michael Platt, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania who began as an anthropologist watching monkeys and now applies neuroscience to business, marketing and everyday choices. The conversation is about how we decide what is valuable: where to put our attention, whom we find attractive, which brands we trust, whom we treat as "us" and whom as "them". Platt's running theme is that the machinery behind these choices is ancient and shared with other primates, and that most of it runs below our awareness. As he puts it more than once, "there's a little monkey in all of us".

The tone is curious, fast-moving and often funny, with two neuroscientists comparing notes on everything from phones and focus to grooming ledgers in monkey brains, oxytocin, testosterone, loneliness, political tribes, meme coins and iPhones. The conversation swings between lab experiments (many of them run in both monkeys and people), evolutionary reasoning, and practical tools for focusing and deciding better.

The Discussion Explores:

• Why attention behaves like foraging for food, and why a rich environment of phones and tabs makes focus so hard
• Simple ways to "warm up" focus, including narrowing your visual field and getting the phone out of the room
• How monkeys and humans read status and hormone signals, and what they will pay to look at
• The brain's running account of who owes whom in a relationship, and how power changes the exchange rate
• What testosterone and oxytocin do to risk-taking, hierarchy, trust and behavioral synchrony
• Loneliness, the loss of social touch, tribalism, and why deep conversation can bring people back into sync
• The mechanics of value-based decisions: speed versus accuracy, arousal, fatigue and time pressure
• How celebrity, other people's choices and brand tribes shape what we buy, from meme stocks to smartphones

Deep Dive into Main Ideas

An Old Brain With Specific Tools

Huberman opens by asking how much of human decision-making is mirrored in other old-world primates such as rhesus macaques. Platt's answer is that the overlap goes astonishingly deep. For nearly every behavioral, cognitive or emotional phenomenon his lab has studied, people and monkeys look almost the same, to the point that he could not tell their game-play apart if the videos were unlabeled. He teaches a seminar at Penn called Being Human that goes week by week through traits once thought uniquely ours (art, theory of mind, markets) and finds more continuity than discontinuity.

Platt pushes back on the image of the brain as a supercomputer bolted onto a monkey brain. It is made of meat and fat, with all the constraints that implies, and a better picture is that "we've got a 30 million-year-old Swiss Army knife in our heads": a set of specific tools that monkeys also have, ours perhaps a little bigger and sharper. Knowing what the tools are, he argues, opens the door to measuring and developing them, not only repairing them when they break.

Attention Is Foraging

Platt defines attention as prioritization: an amplification in the brain of whatever we point our eyes at, needed because we cannot do everything at once. What grabs it is a mix of what we are looking for and what the world looks like: bright, loud, fast-moving things and, for primates, above all other people and faces. Huberman wonders whether emotional faces explain the different feel of Instagram and X, and Platt agrees that emotion in a face raises its salience because a highly aroused individual may be about to do something.

His central claim is that attention follows the same rule animals use when searching for food, mates or water: "Should I stay or should I go?" The optimal answer, which he credits to the mathematical ecologist Eric Charnov in a 1976 paper, is the marginal value theorem: leave what you are harvesting when its return falls below the average for the environment. He says every animal studied behaves as if it performs this computation, and that computer scientists later found people leave a website the moment their information intake drops below their recent average. In a poor environment (one apple tree in ten miles, or a dial-up modem) you stay and pick everything; in an orchard, or with fast internet and twelve tabs and several devices, you skim and move on. Cycling between screens is the brain doing exactly what it was designed to do.

The practical conclusion is to make the environment poorer. Platt mentions turning a phone monochrome, which he says works because the phone becomes a worse source. Huberman cites a result they both reposted: working memory is worse with the phone beside you, slightly better with it elsewhere in the room, and significantly better only when it is out of the room entirely. Platt reads this as the brain including the phone in its background calculations, and connects it to an urgency signal his lab saw building in the anterior cingulate cortex before animals switch to something new. His summary: "the best thing you can do is just change the environment".

Warming Up Focus and the Explore-Focus Dial

Huberman describes an exercise he tried that morning: eyes closed, holding a conversation with himself in complete sentences and redirecting whenever his mind drifted. It took about ten minutes to settle in. He argues that focus needs a warm-up, like exercise, and that scrolling trains the opposite skill. Platt offers a study in support: when people first search a screen for points that are widely dispersed, they become more exploratory in a later, unrelated task (abandoning sets of anagram letters sooner, or leaving a virtual fishing pond sooner); when the points are clustered together, they become more focused. Huberman is delighted, linking it to practices he says are used mainly in China where students stare at a fixation point before cognitive work, and to his view that the width of our visual aperture sets the width of our attention, while panoramic vision lowers autonomic arousal. Platt says he knows of no wider use of this but thinks changing a person's environment or state is a practical and ethical route to effects people usually seek from drugs.

Platt does not think people are as broken as they fear. He sees a continuum from hyper-focused to hyper-exploratory, with most people in the middle, shifting toward focus with age. A person's setting can be nudged (a three to a five, a seven to a nine) but probably not transformed. The exploratory end lines up with creative work and entrepreneurship; he says attention problems are two to four times more common among entrepreneurs than in the general population and often come with anxiety or bipolar features. His group works with a team in Berkeley supporting entrepreneurs, through focusing practices, complementary teams and, where appropriate, medication.

He also argues that neuroscience can improve hiring. Self-report and personality tests are inaccurate and biased by context, so his lab builds short games based on tasks that probe specific circuits, such as a berry-harvesting game that places someone on the explore-focus continuum and a soccer-like game, played by both monkeys and people, that measures strategic planning and theory of mind. He says these predict performance among soccer players and in military cyber operations, and a Philadelphia startup is now testing them.

Covert Attention, Hormone Signals and Social Complexity

The two discuss the primate ability to look at one thing while attending to another. Platt's example is a mid-ranking baboon keeping his gaze on the alpha while tracking an attractive female off to the side. He ties this to theory of mind, which he suggests grows out of infants gazing at a caregiver, then following gaze, then sharing attention. Huberman proposes that we have two attentional spotlights that can be merged or split but not a third; Platt says that fits the data, picturing one or two humps on a landscape of neural activity.

On hormones, Platt explains that monkeys advertise status and fertility conspicuously: females through swelling and reddening of the perineum, males through redness there, testis size and darkening around the eyes. The old view, going back to Darwin, was that humans concealed such cues as monogamy evolved. Platt says the evidence suggests strict monogamy was not the dominant human strategy, noting that humans are sexually dimorphic while strictly pair-bonded primates are not, and that relative brain size is smallest in pair-bonded monogamous species and grows with group size and complexity. For women, he says the data, though controversial, point to subtle changes across the ovulatory cycle: the face becomes slightly plumper and redder, flirtatious behavior increases, and men's attractiveness ratings shift without their knowing why. He mentions a classic study in which exotic dancers received larger tips when ovulating.

Multitasking Neurons and the Relationship Ledger

Platt describes a paper his lab published in Nature that broke with the tradition of varying one thing at a time, the approach of Hubel and Wiesel. His team recorded wirelessly from thousands of neurons in prefrontal cortex and a high-level visual area of the temporal lobe while monkeys simply lived: foraging, grooming, mounting, threatening, with partners and onlookers changing, some 27 or 28 behaviors in all. The two regions, expected to be very different, were indistinguishable. Neurons in both were modulated by what the animal did, what others did and who was watching, and the average neuron cared about roughly seven things. One hypothesis he offers is that even visual neurons need context to encode what a stimulus means.

The finding that most excited him as a primatologist was a mental account of social relationships. Monkeys build alliances through grooming and have long been observed to reciprocate evenly. Using computer vision to track every grooming bout over months, his team confirmed the exchange balanced out, sometimes within minutes and sometimes over weeks, and both brain areas carried a signal tracking who owed whom. He compares it to the unease of sending text after text with no reply. Asked which area keeps the account, he says it is a network.

Huberman relates this to love languages and to transactional people. Platt thinks the accounting is mathematical but that the exchange rate depends on the relationship: among equals it was one for one, but a lower-ranking male may groom an alpha a hundred minutes for one in return, or for years before the alpha saves him in a fight. This, he says, is the argument from neuroethology for studying animals that face the social pressures we do.

What Monkeys and Men Will Pay to See

Building on his postdoctoral work with Paul Glimcher, which found neurons in parietal cortex signaling expected value ("Monkeys are good economists"), Platt gave male monkeys two options paying different amounts of juice, one of which also flashed a picture. The monkeys gave up juice to see female hindquarters and the faces of dominant males, and had to be paid extra to look at subordinate males. Females, he says, value the corresponding signal of male testosterone. The internet labeled the work monkey porn, and he says it was a New York Times idea of the year in 2005.

The human version used clothed photos from a website where people rated each other's looks. Women largely ignored the pictures and went home with more money. Men paid between half and three quarters of a cent per trial to see women rated in the top third, waited longer and worked harder to keep them on screen. Brain imaging in the men showed reward-system activity tracking how much they paid, and single-neuron recordings in monkeys showed the same thing.

Huberman asks whether everything is then transactional, including altruism. Platt says pure selflessness has long been controversial in evolutionary biology, but humans may be subject to group selection, where groups with reliably selfless members outcompete others. He cites his Penn colleague Duncan Watts, whose repeated online Prisoner's Dilemma games found that around 20% of people keep cooperating whatever happens to them, and Bill Harbaugh's finding that giving to a charity you love activates reward circuitry as if you had received the reward yourself, a warm glow that makes giving again more likely.

Testosterone, Oxytocin, Synchrony and Isolation

Asked about testosterone in men, Platt describes placebo-controlled studies by Wharton colleague Gideon Nave with Colin Camerer in which testosterone gel increased desire for conspicuous luxury goods and risk-taking and lowered cognitive reflection, so men jumped to obvious but wrong answers while feeling more confident. He likens status purchases to a male chimpanzee who drew attention by banging fuel cans together. Later he agrees with Huberman that higher testosterone goes with riskier trading, and worries aloud about what traders taking it could do to markets.

Platt treats oxytocin as a volume knob for prosocial behavior. Its core mammalian role is bonding mother and infant, and in humans it has been co-opted for other relationships. Because human nasal-spray studies are variable, his lab delivered it to monkeys through a nebulizer. It relaxed them and reduced vigilance. In males it flattened the steep hierarchy: dominant animals became friendlier, subordinates bolder, eye contact rose, and monkeys more often chose to give juice to another monkey. Females became kinder to each other but more aggressive toward males, which he speculates relates to protecting infants. Huberman adds, from memory, a study suggesting oxytocin accounts mainly for the anxiety-reducing side of MDMA.

Oxytocin also increased behavioral synchrony, which Platt calls "this black magic of social behavior" and "the glue that allows us to live and work together". When people have rapport their brain activity aligns, then heart rates, breathing, movement and gaze. He says synchrony predicts trust, communication and teamwork, and that committees whose hearts beat together were more likely to reach the right answer on a hard problem, which makes it a readout for testing whether team-building exercises work.

Skin on the hairy parts of the body, he explains, has sensors that feed the oxytocin system and respond best to gentle, body-temperature touch, the human counterpart of grooming. He believes we are living through "an epidemic of the loss of social touch", for understandable reasons, and that it may contribute to loneliness, anxiety, depression and despair. He states that isolation is as bad for health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day and suspects it also feeds falling rates of coupling and fertility.

Tribes and How to Bridge Them

Huberman observes that politics now feels like us versus them with no middle. Platt says one of the most effective ways to get in sync with someone different is deep, intentional conversation, helped by structured question sets such as Fast Friends; he cites Annenberg colleague Emily Falk's work showing strangers' brain activity converging as they go through such questions, along with greater liking and closeness. Online life, he says, makes these conversations harder.

Half joking, he says the quickest fix would be an alien invasion, because "to have an in-group, that means you have to have an out-group". He describes classic experiments in which strangers randomly assigned to a red or blue team immediately disparage the other side, and research showing that brain responses to another person's pain are selective for one's own group even when people report feeling the same for everyone. Putting people on a shared team redirects attention to what they have in common and restores that empathy; he notes that the military and sports, both uniformed, were among the first American institutions to integrate.

The Mechanics of Deciding: Speed, Arousal and Fatigue

Platt says the circuitry of value-based choice is well mapped and is the same whether you are choosing a donut over an apple, a house or a spouse. The brain gathers evidence about the options, weighs it against stored experience, assigns expected values, chooses with some statistical noise, and then compares the outcome with its forecast to update itself. Gathering evidence takes time, so there is a speed-accuracy tradeoff: "The more time you take, the more evidence you can accumulate." Arousal turns up noise as well as signal, so slowing down, breathing or holding a calming mantra helps. Huberman adds his lab rule, "we go as fast as we carefully can", and his own heuristic that pressure to decide immediately, absent a real emergency, is usually a sign of a scam.

Fatigue pushes people toward speed. Penn's wrestling coach noticed his athletes making poor decisions in the third period, so Platt's team alternated a go/no-go task with two-minute bouts of brutal exercise. The more calories the wrestlers burned, the more they favored speed over accuracy. Since they were already extremely fit, the suggestion was to hand third-period decisions to the coach, an idea Platt thinks applies to exhausted teams in business too. He admits that how all these factors combine in complex real-world settings is still a gap in the science.

Celebrity, Money, Bubbles and Brands

Platt's lab ran an advertising campaign on monkeys, pairing brand logos with high-status or sexually attractive monkeys versus low-status ones. Though every choice paid the same banana pellet, the monkeys preferred the logos paired with the "celebrities". In people, his eye-tracking work found that when shoppers chose an unfamiliar brand endorsed by a celebrity, their pupils did not dilate as they normally would, which he reads as a quiet signal of added confidence.

On hierarchy, he says the drive to climb is more or less built in, with steepness depending on whether resources can be monopolized: rhesus macaques are despotic, Barbary macaques relaxed. On money, he reports that work by Matt Killingsworth, later reconciled with Daniel Kahneman, shows happiness rising with income, flattening, then rising again at very high wealth. Yet people in deep poverty can be very happy, and his guess is attention: what you attend to is amplified. In loss-aversion studies, most people looked longer at what they might lose, more so if anxious or depressed, and simply making the potential win larger or brighter removed the loss aversion. That work began for a financial firm whose older customers avoided good risks.

Meme coins and meme stocks, he argues, exploit our wiring to watch what others choose. In a stock-market game, the MBA students most attuned to others were the likeliest to be wiped out, in his words "the higher your likelihood of losing everything in a bubble", while the least socially sensitive did best. Monkeys trading alone decided well; once they could see another monkey, they copied each other into bubbles and crashes.

He closes on rationality and brands. Human minds are bounded and built for small face-to-face groups, constant activity and natural food, not today's fast, crowded, sedentary world, which he sees as a source of much misery. On time horizons, he shares that his father died at 55, two years younger than he is now, which left him without a long horizon and inclined to take on everything; Huberman offers Josh Waitzkin's serial reinventions as another model. Finally, Platt's brain-imaging studies found Apple and Samsung users describe the same loyalty, but only Apple users showed reward and pain responses to good and bad news about their brand. Samsung users showed nothing for Samsung and pleasure at Apple's bad news. On EEG, "Apple people are all in sync with each other", while "each Samsung person is like an island onto themselves", and brain areas tied to social relationships were physically larger in Apple users. A planned political version of the empathy experiment was halted by the pandemic.

Conclusion

Platt's message is that decisions are less private and less deliberate than they feel. Attention follows foraging rules, value is colored by status, sex, hormones and whatever sits next to the thing being judged, and our choices are pulled by what the people around us are doing. The same circuitry tracks debts between friends, rewards generosity, bonds us to a team or a phone brand, and shuts off empathy for the other side. The tools that follow are mostly about arranging conditions: make distractions scarce, narrow the visual field before focused work, slow down and lower arousal when accuracy matters, hand off decisions when exhausted, direct attention toward what could be gained and what is shared, and invest in touch, conversation and synchrony with other people. Understanding the monkey in all of us, Platt suggests, is the first step to working with it.

This is a summary of "How Hormones & Status Shape Our Values & Decisions" from Huberman Lab, giving you the GIST so you can decide if you want the REST.