The Neuroscientist Who Became Sobriety’s Biggest Zealot

SCIENCE ON OUR SIDE –

May 30, 2023 – It wasn’t until his parents divorced and he started running around Northern California with skateboarders that he saw people regularly getting f**ked up. Though he has claimed that alcohol was “never [his] thing” and that drinking only made him tired, he had other vices. He started skipping school to travel to skate and, in ninth grade, ended up getting institutionalized for a month at an adolescent psychiatry facility.

Huberman never planned on going to college, but he ended up following an ex-girlfriend to University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1993. There, he fell in love with science, and though his romance wouldn’t last, he would devote the rest of his life to studying how people can fine-tune their brains to live the most optimized life possible.

Huberman graduated from U.C. Berkeley with master’s in neurobiology and behavior in 2000 before finishing his doctorate at U.C. Davis four years later. After a five-year postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University, he became an assistant professor at U.C. San Diego, where he was awarded a McKnight scholarship as an outstanding young scientist. At the same time, he was freelancing for Thrasher and Slap Magazine.