0:00 in this box is a real preserved human brain named Betty and I think you should hold it oh my God it's wet and now we're going to go through all the tools and tricks to make your brain as healthy as it could be are you ready Wendy Suzuki the neuroscientist and professor at New York University whose firsthand research on the brain is helping to improve memory learning and higher cognitive abilities in humans let me start with exercise all the research shows the more you exercise the more change in your brain we notice every drop of sweat counted and the best kind of exercise that you can do is what about things that we consume food drink and alcohol if it's on the meditarranean diet go
0:45 ahead [Music] coffee and then my memory is not great most people feel that but there's four things that you can do to make memories stick number one is is it true that if we have less friends then our brain will shrink yes loneliness damages the brain can you say if someone's in love in the brain yes in the side here a lot of the reward areas are activated doesn't that mean then that if we don't fall in love the love part of my brain gets smaller and would that make it more difficult to love in the future that's a great question so Wendy do you have any brain routines absolutely so every morning I like to oh and then I do the most powerful tool that you can do to protect your brain from aging and neurodegenerative disease states which is
1:31 we've just hit 6 million subscribers on the D Co um so me and my team would like to do something we've never done before as little thank you and we're calling it The dire of coo subscriber raffle and here is how it works every episode this month we're going to pick three current subscribers at random and we'll send one of you a 1,000 voucher one of you tickets to come and watch the D SE behind the scenes live with our team and one of you will have a 10-minute phone call with me to discuss whatever you want to talk about if you're a subscriber you're in the raffle thank you from the bottom of my heart for allowing me to do something that me and my team love doing so much it is the greatest honor of my lifetime and I hope it I hope it continues uh off into the Future Let's get to the [Music]
2:17 episode you just said to me that much of your work is focused on making sure people have big fat fluffy brains yes why does that matter it matters because a big fat fluffy brain brain is a healthy brain and my whole first book healthy brain happy life was about how I learned to use all the tools and tricks and magic of neuroscience and psychology to make my brain work better and I so needed it at that moment my life got better I got happier it is a pathway to a happy life I think having a very healthy big fat fluffy brain do you think people appreciate the importance of that that brain no I think they ignore it all the
3:03 time and I think that is part of my uh part of my message to everybody that that the human brain that is the one in your head right now is the most complex structure known to human kind not Einstein's brain not Marie K's brain but the one in your head and when you think about that it gives you more of a self appreciation of all of the computations that is taking for me to see you and appreciate your face and be able to remember your face next time I see you when I go to my diary of a CEO podcast and and choose an episode all of that is is such a complex structure um you start to appreciate your own kind of brain
3:49 functioning more I think that's a very important thing to do why don't we appreciate our brains because we appreciate a lot of other things yeah we spend a lot of time on our like our muscles yeah our ABS yeah I think that that's a great analogy and part of my goal is to kind of shift the focus from focusing on certain body parts to focusing on what our brain is doing for us what it can do for us and what we can do to change your environments to get to that big fat fluffy brain to get it healthy to get it happy to get it growing if I achieve a big fat fluffy brain how would my life be different I'm saying me Steve Bart I'm I'm a podcaster I'm I'm an entrepreneur relationships I've Got Friends girlfriend family how
4:36 would I show up differently if I was able to make my brain big fat and fluffy yeah so uh let me start with the two areas that we know respond really really well to things like meditation and exercise those two brain areas are the hippocampus critical for long-term memory your ability to form and retain new long-term memories and for facts and events and the second brain area is your prefrontal cortex right behind your forehead critical for your ability to shift and focus attention um it's important for your personality for decision making can you show me on there there's a you brought absolutely I brought a human brain you have bring that you have a model of a brain as well I have a model of the brain okay let's start with the model of the brain so here is a model of the human
5:22 brain so there's a front part and a back part this front part is right behind our forehead that's the pre Al cortex critical for the ability to shift and focus attention also a part of the brain that is very responsive to what you bring into your life exercise actually really helps the prefrontal cortex meditation helps area 10 of the prefrontal cortex which is right in the very front right here the second brain area that you will benefit from when you make your brain big and fat and fluffy is a structure called the hippocampus which is which is very deep in this lobe deep in this lobe right here which is the temporal lobe the hippocampus hippocampus means seahorse and the
6:09 hippocampus is critical for your ability to to form and retain new long-term memories for facts and events you have one on the right and you have one on the left so for you Superstar podcaster what do you need to do you need to remember all the details of that guest that you're sitting in front of you need to be able to focus what did say what do I want to uh ask next and how do I want to come back to those things that is a combination of what your prefrontal cortex is doing for you and your hippocampus is doing for you so I submit that you when you do these things that we know from Neuroscience it are going to make your prefrontal cortex and your hippocampus big and fat and fluffy you will be better at doing your job as a podcaster I am better as a dean and a
6:56 professor of Neuroscience and and teaching in class for example is where I'm using my prefrontal cortex in my hippocampus the most most of us would benefit from these things that make our brains big and fat and fluffy was there a point in your life where you had a personal Epiphany or Revelation about the brain that made you so passionate about the subject absolutely absolutely so this story starts when I was in the middle of getting tenure um at New York University so it takes six years uh you have six years to P prove yourself as a scientist and do something groundbreaking and if you don't you're fired so no big deal no pressure there and I decided to only just work work work work I didn't have a lot of social
7:43 interactions I was just working and I just just threw myself into work and uh I was getting burnt out and um I decided to go on a river rafting trip to Peru by myself because I had no friends so i' go on the river rafting trip and and it's great it's beautiful we're river rafting we're we're camping on Aztec burial sites and it is just spectacular um but I realized that I'm the weakest person on this trip and when I got back after this wonderful you know two weeks in Peru I said I never want to feel like the weakest person on a trip like that again and it was so great to to be moving and to be exercising so I decided I'm going to go to the gym and I'm going to continue this physical activity at
8:30 the gym and somehow it stuck I had I had let myself go not no exercise at all and when I started going to the gym regularly I noticed that that great mood that I found in Peru every day during the river rafting trip stayed with me I think everybody in my lab loved it when I was going to the gym and I started to notice not only I got stronger I was feeling better that mood boost that I got from physical activity was so powerful but then one day this you asked me about this Revelation I had it was one day I was sitting in my office riding a grant which is usually something that I have to do very regularly but usually something that I'm pulling my hair out it's so hard it's
9:16 very competitive I'm competing against Nobel laurates for the same pot of money and I had this thought that went through my mind which was gosh writing went well today I I'd never had that thought before ever in my I'd been there for five years at at NYU writing grants and so um I um I thought oh maybe maybe I'm just having a good day I'm feeling good but I realized that the um the writing seemed to have been getting a little bit better over time I had noticed it a little bit if I think about it and the only thing I had changed in my life was regular physical activity inspired by that trip to Peru and so I'm a neuroscientist I went to
10:02 the literature and I asked well what do we know right now about what exactly exercise is doing and it showed at that moment in time about 10 15 years ago that exercise can improve your mood exercise actually makes your memory work better and exercise improves the function of your prefrontal cortex and I thought wow that that is amazing but the last part of the story was was that when all of this was going on this was after this day of realizing gosh something's you know my writing is better and um maybe it's exercise um I got a call from my mom who said that my father wasn't feeling well and that he had gotten lost driving back from the
10:48 coffee shop that he drove to every day every afternoon for the last 20 years and the hippocampus that structure critical for memory is particularly important important for spatial memory and as an expert in the hippocampus as I am I knew that that was a Telltale sign of dementia and maybe Alzheimer's dementia but as I talked to my father and of course we went and got him a neurology appointment I saw that everything that seemed to be improving in me that is memory Focus completely and very very suddenly uh diminished in him his memory was terrible he couldn't focus he was also very depressed because he could notice how poor his memory was
11:36 and I think those things together what I was noticing in myself about the physical effects of U the effects of physical activity on my own brain function and seeing my father go through which what uh what was a really precipitous loss of his cognitive functions that turned out to be Alzheimer's dementia made me think that the power of physical activity needed to be explored more deeply and by me I I was waking up in the morning thinking about what can we what can I do to better understand how physical activity could be used not just for me for my students can they study better can they learn better can it help maybe not my father I wasn't sure whether exercise could help my father at that point but as people age
12:25 that was the Revelation that I had that made me actually switch my research Focus from memory function to understanding the effects of physical activity on the brain all of this is rooted in a fact that was once not considered a fact which is the idea that our brains can change shape yes yeah this idea of brain plasticity I only really learned about this a couple of years ago because I think I like many people didn't realize that like muscles my brain changes shape based on what I do yes and also what I consume yes I guess yes what is the evidence or the studies that we have that proves our brains do change shape yeah that's such a great question and uh it takes me back to the first day of my freshman year at UC Berkeley when
13:11 I walked into the classroom I didn't know it at the time but the classroom of the professor that discovered brain plasticity her name is Marian diamond and she uh was the very first female PhD in neuroanatomy that UC Berkeley ever gave um I walked into her classroom in the 80s when I went to college but she discovered this in the late 1960s um when it was thought as you said that the adult brain can't change at all there's absolutely no evidence for it and that was true at the time she thought I don't think that's true let's let's do a simple experiment let's try and um uh look at the effects in two randomly grouped set of rats one that lives in what they would consider an
13:57 enriched environment what would be an enriched environment well for her it was a rat cage full of toys that got changed out all the time lots of other rats to play with and um lots of lots of activity I think of it as the Disney World of rat cages and she compared the brains of those rats to rats that she raised in kind of a shoe box a smaller environment they got free food and water all the food and water they could eat and drink but maybe only one other rat and no toys now if the adult brat they were all the same age they were adults if the if the adult brain didn't change then there should be absolutely no difference between the brains raised in Disney World and the brains raised in the shoe box but she found that the the brains of those rats
14:43 raised in the Disney World of rat cages the outer covering of the brain the outside of the brain here uh I'm pointing to the outside of this brain model here called the cortex it was actually thicker she was she was a neuroanatomist and she showed that the thickness of this outer covering actually grew what does that mean there were more synaptic connections there in not in the whole brain in certain brain areas that made sense the visual cortical area there was much more visual stimulation in the Disney World of rat cages the motor areas were thicker the somata sensory the touch areas were thicker because they were interacting in a much more complex way with their Touch system and that was the first demonstration the adult brain could
15:29 change and that it would actually make the cortex of the brain grow and now we know what is it about the Disney World of rat cages you know um is it the toys should we all be playing with toys later study showed that you get almost identical effects just by giving rats a running wheel physical activity is doing all of that has the potential to change all of that in the rodent brain and now in the human brain didn't they find something similar with um London taxi drivers I always hear this I thought it was like a wasn't sure if it was true or like a rumor but no no no it's absolutely true that is a different form of brain plasticity which is something
16:15 that we all do and my students do hopefully very well which is learning so can learning the Streets of London which are I can't remember the the the number of different streets that London taxi cab drivers have have to learn to pass the famous test called the knowledge but I do remember that it takes them four years to study for this test it is intense uh um knowledge you have to learn all the lawful ways to get from all the big landmarks to be a certified London taxi cab driver and what uh my colleague El Eleanor Maguire uh professor of neuroscience at University College London did is she followed w be London taxi cab drivers during their
17:02 four years of the knowledge this test for London taxi cab drivers knowing that half of them were going to fail they they were not going to make it and so she tested them at the beginning and asked how is your memory uh and how big is your hippocampus identical for all all of the uh wannabe London taat cab drivers before they started she scanned their brains yeah she scanned their brains and she tested their memory okay behaviorally then they go through half of them drop out they don't become London tax cab drivers and half of them become certified London taxic cab drivers after successfully learning all of this now let's see how big is your hippoc campus and how good is your memory the people that passed the test and became London
17:48 tat cab drivers the posterior part of their hippocampus which is the part we know is important for it with posterior is back towards the back of the head the posterior part of the hip of Campus which is kind of a cigar shaped structure that goes from the front part of the brain to the back part of the brain that back part of the brain was significantly bigger in those London successful London taxi cab drivers compared to the failed London taxi cab drivers and the memory of the successful London taxi cab drivers were now superior to the memory of the wannabe London TX cab drivers that failed so that is example of how intense learning in a particular part of the brain um uh
18:35 we know the posterior hippocampus is absolutely involved in spatial learning uh that can change the actual structure and the function how much of a difference can we make I'm 31 years old now yeah so if I got serious about my brain health yeah how much of a difference could I realistically see you know I'm trying to figure out if it's worth it yeah if it's worth caring about my brain is is there any evidence within the literature within studies that have been done that show if I start now even though I'm like 30 31 years old my life will be different in the future in the areas that I care about profoundly if I start caring about my brain let me be very very um um concrete
19:20 here the answer is absolutely yes first I'm going to give you results of a study in people that are 65 and older so studied people that are 6 65 and older and asked what is the probability of getting dementia in the next six years depending on the level of activity that you have just right now physical activity physical activity and they measured it in how many walks you take per week and if you took three walks a week or more you were 30% less likely to develop Dementia in the next 5 years so ooh 30 % uh less likely to develop dementia my father passed away of Alzheimer's dementia that makes me sit up and take
20:07 notice but the but the thing that should make you as a 31-year-old uh really sit up and take notice is the larger correlations that show that the longer you have regular physical activity in your life the longer you're able to Stave off dementia the more active you are over your lifetime um that first study shows that it's never too late to start you can start walking regularly which is doable when you're uh perhaps at that age but the longer you stay active the bigger and fatter and fluffier your brain will be why does that make sense so one key piece of information that I haven't told you yet is that we know that physical activity
20:53 is releasing a every single time you move your body you releasing a whole bunch of neuro chemicals in your brain some of them make you just feel good serotonin dopamine noradrenaline endorphins yeah I feel good if I go out for a walk I feel better than if I had been sitting here for eight hours but the other thing that gets released every single time is growth factors I like to call it a bubble bath of neurochemicals that happens every time you move your body what that growth factor does is it goes directly into your hippocampus and it helps brand new cells grow GR in your hippocampus the hippocampus is only one of two total brain areas where new cells can grow that's not the same as synapsis which are Connections in the cells that
21:39 are already there but the hippocampus can grow new cells and this is really important because many people know that the hippocampus is attacked first in Alzheimer's dementia and so exercise is not going to eliminate that disease state but if you start with a huge fluffy hippocampus it's going to take that disease that much longer to actually damage enough of your hippocampus so that you start seeing those telltale signs of memory impairment that comes with Alzheimer's disease and and dementia in general same thing with their prefrontal cortex your prefrontal cortex can grow with uh physical activity that's not neurons but new synapses can grow age and neurod
22:24 degenerative disease states can damage cells but also take away synapses I've got two questions on that so the first is about dementia and Alzheimer's do we know what's causing it no we still don't know no and there's not good drugs unfortunately right now there's a lot of links to lifestyle choices though right yes absolutely and so of course from based on what I just said my number one most powerful tool that you can do to protect your brain from aging and neurodegenerative disease States is start walking why do I start with that because everybody can walk you don't need to buy any new fitness outfits just go out and walk more and then they say
23:09 oh well do I have to become a marathon runner that could help too but everybody can walk and from that study that I mentioned in the 65y olds 30% reduction in um the probability of getting Alzheimer's with just walking you said that if I go and start walking and I do exercise my prefrontal cortex will grow which is the decision- making center right yes so does that mean then that if I am somebody who is very sedentary I don't do much physical activity that my decision making will be worse compared to what it could be with the same person if they're active yes I mean that there is that potential brain plasticity and the Neuroscience of brain plasticity tells us that absolutely with physical
23:54 activity uh you have great potential to improve the function of your prefrontal cortex and I must specify a little bit uh the main function that is um that has been shown to be particularly sensitive to regular physical activity is um shifting and focusing your attention so being able to um listen to me while you might be paying attention to uh the AV guy that might be telling you something right now so to be able to do that effectively uh that that is one of the things that we know is helped with regular physical activity focus and attention that kind of thing okay you talked about memory as well is that does that exist in the prefrontal cortex as well uh there's a form of memory working memory uh which is kind of scratch Pad memory it's a Memory that um when we used to have to remember telephone numbers that that ability to remember a
24:41 Sev digigit at least in the United States telephone number it's different from long-term memory formation which is memory for facts and events uh that is dependent on the hippocampus I feel like my memory is not great most people feel that why is my memory not as good as other people because I I noticed this when I I was with my friend in um Thailand many years ago I think I was 21 years old and we could like leave the house and go on our little mopeds for about an hour yeah and he could navigate us back home without needing satav or Google Maps and if I go three minutes down the street I'm lost and I always wondered why that was is it and then even with names and stuff I would always he's my best friend he still is one of my best friends for for seven eight
25:26 years we ran a business together and he would remember every name of every person and I couldn't I wouldn't and so I'd always T to him and say what was that person's name again what's that you know and I always wondered why my memory he seemed to have this incredible memory and mine seems to be pretty rudimentary I would argue that um yeah everybody has parts of their memory that aren't as good as they want but also other forms of memory that they're very good at so I would guess I've only just met you today that you're memory for stories and storytelling and story progress is excellent because it has to be for the job that you do I bet you it's much better than your friend that can navigate back not everybody has a perfect memory in all the different
26:13 dimensions and and it's like our personality some people have a wonderful sense of humor and others don't um it is about how our brains are wired which is defined both by nature and nurture our genes and you know if I if I went to uh stand up comedy class I would probably get funnier but um uh but there's probably a limit to my funniness compared to other people so there's different types of memory yes in your book you talk about there being I think is it three different types of memory in total that are formed in the hippocampus there's lots of different names for forms of memory in the hippocampus um but I like to describe it as the hippocampus is critical for our memory for facts and and events um also called declarative memory or COG itive memory
26:59 uh another form of memory that's dependent on a completely different structure is motor memory the memory that you uh use to learn how to play tennis or pickle ball or whatever you're playing and it's not declarative I can't declare how I do a backhand in in in tennis but it is in your motor functions and and this is dependent on the striatum a motor related structure and then there's the prefrontal cortex dependent on that working memory or scratch Pad memory keeping things in mind so um you and I are both trying to remember what we've just said so we can we can link it to things that we might say in the future one of things that I found really interesting both as a marketeer but also as a podcaster and as someone that's making a lot of content and trying to get people's attention was
27:44 as I was reading through your work it became quite clear to me that there's a bit of an overlap between memory and attention in in many respects because absolutely you were talking about these four things that make facts or events memorable yes and many of those things are things that I think about as a marketeer when I'm trying to get someone to you know engage with something click on something buy something yeah what are those four things okay can we go through them absolutely so I like to say there are four things that make memory stick and this is after 25 or 30 years studying the hippoc campus and and how memories work number one is obvious repetition okay you you remember things with repetition number two not as obvious Association the hippocampus is an associative structure it Associates
28:31 one thing with the other uh for example your name and your face so I'm I've just met you and I I will remember your name and your face now but it also helps you remember things like who's married to each other associating the husband with the wife uh have you heard of The Memory Palace uh yes yes so this is a technique that has been used for many many ages uh to help remember things and it is a strategy where you picture a spal location that's very familiar to you like your childhood home when you need to remember a list of items you take an imaginative walk through that very familiar environment and place those items in particular locations in the
29:18 environment that is associating something really familiar your childhood home you know every corner of it with the new thing you need to remember and that works uh and has worked for memory champions for many years because the hippocampus Associates things together that's number two Association number three is novelty we remember novel things I've never been to this particular Studio ever before in my 26 years in New York and Brooklyn so this is a novel thing and I I will remember coming here uh to do this podcast with you our brains and this is where it interacts with the attention system our attention system focuses on things that are novel why because it could be dangerous if I've seen it things over
30:06 and over and over again I don't notice them they go into the background it's not going to hurt me any you know it's not it's not going to cause me any danger cliche that's why cliche doesn't work in marketing exactly yeah and so but something novel oo that really uh perks people up I use that in my teaching all the time surprise students uh with uh an element of what you want them to learn and they will remember it better but the fourth one which is so powerful and we know it intuitively we understand this intuitively is emotional resonance makes things more memorable we remember the happiest and the saddest things in our lives because that emotional resonance is solidifies those
30:54 memories where does that come from it comes from a structure called the amydala that sits right in front of the hippocampus right in the front of the temporal lobe right here and the hippocampus is right behind it amydala me means almond it's an almond shaped structure and it sits right in front of um the kind of tube shaped structure that is the hippocampus behind it and the amydala is kind of infusing uh the hippocampus and kind of getting giving it a little jolt when it's emotionally resonant either really happy or really sad you brought with you what you've told me is a real human brain yes I did now I'm not sure if you're just whining me up but we're talking here about novelty and surprise and that's right things you'll
31:40 never forget an emotional resonance correct and as you're saying that I was conscious that over in the corner of the room it appears that there's a human brain in a box so Jack is just bringing the human brain in yes I've never seen a human brain before you've never seen that's why I brought you gloves so you can hold it if you like if you like do you have permission to if there is a human brain in this box and you're not winding me up did you have to get permission from the owner of that brain so um this was purchased uh lawfully um by my department the center for neural science at New York University so it is lawfully ours to use as a teaching tool and it does bring enormous novelty to
32:25 any situation that I go into and makes people really think about their brain in a new way which is why I bring it what is in that box in this box is a real preserved human brain named Betty was the person who used to own that brain called Betty no we don't know the name of the person I named this brain Betty so can can you tell if it's a man or a woman no I can't ah man men and women brains not different at all they are but in very very very subtle ways that we wouldn't be able to tell just looking at the the outside of the brain like this okay I'm ready are you ready I think so okay so I'm going to open the Hat Box no way is that I'm
33:14 going pull out are you joking is that really a brain it is a real preserved human brain there it is frontal lobe frontal lobe occipital lobe for vision occipital lobe back there and in this brain I don't know if you can see it from over there if I pull apart the two hemispheres you can see how deep the the folds of the brain the surface is folded in that deep into the brain which expands the surface area of the outside of the cortex the rat cortex is flat there's no folds humans and
34:01 elephants and dolphins have lots of folds they have much higher capacity for computation because of the folds that you see in this brain it's smaller than I was expecting really half the people say it's smaller half the people say wow that's that's enormous interesting is that the the color of a brain the color of the brain is darker than the real brain if we opened up my head right now um because of the form alahh the the preservative chemical that this has been sitting in for at least 26 years this brain has been in my department for ever since I got here 26 years ago I feel like I probably should hold it I think you should hold
34:48 it oh my God sweat yes so I mean that that has that defined this person's whole life how they saw felt smelled uh heard and thought about the world just right there in your one hand in your right hand it's crazy to think that this little thing is oh it's different underneath yes it's crazy to think that this little thing this little that's the start of the spinal cord right there that you're pointing at and there's stuff at the underneath at the back this that is the cerebellum uh brain structure critical for fine motor movement um so we wouldn't be able to
35:35 walk smoothly if you have damage in your cerebellum isn't it interesting that like everything as you say everything this person worried about every thought every memory every relationship all of their education the school they went to the university everything they saw and remembered and all of their trauma y and their anxiety and maybe their depression everything they went through even their last days before they died is like captured in this little ball of like tofu yep sits in my hand an entire human being's existence it's true what they watched on TV their favorite movie their favorite number color everything is in this tiny little bowl of
36:22 tofu it's true oh gosh it is amazing and actually in real life firm tofu is the consistency of of the brain I often bring in a um you know a block of of firm tofu um when I demo this for students in addition to Betty do you remember the first time you saw a human brain I do did it change how you think about your own brain it changed my life because I was like I want to study that that is the coolest thing that I've ever seen in my whole life and I want to study that and I want to be just like her and um and so it it
37:09 really like okay now I I decided this is what I want to do and it was it was it was life-changing I say that because we you know at the start of this conversation we said that most of us don't appreciate our brain a lot of people don't even realize it's there but the minute I had a brain scan one day and that brain scan really changed my life because seeing my own brain for the first time it was the push that I needed to start caring more about how my decisions and behaviors are impacting it so let's talk about how I can make that ball of tofu in my head super healthy super big fat and fluffy you talked about exercise earlier on but we didn't really dig dig into exactly what you mean by exercise because exercise I think is multifaceted and definition what kind of exercise should
37:54 I be doing to make my ball of tofu in my head great yeah optimal mhm well all the research shows that the best kind of exercise that you can do is anything that gives you aerobic activity that is getting your heart rate up so that that goes for you know power walking will get your heart rate up soccer so many different things name your activity so many people want to say oh my favorite activity will that work and I always just say is it is your heart rate up when you're doing it if the answer is yes then yeah that that works great we know that that level of aerobic activity is critical because that's going to release that growth factor maximally to get into your hippocampus uh that will
38:39 grow those new brain cells how much so um I have an answer to that so um we did two different experiments in my lab one in um low-fit people people that are really not exercising very much at all less than 30 minutes um um in the last three three weeks you you've uh moved your body and um we asked what could we see any behavioral Improvement in your memory function from your hippocampus or your uh ability to shift and focus attention if we ask you to move your body in an aerobic way for two to three times a week and we collaborated with a spin class so clearly very aerobic and what we found was in those people that did successfully do two to three times a
39:27 week of 45 minute aerobic activity their mood got significantly better their memory function got better and their ability to shift and focus attention got significantly better so that gives a little bit of a guideline for low-fit people two to three times a week can start to give you some of those some of those cognitive changes but you don't look low fit so let me let me answer the question you're about to ask me with like what about me I I exercise pretty regularly and um how much how much do I need so to answer that question we went to another spin studio and we said look we're going to give you free classes you could exercise as much as you want in this in this um at this studio and uh um
40:13 go up to seven times a week and the control was just stay the same you know you they were they were working out twice a week at at the studio control was the other group that were you were testing them against yes exactly and so what we found was basically every drop of sweat counted the more you exercise the more change in your brain we noted both your hippocampal function prefrontal function and mood if you you were already getting benefit you know you're already going twice a week but the more you did the more brain changes you got so that that doesn't give the formula that I would like but we were heading in that direction which is part of one of the questions that I want to answer but I love to leave people with the idea that
41:00 every drop of sweat counts for building your brain into the big fat fluffy brain that you really want and then in the real world again making it super um real for people yeah how how does that change how I show up yeah if you allow it to should have a beautiful effect on your mindset um that your mindset around um how often should I take wake up an 30 minutes early and do that walk before I start my day or accept the the invitation to go uh walk the dog with with a neighbor um it's not an obligation it is something that you're doing for yourself it is going to have
41:45 direct benefits on that ball of tofu as you call it in your head it's going to make it work better and and I mean I think the most immediate thing that I benefit from every single day say is the mood boost that you get from that serotonin dopamine nor adrenaline that gets released every time you move your body I always think that because obviously I do a lot of podcasting and it's I'm super reliant on my brain being attached to my mouth and sometimes I notice that it's not you know what I mean like sometimes I'm not articulate I can't get my thoughts together whatever yes and I always try and figure out the correlation between what I did that day when I have a good day versus a bad day and I've from from your and also I speak on stage sometimes so I've often asked myself because I saw Tony Robbins the speaker one day on a trampoline before he goes up on stage I ask myself okay
42:32 should I be doing a workout in my green room before I go up on stage for a big talk or presentation you think I should oh yeah absolutely what's the basis of that in science and a science uh it's the basis is that immediate effect so there's three key effects that we know happen every time you move your body first one is mood you're going to get your dopamine your serotonin up um second is focus and attention so so as single workout isn't going to make more synapses in your prefrontal cortex but the prefrontal cortex uses dopamine and so um it's clear that even a single workout can make your prefrontal cortex work better in terms of focus attention also very important anytime you're speaking and the third is reaction time your reaction time it you know motor your you're you're working your motor
43:19 cortex when you move your body and your response and reaction time is significantly shorter after a even a single workout compared to if you just don't work out and sit sit um alone so great great things to do a great thing to do before you you stand up and speak what about coffee I I'm trying to figure out if coffee is good for my brain bad for my brain I've had a couple of mixed messages around the impact it might be having yeah you know caffeine is a stimulant and uh people respond to that kind of stimulant uh in different ways overstimulation with caffeine is is not good for your your ability to put words
44:04 together you know this is where I turn to a a main theme in in my book healthy brain happy life with this which is self-experimentation for you how what can you titrate your coffee to see what level of coffee is best for whatever your podcast or you're giving a talk the other thing that can work similarly to coffee that that I've started uh and that I do every morning is um hot cold contrast showers because that cold that you shower on yourself after the heat um stimulates adrenaline in you a natural adrenaline o it wakes you up and okay it was painful the first
44:49 kind of few times I tried it but then you get addicted to it and I have forgotten to do it and gotten back in the show hour just to douse myself with cold water because I feel better when I do that for for you know first thing in the morning so lots of different things that one can explore with okay on the other side of the coin then what are some of the central behaviors that people do that destroy their brain well sedentary behavior is one of them um not getting enough sleep is critical we haven't talked about sleep yet sleep is so important for normal functioning of the brain I like to scare my students by saying that um you know
45:35 in torture situations if you deprive a person of sleep for too long they literally die they they they die you cannot function if you are deprived of sleep for too many hours in a row it's that critical yet we don't we we happily you know watch too much Netflix at night and and and and get only five hours of sleep when we could have had eight so um what's happening exactly why is it so important well there's um there's so many different things I'm going to I'm going to say two one is that we know that in regular um um healthy sleep there is activity in the hippocampus that helps you strengthen the memories that you have formed in that previous day it's called consolidation and it's so important if you shorten that if you
46:21 don't get enough you are not consolidating your normal everyday memories and second it is uh the time during sleep when all the metabolites all that garbage that your brain is producing because all biological cells produce garbage it get kind of um cleaned up um through the cerebral spinal fluid that that is flowing through your brain and if you do not get enough sleep you build up garbage metabolites in your brain it's like you have a gunky brain and do you feel like I feel like I have gunk in my brain when I don't sleep enough that is exactly what is what is happening when you think about um things that we consume you know like food and drink and alcohol and all these kinds of things is there is there anything that if I'm trying to have an
47:06 optimal brain I should be yeah having or not having yeah well so um I think the most evidence is around the benefit of the Mediterranean diet which is basically all healthy uh um kind of organic not organic but nonprocessed is the word I was trying to think of things to eat that are very very colorful there is so much evidence about how good that is generally for the brain that that is my go-to like what should I eat well is it on the Mediterranean diet if it is then go ahead if it's too processed only do it just a little bit is it true that if we have less friends if we have less strong relationships if we're lonely
47:53 yeah then our brain will shrink and is more prone into dementia and Alzheimer's and things like that yes we are social creatures and um there are uh really powerful studies that have shown the correlation between the number of social connections that we have including just saying hello to the Barista at Starbucks it's not a close friendship that you develop over 30 years it's it's just how many people you interact with and greet and Longevity the more people you are regularly interacting with the longer you are living overall longevity but if you go into brain health absolutely it's also very very healthy for you it also brings happiness so uh friend and
48:40 colleague of mine um Robert wallinger uh studied um what makes people happy the study started in the 20s 1920s in Harvard and after all of those many many many decades the answer is what brings happiness is a strength of your Social connections so it makes you happier it makes you live longer and and uh yes loneliness on the on the um flip side causes stress uh long-term stress that that damages the brain and uh yeah in the long term can can make it smaller and uh less healthy do you have any brain routines like like a morning routine for your brain absolutely so every morning I like to wake up and I do a um tea meditation which is a
49:26 meditation over the brewing and drinking of tea and this is after many years of yo-yo meditating I knew meditation was good but I just couldn't really get into it and um I was introduced to this form of meditation um from uh by a monk who who invited me to Tea and and just did this silent meditation outside in a beautiful location and the ritual and the um um the sequence of Brewing drinking seeping uh re starting over again kind of kept me in kept me in the flow and so I start with about a 45 minute tea meditation uh then I do about a 30 minute workout I try and do cardio strength sometimes I do yoga sometimes I
50:11 just do Mobility um and then I have breakfast and then I go to work oh and then I I do that H hot cold contrast shower is also something very helpful for my brain health because it it really does in me that adrenaline boost that I get just energizes me and I love that feeling at the beginning of the day just going back to that question because I want to close off on it as well the the idea of what would I have to do to destroy my brain so no sleep yeah I'm GNA be sedentary yeah I'm GNA have no friends yeah and smoking smoking is very bad for your health and and your brain okay um alcohol alcohol I mean yes long-term alcohol can cause significant and named Brain disas diseases um moderation even
50:59 moderation now Studies have shown is not very good and the reason why it's not good is that alcohol disrupts your sleep even though people drink it to to go to sleep faster the sleep is much more superficial and is not deep and it's not the healthy sleep so that is uh not good overall for your for the for Sleep um depth and and health and therefore brain health I'm going to eat a processed diet to hurt my brain and I'm not going to have a lifestyle that is novel because we talked about learning right yes so I'm not going to learn anything new all of these things should shrink that little you're not going to be mindful also does mind is there is there evidence that being mindful which is
51:45 like meditation and being in the moment helps the brain it does uh there's beautiful studies showing brain plasticity um in the areas that are important for focused attention meditation the practice of meditation is basically a practice of um enriching the function of your prefontal cortex so you can focus on that object either the breath or or um loving kindness is is a form of meditation so yes there there's been studies that brain changes um occur in long-term meditators that are that are absolutely beneficial what if I'm on social media all the time because isn't that good for me because I'm going to be seeing lots of new things all the time and I'll be learning lots of new things so isn't if I sat on a on a screen for
52:31 seven hours a day is that good for my brain social media does that take you away from real people and interacting with real people yes okay then then it's modulated by that the same thing there's a difference and I think your brain knows it and um look there's there's enormous amounts of evidence showing that the increase in use of social media um especially in young kids uh correlate with huge increases in depression and anxiety levels particularly in young girls so when when kids started getting the smartphones and started to spend more and more seven hours a day on social media that's when the anxiety and depression went up that's for young kids
53:17 I use social media as well as a tool for business that is a little bit different I'm not 13 years old and you're not 13 years old so so you know there there's some warnings I think that need to go into into that but but let me let me be clear no it's not the same social media is not the same as social interactions face Toof face with people are you are you concerned about what social media is doing to our brains yes because we you know I we hear those stats around you know young young girls are struggling most with social media and we think to ourselves well that's because there's a lot of like comparison and all these kinds of things and there's a lot of like toxic messaging and such but if we think about the physiological consequences of social media what it's actually doing to our brains at a chemical level yeah what what would you
54:05 as a neuroscientist guess is that like is the physiological harm to the brain not the sort of psycholog I'm thinking about like not the psychological okay oh my God she's more this than me but like the physiological harm but the psychological harm causes stress stress releases stress hormone that goes into the brain that at too high and too constant a level can start to First damage connections and then kill cells so it's it's intertwined um there and that that is part of of what is happening um you can't you know pull one one away from the other because all you know we social media is designed to kind of it's like pulling the slot machine handle I pull down on the feed and I get ping oh look there's a nice picture and oh ping there's notifications and comments Etc
54:51 it's that con you know I think about the constant they say there's constant dopamine here they refer to is it a dopamine hit is that's what happening when we're being stimulated by social media or a slot machine yes and is there is there any harm in just a constant dopamine hit all day every day well I would not I'm going to answer that question by saying I would not want to be addicted to gambling that gambling is addictive it it's hard to get away you you you lose all these other things that we just decided were all good for you including sleep including social connections um including exercise and I think that's part of what social media is doing for our young kids is not good that they're not joining teams outside to be social and interactive in uh in that kind of
55:39 now it seems like an oldfashioned way but it's very very powerful way for development um and brain health I think I'm addicted to my phone and I I often ask myself is that is that a problem and from what you said it sounds like the problem is what I sacrifice yeah through that like addiction to that device yes is that that the issue the issue is I sacrifice social connections maybe movement yeah you know although I do work out every day but the brain is smart enough to know that there's no substitute for real human connections absolutely absolutely and that's going to make me what I'm trying to I I need you to help me scare me out of this phone addiction that I think I have but I know many other
56:24 people have as well so that is going to limit your potential for brain growth for for brain plasticity it is going to limit your possibility for for you know not to be dramatic but joy in in your life there's different kinds of joy that you have in in real person-to-person social interactions that it feels pretty good on social media if you get lots of likes and you know um but it's not the same and and um I would I would say that to scare yourself out you're going to have to bite the bullet and do a twow week phone detox what would that do to you how
57:10 would you feel I just could never imagine such a thing well which is a real shame isn't it really because I just think about like my ancestors and my parents they must they must think I'm so strange but it's just the just the way that like when my phone dies I'm like it's like I'm like nervously waiting for it to come back on I'm like staring at it like oh my God like what am I going to do with myself like uh and I remember those studies they did on people where they gave them the choice of either sitting alone with their own thoughts or giving themselves an electric shock and a huge amount of people in that study actually would rather give themselves an electric shock than just sit alone with their thoughts because it's some kind of stimulation that's kind of how I think I am now like I don't know what I'd do without my phone it's really sad I know there's people listening to me now that think I'm an absolute like
57:56 I'm really sad but it's just the N it's the truth you know and um I do wonder what it's doing to my brain but I think you're right I think it's actually what it's doing to my like my life yeah the joy the connections the being being there to experience things and um I mean that point that you made is a very profound one um the the not wanting to be alone with your thoughts is the core of meditation can you be be alone with your thoughts and focus on something something organic usually the breath but also a thought like loving kindness um that is a very powerful practice to do and it and it's hard I find it hard too um and I actually
58:42 notice I find it harder when I'm when I'm using social media and when I'm using my phone more um but I feel most creative and most imaginative when I do practice that that is being alone with my thoughts what comes into mind um how how does my own imagination work which is very much dependent on the hippocampus as well it's putting together all these things in your memory and new and interesting ways that are unique for you or unique for me and it doesn't work the same if you are stimulating your brain with social media all the time you um I mean you wrote a book that kind of speaks to what we're talking about here you wrote a book about anxiety yes yes I did 2021
59:27 yeah I think the the US version is called good anxiety isn't it slightly different title in the US in the UK yeah why did you write a book about anxiety I wrote a book about anxiety because I started to notice my students getting much more anxious than they ever used to be and this was before the pandemic I mean I I I had the idea to write this book in 2018 2019 and so first I noticed in the the students they were getting so stressed out before finals they never did that before so so many accommodations they were asking for and I'm like what's going on here but then I realized it wasn't just them like I'm getting more anxious as well my friends are more anxious and I really wanted to dive into
1:00:13 that I didn't want to be anxious in that way uh because part of me was like oh I'm just New Yorker I'm just anxious all the time right because that's what New Yorkers are no this has changed and we forget that before the pandemic there was there was still global warning warming there was still political issues that that lots of people including me and all of my students were worried about and that was the impetus for for trying to dive in and ask well I made my life happier with exercise what what is the approach when it's anxiety and not clinical anxiety I did not have clinical anxiety and the vast majority of my students didn't have clinical anxiety they had what I called everyday anxiety just worried about the things that are going on in the world and there were
1:00:58 just more things to be worried about is that normal is that human that is human absolutely but is it human in the in is the quantity in which we experience it human uh I think it is I mean because I think about my ancestors I go they they probably I don't know I always imagine my ancestors kind of I don't know just chilling you know like but they didn't have they didn't have global warming where the ocean is about to you know get sucked up in plastic and and the the ozone is gonna come come down no worries like that at all but the everyday anxiety for me is like emails and what's up well by everyday anxiety I mean the anxiety that people are feeling today that is not at the clinical level so all the things that we
1:01:44 just me mentioned global warming and wars in multiple places in the world all of that contributes to the higher level of anxiety and your ancestors in mine went through two world wars but and that was anxiety-provoking no question about it but they weren't also all the other things that were um you know contributing to it including the higher than you know extremely high anxiety and suicide levels of our young people that are you know that strongly linked to social media so that's that's another element what did you find then when you started uncovering and trying to go on this search of figuring out you know the the nature of anxiety and what we can do about it did you first find that you're right in your hypothesis that it is
1:02:31 increasing yeah yeah how much do you know how much um you know it it shifted over the time that I wrote and published the book because I started in 2018 and then it was published in the middle of the pandemic in 2021 where anxiety levels went up approximately 20% worldwide so um but the social media anxiety uh um that is going up in girls even more than 20% and that's kind of in parallel so I I actually don't know how to um integrate those two levels but they're both going in the same direction why are women young women becoming more anxious and suicidality amongst that age group is rapidly
1:03:16 increased you know I think that um it's it's that comparison that that is so easy to do and I see it in my my own work at the University that when I was going to college I had no idea what rank I was in in number in the application but they could see that immediately they know exactly what number they are in each and every class they take in their whole High School class in the in their application to to the five schools that they applied to or 10 or 15 now that they're applying to that gives a much higher level of stress when you know those numbers immediately um that we never had so so there are stresses like that that that um they're they're experiencing more information
1:04:03 yeah more it's funny because more social connection but it's when I say social connection I don't mean real world social connection I mean more followers and likes and more people that can message me and tell me something and DM me or comment on my thing right more noise yeah the volume's increased which is seems to be driving more anxiety where do we experience anxiety where from a physiological standpoint point where is anxiety CU it feels like it's in your chest yeah so anxiety is kind of a fullbody experience and um anxiety is um strongly linked with the stress response so um an anxiety-provoking situation you you um meet somebody that you uh you know had a big fight with
1:04:48 before Oh I'm anxious I might have to speak to that person before uh that launches that launch is the stress response um that is um dependent on What's called the sympathetic nervous system and so this is where it becomes full body so what happens when your fight ORF flight system is activated your heart rate goes up your respiration goes up your um irises get get bigger so you can see everything and look out for that that annoying person that you're worried about um and blood is shunted from your digestion and reprodu reproductive organs towards your muscle so you can fight or run away that's what all of our ancestors evolved to protect us from not not the social media post but um the lion or the Tiger that could
1:05:36 come and attack us so it made sense for that kind of stressor or that kind of threat unfortunately our body's doing the same exact thing when the nasty DM comes in from somebody I wasn't sure who it is but they're saying something really bad about something I care about a lot and we get this stress response we get anxious because of that and uh somebody asked me does that mean our brain is not very smart and the answer is our our our stress and our threat system is not very smart it isn't differentiating between the line that could physically kill us and the DM that might wound our pride but but will not kill us but it causes the same kind of um stress response and anxiety response
1:06:22 what do I do about that you have to learn how to turn the volume of your own anxiety down and part of that is I'm not saying you have to not look at your DMs and not look at or or not look at soci social media there's lots of ways to turn your anxiety down we've already talked about uh some of those approaches exercise immediately decreases anxiety and depression levels and there you don't even have to get aerobic 10 minutes of walking can significantly decrease your anxiety and depression levels that is a powerful tool that everybody can use right right here right now breath meditation did you know that breath meditation that is deep breathing um it's the oldest form of meditation
1:07:09 why because equal in opposite to that fight ORF flight response that everybody seems to know about is the rest and digest part of your nervous system called the parasympathetic nervous system that calms you down it slows your heart rate down slows your respiration rate down and shuns blood from your muscles towards your digestion and reproductive organs so you can do those weekend rest and digest kinds of things well everybody should be asking well do I have that system yes everybody has that system everybody has a parasympathetic nervous system how do I activate that the best and most effective way that you can activate that right now is take three deep breaths because that's the only thing you have conscious control over that can launch
1:07:56 all the rest of that parasympathetic activity slowing your heart rate I can't slow my heart rate by thinking about it can I take three deep slow breaths right
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