Accelerate Learning & Increase Cognitive Capacity | Dr. Tommy Wood

00:00:00There's a much more recent study thattook again older adults and randomizedthem across three different groups. Onewas like a low-intensity group. Anothergroup basically did kind of zone 2 typework on a treadmill three times a week.And the third group did um ahigh-intensity interval trainingintervention which was the Norwegian 4x4protocol. So 4 minutes at 85 to 95% ofmaximum heart rate. They had a 3minutrest in their protocol. They did thatfour times over.>> That was three times a week.>> Three times a week for 6 months. That'sthat's pretty intense. But what theyshowed was that that highintensityinterval training group, they improvedtheir fitness just as well as the zone 2group, interestingly, but they had muchbetter improvements in hypocamplefunction and maintenance of hypocamplestructure and MRI scan. And theymaintained that benefit for 5 yearsafter the six-month intervention. Sothey worked really hard for 6 months,but that that benefit was maintained forfor a really long period of time.Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcastwhere we discuss science andscience-based [music] tools for everydaylife.

00:01:04I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professorof neurobiology and opthalmology atStanford School of Medicine. My guesttoday is Dr. Tommy Wood. Dr. Tommy Woodis a medical doctor and neuroscienceresearcher at the University ofWashington in Seattle. He is also thechief science officer of BetterBrain, acompany that provides free brain healthcoaching. Tommy is an expert inneuroplasticity and human performanceand how science-based protocols can beused to improve your focus, ability tolearn, and skill expression. His workapplies to everyone from the novice tothe elite expert, and for all kinds ofskills, cognitive, language skills,athletic, and creative endeavors. Today,we discuss the brain states that favorlearning and importantly, how to getyourself into those states. We alsodiscuss how to get the most from alearning session. for instance, how longthat session should last, how manysessions to do per day, and perhaps mostimportantly, how to tune your mind andbody to get better at learning. That'ssomething we don't often hear in thecontext of learning and neuroplasticity,that our brain circuits for focusing andlearning are also capable of plasticity,meaning you can literally get better atgetting better. Today, we discuss thingslike flow states and something called aclutch state, which is a seldommentioned but critical

00:02:20brain state toaccelerate learning and performance. Infact, a clutch state is the state thatyou want to seek to learn and perform atyour best. We also discuss how differenttypes of physical exercise from longslow cardio to brief high-intensitycardio and different forms of resistancetraining each open the window fordistinct types of neuroplasticity andlearning. So, this goes way beyond thegeneral discussion about exerciseimproving your brain. We get reallygranular about exactly what types ofthings to do to improve your brain inspecific ways. As a careerneuroscientist who has worked on andtaught neuroplasticity for decades now,it's rare that I encounter someone withas deep knowledge about the real scienceand application of learning andplasticity as Tommy has. He's alsoextremely unique because he has a ton ofknowledge about new science-basedprotocols for plasticity. And he's alsoan athlete. We discuss that a little bitat the end as well. So today you willhear a lot of information that I amconfident you have not heard on thispodcast or anywhere else frankly aboutexercise, mental training, nutrition andsupplementation and much more and howyou can leverage each alone and incombination to learn new skills withaccelerated speed, precision anddurability over time. I should alsomention that Tommy recently released anew book that he wrote entitled TheStimulated Mind: Futureproof

00:03:35Your Brainfrom Dementia and Stay Sharp at Any Age.It's an excellent book if you'reinterested in following up on today'sdiscussion and learning more about howyou can make your brain better at anyage. Before we begin, I'd like toemphasize that this podcast is separatefrom my teaching and research roles atStanford. It is however part of mydesire and effort to bring zero cost toconsumer information about science andscience related tools to the generalpublic. In keeping with that theme,today's episode does include sponsors.And now for my discussion with Dr. TommyWood. Dr. Tommy Wood, welcome.>> So amazing to be here. Thanks so muchfor having me.>> Man, this is my favorite topic in theentire world. What is more interestingthan neuroplasticity, right? The brainis so interesting, but its mostinteresting feature in my opinionanyway, is that it can change itself.>> Essentially, that's its core mostimportant function. If it can't do that,literally none of the other functionsmatter. You could you could argue andit's something that we have to be ableto do right until the end of our end ofour lives.You have an eclectic research tapestry,right? Today we're going to talk aboutneuroplasticity, what it is, what itisn't, how to access it for men, forwomen, different ages, and you also area high performance coach. You're also

00:04:51acompeting natural strongman.>> Uhhuh.>> Yeah. Yeah.>> Uh does that mean lifetime no gear?>> Lifetime. Well, it's tested. I Yeah.Lifetime no gear for me personally, butit's a drug tested version of thestrongman sport. So yeah, if you uh ifyou compete in natural strongman, thenyou you get tested.>> Great. So we'll we'll talk about that.I'll resist the temptation to talk aboutyour two boxer [snorts] pups because I'ma dog lover. That's a different episode.Neuroplasticity. I know what it means tome. How do you conceptualize it? How doyou think people should think about itin terms of wanting to learn things andnot forget things?I essentially just think of it as thebrainresponding to inputs in order for us tothen be able to better navigate andsurvive our environment. And that's whyI think it's such a fundamental part ofwhat the brain does. And essentiallyevery time you learn something, interactwith something, remember something, theprinciples of neuroplasticity areengaged, right? you are making newsinapses or strengthening sinapses,weakening other synapses. A lot ofpeople don't realize that particularlybrain development, but then also therefining of functions in the brainthrough neuroplasticity includes thepruning or removal of signapses.

00:06:06Oftenwe think about it's all about growth andnew connections, but actually it alsoinvolves the refining or removal of ofother connections that aren't needed.That's that's a massive part of of braindevelopment in the first place. And thisis a process that's essentiallycontinuously on ongoing and you canthink of it as it primary role is sothat you can navigate survive the worldaround you and that's through learningskills through remembering people andthings and facts. Um, andwhere I one of the one of the thingsthat's most interesting to me aboutneuroplasticityand the way we think about our brainsover time is that I think people have uhconflatedneurogenesis and neuroplasticity. Mhm.[snorts]>> So when we're thinking about braindevelopment, we're thinking about umthen also brain function over with withwith age and either cognitive decline ormaintaining cognitive function. Wethought that the adult brain was wasfixed, right? Um or or then it was fixedand then it lost function. And this goesall the way back to Kahal who said theadult brain is immutable, right? He toldus that you got into adulthood, itfinished

00:07:21developing and then it was kindof done. He then at other times alsosaid that changes in the connectionsbetween neurons could explain learning.And so there he's talking aboutneuroplasticity. But we we kind of gotthis idea that the brain was essentiallyfixed as an adult and then you knowcouldn't change anymore. But that can'tbe true because you still learn andremember things on a daily basis as asan adult. One of the things that I thinkwe've gotten um confused about is thefact that the adult brain does not makenew neurons in many places, right? maybein the alactory bulbs in the dentus ofthe hippocampus, but tiny tiny number.>> Yeah. But like compared to the rest ofthe brain, they're not you're not reallymaking new cells. And so because ofthat, we thought, well, we can't thengrow and adapt or change our brains asadults. But just because we have a fixedrelatively fixed number of cells doesn'tmean that we can't change theconnections between those cells. Andthat's happening all the time. And thatis, you know, the main principle ofneuroplasticity.>> Yeah, I like your definition. Um, inpart [clears throat] because I agreewith it. in part because it encapsulatesa lot of uh things including u helpingto clear up this misconception that youknow we generate new neurons. I think>> the attractiveness of the new neuronidea is just uh it's so sticky.>> Um and so we would all love to believethat.

00:08:36>> Yeah.>> But maybe there's good reason why wedon't add new neurons. Maybe maybe it'suh not adaptive, right? Adding newelements to a circuit is>> maybe not the best way to change a braincircuit. I think people also like theidea that, you know, every organ in ourbody turns over its cells. That we'renot the same person literally that wewere. The brain is same cells you wereborn with, minus a bunch of them thatdie off, as you pointed out. And thankyou for mentioning pruning and the andthe removal of connections as afundamental uh aspect of plasticity interms of um motor skill learning. Umlet's say I decide I'm going to umpractice billiards.>> Mhm. and I'm okay now. Hang in there.But let's say I want to get really goodas I learn and get better and better.Can we reliably say that uh most of myimprovement is the removal ofinappropriate action and thereforesynaptic connections.>> I don't know whether it's the majority.You might know whether it's themajority, but I think that therecertainly you it requires both, right?the either the development orstrengthening of new connections andthen the removal of other connectionsthat decrease accuracy say or that

00:09:52don'tallow you to do the exact motion thatyou were intending to do. This, like Isaid, kind of goes all the way back tothe development of motor skills, say inchildhood, right? The brain has kind offinished developing new neurons sometimearound 2 or 3 years old, right? Beyondthat point, you're actually primarilyremoving connections in order to refine[snorts] uh functions based on theexposures that you have, be theylanguage, motor, social skills, which iswhat the brain is essentially developingduring that time period. So then thatcontinues throughout our entire lives.And I think that uh something thathappens later in life, one of thereasons why we may lose function isbecause we stop giving the brain inputsto maintain a given function. Therefore,that pruning continues, right? I don'tneed to learn know how to do this. So,I'm going to refine that away. That'skind of the developmental theory ofaging or part of the developmentaltheory of aging. So in that you knowwhen you're learning a skill as an adultor anytime a big part of refining thatmotor patterns that you're developinghas to be the removal of connectionsthat are or you know the down

00:11:07reggulation of connections that aren'tallowing you to to do the skill that youwant to do. If you were to tell people,look, you want to keep your brain asyoung as it can possibly be relative toyour chronological age,>> you should what?>> Like it it so this is a general brainhealth question, but really I'mspecifically asking about plasticity[clears throat]>> and let's make it multiple choice andthen you can add things to it. Okay,>> you should exercise. So it can bemultiple things and then we'll talkabout which types of exercise. youshould continue to do the things thatyou already know how to do.>> Yeah.>> And then third option um not mutuallyexclusive with the others of course isuh you should try to do new things thatyou can't already do.>> I I still toil with this when I look atthe literature on neuroplasticity andaging,>> right? Like yes, use it or lose it istrue,>> but we're also told that novelty andtrying things that we're not good at isan essential component of building outbrain circuits, continuing to make themfunction better as we get older. So, howdo you how do you think about all ofthat? I'll partly answer your lastquestion and then maybe give a frameworkfor how I think about it. So when youlook at

00:12:23a combination of epidemiologicalstudies and intervention studies inolder adults, everything aboutmaintaining cognitive function later inlife, you definitely see that those whocontinue to engage in hobbies andactivities that are cognitively engagingor cognitively demanding and that can belectures, that can be um volunteering,that can be you know reading crosswords,that kind of stuff. those individualstend to either have slowed rates ofdecline or better maintenance offunction over time and or lower rates ofdementia. That's of courseobservational, right? But that's usuallypeople continuing to engage in thethings that you know they've alreadybeen doing, right?>> So they're holding on to what they'vegot.>> Holding on to what they've got bycontinuing to do that.>> Okay. Now, of course, it could partly bereverse causation because if you'remaintaining function, then you willyou're more likely to continue to do thethings that that you enjoy doing, right?So, there's probably it probably goes inboth both directions. However, there'san increasing body of literature thatshows that by engaging older adults innovel cognitive activities, you seeimprovements in function. So that can belanguage learning. Uh that can be uhcomplex like coordinative movement orexercise.

00:13:38You see the same things withum like musical training like peoplelearning a new musical instrument orlearning um musical theory trying toidentify different patterns in music.And you see in randomized control trialsimprovements particularly in executivefunction that seems to be most commonacross those different interventions.But you're seeing um improvements incognitive function with novel cognitivestimuli. Uh there's a lot of uh recenttrials that have also used types ofbrain training um things like thepointer trial that was here in the USmaintain your brain which is a massiveonline study done in Australia recentlyand that's sort of broad cognitivetraining with like an online cognitivetraining platform. So again it's it's anew uh or novel um intervention orexposure that seems to provide astimulus that improves function. So, Ithink both can be or do seem to beimportant.>> I'm excited to share with you that mybook, Protocols, an operating manual forthe human body, is now available forpre-order and will be coming out in lessthan two months. It's my first book, andit's a reflection of decades ofresearch, hundreds of conversations withleading scientists and medical doctors,and my own exploration of health,fitness, and performance. Protocols is astraightforward to use manual

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00:16:50>> Can I ask what um for an example ofmaybe one or two of the things that werein that large-scale trial fromAustralia, like just at a at a very topcontour level, um older adults, meaning65 and older, um are doing what? Themaintain your brain uh study wasactually it was um sort of midlife kindof uh 50s and 50s and 60s mainly andthey actually had interventions acrossfour different domains based on riskfactors within that given individual. Sothey had uh dietary a dietaryintervention, they had physicalactivity, they had um cognitivebehavioral therapy for those who had umyou know some potentially some mentalhealth um concerns and then they had uhonline brain training. Uh there wassomething similar done in the pointertrial uh which was in older adults now60s and 70s that was done here in the USthat was a replication of an older trialcalled the finger trial that was done inFinland but what those guys did wassomething very similar. So it's uh diet,exercise, uh monitoring and and treatinguh cardiovascular risk factors and thenbrain training. So what the braintraining looks like um so the pointstrial is a good example. They did umthey used a platform called Brain HQ>> which is an HQ

00:18:05>> Brain HQ um which was uh developed basedon the work of Mike Mzinich um who's youknow like one of the godfathers oflearning and neuroplasticity right umand theydo various tasks primarily focused ondeveloping and maintaining processingspeed. Um, some of that evidence goesall the way back to an older trialcalled active that was done in the US inthe '90s. It was still the biggest evertrial of like pure cognitive braintraining again in older adults. So 60sand 70s. They had three different umtraining groups. The uh and then acontrol group. Uh the training groupsdid memory training and kind of like youknow pneumonics, memory palaces, thatkind of stuff to help them remember.There was reasoning training which iskind of like looking looking forpatterns in numbers and letters. Andthen there was processing speed trainingwhere in this example it's visualprocessing speed. So things flash up ona screen in increasingly small uhincrements. So could be hundreds ofmilliseconds. And as you get better atdoing it, that time gets shorter and youhave to remember what you saw and whereyou saw it on a screen. They justpublished a secondary analysis of theactive trial that showed that

00:19:20um thosewho did processing speed training withuh booster sessions at one and threeyears had a significantly decreased riskof dementia 20 years later. Um andthey've done some other studies showingthat that kind of training improvesco-allergic signaling in the forebrainum which we know is susceptible to umthe processes of dementia. So inparticular, it's this training uh to beable to improve either visual orauditory processing speed, which is notsomething that you know, as you getolder, you tend to not do activitiesthat require you to process informationquickly. Like driving is probably thethe main one, but you can do it insports and music and and otherscenarios, but if you're not doing thosethings, processing speed tends to dropoff sometime around 60 years old. Whenyou say uh well I say processing, yousay processing [laughter]uh processing speed. Um are you talkingabout reaction time, improving reactiontime or pushing people to um stay at theedge of of reaction time? And when I saystay at the edge, I should clarify forpeople some task where if you go toofast, you make errors. If you go tooslow, there's also a penalty>> in this scenario. And there are, youknow, studies that look at thesedifferent functions over time. Probablythe biggest one looked at uh data thatcame from

00:20:36the implicit association testpeople might have heard of where you getum show these pictures of differentthings and depending on how quickly yourespond it tells you something aboutlike your implicit um you like yourimplicit thought processes. Um they tooksome of the data from that. Um this ispublished in one of the nature journalsa few years ago. And what they showedwas that um you can separate outreaction time versus processing speedbecause reaction time is just is a is avery um just the basic of response to avisual stimulus whereas processingrequires you is is based on how quicklyyou can process and remember theinformation that you're seeing. Youactually think Yeah. So [snorts] whatthey showed in this study was thatreaction time kind of slowly decreaseson average in a population of it wasabout 1.2 million people slowlydecreases in sort of like from about our30s and then and then maybe decreaseseven more once we get past about 60.>> Processing speed on average tended to bemore stable until about 60 years old andthen tends to drop off. So in whatyou're doing in these um trainingmodalities is you're being showninformationfor a very short period of time and thenhaving to remember what it was you sawand where you saw it. Um so requires youto actually think and

00:21:51you know rememberprocess the information rather than justlike responding to a stimulus.>> So for people that want to jump to theokay what do I do? Um,can we conclude? Okay, if you likecrossword puzzles, keep doing them, butdo really hard ones for you. If you likelifting weights, continue to challengeyourself with those. If you like to run,you know, push harder. Or should it bewe shift domains? You like to lift andrun, great. Start swimming again,Andrew. I'm telling myself, I used to I,you know, I just noticed over time, it'sit's such a cliche of aging, right? umthat you one does tend to become morenarrow quote unquote set in their ways.You like what you like, you don't wantlike what you don't. You get busier.Probably don't actually get busier, butyou convince yourself, well, do I'mdoing these things and I do plenty ofthem, so but I'm not doing these otherthings. Or for those of us, I think thisis everybody. If they really askthemselves an answer honestly,>> you'd love to hold on to your motorfunction and cognitive function as longas you can,>> maybe even improve it. Should we pushourselves to do something that's reallyfar outside the box or maybe sort ofcurrent skill adjacent? So, I think ofthose three categories. What What

00:23:06do thedata say? If you want the greatesteffect for the minimum amount of time,assuming you're still going to do allthe stuff you normally do, you're goingto add something else.>> Should it be something really different,slightly different, or just push harderin the thing you do?>> I think it's going to depend a littlebit on what it what it is the thingsthat you currently do, right? So likecrosswords are a good a good example.Even if you're doing hard ones, if youlook at the work of people like uhGloria Mark, the things like crosswordand sudoku, they're less of like a truecognitive challenge, right? It's it'salmost has more of like a meditationmeditative like effect, right? Which canbe a good thing, right? So you'refocused but not challenged really. uhwhereas if we're trying to buildcapacity, you need to spend some timedoing something where you are bothfocused and challenged um cognitively.So that can come from um learning newskills be they motor, language, socialum and ideally as broad as possiblebecause you're going to get better likeoverall stimulus as well as kind of likebroader potential for for transfer intoother areas of of daily

00:24:22life. Inreality, the narrowness of the responseor the breadth of the response isproportional to the narrowness or thebreadth of the stimulus, right? So, youcould get really good at one veryspecific thing or you could try andlearn a new skill that requires a thatinvolves a wide variety of tasks. So,I'll give like like an example islearning a new ball sport, right? thatis going to require multiple assets ofmotor skills, social skills. Um, it'sgoing to include both visual andauditory processing that's going to getfaster and faster and harder and harderthe better you get. So, something likethat uh creates a much broader stimulusum than you know if you get very good atone very specific brain training task onlike one computer program, right? Thisis one of the main arguments againstonline or you know digital braintraining is that you get very good atdoing that one specific thing but itdoesn't transfer over to other areas ofyour life. Whereas some of these broadermore complex ultimately more humanskills probably give us much broadertransfer as well as you know you knowbecause of the the multiple pathways ornetworks that are being activated.

00:25:38>> If my interpretation of what you said iscorrect, pick something hard.>> Yeah. Ideally, pick something that's abit outside or really outside yourcurrent skill set. Uh that involvesmotor and cognitive aspects like maybeum and that's kind of tricky to to find,right? I mean, with sport stuff, itfeels motor and cognitive because youhave to learn the rules of the game. Youhave to in some cases interact withothers. with cognitive stuff. Um themotor skills involved in writing orturning a page, they're not thatsignificant, right? Um even with a videogame, I know [clears throat] video gamescan improve reaction time and visualsearch and things like that, butbasically your thumbs get real realgood. I actually went to a video gamecompetition. They have teams. A kid thatused to work for me, I was like, "Whatdo you want for kind of end of yeargift?" and he's like, I really want togo to this video game championship. Andthe kids actually who compete warm uptheir hands.>> The kids in the audience like have thesestyrofoam things so they clap so theydon't make noise. So they and it was awhole thing.>> Yeah.>> So I don't want to take anything awayfrom the the real sport. I I discoveredthat is playing video games, but>> mostly what was moving was thumbs andfingers,

00:26:53not a lot of large scale motoractivity. Yeah. So, if you had to maybe[clears throat] throw out three or fourthings that are particularly potentplasticity inducers, what would thosebe?>> This definitely doesn't have to be supercomplicated. So, like the things thatyou mentioned earlier, so because youmentioned exercise and then skills,right? And so, you could do those thingsseparately, right? I would maybe we'llget into why aerobic and strengthtraining do different things todifferent parts of the brain, right? So,ideally, you do a little bit of both. ifyou don't feel super compelled to go andstart a new sport, but you're gettingthese inputs from elsewhere. Um, and soyou you would rather say learn a newlanguage, right, which we have which wehave some good evidence for, then thatcombination is great. But if you'rethinking about some of the things thatwe have very good evidence for that kindof hit multiple um networks at the sametime, dancing is probably number one.Lots>> learning a new dance.>> Learning a new dance. solo or withsomeone else? I'm sure we're halfjoking, but some people dance on theirown. Some people dance with someoneelse.>> So, like dancing on your own in yourliving room, highly encouraged, right?It's a great form, physical activity.It's fun. You of course the um the bestevidence is for ballroom

00:28:08and linedancing, which generally requires and sothere are meta analyses of theseinterventions in older adults showingthat ballroom and line dancing have thegreatest effect on cognitive function.And so both of those require otherpeople as well as learning you knowvarious sets of of movements. So youhave a you have skill learning you havesocial interaction and you have aphysical activity component. There'sprobably also the musical componentright you have to listen for the timingof the music and those kinds of thingsthat that is its own skill set. Sodancing has a a large body of evidencebehind it. But then I think you know inthe exercise realm you've got all thesort of ball sports, board sports, teamsports. Um, I think skateboarding wouldbe a great example. As long as you weara helmet and don't hit your head uh toooften. You know, most martial arts,again, as long as somebody's notpunching you in the face too much.>> Something like Brazilian>> jiu-jitsu. Exactly. So, like you're umthere's a physical component, there's acomplex motor skill component. Usually,there's a social component, there's athere's a lot of uh responding, reactingto the environment or your opponent. Uh,right. So then talking about processingspeed again but then beyond that there'ssome really interesting data on someother creative arts that do seem to havesome effect on um you know networkstability and function in the brainparticularly the networks like the frontof prioral network that we know

00:29:24isreally important for like focus andattention and its function does tend todecrease with age. Um so uh things likelike creative or or visual arts um somemaybe some similar effects of learning alanguage umagain um uh similar effects fromlearning to play video games. Yes ofcourse there's no like big motorpatterns involved but you're having todo um you know solve complex problemsyou know uh react quickly to to achanging environment that that kind ofstuff. So that's, you know, eight ornine different things that that somebodycould try. And like just one of those, Ithink, is going to be a new skill, a newstimulus, often happens in a socialenvironment. Um, a number of differentthings happening at the same time.>> Any particular uh instruments?>> I don't think anybody's looked atinstruments like the difference indifferent instruments. So I would sayno. Pick pick one that you would thatyou feel motivated and interested tolearn.>> Yeah. dancing by oneself has a lowershame quotient.>> Well, the shame quot I think might bemight be important, right? the um youknow there's the discomfort of makingmistakes and we know how critical thatis for learning and so like you're Ithink some of that can be important toobut if

00:30:39you do it in a in a classeverybody else is a beginner you're alldoing it together maybe that adds a funcomponent because you can laugh at eachother when you don't get it right youknow so a few uh years ago I wrote apaper with my colleague Josh Tknet aboutthis idea that um potentially one of thereasons why we lose lose cognitivefunction as we get older is because westop giving our brain novel inputs orcomplex inputs that help maintainfunction, drive neuroplasticity. And Ithink one of the reasons that thathappens is because adults hate being badat things, right? You just like thisthought like you you you just imaginedit, right? I'm in a dance class and I'mgoing to suck at dancing, right? Iimagine that I'm going to take my wifeto to a tango class. It's something I'vealways wanted to do.When I go in the first time, I imagineI'm going to be like ArnoldSchwarzenegger and Jam Lee Curtis inTrue Lies. Do you ever see that movie?But anyway, so right at the beginning,they're like they're spies and they'redoing the tango at this, you know, likegangsters mansion or something. And it'slike he leans her over, she grabs therose from the table in her in her mouth.Like I'm going to try that. I'm going todrop my wife and she's going to hit her.She's going to be mad at me and lots ofpeople are going to see and I'm going tofeel stupid, right? And [snorts] sothat's why we don't do those things.

00:31:54Butit's so critical to driving thoseprocesses of learn of neuroplasticitythat we make those mistakes that we haveto kind of let go of some of that thatwe feel as adults like we we think thateverybody expects us to be good ateverything and the best at everythingand you know we shouldn't fail weshouldn't make mistakes but as you havecovered many times um it's so criticalto to do that and so I thinkacknowledging that shame componentexists and leaning into it is going tobe a really important important part oftrying to maintain this function overtime.>> Couple of quick anecdotes and then someencouragement to do the tango class. UmI'll start with tango. My grandparentson my Argentine side did tango untilthey're into their 80s.>> So it can be done but they learned itrather young. Um>> and Tim Ferrris as I recall talked aboutthis one of his books. Yeah, he learnedtango. And um and that gets to the otherpoint which is I want to talk about sexdifferences in uh results of experimentson in plasticity but when you dance thesorts of dances that we're talking aboutso salsa tango>> typically this is you know traditionallythe male leads>> um years ago I had a girlfriend who wasreally into salsa

00:33:10so I went salsadancing with her in the Bay Area onenight and it's it's a tricky thing ifyou're not skil salsa dancer becausebasically you're taking your girlfriendto go dance with a bunch of other men,you know, and then you you until youlearn. So the the it's it's there areconditions that make it harder, socialconditions that make it harder for mento learn than women to learn particulartypes of dance, unless as Tim did, hegot a dance coach, a female dance coachto teach him how to lead and then helearned how to lead and then he was ableto dance tango competitively. I think Ihave that right, Tim. They'll correct mein the comments, but as as I recall,that's the story. So there's that. Umnot that following is is trivial. Itrequires some skill. But there the ifthe person again traditionally the malecan't lead the whole thing it it doesn'twork>> right. So um I just made you morenervous about going to this class butyou should do it because um I had aroommate when I was a posttock who was aneurology resident at UCSF and she wouldgo do tango late at night and she wouldcome back a different person. And sothis is like the other piece here is youknow it seems that when we are tryingsomething truly new that involvesinteractions with other people and we gointo that willingness toenter beginner's

00:34:25mind or whatever it isembrace the shame and as we start to geteven just a little bit better atsomething. I mean it almost seems likethere's this kind of halo around therest of our life. We go to work the nextday differently. We interact with peopledifferently. like our nervous system ischanged. What do you think that is? Imean, we can make up stories aboutchemicals and maybe we should becausethey're likely to be true. What do youthink that is? That like general changein arousal like you're sleeping better,you're you're more excited for the otherthings in life when you're trying tolearn tango and you get just a littlebit better. What is that?>> I don't think I would make up anythingabout about chemicals. I think you couldboil a lot of it down to we like to begood at stuff and we like to overcomethings, right? There's just like thisthis like core need to be challenged andthen to overcome those challenges. And Ithink there's a lot of downstreameffects of of not doing that and theycould be um you know related to mentalhealth. It could also be related tophysical health, right? because we thinkabout physical and and um cognitive oror um you know stressor psychologicalrelated challenges and and the processof overcoming them because that's whatreally drives you know a lot of physicalor or mental psychological growth and Ithink that's something

00:35:40that you knowfundamentally is part of what we need ona daily basis and so you did this thingthat you were bad at and you got betterat it and you proved to yourself hey I'mcapable I'm able to overcome challengesis I'm able to you know engage and andand do difficult things and I think thepsychological benefits of that you justthat process of engaging with achallenge overcoming it uh working hardto do that um I think that's just youknow almost like a core psychologicalneed that we have and then thattransfers to all these other things ohyeah I can do these hard things I'mgoing to do that other thing I'm excitedto try something else that's difficultI'm excited to challenge myself againand it needs to be something that feelsfeels uh meaningful, feels difficultenough that you have the ability toovercome with some dedicated practice oryou know focus time working on it. Ifit's too hard, right, you can have theopposite effect, right? Like makingsomething so difficult somebody can't doit and they just fail again and againand again and again, right? That thatcan obviously have the opposite effect.But something that you know you can getbetter at, you know, you can work on,you can see progress, right? I think allof that then has all these knock-oneffects.>> Maybe we could talk about flow for asecond. you know, one of the mostbastardized terms in

00:36:55uh neuroscienceperformance psychology and the rest.When Cheeks Mahai talked about itinitially, um when he really defined theterm, it was about um being engaged in aprocess where you have a certain levelof skill, but the thing you're trying todo is just beyond your skill level. So,really striving a bit and that kind ofgeneral sense of well-being that cancome from that. Nowadays, I think peopleassume flow is when you are able to dosomething in the absence of kind offeeling of effort. It's like you justyou you get the magic power kind ofthing, which is not what flow wasoriginally intended to to mean. I'd liketo know how you think of this concept offlow and whether or not it's even ameaningful term. And I I you know I tipmy hat to Stephen Cutotler and otherswho have written about it and andstudied it and>> a great respect for Stephen and um whathe's done uh with the concept and and uhand I think it's a meaningful conceptbut I don't think we really know how todefine it. And I think this is importantin the context of plasticity because Ithink what we see in Harry Potter moviesand sci-fi and um you know fight cluband everything else is that suddenlywe're just going to be endowed withthese powers just because we want

00:38:10themand need them and that is not how itworks.>> Yeah.>> So is flow an expression of skill or isit the striving to attain a skill?>> I think of flow as the maximalexpression of a complex learned skill.like you said, you're like right at theedge of your capabilities, but you'restill managing to maintain um maintainfunction whatever whatever skill it isthat you're you're performing at.The thing that really frustrates me isthatbecause of that or you know some versionof their definition of flow, people likewell I've always got to search for flowlike everything happens in flow and likewe need to be in flow all the time whichdoesn't make any sense to me whatsoever.There's two different parts of this. Soone is that people assume that foroptimal performance you need to be inflow. That is not true. Um flow is oneversion of your of your of of being ableto you know perform at the best of yourabilities. If you think about this interms of sports performance there mightbe broadly two states associated withtop level performance. One is flowstates the other is clutch states. Andso a clutch state um you are still atthe optimal level of arousal right if wethink about the arousal curve andperformance which we can come back tobut so

00:39:26at the optimal level of arousalwhich is required for you know you toperform the skill that you're trying toperform but when you're in a clutchstate it still feels like hard workright so like there are you you couldtalk to any athlete about a time thatthey um they performed well they wonthey you know they did at the best oftheir abilities but it was hardcognitive work it hard physical work. Itwas a slog, but they still managed toperform well. That's a that's a clutchstate. And people can perform at thebest of their abilities in clutchstates. Um, and you know, even thoughthey're not in flow, it's not all comingto them easily, right? It requires themto like really focus and work hard toget get the job done. And both of thoseare perfectly reasonable states in whichto perform. And assuming that you haveto be in flow to perform just isn't trueif you look at like how you knowathletes perform in the moment. Theother side of it is that some peoplehave intimated that flow is required forlearning or like optimal learninghappens in flow which doesn't make anysense. Right? If we if we talked aboutmaking mistakes and errors and frictionrequired for learning that is notconducive to flow because it's uh it canbe stressful, it could be frustratingand sort of the other side of that is ifyou know flow is

00:40:41expressing your skill.If you want to get better at that skill,you have to work even further beyondyour current capacities which which willmove you out of flow, right? because oflike the friction, the mistakes and theerrors that come from that. So I thinkyeah, flow is super interesting and I Iwouldn't pretend to be an expert inflow, but there are all these otherstates where learning happens, whereperformance happens that aren't flow andthat's fine, too, right? But sometimesit's hard and that's okay.>> I'm so glad you're here. I I've beenlooking for this conversation for wellsince I started the podcast because Icompletely agree about flow and themisunderstanding of the concept of offlow. I've never heard of a clutchstate. Um is that a term that you coinedor something?>> No, no, it's in the sports psychologyliterature. They'll talk about>> that's why I haven't seen it. Yeah, cuzI'm very familiar with theneuroplasticity literature, but I'veI've never heard of it. Maybe I'm justnot up to date on my reading. But umthank you for introducing clutch statewhich is when one is performing well butit's it is involving and this is a termI did make up sort of some limbicfriction like you have to push yourselfyou're feeling constrained it's thatyou're at that edge where it's there'sreal challenge you're not you'redefinitely not in flow.>> Yeah. Uh, fantastic

00:41:56clutch stateeveryone. Um, learn it, know it, embraceit, um, live there for some period oftime in your life across your lifespan.Uh, and you'll be better off. I I I meanthat. Maybe we could drill into this alittle bit more because you know severaltimes on this podcast or more we'vetalked about the anterior midsulatecortex the structure that you knowmaintains size and super aers who takeon hard things andyou know this area of the brain thatseems associated with tenacity whichwhen stimulated people feel like animpending challenge there's actuallyneurosurgery experiments done by JoeParvey at Stanford people feel like ohthere's an impending challenge I'm goingto lean into it this is sounds more likethe clutch state than certainly and flowstate. So maybe the thing we need toembrace is the clutch state. It's prettycatchy. It's not quite as catchy asflow, but but I I like it because umit has an element of like friction kindof written into it. You heard it firstfrom Tommywood folks uh not me. A goodfriend who uh comes from the specialoperations community. Uh we talked about>> performance uh years ago and he said,"Well, there's unskilled, skilled,mastery, and virtuosity." M okay cooland he said virtuosity

00:43:12is when someonewho has mastery pushes out to an edge ofeffortwhere they're sort of inviting in theunknown. They don't quite know whatthey're going to do next. They they havesome semblance of an idea like they'renot being um haphazard>> but there's an inviting in of theunknown and they find themselves at anew level.I've probably mentioned this documentaryfour times in the last four episodes,but when Andy Stumpf, former uh tier oneSEAL operator, came on this podcast,former wings sutor,>> Red Bull High Performance team came onhere, he suggested a podcast that I'mnow suggest he suggested, excuse me, adocumentary that I highly recommend,which is The Dark Wizard, which is aboutDean Potter, who was a free climber, afree solo climber, turn wings, etc. Andyou see in that documentary how somebodywho's pushing to their edgeand a little bit beyond where theconsequences the death consequence isable to access levels of skill that arelike jaw-dropping I think even to him.>> Mhm.>> So does that make sense? Like is thatsort of how you think about unskilledskilled mastery virtuosity? Do you thinkvirtuosity is like where someone's

00:44:27like,"All right, I've mastered this thing.Now put me in a situation or I'll putmyself in a situation where I don't knowwhat's going to happen and maybe it'llall go wrong, but when it doesn't, newlevels of performance emerge>> as it's described that way." Um, becauseyou people might talk about virtuosos ina skill just because like they're somuch better than everybody else, right?But like that that thatdefinition requires a specific scenarioand moment of performance, right?>> So then that sounds a lot like how Iwould think about flow,>> right? And so like when you when youlook at some of the classic descriptionsfrom individuals who've been in thatkind of level. So like um there'sthere's one from so I I do a lot of workin Formula 1. So there's one from AtonCenter where he's>> from who? I'm sorry. and Senna. Um,>> the driver.>> The driver.>> Sra.>> Yeah. Senna. Senna. Excuse me. Sra isDavid Senna. The great podcaster. He'sthe He's the virtuoso of of uhperformance and business and financepodcasting.>> Don't let any of your uh F1 lovingfriends hear that part of the podcast.>> No, no, I like Sen. [laughter]Some people consider him to be the thethe best Formula 1 driver of all

00:45:42time.He died tragically in a in a crash. Umbut there's this um famous quote fromhim where he's driving in the MonacoGrand Prix and basically what hedescribes is that he's like going fasterand faster and faster. He's like this isbeyond my capabilities. Like he doesn'tfeel like he's actually connected todoing the thing. It's just kind of likehappening. It's exact it's exact likehe's going seconds faster around the lapthan anybody else. And so like that'skind of what like he is so good, right?he achieved mastery and in that in thatmoment he's displaying virtuosity inthat kind of um in that under that kindof definition and so like that thatfeels like there's a lot of overlapthere.>> Yeah. Ever since seeing this uh DarkWizard uh documentary which I've watchedtwice all the way through because it hasa mental health component. It's a it's abrilliant and beautifully shotdocumentary recently released. I um Ithink about this virtuosity thing likeconstantly. Uh, but I I love this notionof the clutch state because it sounds tome thatthat's the state that we want to seek.And the assumption is that highperformers are in this relaxed, mellowstate, but I'm guessing they spend asignificant amount of time there anddrilling the really boring stuff to makesure they

00:46:57can get there. Yeah.>> Um, Twilight Tharp, who's in her 80s,uh, worldass choreographer,sat in the chair that I'm in anddescribed the daily routine of herworldass dancers. They go through themost basic drills>> every single day, but every iterationfor hours upon hours upon hours beforethey begin quote unquote practice,right? Before before they try andembrace the the new performance piece.>> Mh. but over and over and over oftenafter multiple hours of morning exerciseI think we we don't see all of thatfoundational work and that it needs tobe maintained which raises a question dowe always need to maintain uh practicethe fundamentals>> before I answer your question I thinkthere's there's another useful thingjust kind of to remember that relates toall of this from you know in um you knowathletes and sports particularly on thetraining side there's this general ideaof thirds right? A third of yoursessions,>> training, um, learning, whatever it is,are going to feel great. You're going tofeel really good. You're just going toget stuff, you know, immediately. It'sgoing to just come to you. Um, a thirdwill just be average, right?

00:48:12And a thirdare just going to suck and you just haveto show up and get it done.>> But this is all in the same day or thisweek across across the week, acrossmonths, across years, right? This stuffundulates. And the the the main reasonwhy I say that is becauserelated to this sort of glorification offlow is this idea that these thingsshould just like always come easily tous. But that's completely antitheticalto the idea that we have to work hardand challenge ourselves in order tobuild capacity drive neuroplasticity. Sothere's kind of this weird tensionbetween what people are seeking versuswhat is actually just the part of thethe grind of getting better and you knowo over time and sometimes it is a grindand that's you know again that's okaydoesn't mean you're doing it wrong youmaybe it means you're doing it rightwhen you then think about maintainingthe fundamentals I think yes butprobably it's going to depend on thescenario that that you're that you'rethinking about um because sometimes theskill that you're performing, thefundamentals are kind of baked into thatin in some way. So, it kind kind ofdepends on what the what thefundamentals really are. Maybe, youknow, if it's um so I'm thinking aboutone specific study that was done in inpianists. Um

00:49:27so this is kind it was kindof related to the Ericson studies in uhin violinists, right? But this time theywere looking at uh pianists. And so theyhad four they had four groups uh olderand younger. So the younger was like 20sand 30s, older were 50s and 60s, expertand amateur pianists. And so the expertscame from um German like musicconservatories. Um and then they theylooked at um sort of basic skillsrelated to um you know moving thefingers and other things that that youyou would do playing the piano. And umso they were like very task specificskills related to piano playing. Andwhat they [snorts] found was that themost important predictor of how wellsomebody performed at those pianospecific skills was not their age, itwas how much they practice. So it's justthat getting those reps in helps youmaintain those sort of like basicfunctions. And maybe right when you'replaying very complex piano pieces,you're encompassing all thosefundamentals anyway, right? You don'tneed to you don't need to like do youryou don't need to do your scales everyday because some of that stuff is kindof built in. But you will also seepeople as they warm up say you maybethey will do scales and things cuzthat's part of just like you know thethe

00:50:42warm up maybe part maybe that'sroutine right this is me getting in themo in in the mode of you know playing acomplex piece but then maybe some of itis just kind of helping to maintainthose fundamental skills. I'd like totake a quick break and acknowledge oursponsor, AG1. AG1 is a vitamin mineralprobiotic drink that also includesprebiotics and adaptogens. I discoveredAG1 way back in 2012, long before I everhad a podcast, and I've been taking itevery day since. The reason I startedtaking AG1, and the reason I still takeit every day, is because AG1 is, to myknowledge, the highest quality and mostcomprehensive of the foundationalnutritional supplements on the market.AG1 is designed to support things likegut health, immune health, and overallenergy. And it does so by helping tofill any gaps that you might have inyour daily nutrition. I get asked prettymuch all the time, "If I could only takeone supplement, what should thatsupplement be?" And my answer is alwaysAG1. It has just been so helpful forsupporting all aspects of physicalhealth, mental health, and performance.If you would like to try AG1, you can goto drinkag.com/hubermanto get a special offer. For a limitedtime, AG1 is giving away a free bottleof their new Omega-3 co-enzyme Q10product. Omega-3 and co-enzyme Q10 areknown to support cardiovascular

00:51:58health,cellular health, and energy, generally,brain health, and much more. Ipersonally take them both every day.Again, go to drink AG1.com/hubermanto get a free bottle of the new Omega-3co-enzyme Q10 with your first AG1subscription.>> So, now's your opportunity to kill the10,000 hours. I mean, I know otherpeople have attempted to, but what whatdoes that really boil down to? Is itsimply that about 8 hours a day ofpractice for a dedicated period of timeis what leads to rapid plasticity andthat's what was measured or is therereally a a some sort of rule about timeunder uh seeking clutch state? Thesimple answer is what the study showedwas that 10,000 hours was the averageamount of time that an expert violinisthad spent practicing by the time theyreached 20 years old. That's what thestudy showed. They weren't even expertsby that point. That was how much they'dpracticed, you know, essentially intheir youth. So that number of hoursdoesn't even translate over to trueexpertise in violinists in this onespecific example. So I don't thinkthere's some fixed number of hours uhrequired. It is interesting. Other partsof that study kind of looked at the thethe practice routines of these expert

00:53:13violinists and what they found was thatthey tended to practice for about twosessions of 60 to 90 minutes a day. AndI think that's a pretty good rule,right? If you're going to do somethinghard, you're pushing beyond your currentskill level, focusing for 60 to 90minutes, maybe with, you know, a coupleof breaks in there, um, a couple oftimes a day, that's probably about asmuch as most people can do. And I thinkthat also relates to how we perform on aday-to-day basis in other areas of life,right? We kind of expect that we can goto work and we can work really hard foreight hours straight during the day, butlike the brain doesn't really work likethat. If we're doing hard um, cognitivework, right? you're being you're focusedand highly challenged as you might be ifyou're a um you know a future virtuosoon the violin. You're trying to you knowreally practice and push yourself. Youcan only really do that for you knowchunks of 20 to 30 minutes maybe acouple of times of the break right? Solike that's why Pomodoro, even thoughthere's no like good studies on thePomodoro technique, like for those timeperiods, you know, 25 minutes with a5-minute break a few times, they do kindof fit into that kind of rhythm thattranslates over to multiple areas wherewe might want to use our brains. Um, and

00:54:28just remember that hard cognitive workand that process of learning can onlyreally happen in those kinds of size ofof chunks if you want to do themsustainably.>> Yeah. Before I started writing my book,somebody uh who's published several uhvery well-received books said, "You canonly write for about four solid hoursper day>> uh broken up into a couple of sessions.">> I was like, "Come on." I mean, like I'mI'm not trying to boast, but I used togo into the lab and sit down and work ona grant for six hours or something likethat. And I started thinking like, wasit really six hours? Go in there, see mystudents and postocs, sit down. Okay,then there's lunch. I need to walk mydog. Yeah. you know, and there were somelate nights, but then the next morningI'm kind of dragging because I was in,you know, in my office really late andyou you get real honest with yourselfreal quick and you go, "Oh, okay." Inthe periods of time where I definitelypushed to the 6 8 10 12 hours of justnon-stop work as a deadline approached,there was a compensatory drop in outputafter after you clicked send. And so I Ithink>> you're right. They're right. It'ssomewhere between maybe I mean you'resaying 60 to 90 minutes and they'resaying 4 hours, but not a whole lot morethan that for real focused in clutchstate work.

00:55:44>> Yeah.>> So really digging in and nodistractions, no phone, no checking yourtext messages, just you know.>> Yeah.>> Do you ever give yourself uh forcedconstraints to get real work done?>> Not to force it. I will say that um oneof the best ways to like truly getdeep focused work done is to eliminatedistractions, right? That's one of themost important things that you can do.So close the email. I like put my phonein a different room or something becauselike nowadays your own, you know, closeSlack, I have Slack, Teams, my lab and Iuh we uh interact on, you know, wemessage back and forth on WhatsApp. Likethere's email. I've got like five or sixdifferent ways that people can likeconstantly try and get my attention,right? So, like eliminating distractionsis really important. And again, I returnto Gloria Mark's work. She wrote an anexcellent book called Attention Span ifanybody's like really interested inthis. Um, but you get used to a patternof distraction such that when you're umnot actually being distracted, you willdistract yourself,>> right?>> Um, and but you can be trained out ofthat as well. But so you know that thingwhere you're trying to do work and youlike reach for your phone for no reason.It's because your brain is kind of usedto this pattern of

00:56:59you around about nowI'm somebody will text me or send me anemail and I'll and I'll reach my myphone. So you you go looking for it>> even if it hasn't happened. But againyou can train yourself out of that ifyou if you have periods where you're notgetting constantly distracted. So I willeliminate notifications. Um, but atleast for me, what I found is that if Iif I have a ton of friction in terms oftrying to get something done, I willusually step away from it. Um, becausethere's something in there that justlike needs to click or come back beforeI can like really engage in it. Or>> if you're at a sticking point.>> Yeah. Mhm.>> So if if I'm at a sticking point or it'slike if something feels like it's justnot coming in the moment, uh I willusually switch over to to to somethingelse, which is also kind of a normalit's a it's it's one of a a possible setof patterns of work, which is that youhave two or three projects you'reworking on on any given time. If onejust like isn't quite working, then youcan switch over to the other one andcome back to it. [snorts] And then likethe alternative is that when thedeadline is so close and uh you knowthis often happens with a with a grantdeadline or you know when I was writingmy book and there's a you know a bookdeadline and you I've got to get this tomy editor in um how however many days or

00:58:14hoursI I tend to just not need to toeliminate those things because I'll I'lljust I'll just focus in like I I I don'tfeel that kind of draw to be distractedby other things. But that usually onlyhappens for relatively short periods oftime, right? It's going to be a day ortwo or hours during a day rather than,you know, extended periods of time.>> Are you familiar with this recent studyabout phone on the table, phone in thebag? We would just remind people that ifyou're your phone has to be out of theroom, even if it's in your bag beneathyour chair turned off,>> you can still focus, but there's a acost.>> Your cognitive flexibility, etc. reallysuffer. So that means that the brain isunconsciously expecting a call. You'resort of waiting for it. And and the wayyou describe this attentional breakexpectation thing um that we getentrained to interruptions is uh reallyinteresting. Um maybe this is whymeditation is such a useful tool forimproving focus is that it's just aforced no breaks>> yeah thing. Although it's pretty easy todrift in meditation if you are not usedto doing 20 minutes of meditation. Yousit down to do that you set the timerlike your brain can end up way off thetrail. there could be some benefit tothat as well, right? Because there's,you know, without

00:59:29kind of building thatin and I and I don't routinely meditate,but um unless you have some parts ofyour day where actually you're noteither putting in information,distracting yourself, thinking about aspecific thing, right? You don'tnecessarily get that time to integrate.Um, you know, that's kind of, you know,the classic is you come up with yourbest ideas in the shower, right? becausethat's actually the time when you don'thave your phone on you and you're notwatching TV and you're not doing allthese other things, you know, at the atthe same time. So maybe yes, that's notwhat meditation is formally for, but itcould potentially be beneficial if yourif your mind's going to wander, youknow, making new connections, um youknow, coming up with new ideas, havingthat space and time to do it, you know,could potentially be beneficial, too.>> In these studies, these large scale uhtrials, what was the diet intervention?Can we distill it down to some thingsthat um everyone should do or ought toconsider?>> Most interventions in the sort of umcognitive and psychological space arefocused on some version of theMediterranean diet. Um there's uh themind diet um Mediterranean interventionto prevent neurogenerative

01:00:44delay. Itcame out of the Rush U memory and agingproject and it's basically just aversion of the um Mediterranean dietkind of focused on um dementiaprevention and and the way theyinitially created it was they looked atfoods that people ate more or less ofand created a score and those who had ahigher score tends to you know had alower risk of later de dementia. Itwasn't an intervention when it was whenit was first um developed but that waskind of the version. And it it's kind ofcombination of the Mediterranean dietand the DASH diet which is um like a aanti-hypertension blood pressuretreatment type diet. So it's uh you knowseafood, vegetables, berries, wholegrains, that kind of stuff.>> Not too much uh saturated fat or animalprotein.>> And so this is very similar to the dietthey used in the Smiles trial which wasthe first randomized control trial indepression that showed significantimprovements in in mood symptoms. Ithink the the principles are useful, butthere's not necessarily a huge amount ofevidence to say that like this is theway that you you should or you have toeat uh to maintain cognitive health.There was actually um a big trial of theof the mind diet. It was published inthe New England Journal of Medicine acouple of years ago and they compared uhthe mind diet to standard caloric

01:01:59restriction. Um and actually they sawsimilar benefits in both in both groups.There have been big observationalstudies that have looked at how muchtheir diet looks like a Mediterraneandiet. And those whose diets look morelike Mediterranean diets, yes, they havea lower risk of dementia. Of course,right, this is observational data,right? So, it's not you can't say it'scausal. But what's interesting in someof these studies, so a big one that cameout of the UK bio bank was that they umtook out individual uh foods or foodcomponents of the Mediterranean diet tosee if that changed the relationshipbetween the Mediterranean diet anddementia risk. And there was no food oryou know olive oil or food group or youeating more or less meat that changedthe relationship between theMediterranean diet and dementia risk. Sowhat that tells me is it's much moreabout whole foods. they're nutrientdenserather than avoiding any you have to eatyou have to consume lots of olive oilright or you have to restrict meatbecause if those things are eaten in thecontext of all this other stuff it'sreally that bigger context of dietquality and nutrient density that reallymatters so the the parts of diet that Ithink about are the you know there'sthree so there's

01:03:14energy there'snutrients and then there's overalldietary pattern. So, one of theconfounding things about that trial Itold you about the mind diet versuscaloric restriction is you're like,well, the mind diet should win out,right? How does caloric restriction dojust as well? And [snorts] in the kindof average population,we tend to have some issues withmetabolic health and have been in astate of chronic energy excess for someperiod of time. There's been some verynice studies that have looked at brainaging and brain volume or brain reserveum across different populations. Therewas um there was uh one group thatlooked at different um tribes inBolivia, the Bolivian Chiman who arehunter gatherer group, the Metan who arekind of an intermediate group betweensort of the Chiman and like a standardkind of industrialized group and thenindustrialized humans in the US andEurope. And what they found is there'skind of this um bell-shaped curvebetween energy availability and brainvolume. And in general, brain volume,right, the more the better, right, wethink. And so if you're chronicallycalorically restricted, your brain issmaller um because you just don't havethe resources to invest in, you know,the structure um and to maintain it. Atthe other end, you see the

01:04:29same thing.So if you're chronically in a chronicstate of chloric excess, you also tendto have a smaller brain on average. Andthis is related to metabolic disease umyou know and you know potentially andwhat comes with it um higher levels ofinflammation high blood pressure thingslike that that we know can negativelyimpact the brain. So the most importantthing and I think this is where some ofthe benefits of caloric restrictionhappened in that in that trial comparedto the mind diet was that you knowpeople's cognition improved just becausethey decreased their energy intake to apoint that was you know more you knowwas essentially kind of what their brainkind of needed or you know kind ofsupported their overall physical healthwhich then affects you know cognitivehealth and and brain volume and andbrain function. So the first thing to dois to make sure that you're eatingenough but not too much right and that'svery simplistic but like energy isreally critical energy availability nottoo low not too high then the next thingthat you need is there is is nutrientswe know there are several criticalnutrients for uh related to cognitivefunction and risk of dementia. Um theones that we have the best evidence forare vitamin D, iron, omega-3 fattyacids, uh the B vitamins uh involved andthe B vitamins involved in methylation.So particularly B12 and folate

01:05:44alsopotentially B6 and riboflavin althoughthat might depend a little bit more onon the individual. Then there are someother nutrients that you know have somepretty good evidence for them. So manyof the antioxidant uh polyphenols thingsthat you get from berries, coffee, tea,chocolate, the carotenoids that makethings orange, yellow and red. Umlutein, zeazanthin, aazanthin if itcomes from seafood that's that's whatmakes shrimp and salmon pink. Um andthen you know some other aspects likedietary fiber seems to have you knowsome some benefits as well.>> Not magnesium.>> So magnesium is absolutely absolutely inthere in there too. Um and in general Ithink um and the so magnesium uh zinc umthen there's some of the structurallipid components things like choline andethanolamine that you might get from umnuts and seeds or eggs. They have someslightly less you like less evidence.you really when you're looking at umbrain changes over time and dementiarisk, but they certainly do seem to berelated to to cognitive function. So,there are some studies that show thatthose who have lower magnesium intakestend on average to perform less well onsome some cognitive function tests. So,all of those do seem to be important. Ihave two questions about nutrients andbrain

01:06:59health in the short and[clears throat] long term. And they haveto do with interactions betweennutrients,>> which at least to my understanding arerarely explored. You know, you'll seestudies of supplementing omega-3 orhaving people eat some fatty fish or orless and so on, but rarely in thepresence or absence of some othervitamin that, you know, that canpotentially impact the same pathways. Sothere's synergy. There's also, you know,necessity. So that could impact results.The other piece is on what time scaleare these nutrients needed and on whattime scale are they metabolized? Somaybe to just kind of drill into thesecond question first. So you know I'mnot out here as like the defender ofsupplements, but I've been takingsupplements in various forms and eatingwhole foods and eating as generallyhealthily. You know, less so when I wasyounger, but still pretty healthy andmore so as I get older. But here's wheremy brain goes. Wait, whole food isgreat, but let's say dark leafy greenshave a bunch of things in them that arefundamentally important for brain andbodily health. Great. And they havefiber, etc.How many times a week am I eating darkleafy greens? Let's say I do Monday,Tuesday, Wednesday. I'm great. But then

01:08:14I'm traveling on, you know, Thursday,Friday. Should I be just supplementingThursday, Friday? Am I good until thenext week? I think one of the reasonswhy eating really well, I think everyoneknows what that means, not enoughcalories, not too many, mostly wholefoods, etc., enough vegetables, fruits,and high quality protein and qualityfats.I think the reason why supplements stillbecome enticing to me, maybe evennecessary, is because you can take themevery day very easily. So you can makesure that you're in range and maybeabove range. So let's take one of thesethings. Okay, omega-3 fatty acids. I Ibelieve that the data are prettycompelling. They can be helpful forhealth, maybe even brain health.Certainly, I believe that. But let's saythe early part of my week is omega-3rich and the later part of my week isomega-3 poor.Am I good? Versus, you know, spreadingit out across the week. it just becomesdifficult to eat in a truly healthy wayif uh if it's the case that it has to beconsistent every 24 hours. So what do weknow?>> So again, I think we're often tempted toover complicate this and

01:09:30try and think,oh, you know, I have to hit all thesethings at this interval and if I can'tdo that, then I have to supplement. Andin reality, we probably have more bufferin the system than than we realize. So,um, omega-3 fats is a really goodexample. Your adapose tissue, your fattissue is a depo. You know, it kind ofstores excess omega-3s. I actually wrotea paper on this with a colleague ofmine, Rory Heath, a few years ago. Thelongchain omega-3s that we have in ourin our fat stores um may help to explainwhy supplementation does or doesn't workin some of these trials because>> some people just have more kind ofhanging around. And if you eat more thanyou need on one day,um especially in a state of caloricexcess, um that's going to be stored inyour fat tissue. And then when uh you'resleeping or when you uh initiate uhlipolysis, the breakdown of fat. Soparticularly during periods like you'redoing exercise, those then get releasedand they you know the the brain then hasaccess to them. So there's some studiesthat um show that when you this relatesto the form of the omega-3s as well. Somany people will tell you that you haveto take omega-3s in the phosphoipid formuh which is like a a special it's a

01:10:45special supplement. Um you can get itfrom krill. Um and the the form is wherethe the fat is attached to like a aphosphoipid head group just like itwould be if it was sitting in in a cellmembrane. And there's a specific pathwayfor those to get into the brain.>> It's only krill or it's fish oil also.>> Uh no. So fish tends to be thetriglyceride form uh which is you knowglycerol and then three fatty acidsattached.>> When you compare a single dose ofphosphoipid versus triglyceride formthen more of the phosphoipid form getsinto the brain. Some of this, you know,most of this comes from rodent studies,but what's interesting is that if yousupplement over several days, it allkind of comes out in the wash becausethe triglyceride form um cycles throughthe adapose tissue as a depo and then itgets released and the brain can then useit. So, if you're going to take just oneday of supplement and you want to get asmuch of that omega-3 in your brain, yes,you should take the we think we shouldyou should take the phosphoipid form.But the form that comes in seafood,which is primarily the trig triglycerideform, is regulated through the body'sfat stores. So, this is a really longway of me telling you if you eat somefish early in the week, you don't thenhave to supplement later in the week aslong as you got kind of enough. Andespecially if you've consistently

01:12:00eatenseafood across your entire life becauseyou probably have a bit of a depo. Andso what you see in severaltrials where they've given omega-3s todecrease dementia risk or improvecognitive function. So many studies oflike that have been done. There wasactually a very recent one that justcame out of of USC where they gaveomega-3s for a long period of time. Theymeasured omega-3 levels in the in theCSF, right, in the spinal fluid of thesepeople to show that this the omega-3swere getting into the brain. they didn'tsee any changes in terms of cognitivefunction or um brain structure on an MRIscan. So, everybody's like, well,omega-3s don't work. But when you kindof squint at the data and and theydidn't quite give me the data that Iwanted, but when you look at it, thosethe people in the trial just didn't seemthat omega-3 deficient in the firstplace. So, right, if this isn'tsomething that you need more of to startwith, giving a load more of it isn'tgoing to make that much of a difference,right? And this is the case for all ofthese different supplements. So the bestadvice if you have access to it is totest your levels. Test your vitamin Dlevels. Test your hemoglobin and ironlevels. Test your omega-3 levels. Testyour homocyine levels which is as amarker of B vitamin status which we knowis a a risk factor for cognitive

01:13:15declinedementia as well. So if um if you cantest your levels and it shows that youneed more and yes there are the thenormal ranges that you have on a bloodtest are not necessarily the same as therisk ranges. So um homoyine is a goodexample. A normal range for homocyinewhich goes up if you need uh some ofthese methylation dependent B vitaminsthe normal range might go up to like 15or 16. But we know that risk isdefinitely elevated above 13 and isprobably elevated above sort of 10 to11. So what your target range reallymight be is is probably lower than whatthe normal range might be. But we havevery good evidence that if you thensupplement when somebody is above thatrange and you bring that down, you seesignificant improvements in in cognitivefunction or slowed cognitive decline.That is particularly the case foromega-3s and B vitamins that lowerhomocyine. And so this is theinteractions that you were talking aboutearlier and this is the best one that weknow of although I'm sure there are manymore. Like I said, there are lots oftrials that have given omega-3s or havegiven u B vitamins to lower homocyineand just haven't seen much of an effect.And everybody goes, "Oh, well, theydon't work." But there are now at leastthree randomized

01:14:30control trials thathave shown that omega-3 status and Bvitamin status interact and they'redependent on one another. So, if yougive uh B vitamins to somebody who haselevated homocyine, you bring down theirhomocyine, but they have poor omega-3levels, you don't see any benefit. Andthat's been shown in two trials. It wasoriginally shown in the vittog trialthat was run out of the University ofOxford. Um it was then uh replicated inthe B proof uh trial. Then the otherside has also been shown there was a inthe omega AD trial they showed thatsupplements with omega-3s didn't resultin any benefit if people had elevatedhomocyine. [snorts] So this that's justone example and you can imagine like youkind of said there are probably lots ofthese and if we're not you know goinginto a study actually looking like wellwhat nutrients does this person need andthen supplementing with them um you youyou're not going to find any effect likeyou shouldn't be surprised when there'sa when when the study doesn't showanything. potentially the onerecent um example of kind ofjust giving a broadbased kind of set ofnutrients with a multivitamin thatseemed to work fairly well was theCosmos study people may have heard of.It was thousands of

01:15:46people of olderadults um and they were given either amultivitamin or a a flavonoidsupplement.>> It's like a sententrum type vitamin.Yeah, it was it was Centrum silver,right? The most basic multivitamin, just100% of the recommended daily allowance,not like no mult no like massive dosesof anything.>> And in that study, those who got the milgot the multivitamin saw, you know,changes in cognitive function thatsuggested some like some someimprovements. And but that was literallyjust covering the bases, right? Nomassive doses. The most basicmultivitamin. So in the kind of generalpopulation, I think you could say thatsomething like that is probably areasonable strategy. But what they alsoshowed was that um supplementing withthis antioxidant cocoa flavonol was onlybeneficial in those who tended to have apoor quality diet to start with. Right?So they just weren't getting many ofthese kind of compounds from their diet.If you're drinking a lot of coffee,eating a lot of berries, seeing a lot offruits and vegetables, you probablydon't need it because you're alreadygetting it.>> I'd like to take a quick break andacknowledge our sponsor, Function.Function provides over 160 advanced labtests to give you a clear snapshot ofyour bodily health. This snapshot givesyou insights into your heart health,your hormone health, autoimmunefunction, nutrient levels, and muchmore. They've also recently added accessto advanced MRI

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01:18:16functionhealth.com/huberman.Thank you for that clarification. I Ilook forward to a day hopefully not longfrom now where people get their bloodwork done.They are told and they decide, it's acollaboration after all, whichsupplements to take.Ideally, those supplements are tailoredto them. So, it's not gazillion tabletsand capsules and then they can redotheir blood work and see whether or notthings come into range. And of course,that should be measured againstsubjective>> experience of well-being and sleep andall of that. That that's not hard to doin today's environment of technology andtrackers and blood testing. It's justthat uh we're a little bit in the umstill in the '9s. uh even just the waythat most people talk about supplements,certainly not you, but I think whenpeople hear supplements, they go, "Oh,it's expensive urine." Okay, that'svitamin minerals. Maybe some of that isjust getting urinated out, but thenthere's food replacementsupplementation. And then there'ssupplements to get a specific desiredeffect like speed up the transition timeto sleep, get more slowwave sleep, ummore focus, etc. So it's unfortunatethat we don't have good nomenclaturelike we do in science where where wherewords are very important

01:19:31so that peoplecan communicate with accuracy.>> And I also wonder whether okay if youknow one gram of of uh omega-3 uh EPAper day is good um but maybe three isbetter even though I'm at you know upperrange upper reference range. And this issomething that like nobody really wantstoaddress because then it sounds likequoteunquote biohacking, but ultimatelyI think people want to feel good. Theywant to live longer. No one wants to doanything dangerous. I feel like we'rereally like in the in like prehistorictimes with with how we think how mostpeople think about nutrition andsupplementation. I feel like the last 40years have been spent mostly focusing onwhat's bad for us. get trans fats, bad,fried foods, bad, eating too much, bad,right? Um, energy over energy toxicity,bad. Um, too much alcohol, bad. Zero isbetter than any, but you could probablydrink a little bit and be fine. Okay, ifyou're going to take nicotine, don'tsmoke it or vapor dip it or like we sortof figured it out, right? Don't hit yourhead. If you do, don't hit it twice, youknow? Like, like we've sort of beenspending so much time on the don'ts thatnow I feel like we're in this excitingtime of what can you do for one'shealth? And then

01:20:47there's this divide,right? Just eat whole foods, you'll befine. And you've actually convinced methat we'll be fine. The question is,could I be that much better?>> This is really interesting to me becausethere's there's there's two differentparts to it potentially, although, youknow, they may end up being the samething. So one is if we're thinking aboutif we're thinking broadly aboutimproving brain health, cognition at thepopulation level,what's really important is kind ofraising the floor. Like what is going towork for everybody and get most of usmost of the way there. So like thatreally is improving food quality. Um andthen you know access to those foods aswell, right? because that's diff youknow that can be very inequitable likecan people afford it do they know how tocook it can you know can they access itand then within that I think we alsoknow we have very good evidence for cutoffs that predict risk and if you can'tget those um nutrients from food I thinkwe should supplement I think I I like tocall nutrients like the great leveler oflike there's no point in arguing aboutdifferent diets because your bodyrequires these nutrients and like Idon't care where you get them from aslong as you get them, right? So, if youneed to get them from supplements, Ithink that's fine. That

01:22:02that that shouldbe fine. When you then get kind of tothe next level, like how much furthercan we push function? My answer is Igenuinely don't know. Like when you saylike, you know, if I put so if I if Itest my omega-3index, right, you said it was the kindof the higher level, maybe it's seven oreight or something like that. All right.If you push it to 12, is that better? Igenuinely I genuinely don't know. likesome of these more complex um AIsystems, data collection, kind of seeinghow you then respond individually aslong as you can perform your own sort oflike personal experiments, right? Asmuch as you can hold one variableconstant, have some meaningful outputthat you can kind of track over time,see whether it works or not. Can we thenaggregate those data to kind of betterunderstand this? I'm excited to seewhere that goes. I will say that thebest evidence we have just says inreality don't be deficient. If you canreach that threshold of not beingdeficient or insufficient, maybe that'senough. I'm hopeful that that's thecase, right? Because then more peoplewill get to that point more more easily,but you know, there's there's a lot thatwe have to learn there.>> There was a time in the '9s and 2000s umwhere people would take stuff and dostuff.

01:23:17I'm not talking about anabolicsteroids, although that was happeningtoo. Um, and the whole idea was findthings that work, perform really well inone's job or in one's sport, assumingyou're not breaking any rules, right?But not tell anyone you were doing them.And then what changed, I think, were twothings. One is there became a a marketvalue for telling people what one doesin order to make money. So peoplestarted doing that. And I do believesharing is good, right? But also there'sthis problem that goes with that is thatpeople who sit on the outside of kind ofbrain and and sports performance or justlife just trying to maintain memory anddo well in school and be be a busyperson and still get sleep and all ofthat feel like, oh, you know, it's itwe're being sold this one thing that'ssupposed to make all the difference.>> And I think the thing that really cameto came in and changed all of it are theGLPs. I've never taken a JLP, but I'mjust struck by like Americans are nowwilling to inject themselves. So now itopens up this whole thing aboutpeptides, which you know the majorconsumers of peptides are not the broscience guys like the gym bros, it'swomen>> who look I have female family members,right? Um who have

01:24:32and they'll tell youme and andthere's a long history of people doingand taking things and doing things fortheir cosmetic appearance and notnecessarily sharing it with the world.So, these are the performance-enhancinguh um substances of of a whole differentkind, right? And so, how is it that thispeptide industry is so intriguing to somany people that Yeah. like jabbingyourself with something that is not FDAapproved? Like people are doing it likecrazy, even people who are kind ofcautious about what they'll do and putinto their body>> because of this bridge that the JLPshave made. It's so much easier now tojust people aren't as needlehobic. So Ithink we're entering a time now wherepeople are saying okay you know what thegovernment uh the the the food pyramidthe whatever the food quadrants likeyeah that's just like if you don't wantto die but I want to feel great andthere's actually this potential that youand others are sort of offering like youcan learn things into your older age youcan be uh lean and have great postureinto your 60s7s 80s 90s we see examplesof this so I think that there's thispull we're getting kind of pulledforward towards this promise>> and I don't I think that promise is allabout avoiding the the bad stuff. Andpeople say, "Oh yeah, well mygrandfather lived to be 102 and he wassmoking every great like

01:25:48awesome." But alot of people don't have those kinds ofgenetics in their family.>> They really and genetics play a bigrole. So I'm kind of editorializinghere. I'd love your thoughts on how yousort of sit back and you look at thelandscape of things. Um eat right,exercise, get good sleep, socialize isawesome,>> but that is just that is difficult>> for people that puts people into aclutch state. just trying to do thatwhile managing family and profession andcost of life it you know cost of livingthat's a lot so I think people do wantsomething that gives them more energygives them better sleep you know picksup their mood you know and I don't thinkthere's anything wrong with thinkingabout those things as long as it feedsback to to better behaviors>> particularly when I think about thiskind of this new part of the of thesupplement industry and like you saidthe the you know peptides are just thenext they're the next iteration of thepills and potions and things>> to supplements more than drugs becauselook there's no putting the genie backin the bottle. I don't care what the FDAdoes and they can mark my words peopleare going to find their way to get theirpeptides cuz they love them.>> Mhm. [clears throat]>> And most people are not playing a drugtested sport.>> Yeah. And there may be adverse eventsout there, and this isn't a plug forpeptides, per

01:27:03se, but where are allthese adverse events that are not frombotched injections or from really badblack market sources. Where are all theroid rages of peptides? Where are allthe like I think you can see way moreplastic surgery like like whoa, thatlooks bad kind of things in it likeokay, melanitan's kind of an issuebecause people can really messthemselves up um there. But where areall the adverse events? Until peoplestart dropping dead from BPC injections,people are going to get and they'regoing to take their BPC.>> I'll admit I'm more conservative whenyou're trying a new supplement or youpeptide um I'm going to include peptidesin into this, but of course you could itcould be a pill or or whatever, right?Some peptides come as pills. I [snorts]would want some reasonably good evidenceof efficacy that this is going to workin humans like me. Um,that's probably not a bar that most ofthese things are going to hit anytimesoon.>> No, people don't care. I mean, peoplewho who have no interest in walking intoa gym are contacting me like crazy.These are adults who have kids theylove, spouses they love. They are notmedicine phobic like traditionalmedicine phobic. And they're like,"Should I be taking low dose?

01:28:18Should Ibe micro doing or reatite?" I'm like,"Edite's not even released yet." They'relike, "Where can I get it?" like, areyou kidding me? You know, but it's likeit's incredible what's happened in thelast few years.>> So, we think about what might what youmight think about if if you're going tostart to consider one of these.First of all, I would want to seeevidence that that it works. Themajority of peptides don't have goodquality evidence in humans except theGLP ones, right? They're on the market>> and the growth hormone secrets, but forreasons other than people are takingthem.>> Yeah. Yeah. psychopenia um you knowother and and with with the most ofthose growth hormones secret dogs comewith a risk of insulin resistancediabetes at high you particularly athigher doses>> yeah they're not the super popular onesI think the super popular ones arebesides the GLPS and reat is a GLP andother things but are I would say microdoing of reat and trespatide onecategory for weight loss um fat loss Iwould say BPC57 people are taking itwithout even knowing what the desiredeffect is>> recovery is really broad I think it's>> injury repair that's the thesis no humanevidence as far as no good humanevidence and then there are these other

01:29:34kind of dot dot dot ones I would say umGHK copper for skin>> um appearance those are the threebiggies>> um that seem and the last one inparticular with women>> so I would want evidence that in humansit does what I want it to do most ofthose if not all of them except for theGOP ones don't don't have that evidenceor for the thing or for the thing thatyou're you're you're trying to get rightum but beyond that a question that thatyou have to ask and and I I like I likethis reframing I heard it recently heardit recently from um Jeffrey Bland umwhich is that if you're going toconsider injecting or taking somethingthe first thing you should want to knowis is this safe right if you have goodsafety data then trying it is low risk,right? Even if it doesn't work, right?At least, you know, it's not dangerous.And but we don't even have that for mostof these.>> No, we just have the absence ofdocumented adverse effects.>> Yeah. And>> in the time course that they've beenused because we don't know aboutlong-term use.>> And so, everybody has their own risktolerance. Everybody's welcome to dowhatever whatever they want, of course.But for me personally, first I wouldwant documented evidence of safety

01:30:49andthen you can say, well, I'm willing totry it because, you know, it may or maynot do this thing. But you should alsohave a specific problem that you'retrying to solve, right? Otherwise, whywhy would you bother taking it? But it'salso the case for the vast majority ofsupplements that are out there and havebeen around for long periods of time isfirst of all, we don't have goodevidence of long-term safety at whateverdose that you're taking. And then secondof all, we don't know whether it works.For some we do like creatine, omega-3s,magnesium.>> Yeah. And creatine is actually the best.So like omega-3s, we know that they're,you know, critical nutrient, creatine, Ithink, is the best example because weknow it's very safe, right? So eventhough this this idea of creatineresponders and non-responders, um, youknow, maybe it's going to be useful uhto improve or support cognition for somepeople, not others, may improve physicalperformance for some people, not others.At least we know that you can give highdoses of creatine to frail old olderindividuals with essentially no sideeffects, right? We know it's very safe.So then you can try it and see if itbenefits you. So creatine is a greatexample, but there aren't that manyothers that kind of fit into thatcategory.>> Interesting times.>> Mhm. Again, I go back to I love the ideaof blood testing, tailor tailoringsupplementation to the needs of theindividual, retesting so people can bereally objective about

01:32:04whether theirlevels are moving in the right or wrongdirection. Subjective experience. Um thesleep supplementation thing is kind ofinteresting because either pe peoplefeel it improves their sleep or itdoesn't. Even if it's a placebo effect,which in some cases it could be. Um withsleep tracking people can see are theygetting more REM, are they getting moreslowwave sleep? um such a such afascinating um area. [clears throat] Imean, as you and I both know, there's noplasticity pill,>> but arousal,alertness, focus seems to be aprerequisite of plasticity,>> which is why things like caffeine andstimulants and elyroine and all thesethings that you can find some evidencefor them improving plasticity, but itit's very likely to be indirect, right?It's not that they like make you learn.They set the stage for learning. Itseems to always get back to arousal. So,this is what I I want to get back toexercise as as a tool for opening thewindow for plasticity.>> Could it be that it's simply a matter ofmoving your body to get enoughadrenaline in your body, norepinephrinein the brain, and maybe some dopamine aswell, so that the stage is set forplasticity? And it doesn't matterwhether you jump rope, do jumping jacks,sprint,

01:33:20or do deadlifts. It's all aboutgetting your brain into an alteredadmittedly indogenous chemical alteredstate of just more arousal and then boomyou can go learn is it I mean could itjust be that before we get into theexercise there's a an interesting partwith the supplements that increasearousal right so the stimulants inparticular andI am a big proponent of thinking aboutor um tracking how somebody feels rightI think that how you feel is this kindof ultimate integration of all theseinputs and outputs that the brain iskind of bring bringing together, right?And we know that how you feel, so how anathlete feels is a much better predictorof their performance than their HRV orany of their blood test.>> What are you asking them? Like you howgood do you feel today on one to 10>> some some version>> I feel like I can conquer the world oneI feel like>> exactly on you know and you you can boilit down or I mean you can um spread itout to many more questions. So there'sthere's a question there called the restcue which is all about like how yourecovered how recovered you feel, howmotivated you feel to train or performthat kind of stuff. But essentially itboils down to how feel how good youfeel. If you feel good, you're morelikely to perform well. And that worksbetter than the vast majority

01:34:35of datathat you like biological physiologicaldata you can collect. There are papersthat come out on this every year thatessentially show the same thing.>> That's kind of cool. Yeah,>> because mindset as my colleague AliCrumb has focused on so much likemindset can be you can be honest withyourself and you can lie to yourself andtell yourself like okay you got a lousysleep score but like I feel good.>> Yeah.>> Or I'm you know maybe sleep scores arelike they mean something but todayyou know right I mean and it can workright I mean in terms of performance.Yeah. And so absolutely right then thatgets into like the noibo effect of ofhow we think about either our sleep dataor these other things, right? That thatcan negatively impact our performance.And we have good good studies um thatthat show that as well. So so I I thinkthat like tracking how you feel isreally important. [snorts] But when itcomes to stimulants in particular, theythey seem to dissociate how we feelversus how we perform. Right? So therethere are studies that show that um uhgiving people caffeine makes them[snorts] feel like they're performingbetter, but they're actually performingworse on certain cognitive tasks. Sothere's been studies done with like thethe endback task. So like very complexuh you know working memory task

01:35:50particularly as you get like to like N3you're like trying to remember did I seethis letter three letters ago, right? Inthose kinds of complex cognitive tasks,people who take caffeine feel likethey're performing better but they'reactually performing worse. they'remaking more errors or they're kind of umyou know they're reacting too quickly,they're not really thinking about it.>> And [snorts] there are there's similardata from other stimulants too. So therewas a paper that came out in science acouple of years ago with uh givingpeople um methylenadate some of the orsome of the other like ADHD medicationsin people who don't have ADHD. Thesestimulant medications again show thisdissociation between so they feel great.>> It's like the the inverse of thecannabis thing where people thinkthey've got all these great ideas andthen the next day even they are like ohmy goodness this is dreadful. Yeah. Andthat's again been like formalized instudies where where you can do thesetests where then other peopleobjectively see how creative were youpeople taking cannabis felt like theywere more creative but actually theyweren't. And so the reason why um I saythis is that when we're talking aboutsupplements all these other things we'relike well I feel much better thereforeit must be must be doing something good.We know that with many of thesesupplements you can create thisdissociation between how you how youfeel and how you perform. whereas someof these endogenous things don't havethat

01:37:05effect. So that's why that kind oflike endogenous increase in arousalusing things like exercise is a muchmore reliable way to improve performancebecause you don't kind of get thisassociation between the two. So withexercise in particular, we we you knowknow very well that some period ofexercise it can be resistance training,aerobic exercise, very brief sprints,increase arousal, improve cognitivefunction across multiple domains umimprove learning um and retrieval,right? So so you're definitelyaugmenting some of these processes ofneuroplasticity. Some of that's going tobe related to the catakolamines andother things that get released as youknow as you as arousal increases.>> [snorts]>> But we also know that different types ofexercise have different effects ondifferent parts of the brain. So yes, Ithink some of just like the generalprocess of moving your body um andexerting effort definitely increasesarousal. Um definitely improvescognitive function, improves learning aslong as it's not truly exhaustiveexercise. Like anybody who's done someterrible CrossFit wad or, you know, Iused to be a rower. We used to do a 2Ktest on the rowing machine, right? Youdo a 2K test on a rowing machine, yourbrain does not work afterwards. It'slike

01:38:21a six-minute flat out like V2 maxkind of level of exertion.>> Yeah. Thanks. I'm going to interruptbriefly. Thank you for pointing that outbecause I think that people assume theyhave an infinite amount of energy andthere's crossover and um I certainlyhave done, you know, extra sets tofailure in a great morning workout andthen the in the afternoon I'm dragging.If I hold back just a little bit interms of volume,>> I find I get a real boost out oftraining. But I do low low volume highintensity, you know, usually two setsper exercise to, you know, two or threeexercises per per muscle, likequadriceps being one muscle or somethinglike that. If I do three,it's a small addition, right? The restof the day I'm kind of dragging. Soleaving something in the tank,>> yeah,>> does seem worthwhile. not during thesets, but leaving something in the tankin terms of volume really seems to help.>> Especially if you want your like toperform hard cognitive work directlyafterwards. Sometimes if you're tryingto really push>> sure>> performance or adaptation, right, isworth digging into that hole. But itreally just depends on what you want tobe able to do directly afterwards.>> I think student athletes, especially inD1 schools, they really um come toappreciate this. I've had a few of themin

01:39:36my courses over the years and um theyreally understand when they're pushingvery very being pushed very hard intheir sport and um they know that theyhave to sit in the front of theclassroom, sit upright, do ex take extrameasures to make sure they're not>> dozing off, attention drifting,especially in the age of phones andiPads and and things like that. It'svery very difficult. Um, yeah, thank youfor for mentioning that because they'rejust an extreme case of the rest of us.You know, we're told, we're all verybusy like, "Oh, you need to exercise.It'll help your brain." And people like,"Well, I exercise and I'm exhausted."You know, that's not helping my brain.Let's get practical here.>> So, is there any way uh toit's got to be really subjective and uhdepend dayto day. Is is there any way tokind of formalize that? like should youtrain let's say resistance training orrunning you know should you cap it at anhour should you pull back on theintensity if you have harder cognitivework to do in the afternoon we all wantthe maximum effect of exercise but wedon't want it to undercut our efforts>> yeah I think that a lot of it's going tobe based on what your current capacityis right as as with everything so ifyou're you you want to do some you gotsome you know learning to do you got

01:40:51anexam you want to do some hard cognitivework at, you know, whatever it is,writing a presentation, analyzing data,you uh reading you reading papers,writing your book, then doing some kindof workout that's that's probably belowyour kind of typical or below what whatyou would do when you're really sort ofpushing pushing the envelope. We I thinkthat when you look at meta analyses ofexercise and then cognitive functionimmediately afterwards, the the protocolthat has like the best evidence for itis like a 20 to 30 minute jog, right? Solike that's the kind of um level ofactivity that that really seem to sortof like support all those generalprocesses of plasticity and learning.>> What do you think is going on? Becauseit can't be that much arousal. I meanthat the amount of catakolaminesreleased from again catakolamines folksbeing the you know adrenaline,norepinephrine and uh dopamine umgenerally increased levels of arousal,alertness, uh propensity to move. Youjust that's that I feel better. Peopleoften think about the runner's high andendorphins. The endorphins come frompretty long intense duration effort.They're more of a you're floating kindof like uh you know I think thecatakolamines are really the thecocktail of like all right I got a greatworkout in this morning showered got

01:42:06dressed I'm off to work let's go that'sthe so 20 or 30 minute jog I don'texpect you'd get that much catakolaminerelease>> I mean you'll definitely get some rightand like cortisol too right whichobviously increases alertness andarousal and can can in the short termmake you feel good>> it's a good thing>> um you you see similar effects of youknow short resistance training workouts.Um, I think of it, it's it's probably alittle bit of like an area under thecurve thing because you see some similareffects of like you go out and you do>> sixsecond really hard sprints like maxeffort sprints. You do that a few timeswith a long break in between, right?That seems to have a similar effect, butyou're only working for very shortperiods with very long rest periods.>> So, it's some it's something in that inthat sphere. And I think it's that'sprobably just it. It's just enough toyou just kind of boost catakonamines alittle bit, a little bit of cortisol.That's enough to kind of move you up thearousal curve to the point where you'rethen able to focus and engage a littlebit better. And I think yeah, you don'tneed a huge dump of that um in order toachieve that increase in arousalparticularly as it pertains to likelearning and then you know cognitiveperformance in like formal cognitivetests when which is where this isusually done. If you're then thinkingabout the type of exercise that

01:43:22changescognitive function or brain structurelong term,effort uh and intensity do seem tomatter a lot more. But those studieshave looked less of well how did thathow do they feel directly afterwards?Right now you're thinking about what'sthe kind of stimulus that drives changeover time and then intensity matters alot as well. So um the the best exampleum is with aerobic exercise on the kindof uh zone 2 up to kind of zone fourfive sprint spectrum. So most people wholisten to your show are probablyfamiliar with a study where in olderadults they had them do uh brisk walkingthree times a week 40 minutes. Um andwhen you kind of read the study and andthe heart rate uh levels they weretrying to attain, it was basically zone2 work, 40 minutes brisk walking threetimes a week for a year. And they sawsignificant increases in the volume ofthe hippocampus uh increases in V2 maxfitness, increases in circulating BDNFlevels, though circulating BDNF doesn'tactually get into the brain, but it'skind of telling you something aboutprobably BDNF that's being produced inthe brain. um and improvements inmemory. With all of that, [sighs]

01:44:38however, there's a much more recentstudy that took again older adults andrandomized them across three differentgroups. One was like a low inensitygroup. Another group basically did kindof zone 2 type work on a treadmill threetimes a week, very sim similar to thatprevious study that I mentioned. And thethird group did um a highintensityinterval training intervention, which isthe Norwegian 4x4 protocol. So 4 minutes85 to 95% of maximum heart rate. Theyhad a threeminute rest in theirprotocol. They did that four times over.>> That's really hard. Anybody who's donethe Norwegian 4x4, if I then say, well,hey, do that three times a week for 6months. Like that's>> that was three times a week.>> Three times a week for 6 months. That'sthat's pretty intense. But what theyshowed was that that high-intensityinterval training group, they improvedtheir fitness just as well as the zone 2group, interestingly, but they had muchbetter improvements in hippocamplefunction and maintenance of hypocamplestructure on an MRI scan. And theymaintained that benefit for 5 yearsafter the six-month intervention. Sothey worked really hard um for 6 months,but that that benefit was maintained forfor a really long period of time. And inseveral analyses within that study, theybasically show

01:45:53that the harder peopleworked um and the more cortisol theyreleased, the better the benefit. And sothis is important because nowadaysthere's or you know there's severalpeople out there saying, "Oh, don't dohigh intensity exercise. It releasescortisol. That's stressful. Your bodycan't handle it." Right? This studydirectly shows that working really hard,releasing a lot of cortisol inhigh-intensity interval trainingactually improves hippocample structureand function um over over time. So yes,I imagine after they did their workouts,their brain wasn't maybe working at itsbest cuz that's a hard workout. But overtime, this was this really strongstimulus that then resulted insignificant improvements.>> Forgive me if you said it and I missedit. Uh what was the form of exercise?Was it rowing or biking or>> It was on a treadmill.>> Treadmill.>> Yeah.>> Uh really interesting. Um and you saidit about 85% of max heart rate.>> Yeah. So that's that's a typicalNorwegian 4x4 protocol, but I don'tthink that's the protocol you have todo. I think it's just this process ofhighintensity exercise that it releasesa whole bunch of myioines and lactate inparticular. We know that lactate veryeasily gets into the brain, generate,you know, stimulates BDNF production asas kind of part of that support ofneuroplasticity or augmenting recent

01:47:08neuroplastic processes. I think there'ssomething about that just thathighintensity work that drives some ofthose factors that then supportstructure and function.>> It's an unfortunate reality, but tapwater often contains contaminants thatnegatively impact our health. In fact, a2020 study by the Environmental WorkingGroup estimated that more than 200million Americans are exposed to PASchemicals, also known as foreverchemicals, through drinking of tapwater. These forever chemicals arelinked to serious health issues such ashormone disruption, gut microbiomedisruption, fertility issues, and manyother health problems. The EnvironmentalWorking Group has also shown that over122 million Americans drink tap waterwith high levels of chemicals known tocause cancer. It's for all these reasonsthat I'm thrilled to have Aurora as asponsor of this podcast. I've been usingthe Aurora countertop system for almosta year now. Roro's filtration technologyremoves harmful substances, includingendocrine disruptors and disinfectionbyproducts while preserving beneficialminerals like magnesium and calcium. Itrequires no installation or plumbing.It's built from medical grade stainlesssteel, and its sleek design fitsbeautifully on your countertop. In fact,I consider it a welcome addition to mykitchen. It looks great and the water isdelicious. If you'd like to try Rora,you can go to roora.com/huberman

01:48:24and get an exclusive discount. Again,that's Rora. R O R A.com/huberman.>> Yeah. Uh, two things. Super interesting,um, comparison between these studies.Um, and as somebody who incorporates oneday a week of 4x4 type>> exercise and one day of longer, slowercardio, maybe I should try maybe doing abit more of the high intensity.>> I think if you want it to be sustainablefor long periods of time, like I wouldtypically say one day of highintensitywork is fine, right? Cuz you probablyyou want to be doing some resistancetraining. You>> I'm doing that three days a week. I doone long slow for me jog of about 60minutes>> uh 45 to 60 minutes and then one kind ofin moderate kind of maybe more like zone3 4.>> So thank you for putting in a a strongum word for cortisol not always beingthe bad guy.>> Um people are so afraid of cortisol. Youwant your morning cortisol high. It'sgoing to make you sleep better at night.You'll have more energy during the day.It's a It was interesting to me to diveinto the literature on cortisol and findthat a moderate and int a moderateintensityresistance training session or cardiosession probably a little bit easierthan the uh 4x4 will triple one'sbaseline levels of cortisol

01:49:40and like orquadruple it. It's transient, butnobody's freaking out about theseworkouts, but they're afraid to get in acold shower, which doesn't have nearlythe same impact on cortisol or um it'skind of wild how afraid of cortisolpeople are. People think they're goingto get Cushing syndrome. It's been Idon't know what the SCOP on cortisol wasall about, but you know, you're going toget moon phase, you won't be able tolose abdominal fat. I mean there is a areal condition which is you and I knowit's a Cushing syndrome where cortisolis is pathologically elevated but comeon folks like cortisol goes up cortisolgoes down you that but 20 30fold fromthe morning until night in a healthyindividual. So what do you think it isthat that people get you know likeafraid of cortisol afraid of uh somestress? I mean like your hippocampusobviously in this case their hippocampusgot better. It's not dissolving into apuddle of its own tears. [laughter]What What is this? What did What did ourpredecessors do wrong?>> You know, let's blame it on the parents.What? Because [clears throat] we weren'tdoing science communication then. WhatWhat What in the world was the incentivefor like demonizing molecules? It's socrazy. So even though his uh frameworksare still potentially very helpful, someof it we can blame on

01:50:55Hans and his likegeneral adaptation response like the thethe original idea that if you werechronically stressed it would lead tolike true exhaustion of all yourphysiological systems, right? Becausethat was the final phase of his generaladaptation response.>> People have conflated acute stressesversus chronic stresses. And yes, weknow chronic stress be theypsychological, physical, increaseallatic load, increase metabolicdisease, inflammation, blood sugardysregulation, insulin resistancesignificantly associated with heartdisease, dementia, all these kinds ofthings, right? So we so we know thatthese chronic stresses are can be reallydetrimental to our health. But we'vekind of conflated that like any stressis bad because chronic stress is bad.But the way that I think about it or Itry and talk about it is that actuallythe stress response and this is as kindof Sier originally described it isstress drives adaptation. He called itgeneral adaptation syndrome or thegeneral adaptation response because whatstress is is your body acknowledgingthat you need to respond to someexternal stimulus, right? And so stressdiverts resources so that you can thenadapt to that stimulus. Be theyphysical,

01:52:10cognitive, neurological,right? A stressor diverts glucose to theimmune system, right, in in an infectionso that it functions better. You caneliminate the infection. And so yeah, ifyou took somebody and you like look youmeasure their cortile levels after aworkout, it actually looks very similarto how it would look if you just brokenyour arm or if you were like reallysick, right? This is the body adaptingto a stimulus and like everything we'vetalked about here you know physicaltraining driving neuroplasticity thatrequires adaptation and so some of thatcore stress response is involved in thatthe release of cacodium as you talkedabout in the brain right those arestress related molecules that aredriving adaptation so that your body candeal with the stressor better in thefuture and we also know actually thatthere's some where there's some evidencefor the uh cross stressor adaptationparticularly with exercise, right? So,if you exercise regularly, you arebetter at dealing with other stresseslike psychological stresses. You won'tyou're more robust to stresses. Youryour mood or your cognitive functiondoesn't dip as much when you're whenyou're then psychologically stressed.So, stress is actually really importantbecause it's the fundamental driver ofadaptation. But because we've kind of,you know, we know that chronic stress

01:53:26isbad if if you never get a chance andthat's because you never get a chance toadapt. You never get a chance todownregulate. you never get a chance torespond because it's just continuous.But right intermittent exposure to thesestressors is really important. And Seliaalso talked about the idea of hypostress, right? Not having enough stressbecause then you can't you don't adapt,you don't build function and response.So we just need to think about them verydifferently because that those acutestresses are incredibly important fordriving adaptation.>> Way I think of it is pick your stressor.You can either be exercise or it can bepsychological stress. If you take it inthe form of exercise, you probably haveless in the form of psychologicalstress. It's obvious not not completelytrue at a one for one, but I think uh asyou pointed out, we and all organismsthrive on some degree of stress. I thinkif people are getting enough good sleepat night,>> yeah, sleep is the>> I don't want to say there's no limit tothe amount of stress they can absorb,but when it starts to erode your sleep,that's perhaps when things need to be,you know, adjusted.>> Resistance training. Um, is there aparticular protocol for resistancetraining that opens the opportunity forplasticity better than others that issupported in the literature?>> Again, two different windows say of ofaction. So, there's

01:54:41that that acute kindof arousal and this would be um, youknow, you you go in the gym, you do acouple of sets, you're not maxing out.Um, you know, it's it's probably goingto be your fairly typical couple of setsof uh 8 to 12 reps, kind of 80% of ofmax, something like that. You do>> compound movements. So, most studies usemachines, right?>> Um, so maybe do a leg press and a chestpress and a lat pull down, shoulderpress, multi- joint movements, usuallywith machines.>> [snorts]>> And again, if that takes 20 to 30minutes, that kind of shows some similareffects to that like 20 to 30 minute jogthat I talked about in terms of somesome acute bumps in in in cognitivefunction probably through througharousal the mild activation of thosearousal pathwaysactually quite similarly though I meanprobably um slightly higher intensitywill also be beneficial as long asyou're able to uh recover over time likethat that that recovery is is criticaljust like I was just saying in terms ofany kind of adaptation. Um there areseveral studies of resistance traininglooking at cognitive function and uhbrain structure over time. I sayseveral, it's like three or four inolder adults and

01:55:56they typically do twoor three times a week, five to sixexercises, three sets of 8 to 12 reps.Very very similar. Um, so those multi-joint machines in in the gym thatanybody can do and they're in any gym.>> Presses, pull-ups, rowing, pull downs,leg press, leg press,>> hamstring curls. Exactly. Okay.>> Yeah.>> And what you tend to see is that if youdo that for at least 6 months, so thestudies go on for like 6 to 12 months,you see significant umchanges in the structure of the whitematter of the brain and with thatimprovements in executive function. Youwant to remind people what white matteris just for for the for the newbies.>> Very broadly, you have white matter andgray matter in your brain. In the humanbrain, white matter makes upapproximately 60% um more than um mostother species, any other species. And solike the wrinkly outer part of yourbrain, the cortex, that's gray matter.You also have more gray matter deepinside the brain. In between that is thewhite matter, which is where you have uhthe myelin sheaths on your axons. That'swhat allows those uh nerves to conductinformation really quickly. Whereasaerobic exercise on that kind ofintensity spectrum we just talked aboutseems to particularly benefit the graymatter

01:57:11which includes the hippocampus.Resistance training seems toparticularly benefit the white matter.Um and so you see improvements in awhite matter structure which and andchanges in white matter structure withage are one of the best predictors ofcognitive decline with age.Interestingly, like outside of otherthings you see in terms ofneuropathology, amaloid tow etc. Thatloss of white matter structure andfunction is you know closely tied tocognitive decline over time. So you seeimprovements in structure and functionof the white matter and potentiallyimprovements in something that we call Ymatter lesions which tend to happen umaround areas of poor blood flow uhwithin the Y matter of the brain. Um andwith that improvements in executivefunction. So um uh aerobic exercise isgray matter and memory and resistancetraining is um white matter and moresort of executive type decision-mprocessing speed type functions. Youknow we talked about uh lactate and someof these other things that mightincrease uh um uh BDNF with the aerobictraining in resistance training. The I Ithink the primary mediator of that orone of them is IGF-1 which is inparticularly increased with resistancetraining. We know that IGF-1 is reallycritical to the development of whitematter uh you know right you know in thewomb and then as

01:58:26a baby and it seems tobe also really important for for whitematter structure then throughout um thelifespan. So resistance training is areally great way to then create theseboosts of of IGF-1. So that's probablythat's that's probably part of of of whywe see that difference. But that that'swhy you need to do both though they mayhave similar kind of acute effects interms of cognitive function. they seemto be having very different effects interms of the structure and function ofthe brain long term.>> I so appreciate that you're basicallytelling us that different forms ofexercise impact different criticalaspects of brain structure and function.So, resistance training, white matter,cardio, gray matter, broadly speaking,and many different molecules, IGF-1,BDNF, lactate, and on and on. Just foruh>> uh what how do you say in in Britain?Well, it's not kicks, they use adifferent word, but for kicks andgiggles, I'll just tell you there weresort of two running jokes in the fieldof neuroscience when I was coming up,which was if you desperately need athesis, fortunately, this was not theposition I found myself in. uh if youdesperately need a thesis and like it'snot going well,study the effect of pretty much anycompound on REM sleep because it willreduce REM sleep. There are very fewthings that increase REM sleep. Very,very few except sleep deprivation andthen

01:59:41REM rebound.>> Likewise, there was a review publishedby a guy named Jeff Lickman and JoshSains who were in a different field. So,they did a kind of cocky thing, but theyback then they were like like they'regood guys. Um I know them both. Um butthey published this review aboutlong-term potentiation>> where they said they did a review of theliterature and they said basically youcan throw any molecule on a couple ofneurons and do the protocol forlong-term potentiation and you get anenhancement of long-term potentiation.Now that wasn't completely true. Thereason I'm raising this is that there'sthis theme right like it's um there arecertain processes like processes thatare not that hard to disrupt like REMsleep. you just kind of tweak the systema little bit, you see a deficit, smallor large deficit. And then things likelong-term potentiation, which is thoughtto underly a lot of forms of learningand memoryin a dish with some neurons or maybeeven an animal, you can knock somethingout or overexpress something and whoop,you get more or less long-termpotentiation. It's not that hard to tiltthe scale on it. But in reality, thehuman body has tons of molecules that itdeploys. And it now to me makes perfectsense why plasticity which of course isthe the foundation of learning sort ofone in the same uh in many ways is

02:00:57brought about by resistance training andby cardiovascular training becausethey're both motor.>> Yeah.>> Just like crossword puzzles certainplasticity effect>> maybe less than you know dance wherethere's a number of different thingssocial inputs balance inputs and on andon. So whereas 2 3 years ago I wouldhave said all right are we reallytalking about exercise openingplasticity that's always seemed likemice running on wheels and you get a fewextra neurons you get a nature paperlike I love that work don't get me wrongbut it turns out to not be thatmeaningful>> in terms of new neuron production isn'tthat doesn't seem to be that meaningfulfor human uh memory and and offsettingcognitive decline. So, but now I have acompletely different view of exercisebased on your work, based on the studiesthat you're describing because it'slike, yeah, these are the big guns interms of deploying lots of moleculesthat>> without question are interacting withone another.>> So, I no longer think about exercise aslike okay well like it's just increasingvessel growth, you're getting moremetabolic health, so then the brain getsbetter. Um I now think about resistancetraining and cardio and their variousforms as you point out 4x4 etc as likethe realplasticity

02:02:13uh triggers.>> So that that was a long-winded way ofsaying thank you to you and yourcolleagues who've been doing this andthinking about things like clutch statesand and molecules that shift plasticitybecause I love reductionist singlemolecule manipulations. I think they'revery important in a certain context, butuh for a while it was like gosh,everything opens plasticity andeverything disrupts REM sleep and likewhen are we going to get to this stuff?>> Anyway, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, nobodywants these neurodeenerative conditions.What is the current thinking aboutthe factors that make one susceptible toAlzheimer's? I'm beginning to think thatit's not just one, but that there's a pgenetic predisposition issue that maybeyou could touch on. And what can we dobesides the things that we're alreadytalking about today um tobest reduce the chance of um acceleratedcognitive decline or full-blownAlzheimer's?>> First, we talk about dementiaum which is essentially the end stage ofcognitive decline. there's sometrajectory of decline that happens fromyour peak to that point um where ideallywe'd intervene much sooner

02:03:28but right nowyou know we don't really do much untildementia is diagnosed. It's but it'sit's very similar like we don't do verymuch until diabetes is diagnosed. youknow, ideally we can we can act muchearlier in that trajectory and that'sincreasingly being accepted in theneuroscience and neurology communitiesthat actually we could potentiallychange that trajectory or at leastdecrease risk. And so within dementiathere are as an umbrella term which isessentially the loss of cognitivefunction such that you can't look afteryourself on a day-to-day basis. Youcan't do the day you sort of the thebasic activities of daily living.Alzheimer's disease is the most common.It makes up about 60 to 80% of cases ofdementia. Um the next most common isvascular dementia. Although vasculardementia and Alzheimer's disease overlapa ton like the vast majority of peoplewho have Alzheimer's disease also havesome element of pathology or changes inthe blood vessels in the brain which iswhat you get with vascular dementia. Andthen there's also dementia with Louisbodies um uh front to temporal dementiaand then uh dementia related toParkinson's potentially although thatoverlaps a lot with um Louisibodydementia and and dementia andParkinson's may just be may actuallymostly be Louis body dementia but[gasps] we've gotten to a point now

02:04:44where it's generally accepted thatpotentially half of cases of dementiaare preventable and I think the majorityof that falls into those first twobuckets Alzheimer's and vasculardementia althoughmetabolic disease and other risk factorsfor Alzheimer's disease also increasethe risk of Parkinson's disease and andthose other dementias as well. When youthen think about Alzheimer's diseasespecifically, there's there's one smallslice of Alzheimer's which is likemonogenic dominant mutations that youhave in either most of them happeneither in the precinylan genes pin oneand two or the amaloid precursor proteingene. They make up at this point lessthan 5% maybe as little as 1% ofAlzheimer's disease. So, we're kind ofwe set those to the side a little bit.The vast majority of Alzheimer's diseaseis what we would call late onsetAlzheimer's disease, although it'shappening actually earlier and earlierin in some populations. Yes, there's agenetic component. Um, your APOE gene isyour probably your most common uh riskgene. It's also associated there's alsopolygenic risk. So thousands of genescan give you a little bit more a littlebit less risk of of of Alzheimer'sdisease, [gasps] but it's much morerelated to lifestyle and the environmentthan say that that kind of early onsetmonogenic Alzheimer's disease.

02:05:59Andthe the kind of the best acceptedum review of all of this um is is run bythe Lancet Comm Commission on DementiaPrevention uh overseen by professor JillLivingston and their most the mostrecent version of this suggested therewere 14 risk factors who between themaccounted for about 45% of uh dedementia risk or dementia cases and thatthat are modifiable. So early lifeeducation, high blood pressure,diabetes, hearing loss, vision loss,brain trauma, um high uh highcholesterol, they recently recentlyadded>> high LDL,>> high LDL cholesterol, low physicalactivity. So this is all related to thethings we've already talked about,right? Maintaining good physical health,maintaining uh maintaining inputs,getting inputs in the first place,right? Education is is uh is critical.Um>> and hearing loss, as I recall, was animportant one, right? in reference to toinputs like you don't want sensory inputdegraded.>> Absolutely. So hearing loss, visionloss, um social isolation. Um theydidn't uh it was quite so two thingsthey didn't include um that were fairlycontroversial and were sort of debated.Letters were written to the editor andall that kind of stuff as happens in inacademia uh related to so they didn'tinclude sleep

02:07:14loss or sleep deprivationas a risk factor for dementia eventhough the evidence particularly ifyou're>> didn't look at it or didn't include it.>> They didn't include it. So, like theytalked about it, but they felt that thelevel of evidence wasn't high enough,though it was probably as high as someof the other things that they included.>> It's a tricky one. I I don't want totake us on too much of a tangent, buthaving looked at these data a lot, I dothink that people need to get enoughsleep, but some people, like myself, dofine on 6 and 1 half or 7 hours, andother people can do fine on only sevenor eight or nine.>> Very few people are a-okay all the timeon just four to five hours for prolongedperiods of time. But what but when wesay not a-ok okay what tends to happenwith shift work or people that arechronically sleepd deprived is most ofthe other things you're talking aboutget worse LDL goes up stress levels goesup diabetes go so it's>> it's like uh I can understand why theymight not have included it but it seemsso foundational to me that it does seemkind of a shame>> part of it is related to how theyanalyze the data so we can we can we canget to that but I mean in reality whenyou look at the data on sleep loss anddementia risk The cut off is reallyaround 6 hours. So if you'reconsistently sleeping fewer than 6hours, that's where risk starts toincrease. So that that kind of soundsYeah, that sounds about right. Cuz it'sthe I think it's the LA it's the lack ofthose last two cycles

02:08:29where that are REMenriched.>> Yeah.>> You know, cuz in the beginning of thenight, you get your growth hormonesurge, you get a lot of deep sleep,assuming you're, you know, doing thingsright during the day and and then it'sthose last, you know, 290 minuteishcycles that you glean most of your REM.>> Yeah. And if you're not getting thosenight in and night out and night innight out, like sooner or later, you'regoing to have issues.>> Yeah. So, so sleep was one. Then theother one was was nutrient status. So,they didn't talk about omega-3s, Bvitamins, which we do actually have somesome quite high quality interventionaland observational kind ofepidemiological data for. So, there waskind of some discussion as whether thosethings should have been included. Otheranalyses that looked at those suggestedthat they potentially contribute asignificant of the amount of thepopulation attributable risk ofdementia. So all that to say that theirtheir 45% estimate could be quiteconservative if we consider some of theother things there there are some otherstudies that suggest that the maybe asmany as or as much as 70% of dementiasmay be preventable but then you have tostart including things related tosocioeconomic status and deprivation andother societal factors that we know havea massive impact as well. So that's lessmodifiable like on the individual level,right? It really would require mod like

02:09:44changes at the societal level which iskind of harder to do.>> Could I ask you a question? It's goingto be a very controversial one, but>> um>> there are people arguingthere are very smart people I should sayarguing that the shingles vaccine islowering rates of dementiasignificantly. I haven't looked at thosedata closely yet. I plan to, but itcertainly is intriguing given the datathat herpes viruses of various sortshave been correlated with uhAlzheimer's. This comes off the back ofthree or four very large naturalexperiments that have been done in invarious countries. And really how youinterpret these data is going to dependa little bit on your kind of risktolerance and like how you what youthink should be done in terms of the lelevel of evidence required to tointervene. So, I'll describe the studiesin a second, but some people aredefinitely saying, you know, if you wantif you want to say that um the shinglesvaccine decreases dementia risk, youhave have to have a clinical trialthat's adequately powered to show that.And there is a trial like that beingplanned currently.>> So, the the studies that have happenedso far, uh there was one in the UK, inin Wales, uh one in Australia,

02:10:59uh andone in Canada. And in each of thosecountries, what happened was that on asingle date, a huge trunch of peoplebecame eligible to get the shinglesvaccine. Whereas if they were born oneday earlier, they weren't eligible. Soyou get what you call like a naturalexperiment where from one day to thenext, those people shouldn't be thatdifferent otherwise. and and they showedthat, you know, rates of other diseasesweren't that different. Rates of uptakeof other, you know, health care andother vaccines weren't wasn't thatdifferent, but there different there wasa big shift in the uptake of of theshingles vaccine. And so what theyessentially consistently showed acrossall those different populations was thatthose who got the shingles vaccine um orwere eligible to have the shinglesvaccine, depending on whether they hadaccess to the data on whether people gotit or not, had a had decreased risk ofdementia. And that was consistently seenacross those three groups. All thosethree trials used an older version ofthe shingles vaccine called zostifaxzostifax which was a live attenuatedvaccine. There's now a newer version uhcalled Shingri which is a recombinantvaccine and there was a study done inthe US that um compared people whoswitched from you

02:12:14know there was asimilar switch from Zustvax to Shingriand and saw that Shingrix was associatedwith with a lower risk of dementiacompared to Zustvax although both wereassociated with a lower risk than none.When you look at some of these trialsum or studies because they're nottrials, people have made the a very faircomment which is that when you look atthe trajectory of dementia over time,you look at something called a KaplanMeyer curve. So it's like a survivalcurve. So like um every time somebodygets a case of dementia like the linegoes up and you look at the trajectoryof the two lines those who got you knowgot the uh vaccine or not they divergevery early which kind of says that oh itonly takes a couple of months to kind ofsee this difference in dementia riskwhich you which you wouldn't reallyexpect based on like the natural courseof dementia takes years to happen. So umthis is very common in these kinds ofstudies. Um and it it's it's due toresidual confounding. So there's likesomething inherently different about thepopulations that may be driving some ofthis different. Right? They they weregoing to get less dementia anyway. Andso maybe the shingles vaccine isn'thaving that big of an effect. But Iwould say that having looked at allthose trials and all those data, I'mfairly, you know, I'm convinced enoughthat um there's

02:13:30there's a signal there.there should be a randomized controltrial. That's that's happening. Butthere's a number of reasons why thismight be the case. One, uh it obviouslywe know reduces cases of shingles.Shingles can be very painful. It can,you know, can uh change how peopleinteract with the world. You stay athome. You don't feel good. You're in alot of pain for a long period of time.That can be that can go for you manymonths. It's rare for it to last manymonths, but it can can last a long time.Um then you know there's they'vehypothesizedin some of those papers that themagnitude of the reduction of dementiarisk didn't map perfectly onto thereduction in uh in cases of shingles.Right? There had to be something elsegoing on as well. They've suggested thatit may be um due to like an imunommodulatory effect. It may be becauseyou're also suppressing other viruseslike herpes simplex virus that we knowuh may also be associated with certaincases of dementia Alzheimer's. Um andthe reason you one of the arguments forthe imunom modulatory effect is becausenot in all the studies but in most ofthe studies there's a slightly biggersignal in women than there is in men. Umand it may be that that sort of um>> meaning

02:14:45it's more effective in>> more effective in women than it was inmen. And we should mention that theshingles virus lives on neurons.>> Yes.>> Yeah. The herpes viruses tend to live onneurons that and they hang out onneurons which is why people who you knowget herpes [clears throat] oneinfections will get a cold sore at aparticular location that will come backbecause it's living on the trigeminalnerve. This just you know uh I thinkpeople don't often understand thatviruses can you know harbor in inparticular cell types.>> Yeah. And uh so the logical link betweenherpes viruses and and uh dementia riskis you know it's not>> I mean that that alone is not a causalrelationship but it but it makes sensemechanistically.>> Yeah.>> And a fundamental feature of herpesviruses is they generally don't kill theneuron. They can>> but that's why they stay alive. Theseviruses are very smart.>> They know how to get infect their hostbut not kill their host which is whatreally smart viruses do.>> Yeah. So what age are people getting theshingles vaccine?>> The study is actually quite late. It'slike people in their 807s and 80s.>> Oh wow.>> Yeah.>> Okay.>> So again, um it would be very fair toargue that getting it much earlier wedon't have any evidence for because youknow in reality

02:16:00in these particularly inthese the studies um like the UK this isdone in the national healthcare system.it was you know for the the highest riskolder you know older adults and sogetting it in your like 50s or you knowmid-50s which is u sort of theguidelines in the US that yes to reduceshingles absolutely but it doesn't maponto the dementia risk um age that wasseen in seen in these studies a finalpiece of this that I think is importantand kind of goes beyond just theshingles vaccine is thatif you want to maintain function overlong periods of time, one of the bestthings you can do is minimize yourchances of getting really sick. Therehave been sever several studies, one wasthe adult changes in thought study doneat the univers University of Washingtonin Seattle primarily. Um this a similarthing was shown in the Rush memory andaging project. But basically, when youwhen you look at the same individualover time and you measure theircognitive function every few years,which these studies did,cognitive function doesn't just declinesort of linearly or steadily with age.It goes down, you know, a little bit onaverage, but the biggest decreases sortof happen stepwise after periods ofsignificant illness. Um and so like inthe adult changes

02:17:15in the thought study,those who'd been um you know sick inbetween, you know, had a major illnessin between uh have be having theircognition retested, they had a stepchange down and those who werehospitalized that that step change downwas even bigger. Soyou could talk about, you know, howpeople maybe could have changed thingsin order to recover some of thatfunction afterwards. I think that wouldhave been possible if you'd, you know,thought thought about how you mightintervene. But a major I think it it's ait's a reason to say if I can do as muchas I can to minimize the chance that Iget really sick because what happensthen is I'm I'm at home. I'm notreceiving any stimuli any inputs. I'mnot moving. I'm not eating well.Obviously there's the all the downsidesof the infection itself. um then youknow if I can avoid that as much aspossible then over time that that thatcould lead to you know greater benefitsright change change change the overalltrajectory so I think that's one reasonwhy some of these vaccinations could bebeneficial is just you're minimizing thetime you spend really sick as you'reolder which we've seen is results inthese sort of like step changes down incognitive function>> fascinatingI realized that we

02:18:31could and probablyshould do an entire podcast abouttraumatic brain brain injury andconcussion.>> But as a [clears throat] teaser forthat, um,>> are there anythingthat people should do and or take in theimmediate aftermath of a head hit? Now,I'm not talking about uh hopefullypeople are getting checked out for brainbleeds and things like that. So, I'm I'mtalking about moderate concussion.Someone got their quote unquote bellrung. uh they slipped and fell. Uh theygot clipped in soccer practice. Um theirkids a little dizzy. Not of coursesomebody young or old is vomiting or youknow not able to sleep or real issues. Imean everyone should probably be checkedout in in the first case but I get askedthis question all the time. Is thereanything that people can take to kind ofget over mild concussion or moderateconcussion? The evidence base on this isa little shaky, but I think for mostthingsit kind of fits into this idea ofpositive asymmetry, right? Low risk,high potential for benefit. And therehave been lots of you there have beenrandomized control trials to kind oflook at some of these things. So we acouple years ago we published a paperlooking at different nutritionalsupplements after concussion that youknow we have

02:19:46some reasonably goodevidence for. So, um, yes, you should beseen by a doctor. You should getwhatever scans and, you know, immediatemedical care that you need. Absolutely.Right. That's we're assuming all of thatis done or will be done.>> Yeah.>> Immediately, there are a couple ofthings that I think we know um from sortof um animal studies that translatefairly well onto onto humans, but alsosome you maybe some observationalstudies in humans. But, a couple ofthings are important. So one is temptemperature management temperatureregulation. There have been this is whatmy PhD was actually in hypothermia afteracute brain injury>> hyperothermia.>> Hypothermia. Yeah. So cooling down.>> Although I did do some studies where weyou know heat it up and that makesthings worse. So this kind of pertainsto imagine brain doesn't like to get toohot.>> That's essentially what I'm about tosay. So there have been lots of studieswhere they've done cooling hypothermiain people after traumatic brain injuriesand concussions hasn't really shown muchof an effect. What seems to be importantis preventing hyperothermia.So um one of the effects of coolingsomebody down is that they don't gethot. So that's probably something that'sreally important. So often concussionshappen in a heat stressed environment.You're on a football pitch.

02:21:01It's Augustin Alabama. It's 40°, right? Get inside,get cool as quickly as you can becausethere are there are studies that andthat doesn't mean you have to get an icebath. Just don't be really hot. If youget a fever, which you might might doafter a more significant injury, youknow, Tylenol or something like that tohelp maintain thermmorreulation will bereally important. The next is uh bloodsugar regulation. So, we know that aftera significant brain injury, you haveincreases in in blood sugar that'sassociated with worse outcomes. Some ofit's like what's caused, what'sconsequence, is the injury driving theblood sugar, is the blood sugar drivingthe injury. I think an easy thing tojust say is I would avoid any supersugary refined carbohydrates that mightjust sort of you know uh kind of pile onfor one of a better word, right? Whatabout alcohol?>> So alcohol um I would avoid as wellmainly because it impairs sleep and weknow that sleep is going to be criticalto recovery. Some people would saysomething similar about caffeine acutelyafter injury because it's a it's astimulant. Um, one thing that the reasonwhy hyperothermia or getting too hotmakes the injury worse is because it um,you know, simply speaking increases thegap between energy requirements andenergy production. So like one of thehallmarks of these acute

02:22:16brain injuriesis a deficit in energy production withyou know mitochondrial failure ormitochondrial dysfunction. And so if youget too hot or you stimulate the brain,you're asking for more energy when thewhen the when your neurons can't produceit and that is a trigger that kind ofdeficit in energy production is atrigger for cell death andneuroinflammation and some of theseother processes that then may happen. Soavoid alcohol, avoid caffeine. Both ofthose potentially related to improvingsleep. Then uh things that we have someyou know reasonable evidence for umimmediately after concussion arecreatine.>> At what dosage? The best trial wasactually done um in a p like pediatricgroup although very broad. It was likeone year old to 18 years old. Um butthey gave point4 gram per kilo per day.So>> wa.>> Yeah. So it's it's a pretty it's it'slike double a traditional loading doseif you're a 100 kilo person. But like ifyou're 7 if you're 70 kilos um you know155 lbs or something like that thenthat's 28 g of creatine. So like it's alot but not>> trips to the bathroom could be expectedbut you just spread it out across theday right.>> Yes. So well one thing I'll say aboutthat is um the most recent meta analysesshow that you actually don't get is

02:23:32actually quite rare to get more GI sideeffects uh with creatine compared toplacebo. Some of it is probably relatedto the quality of the supplement. Sopoor quality creatine supplements havemore adulterance that may cause some ofthose GI side effects. Some of it is canbe due to high um um you can saturatethe creatine transporters. It doesn'tget absorbed. Water gets drawn into thegut that can that can then write causediarrhea or something. Um but some ofthe GI issues that people experience areprobably due to poor quality productsthat they're taking. For the non uh headinjured individual, is there any reasonto go back to the old loading protocolsof taking 20 grams per day, putting itin a little bit of grape juice orsomething else to spike blood sugar forthis very reason that it could umaugment the the passage of creatine intoyour cells as opposed to drawing waterinto the gut? In the '9s, we would takefive grams of creatine four times a dayin an ounce or two of pure grape juice.Yeah. Um, and you draw a lot of waterinto your muscle cells. You put on, youknow, it varies, but for me, anywherefrom 5 to 8 pounds of, it's waterweight, but it's mostly in the muscles.It's not insignificant. Translates tobig strength

02:24:47increases. I don't takenearly that much now. I just do the 10grams per day. But is there any reasonto go back to those traditional loading?>> So, if you're just like long likelong-term creatine supplementation, proprobably not. um in this kind of settingI think a a you know the the evidence isfor a loading style protocol right sofor most people it might be 20 to 30grams of of creatine spread spreadacross the day you know for if anybody'sjust like taking creatinefor other reasons you know this is astandard dosing protocol I think is fine>> I thought you were going to tell me Icould get it to work that way>> so so like the the some of the studiesthat use traditional like creatinemonohydrate and look at creatine levelsin the brain they did use is a loadingprotocol for for a week and then you seesignificant increases in brain creatine.But you creatine having other effects onthe brain, you know, potentiallyimproving mood, improving uh memory andin older adults. Um some of thosebenefits happen at just like atraditional creatine doses. So you don'tneed to take massive doses, you know,take load loading doses. You canactually see some benefits of like 5 to10 grams. So that's a creatine. Somagnesium, so 400 milligrams once ortwice a day. There've been some trialsthat shown um>> what form>> those studies actually use magnesiumoxide. surprisingly. Um, but I wouldprobably use magnesium

02:26:02glycinate. Um,the it's very bioavailable. Um, athletesusually need a bit more glycine anyway,but any bioavailable form will will befine than omega-3 fatty acids. Um theevidence is is is a little bit betterfor like um there are now severalstudies in like America in likecollegiate American football playerswhere they take a couple of grams ofomega-3s every day and across a seasonyou see um less accumulation of uhbiomarkers of of injury likeneuropilament light that are circulatingin the blood. So that's something that Iwould just take long likelongitudinally. you're somebody who's atrisk of a concussion uh because of yoursport or your job, I would just, youknow, take a reasonable omega-3supplement just long term because wehave some reasonable evidence for that.Then uh other things might become alittle bit specific to uh the symptomsthat you're experiencing. So if you havesleep issues, then uh there's studiesthat have used melatonin and that'sthat's shown improvements branch chainamino acids at high doses uh for sleep.And that's interesting because outsideof TBI, high doses of branch chain aminoacids may actually impair sleep becausethey compete for tryptophan uptake intothe brain, decreasing

02:27:17potentiallydecreasing serotonin, melatonin uhproduction. But in TBI, there are twostudies that suggest improvements insleep with high doses of branch chainamino acids.>> If somebody's going to take branch chainamino acids, presumably they're going tolook at how much leucine is there for avariety of reasons. Um, so do you recallhow much leucine to get this effect postTBI?>> So I I don't think they at least I don'tremember the leucine dose, but they weretaking up to 60 g of branches.>> 6. Okay. Cuz a typical kind ofsuggested supplement bottle gym dosewould be 3 to five grams. That's usuallyabout six capsules. Yeah.>> So Okay. So like one study they did inuh veterans they had um I think it wasthreedoses of 20 grams AC spread across theday.>> Are you curious about um these uh Ibeanestudies that are looking at uh you knowTBI and brain recovery? I mean Ibeane isa it's a a whole other thing becauseit's a the the most powerfullong-lasting psychedelic at least thatI'm aware of. But it seems like there'ssome interesting data coming out.Absolutely. Um and then you know inpeople with a history of brain traumaand

02:28:32PTSD and I think some of these otherpsychedelics are going to be um veryinteresting um there as well potentiallydue to their neuroplastic um effectsthat tend to particularly happen in likemacro doses right in in [clears throat]um in the psychedelic doses. I thinkthat there's a lot more to come there,but certainly the trials that have beendone so far are quite compelling, butthat's obviously in in a very controlledkind of clinical setting, heart ratemonitor. Again, it's not legal in theUnited States, although things areshifting. But>> choline is another thing, particularlyacetyloline. So um uh best evidence isfor 1 to two grams a day um>> of choline>> of choline, you know, in the form of CDPcholine or citicoline, which is thewhich is the same thing. Um those arethe main ones. Then there's some otherlike Nisha supplements that do have someevidence. The one that's probably hasthe most evidence for it is Boswellia.>> Boswellia.>> Yeah. Uh which is a frank Indianfrankincense. But there's an extract ofBoswellia that's been tested in I thinkthree different clinical trials afterTBI showed some benefit. Enzogenol whichI think is a pine extract. Slightly lessevidence than Boswellia. I typicallywould recommend people stick to thefirst group of kind of nutritional typesupplements. um but in very specific umuse cases based on specific symptomssome of those

02:29:47other things might bebeneficial. Then beyond that we knowthat phys return to physical activity assoon as possible is really importantafter>> without getting another head injury>> without getting another head injury. Andyou know so so this really changed overthe last few years. You know maybe 5 10years ago people like you know rest iswhat you need to do. Go lie in a darkroom. If you got a concussion in sports,you you would expect the team to have arigorous return to play protocol thatincluded lowle aerobic activity as soonas you're able to tolerate it u two orthree times a week at a level just belowwhat might make your symptoms worse. Andthen first you do sort of likenon-specific aerobic exercise and thenyou start to bring back skill specificexercises, sports exercises, then goback into full training and then um goback into into playing kind of in thatorder and that should be quitesystematized now. So I would expectsports teams to kind of have have thatin place. So like the standard of careis generally phys physical therapy. ifyou have any ongoing cognitive orphysical symptoms sort of a month plusafter uh any kind of traumatic braininjury. Um there's some evidence thatlike virtual reality or augmentedreality uh physical uh activity uh mightimprove cognitive symptoms

02:31:03uh vestibulartherapy for balance and dizzinessissues. And then increasingly uh youknow there's um a focus on sort ofocular motor training for likeconvergence or other eye like um eyeissues that are very common afterconcussions but aren't picked up asoften as as people might like. Butincreasingly kind of eye tracking andthese kinds of things are doneparticularly in professional sports orother arenas after brain injuries tokind of ideally you'd have a baselineyou figure out what's changed and thenyou would track that over time and youcan you can train that depending on thedeficit.>> Those recommendations are going to beextremely helpful for people athletes atall levels. I mean, I think for peoplethat don't have access to the, you know,all the latest and greatest, uh, youknow, technology and coaches and, uh,nurses and doctors that, um, you know,there's a lot of head hits out therethat aren't nec,>> you know, fortunately aren't umfull-blown brain bleeds and braindamage, but the the low-leveltrauma to the brain is obviously aconsideration, especially kids like justfalling off the monkey bars. Likeparents want to know what they can do.So, thank you very much for thoserecommendations.>> You're doing a strongman competition.>> Uh-huh.

02:32:18>> All natural. This is not the enhancedgames. No.>> Um, just tell us what the format of thatis. Well, first of all, how old are you?>> 41.>> Cool. Have you done one of these before?>> Yeah, six or seven competitions at thispoint. I started during CO. I've donelike a competition or two every yearsince then.>> Mhm. You're a tall guy. You're like 6'2.You weigh>> like 210 215 usually.>> And is it So, it's height and weightclass or just weight class? So, it'sit's weight class. Um, I now so now thatI'm older than 40, I compete uh in themast's category. So, there's a>> this one of my favorite things aboutstrongman is that if you weigh less than200 lb, you're a lightweight. So, I'm uhI'm in the lightweight masters category.It means that I usually have to like doa a water cut to like for a weighin cuzI don't normally I'm not I'm normallyabove 200 lb. Um but yeah, they so theyhave they have weight they have weightclasses and age classes. Can you eatyour way and hydrate your way back up toafter?>> Yeah. Like the usually you weigh in 20hours 24 hours before. I'm I'mdefinitely back to my usual weight by bythe next day.>> Gotcha. Yeah. We don't want you tryingto lift heavy things dehydrated. Whatare the big events? So, you're carryingstuff overhead. You're carrying stuff atyour sides. You're What are you doing?>> A standard kind of local regionalcompetition is five is five

02:33:33events. Um Iqualified for the natural like world'sstrongest man uh which is going to beseven events. But there's usually umsome kind of deadlift, some kind ofoverhead pressing event, uh some kind ofum medley where you're like carryingsomething, lifting stones, farmerswalks. So in um truck pull, somethinglike that. So like more dynamic. Sothere's like usually like a static maxstrength thing, but then also like moredynamic.>> The teeth you do the teeth pull the>> Oh, no. No teeth. Uh no, no teethpulling. Um the we didn't talk aboutoral health and cognitive function, butthat's really important too. The eventsin the competition that I've got comingup, the the world's strongest, there'sgoing to be a farmer's walk. So that'swhere you just like pick things up atthe side and kind of>> So for a guy, let's say you you hydrateback to like 2 205 210 or something likethat. What what what's a good distanceand weight to carry?>> I know the weight in the competition.It's 120 kilos per hand. So that's 264pounds per hand. Um and as far as youcan as far as you can carry it. Um Ican't remember if>> that's a big human in in each hand.>> Yeah. Um so typically,you know, if you if you can get to whereyou've got like your body weight in eachhand and you're able to pick it up andmove with it, even if it's not very far,I

02:34:48think that's pretty good. Um but like,you know, some people might say halfyour body weight. In reality,>> if you pick something up heavy and movewith it, that's great. Like, and thenget better.>> We're not talking about recommendations.This is your time to shine, my friend.People can work their way up. I I Iwatch uh Tom Havlin's um uh Instagram.We'll put a link to it. Everyone shouldsee that. His wife and his kid also workinto the workouts. He's got a But man,he's strong. But yeah, carrying heavyweight. No, no, this is not your time totell people how to tiptoe into it.That's a different podcast. So, you'recarrying 220 lbs in each hand.>> 264 lbs per hand>> and walking how far?>> It's maximum distanceum in I can't remember if it's 60 or 90seconds.>> You can set it down. You can set it. Youcan set it down. So, it's as far as youcan get in that period of time. Andit'll be similar with a with a yokewalk. So, there's a a yoke where youknow sort of like put it on your back.It's 700 lb. How far can you how far canyou walk in that period of time?>> Love this. So primitive. Love it. Purehypothalamic event. Yeah.>> So, in that event in the in the yokewalk, if you get to the end, I thinkit's 30 I think it's 30 m 90ish feet. Ifyou can carry that in that far in thetime cap, then you do reps on a circusdumbbell. So like this this big massivedumbbell that you have to like shoulderto overhead. There's one at 110 lb andthe next is

02:36:04at 135 lb. Then there'sgoing to be a loading medley. Sosandbags and kegs uh like over over aplatform that's like I think 200 to 300lb implements. They kind of increaseover time. Um there's a maximum squatand you have a choice of two differentum weights. Um, and so like if youchoose the bigger weight and you getreps on the bigger weight that you get abetter score than somebody>> standard back squat.>> It's a standard back squat is with anaxle bar. So like a thick bar.>> Um, and then in strongman when you havesquatting you usually have pads that yousquat down to. So there's a specificheight you squat down to.>> Um, so like that could give you anadvantage if you're shorter, right?Because you have to go less distance toget the weight on the pads. But like>> but there's no geeking it and callingless than a one rep. Yeah, people havedone that. It doesn't look good.>> Yeah. No, no. Like it just has to hitthe pads and come back up. And theweights are 170 kilos and 200 kilos. Sothat's>> what uh nearly 400 lb and 440 lb uh logpress um for reps. And again, it's asimilar style. And I I think it's 100kilos. So 220 lb and then 120. So 264.And then there's a sled like you uh Ithink you push a sled and then you loadit with a 275

02:37:19lb sandbag and then youdrag it um in a in a time cap. I thinkthat I think that's all the events.>> Awesome. Uh you'll let us know when itis.>> Yes. Uh it's at the end of August.>> Cool. Will it be online?>> Uh it won't be online, but I'm surethere'll be some stuff on Instagram.>> Cool. I I love that you do this. Uhclearly um you got a lot of brains inthat. uh skull of yours and you you'realso super strong. Love hearing it.That's that's great. And and uh you haveno excuse not to carry the groceries athome, right? So you you lost that thatride. But there's no doubt you would.Anyway, that's awesome. I I I'm veryimpressed by the by people who continueto take on athletic challenges in theiruh in their adult life as which is veryappropriate to context today. So Dr.Tommy Wood, thanks for coming out today.I learned a ton from you and you knowgoing into this I like I like to think Iknow a thing or two about plasticityhaving spent so much time in it andstudying it over the years but I learneda lot from you today and I know everyoneelse did as well. You're anexceptionally clear communicator and umyou're working on not just an importantissue you're working on the issue uhthis neuroplasticity thing and a wholelot more. So, let's definitely get youback to talk about recovery from braininjury and stroke and things of thatsort because

02:38:35there's a lot of uhadditional things I think we could diginto,>> but uh meanwhile, you've given us a lotof uh actionable tools and um>> yeah, I I love that uh you're doing thestrongman competition and uh come backagain. We appreciate you.>> I will. Thank you so much.>> Thank you. Thank you for joining me fortoday's discussion with Dr. Tommy Wood.To learn more about his work and hisbook, please see the links in the shownotes caption. If you're learning fromand or enjoying this podcast, pleasesubscribe to our YouTube channel. That'sa terrific zerocost way to support us.In addition, please follow the podcastby clicking the follow button on bothSpotify and Apple. And on both Spotifyand Apple, you can leave us up to afivestar review. And you can now leaveus comments at both Spotify and Apple.Please also check out the sponsorsmentioned at the beginning andthroughout today's episode. That's thebest way to support this podcast. If youhave questions for me or comments aboutthe podcast or guests or topics thatyou'd like me to consider for theHubberman Lab podcast, please put thosein the comment section on YouTube. I doread all the comments. For those of youthat haven't heard, I have a new bookcoming out. It's my very first book.It's entitled Protocols, an operatingmanual for the human body. This is abook that I've been working on for morethan 5 years, and that's based on morethan 30 years of research andexperience. And it covers protocols foreverything from

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