00:00:00
there are in fact many roads to Alzheimer's disease and it's things like marijuana alcohol and football and then
00:00:06
a study found that people had had a simple carbohydrate based diet had a 400% increased risk of getting
00:00:13
Alzheimer's but one of the major classes is gosh Dr Daniel aan is the renowned
00:00:21
psychiatrist and brain health expert who has scanned over 260,000 brains including Justin Bieber Miley Cyrus and
00:00:27
Kendall Jenner to determine what we need to do for Optimum brain health in 2024 the word of the year was brain rot why
00:00:34
because people are worried that their habits are shrinking their brain like food gaming social media pornography
00:00:41
what about working with bad for your brain and then is there anything nonobvious that we do to our children's
00:00:48
brains yes and this is so important because this is one thing a lot of parents do without knowing the
00:00:54
consequences for their children and we'll talk about that what about negative thinking well we just this huge
00:01:01
study on this and the science is really clear it decreases activity in your
00:01:07
preal cortex which impacts your motivation focus and mood it is detrimental to your brain so how can you
00:01:14
kill the negative thoughts well there's a whole bunch of things when is sap on head-to-head has been shown to be
00:01:20
equally effective as anti-depressants and then whenever you feel sad or mad or
00:01:26
nervous what I want you to do is it's so simple
00:01:32
I have been forced into a bet with my team we're about to hit 10 million subscribers on YouTube which is our
00:01:38
biggest Milestone ever thanks to all of you and we want to have a massive party for the people that have worked on this show for years behind the scenes so they
00:01:45
said to me Steve for every new subscriber we get in the next 30 days can $1 be given to our celebration fund
00:01:53
for the entire team and I've agreed to the bet so if you want to say thank you to the team behind the scenes at D of a CE all you've got to do is hit the
00:01:59
subscribe button so actually this is the first time I'm going to tell you not to subscribe because it might end up
00:02:05
costing me an [Applause]
00:02:13
[Music] awful Dr Daniel aan if someone's just
00:02:21
clicked on this conversation now and they have no idea who you are which is highly highly
00:02:27
unlikely can you tell me why listening to you and this conversation and the
00:02:33
work that we're about to go through now is so important for everyone even those
00:02:40
who believe that right now they have no issues everybody has a brain that's
00:02:46
listening it controls everything they do how they think how they feel how they
00:02:52
act how they get along with other people and most people know it but don't
00:02:59
your brain is the organ of intelligence character and every
00:03:06
decision you make and when it works right you work right and when it doesn't
00:03:13
you have trouble and most people have no idea
00:03:19
that their bad decisions their sadness their anxiety their
00:03:26
insomnia their poor relationship have has to do with the physical
00:03:32
functioning of their brain so if they want to be
00:03:38
happier they need to think about loving and caring for their brain optimize your
00:03:46
brain you optimize your mind's
00:03:51
ability you mentioned scanning brains there remind me again how many people's brains youve scanned now so it's now
00:03:57
about 260,000 260,000 people's brains and you've scanned some famous
00:04:03
brains yes actually people from nine months old to 105 from
00:04:09
155 countries and it's public knowledge I've been in Justin Bieber's docu series
00:04:14
seasons I scanned his brain I've scanned Miley Cyrus's brain um Mel Gibson just went on Joe
00:04:22
Rogan and talked about me scanning his brain um Muhammad Ali Mike Tyson Jake
00:04:28
Paul you also scanned my brain and you actually taught me a lot from scanning
00:04:34
my brain which I'm did you think about your brain after we talked about of course I think about it all the time now
00:04:40
it's also interesting that in 2024 the year just gone the word of the year was
00:04:47
the word brain rot and that's interesting because the subject of the brain I don't think has
00:04:54
been given the credit and the attention it deserves really until recently and
00:05:00
much of your work has played into that why do you think if you had to guess why do you think Oxford University's word of
00:05:06
the year was brainroot because people are worried that their
00:05:12
habits are shrinking their brain
00:05:17
especially social media and digital addictions I'm so hoping they'll go to
00:05:25
brain health as be more aspirational we've talked about a lot of
00:05:32
things on this show um one of the things that really stuck with me is how the content we consume can have a profound
00:05:39
impact on our brains we often think of the chemicals the the drugs the alcohol and all those things which I want to talk about but one such piece of content
00:05:46
which I don't think we have talked about is the impact of pornography on the brain is there a link between brain
00:05:53
health and pornography consumption you know it's such an
00:05:58
important question and the first thing that comes to my mind
00:06:04
is exposing developing brains to
00:06:10
pornography is so dangerous and8 nine 10
00:06:15
yearold boys are being exposed to the internet where they can see all sorts of
00:06:24
pornography when their brains aren't anywhere near
00:06:30
the ability to discern what's good what's not good what's healthy what's
00:06:35
not healthy and it's deadening and I use that word
00:06:41
purposefully the nucleus accumbens which is the area of your brain that produces
00:06:47
that responds to dopamine so dopamine and I know you've done podcasts on
00:06:53
dopamine it's the neurotransmitter that helps us with
00:06:58
motivation which helps us with Focus which helps us with happiness and mood and when the
00:07:07
nucle succumbent gets hit repeatedly with pornographic images it's
00:07:14
like dopamine dopamine dopamine it begins to deaden that area and then you
00:07:20
need more and more to begin to feel anything at all it's why Fame is so hard
00:07:28
on the brain but pornography especially in the young is
00:07:34
incredibly damaging to the brain so is that applicable to all things that cause
00:07:39
like a really sharp burst of dopamine and stimulation so you said there Fame
00:07:45
ponography I mean potentially gaming or gambling those kinds of things um alcohol is obviously one of those things
00:07:51
as well cocaine cocaine especially for a developing brain especially for a
00:07:57
developing brain if there's any message protect your brain until you're 25 and
00:08:04
then your brain will protect you but until then your prefrontal cortex at
00:08:11
from third of your brain is not fully developed which is sort of why God gave
00:08:17
you parents it's like so supervise it's like oh my teenagers hate it if I
00:08:23
supervise them and yeah they hate it more if you don't um but what if you get to 25
00:08:29
and you're listening to this now and you go Jesus I does this mean that I can do nothing about my brain of course not I
00:08:37
mean what I've shown is let's just take the NFL work H big damage right let's
00:08:45
stop lying about this football is a brain damaging Sport and soccer as well
00:08:53
is a brain damaging sport so high levels of damage 80% of my NFL players got
00:09:00
better when we put them on a rehabilitation program so if you've been bad to your
00:09:09
brain like non-stop gaming lots of pornography terrible
00:09:16
food and all of a sudden you go oh I can
00:09:21
have a better brain your brain can be better in as little as a couple of months where you
00:09:29
just feel better think better your mood is better but it has to start with this
00:09:37
concept I think we've talked about brain Envy it's you have to want to have a
00:09:43
better brain when when people come to you what
00:09:48
is it they're typically motivated by like in ter when they come to you why do they come to you
00:09:54
is it because they've heard of your work on the internet and they they want to just they're curious about getting their brain scanned or is do they usually come
00:10:00
with a symptom or some other ailment no usually they come because
00:10:06
they're in pain that they're anxious they're depressed they're um marriage is
00:10:14
falling apart or um their wife says come
00:10:19
or I'm going to divorce you it's not an uncommon thing or they're struggling in
00:10:25
school they're not living up to their potential in one way or another now
00:10:30
about 10% of the people come to us go I'm fine but I want to see and I want to
00:10:36
be better and I don't want Alzheimer's so a lot of people come because they
00:10:41
love a parent or grandparent that has Alzheimer they realize there's a genetic
00:10:47
component to it and they don't want to have that but that's really someone who
00:10:54
is Forward Thinking I think more people come because they're
00:11:04
hurting what evidence have we got that alcohol is bad for the brain and bad for
00:11:09
the rest of our body especially in moderation well the S US Surgeon General just came out wanting to put cancer
00:11:17
warning labels on all alcohol um that's sort of big evidence I mean
00:11:25
three years ago the American Cancer Society came out against any alcohol
00:11:32
because drinking any alcohol increases your risk of seven different
00:11:40
cancers and that's a big deal and then the evidence I have and my first Clinic
00:11:46
was outside of the Napa Valley in Northern California so alcohol is a big
00:11:52
thing and as I was looking at scans I'm like your brain's older than you are
00:11:59
that alcohol is not a health food it is detrimental to brain function and then
00:12:07
of course you know so I've been a psychiatrist now I decided to be a psychiatrist 46 years
00:12:12
ago the number one problem I see is someone drinks and they make a bad
00:12:19
decision someone drinks and they say something to their partner that they just shouldn't have said or they drink
00:12:27
and they go to work or they drink and they drive or they drink and it just
00:12:32
causes so much trouble and in 1999 I did
00:12:37
a show uh called the truth about drinking and we took a young adult um
00:12:44
who had trouble with alcohol got him sober scanned him and then on National Television we got him drunk just like he
00:12:52
got drunk and it just crashed his frontal loes and you just it's so clear
00:13:01
that alcohol takes the break off your
00:13:06
brain and so people use it to calm the brain down but there's certain parts of
00:13:12
your brain you really don't want to go offline the part that says don't say
00:13:18
that don't do that is that just when when I've had one drink and then when I
00:13:23
say BR up I'm back to normal or is this chronic well it depends
00:13:29
one drink will decrease um in a mild way your decision
00:13:36
making when it becomes chronic your life begins to get out of
00:13:43
control because I'm wondering you know if if people drink in moderation are they going to see long-term impacts to
00:13:50
their brain what is there such thing as um drinking just a little bit and
00:13:56
being fine well you I think there's always sort of a dose response there was a
00:14:02
study in Spain that looked at people who had mild moderate and severe drinking
00:14:11
and they compared them to people who didn't drink at all even the people who
00:14:16
only drank a little had disruptions in the white matter of their
00:14:23
brain now most people have heard about gray matter and white matter gray matter
00:14:29
is nerve cell bodies white matter is nerve cell tracks
00:14:35
so if you think of gray matter is where the computation uh is happening in the brain
00:14:42
and white matter are like the highways and so even a little bit of
00:14:49
alcohol is creating potholes it's disrupting the
00:14:56
highways in the brain and if if you're drinking a lot you are prematurely aging
00:15:03
your brain you've scammed a lot of people who are alcoholics Lots I mean
00:15:09
I've got some scans here and which I'll put on the screen but can you explain to
00:15:14
me exactly what a brain looks like when the person has been drinking heavily for a long period of time so again we do a
00:15:21
study called Spa in Spec looks at blood flow and activity it looks at how the brain works and
00:15:30
for people who know the mitochondria those are the little Powerhouse energy plants in your cells the spect Tracer
00:15:38
49% of it is taken up by the mitochondria in the brain so we're also
00:15:44
looking at energy metabolism and what we see with
00:15:50
alcoholic brains is something we call scallopine which is This Global
00:15:57
decrease in Act activ it so a healthy brain full even symmetrical activity it
00:16:04
sort of look big fat and round with alcohol or other drugs too you see the
00:16:11
brain begin to shrivel and you see it gets this wavy
00:16:18
appearance and I'm like the real reason not to drink is it damages your brain so
00:16:26
if you drink then you have a smaller brain than you would have otherwise
00:16:32
correct that's pretty scary what does it why does brain size matter you know when
00:16:37
people say it's going to shrink your brain why does that matter so I often say the only organ where size really
00:16:44
does matter is your brain um because you don't want to
00:16:53
lose brain tissue right there is a part of your brain called the Hipp canvas
00:16:59
which is on the inside of your temporal loes right here and it's really
00:17:08
important and um it makes new stem cells
00:17:14
every day about 700 and if you're
00:17:20
drinking it's not allowing those new stem cells to take hold to take root you
00:17:28
want to strengthen them so they will continue to support mood
00:17:36
memory um spatial orientation spatial processing so that's the symptoms you
00:17:43
you're naming there inadvertently symptoms of someone who has damaged their hippocampus right so poor memory
00:17:49
probably poor spatial awareness brain fog and moood and me issues and judgment
00:17:55
and impulse control um but it it impacts
00:18:01
the brain globally so the cerebellum so they're not going to process as quickly
00:18:08
their decisions are not going to be as good and
00:18:13
um I worked with my friend BJ fog who wrote a wonderful book called tiny
00:18:20
habits and he's the um director of Stanford's persuasive technology lab
00:18:27
which is really on how people people change and he and I work together cuz I'm always interested in how I can help
00:18:33
my patients better um and I met him at a conference like 18
00:18:39
months after we worked together and he said I just want to thank you I'm like
00:18:45
why he said I wake up 100% every day I'm
00:18:51
like why I stopped drinking because people with and they're around me enough they either drink more
00:18:58
I suspect or they stop and isn't that
00:19:04
what you want you wake up 100% every day why would you ever do
00:19:13
anything that damages stem cell production in your
00:19:20
brain one might argue that it's serving me in the short term of course but there are lots of things that like you see you
00:19:27
know let's say you're married but but you're at a conference and you see this really cute person and you're like oh
00:19:34
well in the short run that could be awesome and in the long run you lose
00:19:39
half your net worth and visit your children on the weekends it's
00:19:45
like that's not a good thing and you know in the short run you feel more
00:19:52
relaxed right with alcohol you feel more relaxed and in the long run it increases
00:19:57
your risk of Al Al's disease I'm like that's not a good tradeoff on your blog
00:20:04
you published a study from 2019 sorry from 2009 it was a study on monkeys that
00:20:09
showed a decline in new brain cell development and in that study there was a 58% decline in new brain cells and a
00:20:16
63% reduction in the survival rate of new cells from alcohol use they had monkeys drinking alcohol yes they have
00:20:23
monkeys doing all sorts of things they shouldn't be doing which is effectively like pre ual brain
00:20:30
aging right and it's worse if you do it before your brain is
00:20:38
finished developing and so if you think of fraternities yeah and surori like I'm
00:20:45
not a fan of sending children away to college and um is because you have all
00:20:53
these underdeveloped brains or not fully developed brains and you put them all
00:21:00
together without appropriate adult supervision and a lot of bad things
00:21:07
happen at fraternity parties and sorority parties they're drinking less
00:21:12
though now no they're still drinking it oh really there's one second and now they're adding mushroom parties to it so
00:21:20
it's alcohol and psilocybin and marijuana because everybody thinks
00:21:25
marijuana is innocuous which is a lie and uh is it m marijuana it's a lie yeah
00:21:34
and I was actually really upset um so President
00:21:41
Biden during the time he was running for president so this is
00:21:48
2019 he's on debate stage with a lot of other people and they asked him if he
00:21:54
would federally uh legalize marijuana
00:21:59
and he Saidi don't think the science is decided and no I don't think I would and
00:22:05
Cory Booker the senator from New Jersey shamed Biden on National
00:22:12
Television he said man are you high which is just horrifying and I'm
00:22:20
watching this going the science is actually really
00:22:26
clear marijuana is bad for the brain I
00:22:31
published a study on a thousand marijuana users every area of their
00:22:37
brain is lower in activity and just today a study came out in the Journal of
00:22:44
the American Medical Association on a,
00:22:50
21,27 marijuana users um it decreased activity in the hippocampus that
00:22:57
affected their memory centers if you're a teenager and you use
00:23:06
marijuana in your 20s you have a higher incidence of anxiety depression and
00:23:12
suicide this is not innocuous and we've been advertised this load of crap which
00:23:21
is oh it's just good medicine and for some people it is
00:23:26
helpful but let's not say say it's innocuous because that's a lie and we
00:23:33
are now so many states have legalized marijuana for recreational use including
00:23:38
here in California and the Mental Health crisis is not better if anything it's
00:23:47
dramatically worse there's two issues here isn't there there's the impact cannabis has on
00:23:53
the brain and then there's the whole issue of legalization and I was re as you was speaking I was was just looking at some
00:23:59
of the research and it it says exactly what you said it says that there was a study published in Jama Network which examined over a thousand young adults
00:24:05
brains and almost 70% of heavy users exhibited reduced brain activity during
00:24:10
working memory tasks the decline was associated with poor poor performance in retaining and using information
00:24:16
long-term cannabis use has been linked to smaller hippocampus volume which again impacts memory and learning so I
00:24:22
mean the science is clear that of what it's doing but the the question of legalization is a whole another issue
00:24:28
well please don't put people who use marijuana in jail yeah like that's just a bad use of money yeah that that's not
00:24:36
smart but the the problem becomes we're not educating kids on the potential
00:24:44
damage to brain development which nobody really argues about nobody's really nobody reputable I
00:24:52
know of is going yeah give it to teenagers and let them smoke all they want no it's just dumb so I it's a
00:25:01
bigger question and I think the answer I have a high school course
00:25:08
in um it's called brain Thrive by 25 and we actually studied it in 16 schools
00:25:13
decreases drug alcohol and tobacco use decreases depression and improves self-esteem why we teach kids to love
00:25:22
and care for their brain you got your brain scan and now you love love your
00:25:28
brain more you you want it to be better that's the answer it's not scanning
00:25:36
everybody it's educating everybody your brain controls everything you do and
00:25:42
when it works right you work right and when it doesn't you don't so let's love it and let's learn
00:25:49
together how to optimize it but the big innovation Stephen for 2025 in
00:25:57
psychiatry marijuana psilocybin and ketamine the street drugs of the 60s are
00:26:05
coming back and I'm like I feel like I'm living in this
00:26:10
insane world where we're not talking about you should eat better and exercise
00:26:17
and learn not to believe every stupid thing you think and meditation could
00:26:23
calm your mind probably more effectively than alcohol or marijuana it's not hard
00:26:31
to learn what's wrong with cocy in magic mushrooms yeah everybody's so excited
00:26:37
about micro doing and it's a treatment for depression and I think I've seen this story before so in the early
00:26:47
80s benzos you know like Xanax and clopen and Adavan they were Mommy's
00:26:53
Little Helper and this will really help your anxiety the problem is they make
00:26:58
your brain look older than you are and they're addictive as hell then there was alcohol is a health food marijuana is
00:27:05
innocuous pain is the fifth Vital sign which led to the opiate epidemic and now
00:27:12
we're into mushrooms psilocybin Associated
00:27:17
psychosis has gone up 300% in the last couple of years that
00:27:22
not for everybody but for some vulnerable people and we don't know who they are
00:27:28
it can flip them into a psychotic episode I'm like we need to be careful
00:27:36
we need to be thoughtful so psilocybin hasn't yet been legalized in the US in Oregon oh it has
00:27:44
been in Oregon um is it being delivered yet in Oregon in a theraputic just now is it so it
00:27:52
there was a 2-year waiting period yeah and they were training uh people to do
00:27:58
psilocybin assisted psychotherapy but there isn't a psilocybin compound that's
00:28:03
been approved yet by the FDA so there's still I think it's stage three clinical
00:28:09
trials from what I understand I was quite involved in that world as an investor once upon a time so I
00:28:15
understand the like rigor to get these compounds clinically approved and you're
00:28:21
right so in the early like clinical trials there's I mean groups of like 20 people in some of the early clinical trials and as they're progressing now I
00:28:28
I think getting to stage three they need to have bigger sample sizes and make sure that these compounds are safe and
00:28:34
from what I've seen a lot of people are trying to get it approved in a clinical setting for CA cases of treatment
00:28:41
resistant depression where you do see even in those the studies that I've read you see some people have adverse
00:28:49
responses so some people get worse and there's you know if you take a someone who's treatment resistant depressed and potentially suicidal and you give them a
00:28:56
a a strong compound like of sideon some people can get worse but for the ones
00:29:02
that get better it's pretty remarkable it's like I've been I remember the first
00:29:07
study that I read I think coming out of the L uh one of the London universities
00:29:12
that's really leading on this maybe Imperial College London or something and it said something like 30% of people
00:29:19
that did one dose of celoc cybin were went into clinical remission after 12 weeks after one dose and there's
00:29:27
really like nothing else that I can think of that can deliver that kind of response in that period of time K
00:29:35
ketamine ketamine I mean MDMA has I think been ketamine can do it but then
00:29:40
ketamine can also be addictive and can be
00:29:46
problematic so I'm like well why wouldn't we scan them
00:29:52
first and then try to figure out why you're depressed CU if you think about
00:29:57
it depression is like chest
00:30:03
pain and nobody gets a diagnosis of chest pain why it doesn't tell you
00:30:10
what's causing it and it doesn't tell you what to do for it all sorts of things can cause chest
00:30:17
pain right from a heart attack a heart arhythmia a heart
00:30:23
infection gas an ulcer grief all of those can cause chest pain well there's
00:30:31
a whole bunch of things that can cause depression like loss negative thinking
00:30:37
low thyroid having a head injury um
00:30:43
being exposed to mold or Mercury
00:30:48
blad it's like if you don't look if you just give everybody you're depressed
00:30:55
based on these nine symptoms and now we go give everybody an SSRI which is
00:31:01
ludicrous because that's assuming everybody with it's sort of like giving everybody with chest pain
00:31:08
nitroglycerin which is stupid right you would never give
00:31:16
everybody who has chest pain one treatment you'd go I have to Target the
00:31:23
treatment to the cause but if you never look
00:31:28
you have no idea so for example I was on the Kardashians and so it's public that um I
00:31:36
saw Kendall and I saw her for postco anxiety her brain was on fire from covid
00:31:45
and a lot of people don't understand that covid and other infections can cause
00:31:51
inflammation in the brain well that's not a psilocybon thing that's an
00:32:00
anti-inflammatory cocktail to help postco anxiety or postco depression if
00:32:07
you don't look you don't know you end up Flying Blind and that's what I'm in fighting
00:32:14
with my colleagues for the last 33 years it's how do you know unless you look and
00:32:22
what other Medical Specialists never look at the organ they so we could talk
00:32:28
about oh I've seen these amazing results and I think we should see well
00:32:35
what's this scan pattern that you're going to respond to
00:32:40
psilocybin or Lexapro or ketamine or lctl right I mean it's great we have all
00:32:47
these treatments but let's not fly [Music]
00:32:52
blind when we don't have to there's this graph I saw the other day circulating around the internet which I'm going to
00:32:58
show you and I'll put it on the screen for anybody that can't see it but it shows globally which countries
00:33:04
distribute the most anti-depressant pills ssris and the United States leads the
00:33:11
way by a long margin I mean I think in in looking at that graph it's almost 10
00:33:17
times more anti-depressant pills per person are handed out in the United States than other parts of the
00:33:23
world and I wondered why why does the USA
00:33:28
hand out anti-depressant pills like like their water or
00:33:35
something it's such an interesting graph um because here in America we want the
00:33:43
fast answer I don't feel well fix me
00:33:51
and what doctors have do you know 85% of psychiatric drugs in America are
00:33:58
prescribed by non- psychiatric physicians in 7-minute office visits
00:34:04
that do standard of care 12% of the time what does that mean and
00:34:10
that they do what most doctors would consider good medicine 12% of the time
00:34:17
so you go to your family doctor or your nurse practitioner and you go I'm sad
00:34:22
I'm anxious I'm not sleeping you might and we hear this all the time at clinics
00:34:28
I have 11 clinics around the United States we hear it all the time that I went to my doctor and he gave me a
00:34:35
prescription for Lexapro Xanax and ambian and it just blows my mind that
00:34:44
they would put you on something that changes your brain to need them in order
00:34:50
for you to feel normal see people don't understand and I am not opposed to
00:34:56
medication I use it when I think I need to but let's be clear they do not heal
00:35:06
fix anything what they do is they suppress symptoms but then once they've
00:35:12
suppressed the symptoms they've changed your brain so you need them in order to
00:35:18
feel okay I don't like that like what can I
00:35:24
do naturally head-to-head against anti-depressants
00:35:31
saffron has been shown to be equally effective the spice saffron head-to-head against
00:35:38
anti-depressants walking like you're late 45 minutes four times a week equally effective head-to-head against
00:35:45
anti-depressants taking omega-3 fatty acids equally effective in a study from
00:35:53
Australia head-to-head against anti-depressants learning how to not believe believe every stupid thing you
00:36:00
think has been shown to be equally effective so why not if you're depressed
00:36:07
and you can't get scanned start walking take omega-3 fatty acids and
00:36:16
saffron and learn how to kill the ants ants stands for automatic negative
00:36:21
thoughts the thoughts that come into your mind automatically and ruin your day and we grow up I don't know if the
00:36:27
same thing is in England there's no training on how to manage your
00:36:32
mind right I was 28 years old in my psychiatric residency when one of my
00:36:38
professors said you have to teach your patients not to believe every stupid thing they think and I'm
00:36:44
28 and I'm in my residency which means I finished College I finished medical school and I believe every stupid thing
00:36:52
I think that no one had ever taught me how to manage my own thoughts I can't believe that thing you just said about
00:36:58
saffron I was reading about it here it says Research indicates that saffron may be as effective as ssris in treating
00:37:04
mild and moderate depression and a metaanalysis of eight studies found no difference between saffron and ssris in
00:37:12
reducing depressive symptoms but in fact the side of effect profile is probably better for
00:37:17
saffron well so I got interested in Saffron about 25 years ago because I saw
00:37:23
a study so there are now 25 randomized controlled trials showing
00:37:30
that saffron is as effective as ssris and other
00:37:37
anti-depressants but the thing that caught my interest this may speak more
00:37:42
about me is they didn't decrease sexual function in fact they enhanced it and so
00:37:49
I've been a psychiatrist a long time and ssris for the right brain they work but
00:37:57
they make it harder to have an orgasm they decrease your
00:38:02
libido and I don't like that I don't want to separate if you're depressed
00:38:08
you're already separated from your partner yeah if you're depressed and you
00:38:14
can't have an orgasm or you're not interested that's
00:38:20
damaging not only to you but it damages your partner and so and I thought
00:38:26
saffron can enhance sexual function and I'm like okay I'm paying attention and
00:38:31
so I have collected every study ever published on saffron and brain and
00:38:37
mental health there's actually five studies showing en hance's memory that it was as good as AOSP in people AOSP a
00:38:47
medicine we use in Alzheimer's disease and it's as good as AOSP so it helps
00:38:52
memory it helps mood it helps sexual function I'm like mood memory and sex
00:38:57
I'm going to take it mood memory and sex so yeah i' love
00:39:05
saffron so why wouldn't we start with that and exercise and learn to manage
00:39:12
your mind rather than start with Lexapro or even soloc cybin or ketamine one of
00:39:21
the things when people are talking about psychedelics that they're trying to treat is trauma right Early Childhood
00:39:26
trauma um is that something that you can see if you looked at my brain could you see trauma on my brain yes and have you
00:39:33
looked a diamond pattern that I've written about I published in actually
00:39:38
discover magazine in 2016 listed my study so I published a study on 21,000
00:39:45
people showing we could separate post-traumatic stress disorder from
00:39:51
traumatic brain injury with high levels of accuracy and then we repeated this
00:39:57
study on soldiers and showed the same thing and this year I just published the
00:40:04
world's largest study on childhood trauma so do you know the a score yes
00:40:09
which is a measure of childhood trauma childhood trauma adverse childhood experiences so it's on a scale of 0 to
00:40:16
10 how many bad things happen to you as a child physical emotional sexual abuse
00:40:25
neglect um being being raised with parent that has a mental illness that's
00:40:31
incarcerated addiction watching um your mother be abused so
00:40:37
domestic violence so 0 to 10 I'm a one my wife's an eight we adopted our two
00:40:45
nieces who are both nines and so I'm very interested in childhood trauma so
00:40:50
so a nine is good or bad nine is terrible okay so higher the number so zero is means you have none of those
00:40:57
okay a you have a lot and we if you have four or
00:41:05
more you have an increased risk of seven of the top 10 leading causes of
00:41:13
death if you have six or more so my wife's in eight my nieces are nines you
00:41:19
die 20 years earlier than the general population and in our study what we
00:41:27
showed the more Aces you had the more activation of your limbic structures
00:41:36
especially a very interesting area called the anterior singular gyus I
00:41:46
think of this as the brain's gear shifter lets you go from thought to thought move from idea to idea be
00:41:52
flexible go with the flow and when this is overactive
00:41:57
people worry they hold on to things it's like the trauma is always in front of
00:42:06
them and I often do timeline I ask people do you see your
00:42:12
life um going from left to right or from front to
00:42:19
back and I see the past behind me my wife sees the past in front of her and
00:42:27
that's often what you see with trauma and their brain becomes
00:42:34
overactive in their emotional brain which makes them at higher risk for pain
00:42:40
syndromes um higher risk for anxiety higher risk
00:42:45
for depression higher risk for insomnia that they're sort of always looking for
00:42:51
bad things to happen is there anything someone can do at home because you know not everybody can
00:42:58
afford to go to a therapist it's hard to get access to these kind of treatments if if I have some kind of Trapped trauma
00:43:06
or traumatic experienc PTSD that I've been through and I don't have any money at all it what would you recommend for
00:43:11
me well I mean the first thing I want everyone to do is love their brain right
00:43:17
the healthier your brain and before we we started we talked
00:43:23
about this idea it's the brain you bring in into trauma that often determines how
00:43:30
you deal with it and to get well you have to get your brain
00:43:35
healthy so that's the first thing so that means getting off the alcohol exercise eat well certain simple
00:43:43
supplements yes what supplements and then um multiple vitamin for basic
00:43:50
nutrition know your vitamin D level and optimize it and most people need to
00:43:56
supplement vitamin D and if you have darker skin you need five times the level of
00:44:03
Sun as someone from northern Europe to get a healthy vitamin D level so you
00:44:09
should know your vitamin D level and optimize it like I always say can't
00:44:15
change what you don't measure and vitamin D is a very important number to
00:44:22
know so multiple vitamin vitamin D
00:44:27
omega-3 fatty acid I did a study 50 consecutive patient Stam in
00:44:34
clinics who are not taking vitamin D we measured their omega-3 index 49 were
00:44:40
suboptimal and so I think most people would benefit from an omega-3 fatty acid
00:44:49
supplement and then it's sort of depends if you have issues with your mood
00:44:54
saffron would be great if you tend to be anxious don't go for the benzo um
00:45:01
theanine ashwagandha magnesium Gaba diaphragmatic breathing hypnosis so many
00:45:10
things to help anxiety before you ever go to something that's addictive that
00:45:16
makes your brain look older than you are that increases your risk of dementia one of the really really
00:45:22
interesting things that you mentioned which I had never heard of or thought thought of before is the impact of
00:45:28
negative thinking on your brain we just published this huge study on negativity
00:45:35
bias and it's not good for your frontal loes and so I love doing positivity
00:45:43
biased training like I train all of my patients start every day today is going
00:45:49
to be a great day I mean somebody asked me today if I believe in
00:45:55
manifestation um part of I think you have to tell your brain what you want
00:46:01
and then your brain will figure out how to get it and so if you go today is
00:46:06
going to be a great day your brain starts looking like why is today going to be a great day and when you go to bed
00:46:14
at night what went well today that's so helpful to just start programming your
00:46:21
brain to look for what's right not just for what's wrong virtually every
00:46:28
depressed patient I said have a high negativity bias and so training them to
00:46:35
be more positive now not irrationally positive because you need some anxiety
00:46:43
people have low levels of anxiety die early from accidents and preventable
00:46:49
illnesses people who have low levels of anxiety low levels of anxiety so I always I have an older brother who I
00:46:55
love um but he's one of the don't worry be happy people and I sort of always wanted to be
00:47:03
like him because I'm much more serious much more driven and I'm like no I
00:47:10
wanted to be like him until I read the research the people who live the longest
00:47:16
so there's a study from Stanford they started in 1921 and they looked at
00:47:23
1548 10-year-old children and they were looking for what goes with
00:47:29
success Health and Longevity and what they found was
00:47:38
shocking the don't worry be happy people died the earliest from accidents and
00:47:44
preventable illnesses the people who live the
00:47:49
longest the one theme was they were conscientious if they said they were
00:47:55
going to show up and they showed up reliably consistently
00:48:01
they live longer than everyone else and I just shows they had good frontal function it's like if I say I'm going to
00:48:08
do something and I commit to it I do it you live longer could that be also linked to like discipline those people
00:48:15
are more likely to be disciplined with other areas of their life habits eating gym yes which means they had better
00:48:22
frontal lob function so why would we ever take these guys fernal loes offline
00:48:29
no love your fernal loses this is why when you have children don't let them hit soccer balls with their forehead
00:48:36
it's just not a smart thing to do I think that's probably a big thing people are thinking about this time of the year
00:48:43
so we're recording now in January 2025 wow um and everybody's thinking about
00:48:49
new year new me they're thinking about their New Year's resolution becoming a new person habits motivation discipline
00:48:56
these are like the trifactor of what I I see people talking about the most at this time of year when you with
00:49:02
everything you understand about the brain how do I become a more disciplined motivated person who has better habits
00:49:10
so one you take care of your brain and two you know when relapse happens
00:49:16
relapse happens when you don't sleep okay
00:49:22
when you've gone too long without eating when blood sugar levels go low relapse
00:49:31
happens you start making bad decisions when if you're a female when
00:49:37
you're in the last week of your cycle because blood flow to your frontal lobe
00:49:42
drops for many women so I have five sisters and five daughters I completely
00:49:47
believe in PMs and I've scanned people best time of
00:49:53
their cycle worst time it's like they're two different people sort of like they have multiple personality disorder
00:50:00
because their brain is just so different now obviously not with all women but for certain ones it's a big issue and if the
00:50:11
ants are taken over so if the automatic negative thoughts which also tend to go
00:50:19
up if you haven't slept if you've gone too long without eating if you're at that time of your cycle or you're under
00:50:27
chronic stress or you're drinking or using other drugs so you might suppress
00:50:34
them but then they come back and they attack you so then you have to suppress them again and this is how
00:50:41
addiction starts so is it fair to say that if you're trying to change who you are and you're trying to establish a new
00:50:47
habit or crack motivation then the goal shouldn't be necessarily to get a six-pack it should probably be something
00:50:53
further Upstream like sleep well or better frontales and so how do I get
00:51:00
better frontales and it's three strategies frontal lobe Envy right brain
00:51:05
Envy got to care about it avoid things that hurt damaging my frontal
00:51:10
loes and do things that strengthen my frontal loes we talked about two of
00:51:16
these points earlier but you we talked about alcohol but in the context of sleep I've heard on you I think it was in your podcast change your brain after
00:51:23
two drinks your REM sleep drops to roughly an hour after four drinks your REM sleep drops to 30 minutes and after
00:51:30
six drinks your REM sleep drops to less than 2 minutes for many people um obviously these aren't specific numbers
00:51:37
because everybody's brain is different but it just goes to show I guess the relative drop in REM sleep
00:51:44
which is your restorative sleep based on alcohol consumption and so if I drink I'm not going to sleep while I'm not
00:51:49
going to get restorative sleep I wake up the next day I'm going to struggle more with motivation and keeping any habit
00:51:55
that I have ending anxiety and then you're going to be more ants and then you're going to drink more
00:52:02
to shut up the ants and then when they come back they come back stronger and by ants you mean the automatic negative
00:52:08
thoughts okay the chatter that hurts you and we talked about how to kill them so
00:52:17
whenever you feel sad or mad or nervous or out of control what I want you to do
00:52:25
is just write it down and then ask yourself a series of
00:52:32
questions um and I have I have this cute diagram of the different types of ants
00:52:40
and I always ask my patients so which which are your ants are they like All or
00:52:46
Nothing ants were you thinking words like always never everyone every time are they less than ants given to us by
00:52:53
social media uh where we compare ourselves others in a negative way guilt
00:52:58
beating ants mind reading ants fortune telling ants blame
00:53:05
ants um so identify the type do you have
00:53:10
a example of a bad thought that just sort of runs around your head oh
00:53:17
gosh um I think I live in a permanent state of assuming I'm going to get bad
00:53:22
bad news and it doesn't haunt me I think I'm generally quite calm person and
00:53:28
quite focused and peaceful in my brain but I think because I've ran companies for the last 10 years or longer you're
00:53:35
always just about to get bad news so I think that can be that can be playing on
00:53:41
the radio in the background somewhere like I'm GNA open an email and it's going to be bad news there's so many
00:53:47
opportunities for bad news in my world so yeah yeah so I think you write it down this is going to be bad and then my
00:53:54
friend Byron Katie has has this process that I've refined a bit so that's a
00:54:00
fortune telling amp right and so this is going to be bad news or I always get bad
00:54:07
news fortune telling and all or nothing and so the first question is is
00:54:14
it true right the second question is it
00:54:20
absolutely true with 100% certainty and if one is no two is automatically no the
00:54:25
third question question is how does that thought Make Me Feel on edge on edge how does the
00:54:32
thought make me act so the third question has three parts how does the thought make me feel tense on edge how
00:54:37
does it make me act uh removed uh what's that word is it
00:54:45
apathetic reticent yeah yeah and the
00:54:50
third part of that what's the outcome of believing it's always is going to be
00:54:58
bad news I mean there's no good outcome really suffering yeah suffering yeah the
00:55:06
fourth question is how would you feel if you didn't have that thought free and
00:55:12
how would you act uh happier and
00:55:17
uh more present and the outcome of not having that thought better relationships
00:55:27
because you're more present yeah yeah and then the fifth question so the first
00:55:33
one is is it true the second one is it absolutely true the third one how would
00:55:39
I how do I feel act and what's the outcome of having this thought the
00:55:45
fourth question is how would I feel act and what's the outcome of not having the
00:55:50
thought the fifth question is my favorite just take the thought and turn
00:55:56
it to the opposite and then ask yourself is that
00:56:01
true so it's going to be good news or it's going to be innocuous
00:56:11
news and then go yeah 99 times out of 100 that's
00:56:17
true and then I would because I'm also a CEO I'm like well how many of these
00:56:23
things can't I handle virtually none of them I can handle all
00:56:29
of them right so I'll be okay and then I
00:56:36
meditate on the opposite of the thought that's bothering me and so I take these
00:56:44
thoughts captive I like that and people who are
00:56:50
depressed are infested with negativity
00:56:58
but you can train that your brain is healthy it's easier to do you can train
00:57:04
that but you imagine there's no second grade class in the world where teachers teach children not
00:57:12
to believe every stupid thing they think in fact I was watching one of the
00:57:18
confirmation hearings today and the senators were filled with ants oh yeah
00:57:25
they were distorted things they were angry they were making things more
00:57:30
negative than they needed to be we are model bad
00:57:37
thinking and the News does it purposefully because they know if they
00:57:42
piss you off if they scare you you're going to tune in so they can sell you more copper underwear so we're in a
00:57:50
society that breeds these ant attacks
00:57:56
so you have to be careful people who watch the news in the morning are 27% less happy in the afternoon and so you
00:58:04
have to guard what goes in so every day your programming
00:58:13
happiness or sadness and I
00:58:19
believe Dennis Prager has this great five minute video called why be happy
00:58:26
and I love it so much I wrote a book called you happier and I start with his idea that happiness
00:58:34
is a moral obligation and I'm like so I grew up not too far from here I went to
00:58:40
Catholic School my mom was very serious about being Catholic and growing up the idea
00:58:47
happiness is a moral obligation was nowhere in my childhood and I had a good
00:58:53
childhood why is it a moral obligation because of how you impact other
00:58:59
people if you were raised by an unhappy parent or married to an unhappy spouse
00:59:05
or raising an unhappy child and you ask those people is happiness an ethical
00:59:11
issue they would all say
00:59:17
yes so is it wrong to program your mind
00:59:23
to look for what's right it's hard for some people it's just a
00:59:28
pattern right it's like getting biceps are hard but it's it's not right it's just
00:59:37
repeatedly doing the same thing that gives you the desire you want have you
00:59:44
seen someone shift from being a stereotypically negative person down and
00:59:49
out negative depressed to the opposite yes truly the opposite a lot
00:59:57
but you got to do the process it's you you got to do the
01:00:03
work when you love yourself you do the
01:00:09
work like I come from a family of fat people but I'm not why because I know
01:00:16
it's a risk for me and so every day of my life I'm on an obesity prevention
01:00:24
plan and wish I didn't have to be right I wish I could just eat anything I want and it would be okay but it's not the
01:00:32
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01:01:34
that don't know who Elizabeth Smart is who is she and what did you learn from
01:01:39
scanning her brain so Elizabeth is someone who made
01:01:45
really international news many years ago she was kidnapped when she was a
01:01:51
teenager and virtually raped every day for nine months and then she was
01:02:01
found um that she was actually very smart and she manipulated her kidnappers
01:02:08
to bring her back to Utah Salt Lake city where the kidnapped her from and she was
01:02:13
found by the police and one would think
01:02:19
she would have severe lasting post-traumatic stress disorder
01:02:26
and I was very interested to scan her
01:02:31
and be helpful to her she in fact did not have post-traumatic stress disorder
01:02:39
she had post-traumatic growth she took her trauma and made
01:02:47
something special out of it where she actually runs an organization for women
01:02:53
who have been abused um and I just remember sitting
01:03:01
there and her brain was actually quite healthy I think she helped me more than I helped her just so
01:03:11
fascinated by how she could take something that's truly
01:03:18
horrifying and come out of it and be quite okay and she's how old
01:03:25
now she's in she's in her in 30s and she's in a relationship married she's married she has children she's running
01:03:32
an organization she speaks around the country I mean when people hear that
01:03:40
they might begin to question how they think about trauma because we think of trauma as a very
01:03:45
deterministic thing I if that happens to you I can predict that you're going to be X you're going to be you know maybe
01:03:53
depressed you're not going to be social functioning you're probably not going to have functional good relationships
01:04:00
that's the kind of thing we think when we hear about such a horrific event we kind of see it as deterministic of who
01:04:05
you then become but she's proving that that that's not the case now in fact of people who go through something really
01:04:13
terrible about 10% of people will develop PTSD and about 10% of people will
01:04:20
develop post-traumatic growth and most people sort of land in the middle I
01:04:26
wrote an article 1982 when I was a resident at
01:04:32
Walter Reed um called post Vietnam stress disorder a
01:04:38
metaphor for current and past life events and it was when I was resident I
01:04:46
got the idea it's the brain you bring into Vietnam that often determines the
01:04:53
brain that comes out of Vietnam that if you grew up in an alcoholic home or you
01:05:00
grew up with a lot of stress you are much more likely to become a heroin
01:05:05
addict and much more likely to come home and struggle um obviously not
01:05:13
always but we should there's a concept since I started Imaging that I just
01:05:20
dearly love so much called brain Reserve so brain Reserve is the extra tissue you
01:05:28
have to deal with whatever stress comes your way and brain Reserve actually
01:05:37
starts before you were conceived so you get your brain wrapped around that a
01:05:43
little bit it's the idea of epigenetics that if your parents grew up
01:05:49
in trauma and abuse it changed their genes
01:05:56
to make you more [Music] vulnerable
01:06:02
and if so your genetic history matters the health of your mom while
01:06:11
she's carrying you your brain starts to develop three
01:06:16
weeks after she gets pregnant three weeks like about day
01:06:22
21 and so her stress level her
01:06:29
infectious disease level burden her nutrition her
01:06:34
sleep all of these things matter one of my patients wife is pregnant I'm like
01:06:40
you need to be nice to her you need to like lower her stress because you a
01:06:48
child that this has generational consequences and then when you're born
01:06:56
how did the birth go and then as a child what was your nutrition link what were
01:07:02
your stress levels like did you play football did you fall off the
01:07:08
swing all of those things are either building your brain Reserve or
01:07:15
stealing your brain Reserve so when you get
01:07:22
kidnapped or let's just take two soldiers and War they're in the same
01:07:28
tank they go over an IED so they're both the tank is blown
01:07:35
up one walks away unharmed the other one's permanently
01:07:43
disabled why it's their brain reserve the brain they brought into the
01:07:50
explosion often determines how they are so I
01:07:57
argue we should always be building
01:08:03
reserve and I turned 70 this year and I know 50% of people 85 and older have
01:08:12
Alzheimer's disease one and two horrifying statistics and so I know that
01:08:19
so between now and 15 years from now what are the things I can do
01:08:26
to build my Reserve so the gravity of
01:08:31
age has less impact on me because your brain is going to shrink with aging
01:08:37
regardless of any it it's going to show although I have a whole group of super
01:08:45
brains people that are 80 90 1005 like
01:08:51
stunningly beautiful brains but they're people that had stunningly beautiful
01:08:56
brain Reserve habits okay that they didn't smoke they weren't drinkers they
01:09:02
ate well they were not overweight so on this subject of Alzheimer's it's increasing globally the I reading
01:09:10
something I think from like the Alzheimer's Association that said they're predicting by 2050 that there's
01:09:15
going to be 150 or 160 million people globally that have Alzheimer's disease there's still a lot of question marks
01:09:21
around what causes it what increases its probability Etc but what do you think the cause of Outsiders is I think there
01:09:29
are many causes of it and the going
01:09:34
wisdom until recently was excessive beta ameloid pla formation caused Alzheimer's and there's
01:09:41
a lot of questions around that theory I think uh I have a pneumonic I
01:09:49
like called bright Minds you want to keep your brain healthy or rescue it you have to prevent or treat the 11 major
01:09:57
risk factors so I think there are in fact many roads to Alzheimer's disease
01:10:04
and people go what the difference between Alzheimer's and Dementia dementia is the umbrella category you
01:10:11
start losing your faculties Alzheimer's is one of the types but the more you get
01:10:19
into it you realize it's a pretty mixed bag and so
01:10:26
um bright Minds blood flow retirement and aging
01:10:31
inflammation genetics head trauma toxins mental health you know if a woman is
01:10:39
depressed it doubles her risk of Alzheimer's disease if a man is depressed it quadruples his risk of
01:10:47
Alzheimer's and then the sleeper in all of these is infections immunity and
01:10:53
infections many of of us think it's a major one of the major causes of
01:11:01
Alzheimer's disease in fact there's a new study out on covid people who had covid had an significantly increased
01:11:09
risk of getting Alzheimer's disease and then neuro hormones and we have this
01:11:15
epidemic of low testosterone in young males now um
01:11:22
diabesity and sleep diabet is you either have high blood
01:11:29
sugar and or you're overweight and that one risk
01:11:35
factor if you have that one risk factor now all of a sudden you have 10 of the
01:11:40
11 risk factors because if you have one if you have diabetes if you're
01:11:46
overweight or you have high blood sugar it lowers blood flow to your brain it
01:11:52
prematurely ages your brain it increases is inflammation fat cells produce
01:11:58
something called adapin which is inflammatory molecules it changes your
01:12:04
genetics fat stores toxins you're more likely to be depressed you're it damages
01:12:10
your immunity um takes healthy testosterone turns it into unhealthy cancer promoting
01:12:17
forms of estrogen and impairs your sleep om justly and then people go oh but
01:12:23
you're fat shaming and it's like no I published a study on 33,000 people as your weight goes up the
01:12:32
size and function of the brain goes down somebody's got to like say the truth the
01:12:40
truth is being at an unhealthy weight is unhealthy for your brain and body I was
01:12:48
reading a some studies earlier on when I spoke to a insulin resistance expert one
01:12:54
of the things said to me was that they now almost describe Alzheimer's as type
01:12:59
3 diabetes that's a phrase that's often used and when they look at brains that are insulin resistant the person between
01:13:06
40 or 80% of the time depending on which studies you look at has insulin resistance I.E they've had elevated
01:13:13
blood sugar levels which have caused an insulin resistance or something else it could be stress that causes insulin resistance or many other things but it's
01:13:20
interesting to think of to think of as you said that that one one thing which
01:13:26
is the high blood sugar levels insulin resistance can have such a profound
01:13:32
impact on the brain and if I've ever heard a case for being a bit more careful about
01:13:38
sugar and other things that will Spike my blood sugar levels and chronically I
01:13:44
think that's probably it you know because your brain as you said at the start of this conversation drives
01:13:49
everything in your life and to think that Sugar an overc consumption of sugar
01:13:55
should I say has such a profound impact on the brain is is pause for me because I don't like sugar that
01:14:02
much um you don't like it as much as you like your brain yeah and my life so
01:14:07
there's a study from the Mayo Clinic where they looked at people who had
01:14:13
primarily a fat-based diet so
01:14:18
fish healthy oils avocados nuts and seeds they had
01:14:25
42% less risk of getting Alzheimer's disease and then they looked at people
01:14:31
who had primarily a protein based diet so think of a caveman diet 21% less risk
01:14:39
of getting Alzheimer's disease and then they looked at people that had a standard American diet simple
01:14:46
carbohydrate based diet bread pasta potatoes rice fruit juice sugar a 4 100%
01:14:56
increased risk of getting Alzheimer's disease it's the sugar and the foods
01:15:03
that quickly turn to sugar which goes with the insulin Diabetes Type 3
01:15:11
hypothesis you have to manage it and the reason this is so important to me
01:15:19
is having high blood sugar makes your blood vessel
01:15:26
brittle and more likely to break which means it takes longer for things to
01:15:35
heal and you're more likely to have a stroke and having a stroke increases
01:15:40
your risk of Alzheimer's tfold so you a fan of the keto diet I
01:15:47
sound like for some people I I I find that it doesn't have enough plants m in
01:15:54
it which means it's probably not going to be awesome for your microbiome so I'm more a fan of a paleo
01:16:04
diet that has healthy fat healthy protein and lots of plants MH we've
01:16:13
covered so much there's uh the one thing we talk we started talking about briefly I think before we started recording was the subject of Hope and grief I've never
01:16:21
heard someone talk about the impact that grief has on the brain brain when we lose someone when we're going through
01:16:28
prolonged pain because of a loss oh I know more about this than I
01:16:34
want it activates the limic or emotional
01:16:39
circuits in the brain and so when you lose someone important to you or even a
01:16:49
pet like I hadry
01:16:54
a white shepher and so beautiful and so
01:17:00
sweet and he got cancer and when he died he still lives in my
01:17:08
head and I lost someone important to me about 20 years ago and for like a year I
01:17:16
was just not okay and so I scanned myself and my emotional brain was so
01:17:23
busy and it's like when you have someone they actually become
01:17:31
ingrained in every fun place in your brain so they get stored in multiple
01:17:38
places in your brain and when they're not there anymore your brain still looks
01:17:46
for them and figuring out ways to sort of calm down your emotional brain can be so
01:17:55
help so helpful what part of the brain is that is that the amydala no it's more the
01:18:03
insular cortex and the thalamus and that's what we found with
01:18:09
depression I published a study with Scientists from USC and Los Angeles
01:18:16
Children's Hospital on depression and what we found those were the structures
01:18:22
that were dramatically overactive compared to people who were not depressed so in grief the prefrontal
01:18:30
cortex assuming because that's the more rational part of the brain that's probably going to be quieter right what
01:18:38
do I and so it's the pre fernal cortex you bring in to the loss that often
01:18:45
determines how you deal with it okay and so your emotional brain fires up if
01:18:55
you're drinking and taking the prefrontal cortex offline it can't
01:19:00
manage it so one thing people don't understand is the fibers from the preal
01:19:07
cortex to the rest of the brain are inhibitory which means they calm things
01:19:14
down so if this isn't working right the emotional part can sort of override it
01:19:22
and it becomes problematic IC um and so protecting this is so
01:19:32
important to managing so much of your life I mean it's really the human most
01:19:37
human thoughtful part of us and what we found within Hope was the
01:19:46
insular cortex was low it's really interesting to us and hope is
01:19:56
tomorrow can be better and I have a part in it when you're hopeless you don't
01:20:03
believe you have agency to make tomorrow
01:20:09
better and so often there are hope training courses that can be good and I
01:20:18
with all of my patients I do this exercise called the onepage miracle I referred to earlier it's like write down
01:20:24
what do you want relationships work money physical emotional spiritual
01:20:32
health all these things write it down and so talked earlier about we're recording this in January I have all my
01:20:39
patients do it when I first see them and then every January for sure and then you
01:20:45
just ask yourself does my behavior get me what I
01:20:50
want but but it starts with or what do you want you have to write it down like
01:20:58
with my wife I'm very clear I want a kind caring loving
01:21:06
supportive passionate relationship always want that don't
01:21:12
always feel like that got these rude thoughts that show up or conflicting
01:21:19
ideas that'll just show up in my head and I'm like oh no
01:21:25
don't say that no don't do that because it doesn't fit and it's been the best relationship
01:21:33
of my life because both of us have the same goals and we're pretty good at
01:21:40
matching our Behavior to the goal and as a CEO right what do you do
01:21:46
with companies you have a business plan and then you have regular meetings
01:21:53
and key perform indicators to like go how are we doing and if we're not doing
01:21:59
great we change but it always starts with plan and most individuals never
01:22:06
have a plan so they're kind of just being dragged around by whatever I mean
01:22:12
and now in social media it's very dangerous because you might want what the Kardashians have and it's like wait
01:22:20
a minute relationships work money physical
01:22:26
emotional spiritual health and then if I had tattoos I don't yet my wife got one that freaked me
01:22:34
out it's my daughter's birthday but the tattoo would be does it
01:22:42
fit know what you want and then ask yourself every day my behavior get me
01:22:49
what I want and some people go well isn't that selfish it's like absolutely not cuz if
01:22:56
I'm good I'm good for everyone around me your goal could be to be a great father
01:23:04
it absolutely should be a great father it's to be a loving husband kind caring
01:23:09
loving supported passionate it's oh by the way when people do our program their erections
01:23:17
are better just saying because blood flow is better when brain health is better CU
01:23:23
your brain uses 20% of the blood flow in your body and so if you're working to
01:23:30
have a healthy brain everything works better J say why
01:23:35
did that come to mind when I asked about your goals well because I went passionate and I'm like
01:23:41
okay you have to be clear um and or even think about work you know
01:23:49
what's the goal with work it's to do meaningful work it's to to make a
01:23:55
difference I am you're a father I'm not a father yet but I hope to be um I've
01:24:01
got three little nieces my brothers had three three two little nieces and one nephew my brother's a year older than me
01:24:07
and he's had three kids already so I've got some catching up to do but as I'm progressing towards this season of life one of the things I think about having
01:24:13
met you is how to raise healthy brains like what parenting style is going to
01:24:19
make sure that my kids have very healthy brains there's so much conversation about parenting stuff
01:24:25
um some people say just let them do whatever they want to do some people say be an authoritarian and put rules in
01:24:30
place I'm wondering from the perspective of someone who scanned 260,000 brains
01:24:35
how do you raise a perfect brain well one you get rid of the idea that you're
01:24:41
going to raise a perfect brain okay because there's a little OCD in there
01:24:50
um the first thing you do is you have goals for yourself what kind of parent
01:24:56
do you want to be and what kind of child do you want to raise and for me I want to be
01:25:05
present kind and effective and for my kids I want them to
01:25:12
be mentally strong and resilient and I want
01:25:17
them to feel good about themselves and then you bond with them you want to be a
01:25:23
good dad bonding requires two things time actual physical
01:25:30
time and listening so time have an exercise I
01:25:35
love so much called special time 20 minutes a day do something with your
01:25:41
child that your child wants to do and during that time no commands no
01:25:46
questions no directions just time to bond the most important thing to
01:25:54
Children is time with their parents and people are
01:25:59
busy doesn't have to be a lot but if you do that 20 minutes a
01:26:05
day it's money in the relational
01:26:10
bank so my first literary agent I think he was 42 when he had his
01:26:16
first child and he's like my daughter she's to Laura never
01:26:22
wants to be with me I come home she completely ignores me she just wants her mother she wants nothing to do with me
01:26:30
that's because she's a girl right like absolutely not Carl you're ignoring her
01:26:35
what do you mean I'm ignoring her I said you're ignoring her do this and I told him about special time and he's like
01:26:42
that won't work I'm like negativity bias I'm like oh great you represent an
01:26:50
idiot you represent me and you're telling me it won't work I said do this
01:26:56
it works and I'm going to call you in three weeks so I wrote them in my appointment book we had appointment
01:27:01
books then and three weeks later I called him Carl it's Daniel Daniel she
01:27:08
won't leave me alone all she wants to do is be with me as soon as I get home she grabs my leg and wants her time I'm like
01:27:17
I told you it works it works time actual physical time
01:27:23
and then shut up listen this is so important
01:27:30
parents are awful at listening you've heard of active listening yeah so active
01:27:36
listen it's like so simple child says something before you give your two
01:27:42
cents just repeat it back and sort of listen to the feelings behind the
01:27:49
words I want to have blue hair I know what my dad would have said
01:27:55
want I have blue hair no way in hell as long as you live in my house you can have a blue hair but what does that do
01:28:01
it just shuts down the conversation or starts a fight like oh you want to have
01:28:07
blue hair and then just be quiet and then the child might say
01:28:12
everyone's doing that my dad would say I don't care what anyone else is doing as long as you live
01:28:19
in this house you're not going to have blue hair if they're going to jump off a cliff or you're going to go with them
01:28:24
not helpful sounds like you want to be like the other kids and then he might say sometimes I
01:28:31
feel like I don't fit in which is really the conversation you want to
01:28:38
have and my mother would have said of course you fit in you're a good boy you're a good-look boy said and that's
01:28:45
not helpful either it's just helpful to listen if you have time and you have listening you
01:28:52
Bond and then the kids tell to pick your values because they're
01:28:58
bonded and then when they make a mistake don't rescue them today parents do way too much for
01:29:06
their children and they steal their self-esteem I often say if you do too
01:29:13
much for your kids you build your self-esteem by stealing
01:29:20
theirs and you're going to be tempted
01:29:27
because you're going to have such love for them you don't want them to
01:29:33
hurt and that's a mistake because character is built through
01:29:41
struggle character and self-esteem are built by feeling
01:29:48
competent you can solve problems so when a child says um
01:29:56
bored rather than well we could do this or we could do that or we could do
01:30:02
this go I wonder what you're going to do about in terms of their diet and
01:30:10
lifestyle am I right in thinking it's it's pretty obvious here
01:30:16
sugar chemicals toxins these kinds of things are really really bad for the
01:30:22
child's bre is there anything non-obvious that we do to our children's brains well
01:30:27
I think the most important thing is you model OKAY the message so what you do
01:30:33
and there's a reason that all of the
01:30:38
sugar poison cereals are on the bottom two
01:30:44
aisles or the bottom two rows on because that's where children can see them and
01:30:50
they're like Mommy I want this and I always want you to remember this Rule
01:30:57
and I want you to consider sharing it with your children if you have a tantrum to get
01:31:03
your way the answer is no it's always going to be no go for
01:31:10
it I'm dead serious we teach
01:31:17
people how to treat us by what we tolerate we train children to be bad by
01:31:24
what we pay attention to so I think that's always been a very
01:31:30
effective rule for me if you have a fit
01:31:35
the answer is no it's always going to be no and I'm not going to be phased if you
01:31:40
do but what if they do it in a store it's like you want long-term pain
01:31:45
or short-term pain short-term pain is not given into the Tantrum and there' probably be a
01:31:52
consequence when you come home for acting like that um so are you saying to
01:31:57
ignore the tension it's like I'm not giving in like have fun with
01:32:04
it I am not giving in we're at a friend's house and you have a fit well
01:32:12
one there's going to be a consequence uh when you come home I
01:32:17
don't know what it is but I'm going to think about it it's such a great line that in my book raising mentally strong
01:32:23
kids kids we we have lots of great lines for parents and it's I don't know what
01:32:30
the consequence is but I'm going to think about it just to increase their
01:32:36
anxiety about it uh because we want them
01:32:42
thinking about their behavior and like in life their consequences to bad
01:32:49
behavior we want them to think about what that might be might that stray into neglect when they
01:32:56
get they express their emotions though for example if my kid is in a supermarket and screaming and crying
01:33:02
Daddy give me this and I just always ignore them are they going to be raised
01:33:07
to be like neglected children or something well if you do it in the context of special time an active
01:33:15
listening and I think rules are important um like tell the truth put
01:33:22
away things that you take out we treat each other with respect um do what I ask
01:33:27
the first time it's one of my favorite rules um it prevents the kids from like going
01:33:34
on and on about being oppositional
01:33:41
um there's no way they're going to feel like you're not listening and you're ignoring
01:33:47
them but if they're acting inappropriately you you want
01:33:54
one not give into it and to have a significant conversation and consequence
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if you're in a supermarket you can get it at tesos or Holland and Barrett or in the Netherlands at Albert Hein and those
01:35:03
of you in the US you can get it on Amazon one of the big themes that I wanted to ask you about it's the last
01:35:08
thing I really wanted to to focus on today is there's been such a huge rise in the conversation around neurod
01:35:13
Divergence which we talked about in part last time you looked at my brain you looked at my brain and we did some tests and such and you spoke to some of my
01:35:20
colleagues and people that know me I think they did some surveys about me as well and you concluded that I had ADHD
01:35:26
so many people are being diagnosed with with ADHD it seems when we look at some of the numbers around the increase in
01:35:32
diagnosis it's quite it's quite alarming and I wonder why that is are people
01:35:39
being born with more ADHD or is it an increase in the diagnosis um is there a pop culture
01:35:45
element to it where it's become quite popular to say that you have ADHD if you like forget your keys or something what
01:35:51
is it in your view so ADHD is real there's a significant genetic component
01:35:59
to it but we're also living in a society that promotes its expression
01:36:06
so the more sugary cereals with red dye number
01:36:12
40 increases hyperactivity the more gadgets you give
01:36:18
them so they can't pay attention um the less they're outside in
01:36:24
the sun the more they're playing video games all of those things increase the
01:36:33
expression of ADHD um again something I know more about
01:36:41
than I want to um I I have a book called healing add and I write about my own
01:36:47
personal experience being married to someone who has ADHD and having several
01:36:52
of my kids who have it um that it's real and left
01:37:00
untreated they're all sorts of consequences so people always ask if you think of medicine like Rin or adderal
01:37:07
people go what are the side effects and it has side effects sometimes it can increase tick sometimes it'll cause
01:37:15
sleep problems sometimes you'll lose some weight or decrease your appetite um
01:37:20
but they don't ask me the other question and I always want to make sure they do is what are the side
01:37:27
effects of not treating
01:37:33
ADHD and they are things like School failure incarceration bankruptcy divorce
01:37:41
it's serious now for someone like you who's really driven and very
01:37:52
bright for you the consequences and this is going to sound
01:37:58
crazy but it's under achievement or it takes
01:38:04
more for you to be at your best than if you had it
01:38:13
treated but I have this an example of a 14-year-old who was literally failing in
01:38:22
school and conflict driven with everyone around
01:38:29
him so people didn't really want to be near him and I diagnosed
01:38:36
him started with natural things and they help but not enough put him on conserta
01:38:42
a form of methylphenidate or Rin and he went from
01:38:49
failing to all A's and B's and he got into the
01:38:54
high school he wanted to get into which was very competitive and he's easy to be
01:39:01
around that's a win because it's going to change the trajectory of his life and I like that I
01:39:11
remember you talking last time about your daughter we have the clip don't we of Dr talking about his daughter we can
01:39:17
just insert it here I have a daughter and the truth is and this is going to
01:39:22
sound awful I never thought she was very smart and and I'm ashamed of myself for
01:39:29
thinking that and um she's staying up every night till 1 or 2 o'clock in the
01:39:36
morning to get her homework done and one night she came just crying to me and she
01:39:43
said dad I don't think I can ever be as smart as my friends and it just broke my heart
01:39:51
and I scanned her the next day and I'd
01:39:56
actually scanned her originally but I had no experience in scans this was like
01:40:02
1991 I'm like child psychiatrist and an expert in
01:40:08
add and I didn't see it in my own child
01:40:14
and the next day I put her on Tiny dose of Ridin scanned her again and her brain
01:40:21
normalized normalized a week later I had dinner with her and I'm like do you notice any
01:40:28
difference and she said oh my God she said a class seemed like it always took
01:40:36
eight hours to just do that one class and I was always lost and I'm very religious I was praying to God that the
01:40:43
teacher wouldn't call on me because I was lost she said now that same class goes by in about 20 minutes and my hands
01:40:53
up because I track what's going on and that child who had always gotten B's and C's
01:41:01
but with great effort her first report card was straight A's the next 10 years
01:41:10
straight A she actually got into the University of Ed University of edinburgh's veterinarian school one of
01:41:16
the best vet schools in the world where they clone Dolly the sheep and
01:41:24
if I wouldn't have figured that out she would have been condemned to a lifetime
01:41:30
of mediocrity hating herself working so
01:41:36
hard to get a mediocre result optimizing your brain and
01:41:45
medicine's never the first thing I think about but it's one of the things I think about because I just want to use all the
01:41:52
tools of my tool tool box to optimize your brain because if I optimize your brain I optimize your life it was really
01:41:58
powerful and something that I then spoke to lots of my friends about and such um
01:42:03
one of the things I've always struggled with with ADHD in terms of my understanding is some people that I know
01:42:09
H that have ADHD they just they're so remarkably different to me and they're so
01:42:15
remarkably different from each other so I think about one of my friends that has it very very different in terms of productivity symptomology versus someone
01:42:22
like me who for example in my case I'm very focused I think I can be very focused
01:42:30
not always but when I'm into something I can I can focus on it for a long period of time in fact people don't know this
01:42:36
but it's worth me saying um my last book I went to Barley for I think it was
01:42:41
either 11 or 14 days and I came out of the Jungle with the book so I went into the jungle with um basically 33
01:42:52
sentences individual sentences I knew what the chapter titles were they came out of the Jungle and handed my
01:42:57
publisher penguin the manuscript after that that period in The Jungle which basically meant that for those 11 or 14
01:43:03
days I can't remember the exact number I sat there for about 10 hours a day and did I was obviously getting distracted
01:43:08
once in a while but I I wrote the whole book in uh about 14 about 14 days decent book I'm so jealous um but I but for me
01:43:17
it's an example of the you when I think of ADHD I think of like attention deficit and again I don't know much
01:43:24
about ADHD so I'm very naive I represent most of the population probably in that regard but I don't think I have an
01:43:29
attention deficit necessarily well for things that are new
01:43:36
novel highly interesting stimulating or frightening yeah people with ADD can pay
01:43:43
attention just fine that's why a lot of people who have it though I don't have it like if I love my history teacher I'm
01:43:52
like focused but then when I go to
01:43:57
Geometry I can't do it at all yeah that's the story of me in school
01:44:03
it's it should be it's like love is a drug if you love something well you can
01:44:11
do it but the problem is most of life you
01:44:17
don't love and so you end up with this really sort of AR
01:44:23
IC attention disorder um and they tend to gravitate
01:44:32
toward things you know I I see hear this story a lot
01:44:37
unfortunately is they they experiment in college and they take a little bit of
01:44:42
methamphetamine and it helps them and they're more focused
01:44:48
and but then they don't know how to manage it and they end up taking more and more and they end up getting
01:44:55
addicted and it steals their soul
01:45:00
love can you see love on the brain Helen fiser who's a neuroscientist
01:45:09
in New Jersey has actually studied love and new love shows up is increased
01:45:18
activity in the dopamine centers of the brain and it makes you just a bit
01:45:27
obsessive I think of new love as dopamine but
01:45:33
lasting love more like
01:45:40
opiates so new love when you break up is sort of like getting off
01:45:46
cocaine hard but not that bad lasting love
01:45:53
if it goes away and we talked about grief earlier it's like it's ripping your skin
01:45:59
off it's really hard sort of like getting off of
01:46:05
heroin do people come to you that are heartbroken a lot what do they say I
01:46:11
can't stop think that their brain gets into um anxiety sadness
01:46:21
and that that person just lives in every fun place in their brain and they can't
01:46:28
get over it and it can be quite messy for them what is the change that you
01:46:34
would like to see in the world well I'm actually working on it
01:46:40
um I want everybody to just ask this one
01:46:50
question and we mentioned my work with BJ fog on how people change and he um
01:46:59
talks about tiny habits what's the smallest thing I can do that will make the
01:47:05
biggest difference and if
01:47:13
I could impact the world it would be through one question whatever I'm doing
01:47:19
right now is it good for my brain or bad for it I want to teach people to love their
01:47:27
brains and to just make better decisions for the health of their brain because
01:47:34
then everything follows that so good for my brain or bad for it I'm 15 I have a
01:47:42
developing brain my brain is milting itself which means it's wrapping all my
01:47:51
nerves all my brain cells with a white fatty substance called myin and my
01:47:56
frontal Oaks are not done until I'm 25 oh I'm going to love my brain so I'm
01:48:02
not pouring crap in my body with what I eat or what I drink because it's bad for
01:48:10
my brain when I'm 60 and I'm
01:48:17
stressed because my football team's not winning I'm not going for Extra beer
01:48:23
because I'd love my brain and I'm going to get to a healthy weight
01:48:29
because I love my brain that's the change that's why I think God put me on
01:48:35
the earth I wanted to do something um was
01:48:40
just thinking about it as you were speaking then about the one simple thing that I can do to help my brain and to love my
01:48:49
brain when you think about behaviors and habits that are popular and trendy at the moment are there any that stand out
01:48:56
to you as being particularly good for the brain or particularly bad for the brain CU I had a couple come to mind
01:49:03
that I wanted to throw at you I mean one of them that's exploding in the UK at the moment is paddle which is kind of I
01:49:10
think you call it pickle ball here good for my brain bad for my brain good for your brain really good do you know what
01:49:17
brain you when you scanned my brain you told me that you said for the next six months Steve I need you to take some Omega-3 do this do this do this and I'd
01:49:24
like you to play more racket Sports I built a paddle Court in my garden so I have a paddle Court in my garden um in
01:49:30
Cape Town and I love playing it now and when I play it all the time I said Dr aan said it's good for my brain um but
01:49:38
it's exploding it's exploding across Europe really but really across much of the world now p and here in the US too
01:49:44
oh really and it's so good for your brain
01:49:49
because it's working your sh Bellum and I told you that because yours was
01:49:56
sleepy and is you activate this and you do that with coordination exercises it
01:50:02
then activates your frontal upes does that mean that people that are uncoordinated have a cerebellum issue
01:50:08
yes oh really okay and the more you do it the better coordination you
01:50:16
develop and that's why coordination exercises for kids so we talked about kids is is you want to do that with them
01:50:26
early play sports but not Sports where they're going to get a head injury right
01:50:31
I mean we have to be smarter than we are um but when I was young my mother who's
01:50:40
now 93 was the pingpong champion in the
01:50:46
neighborhood and she was really good and she never let us beat her until we could
01:50:52
and but she was always encouraging I've got um I was looking
01:50:59
then as you were speaking about different trends at the moment that are either good or bad for the brain and one
01:51:04
big Trend at the moment is neuroplasticity training lots of people are doing games and using other things
01:51:10
to like there's apps you can get that are neuroplasticity training apps does any of that stuff work some of it some
01:51:17
of it works and if you're so for example if you're doing memorization games do
01:51:24
them while you're on the bike now not in the street but if you're
01:51:29
on a stationary bike and you're doing those games it's
01:51:36
been found that exercise increases blood flow to the
01:51:43
hippocampus meaning you're more likely to remember it and you're strengthening
01:51:48
your brain in the process so exercise with new learning stunning so if I want to learn
01:51:57
something I should do it while walking or moving in motion right so if you're listening to a
01:52:04
language app for example do it while you're walking mindfulness and meditation good or bad for the brain
01:52:10
great I published three studies on a calini yoga form of meditation called
01:52:16
Kon Crea it's a 12 minute meditation I always say it's the perfect add
01:52:21
meditation because it's only 12 minutes and for 12 minutes you do this
01:52:30
sa it's two minutes out loud two minutes Whispering four minutes silently to
01:52:36
yourself two minutes Whispering two minutes out loud you're done sat ma
01:52:42
birth Life Death reborn birth Life Death reborn but the one we studied is sat ta
01:52:50
na ma and so if they look it up kytin
01:52:55
Crea um activates your cerebellum activates your frontal loes calms down
01:53:03
your emotional brain people who did that for 12 minutes for eight weeks their
01:53:11
resting frontal lobe function was Stronger so simple what the hell is
01:53:19
going on there I think it's the focused attention plus you're doing a coordination
01:53:31
meditation cold therapy cold exposure therapy ice bath those kinds of things good or bad for the
01:53:37
brain um I think you have to be careful with it because it can trigger atrial
01:53:46
fibrillation um I think taking a cold shower is probably good for your brain because it's going to shortterm increase
01:53:53
dopamine and sort of give you a jolt loving your job absolutely great for your brain
01:54:02
if you're learning new things people who are in a job that does not require new
01:54:09
learning have a higher incidence of Alzheimer's disease so if you're stagnant in your work you have a higher
01:54:15
risk of alheim and like if I just read brain scans all day well I know how to
01:54:21
do it I'm not learning anything new so I do
01:54:27
that but I also am writing about something I don't know
01:54:33
about um or I'm learning something new what if you're working with I'm
01:54:39
sorry I love the job but I'm working with bad for your brain chronic
01:54:44
stress increases cortisol and I think everybody should sort of know their Baseline cortisol level
01:54:53
and cortisol shrinks the hippocampus and puts fat on your belly
01:54:59
so that's two very bad things for your brain breath work that's a big Trend excellent excellent you want to break a
01:55:06
panic attack the 15 second breath 4 seconds in
01:55:13
hold it for a second and a half 8 seconds out hold it for a second and a
01:55:19
half you just do that four or five times your whole nervous system will calm down
01:55:27
and the research shows take twice as long to breathe out as you breathe in
01:55:34
that's why 4 seconds in 8 seconds out yeah shift your nervous system doesn't it yes it increases something called
01:55:41
vagal tone okay some bad things then social media usage chronic social media usage good for the brain bad for the
01:55:48
brain because you're constantly comparing yourself to people who aren't real
01:55:53
what about workaholism and hustle culture
01:55:58
so I love my work am I addicted to it I don't know
01:56:05
but I love it when they say people are Workaholics
01:56:12
and it's bad for the brain it's their working with
01:56:19
or doing something they don't want like or doing it for the money but
01:56:26
without other purpose microplastics that's a big Tri awful for the brain one of the major
01:56:33
causes of hormone disruption and
01:56:38
cancer and other environment thank you for not giving me a plastic water bottle yeah it's okay imagine if imagine if we
01:56:45
did that when we spend long a lot of time these days talking about the microplastics and other environmental toxins that I think people are becoming
01:56:51
more aware of now which is good noise pollution bad for the brain and if if it
01:56:58
hurts your hearing hearing loss is actually one of the risk factors for
01:57:05
Alzheimer's why is that I did I did a hear because you're not getting input right and if you're not getting
01:57:11
appropriate input your brain starts to
01:57:17
atropy and if you don't hear what other people are saying and you have a lot of
01:57:24
ants you have a high negativity bias is you can actually begin to get a bit
01:57:29
paranoid and fill in the empty spaces with negativity I just bought some new Apple
01:57:36
airpods and when I connected them to my phone it said you want to do a hearing test so I did the hearing test and then
01:57:42
I asked my girlfriend I said you should do this hearing test as well because I needed something to compare it to and I was a little bit shocked um it said I
01:57:49
hadn't lost any hearing yet but my hearing was significantly not as good as hers and I remember
01:57:55
thinking gosh you know this is but I didn't have any idea that it was linked to Alzheimers at all so now I've turned
01:58:02
down the volume for the first time in my life because I think your hearing declines regardless really of what you
01:58:07
do with age anyway um but as you said earlier like starting from a better Baseline when you're talking about the
01:58:13
brain reserves is really the game I think with aging my last point is a my
01:58:20
last question is a bit of a seems to be uncorrelated but the world is heading towards a world that's driven
01:58:27
by artificial intelligence it's like all the all the rage at the moment if you log on the internet people talking about
01:58:33
they're going to lose their jobs all of these new tools that allow us to optimize our lives in a variety of different ways when you think about the
01:58:39
world of AI that we're heading into there's so many ways that I imagine it's going to make your job easier as someone
01:58:45
who's doing scans of brains and so on but do you think artificial intelligence is going to be good or bad
01:58:51
for our brain I think in the short run it's going to
01:58:56
be bad because your brain is going to do less
01:59:03
and that's bad for the brain I I think it's fascinating to watch what's going
01:59:09
to happen and ultimately in the words of my friend Byron Katie argue with reality
01:59:17
welcome to hell we need to figure out how to use said to enhance Our Lives
01:59:24
rather than to steal brain development and so much of Technology
01:59:30
you haven't talked about this has stolen brain development um when video games came
01:59:38
into my house was actually 1987 I remember my son was
01:59:44
11 he was a straight A student and then he
01:59:49
wasn't and then we started fighting about it's like you can play for a half
01:59:55
an hour and then like I took it out of the house because I saw it as an agent
02:00:02
of thrilling his brain to death deadening the dopamine
02:00:09
structures um and then I've watched this whole group of kids grow up with very
02:00:14
cool video games that are I think damaging their
02:00:20
brain so unleash technology without any
02:00:26
Neuroscience study on the impact of brain development it's a bad idea our
02:00:33
brains getting bigger or smaller do does anybody know I don't know wondering if tech
02:00:39
interesting question yeah because if ask GPT oh gosh yeah is it funny well it's
02:00:44
it's things for you this is the thing although one caution with chat GPT it sucks if you ask it for medical
02:00:52
advice it often will make mistakes and so there are other sites I like better
02:01:00
that I trust more social connections obviously another point on that because there's
02:01:07
now saw articles where men are getting into relationships with an AI character
02:01:13
of a woman they like and you know social connection is so good for the brain so I wonder if artificial social connection
02:01:20
is going to is probably not great for for the brain because your brain doesn't have to
02:01:25
work as hard with an artificial especially one you created yeah right
02:01:31
your brain is when when you're with like another real person your brain has to do
02:01:38
a lot more calculations to make that work than with someone you can just
02:01:45
trash anymore well you'd program it for dopamine wouldn't you if you're making a friend or partner yourself
02:01:52
what's the most important thing we haven't talked about that we should have talked about Dr I think purpose
02:02:00
and um what is purpose matter connection to a higher power well I always think
02:02:07
when I assess patients of them in four big circles it's like what's the biology
02:02:13
we talked a lot about the brain what's the psychology so we talked about
02:02:18
development a little bit and Trauma and ants what's the Social Circle like
02:02:25
what's going on in your life now and who you're connected with and we talked about love but we didn't really talk about the
02:02:31
spiritual Circle which is so what's the point why am I here am I here because of
02:02:41
random chance because of an explosion that happened billions of years ago or
02:02:48
do I believe in Creative Design
02:02:53
where I'm really created for a purpose
02:02:58
that is to make the world a better place and I find people who live
02:03:04
without purpose have a higher incidence of depression have a higher incidence of
02:03:11
loneliness have a higher incidence of
02:03:16
dementia and so I encourage all of my P patience to
02:03:24
seek and live with purpose it's one of the reasons the onepage miracle is so important to me what do I want
02:03:31
relationships work money physical emotional spiritual health which is
02:03:38
really the why question and a lot of my colleagues
02:03:45
go well how can you believe in God if you're a scientist and I'm like
02:03:52
do you know anything about physics that the second law of physics is entropy
02:03:58
things go from order to disorder I'm like I think there's an
02:04:06
order to this and that I'm here talking to
02:04:11
you and there's a purpose behind it that's greater than
02:04:17
me studies suggest that religious belief can be associated with differences in brain structure and
02:04:23
function while there is no single religious brain certain patterns have been observed in Neuroscience research
02:04:29
the prefrontal cortex involved in decision- making mortality and self-regulation tends to be more active in religious
02:04:36
individuals and their right temporal lobe tends to be bigger there's another study with that
02:04:43
and if if there is a God and we communicate with God there's
02:04:50
got to be a neurosci mechanism for that and Michael perser
02:04:56
is's a researcher out of the University of Laurentian University in Canada he
02:05:02
would put helmets on people and give them low volt electrical
02:05:07
activity and whenever he would stimulate the right temporal loow people would get
02:05:13
a sensed presence they would actually feel the presence of God in the
02:05:19
room I just think that's so interesting and does that mean that the brain makes
02:05:27
up God or that the brain has Pathways to
02:05:33
experience God has you I think it's an interesting
02:05:39
question I actually did a study on prayer uh we have a foundation called the change your brain foundation and we
02:05:46
rais money for research Education Service and um I did a prayer study of
02:05:53
conversational prayer I pray for you and speaking in tongues which is
02:06:01
channeling the holy spirit in Christian tradition and it was so interesting and
02:06:07
there's actually been other studies uh Andrew Newberg uh who studied channelers
02:06:16
in Brazil they would channel the dead and the idea is if you're going to channel
02:06:22
an outside Spirit you have to turn down the noise in your brain so that you can
02:06:29
sort of fear the other frequencies and that was our hypothesis and 60% of our
02:06:35
subjects dropped their brain activity when they
02:06:40
were speaking in tongues which sounds so interesting one completely activated the
02:06:47
dopamine centers so I'm looking at him like I bet you do this
02:06:52
L prayer prayer can change the brain I
02:06:57
mean we talked about meditation changing the brain and Dr Newberg again studied
02:07:03
Tibetan Monks while they meditated and Franciscan nuns while they prayed and
02:07:10
they found very similar changes strengthens the prefrontal
02:07:16
cortex reduces Stress and Anxiety increases dopamine changes brain connectivity thickens the cortex promotes
02:07:22
neuroplasticity if you pray now what if you're not religious cuz I I don't think I believe in any particular
02:07:30
God but I would like some of these benefits so I guess I could achieve them by meditation and those kinds of things I
02:07:36
could still pray I've got no issue with praying I don't know what would be praying and you could be curious yeah
02:07:42
I've got no issue with praying I just don't know what i' be praying to praying to the universe I guess spirituality is
02:07:47
another big Trend I wonder if that's good for the brain if any I guess depends yeah on is it a healthy
02:07:54
tradition or is it an unhealthy tradition and I've I've seen
02:08:02
both I've seen some religions uh being very rigid and
02:08:10
shaming and I've seen others you know be more open and seeking
02:08:19
you've scanned 260 thousand brains roughly how has that if
02:08:25
at all changed your belief in a
02:08:30
god um you know I believed in God since I was since I can
02:08:37
remember and there's not been one thing in my life that's caused me to not
02:08:44
believe so I I always thought going back to the second law
02:08:52
physics that if it's random chance it just doesn't make sense that
02:09:00
randomly we would get a brain cell that has DNA and a
02:09:07
mitochondria it's like it's it's statistically
02:09:13
impossible and I'm just like we are so beautifully made I just don't get the whole thing
02:09:22
so one thing we haven't talked about is the LA fires and the impact of
02:09:30
disaster on the brain and I grew up in Los Angeles
02:09:37
and I'm just horrified by what
02:09:44
happened um and we talked that my Foundation is
02:09:50
actually going to give away a hundred evaluations for
02:09:55
firefighters and I almost feel bad I I did the big NFL study and it was really
02:10:01
cool and it was a lot of fun for me but NFL players aren't Heroes they're
02:10:07
entertainers firefighters are heroes First Responders are heroes and what
02:10:13
I've seen with firefighters this makes me so
02:10:18
sad because they have damaged brains often because of the toxins that
02:10:26
they're exposed to the emotional trauma that goes with
02:10:31
that job and the head trauma that also goes with this with things falling on them
02:10:41
and they have a higher suicide rate than the general population significantly
02:10:48
higher I think it's like 25% higher and shouldn't we be teaching them about
02:10:57
brain health and go hey look this is a brain
02:11:03
damaging job but we need you to do it so all the way
02:11:10
along let's see and repair your brain
02:11:15
let's make sure your reserve is something special rather than we had a
02:11:21
really bad day at work let's go get drunk
02:11:26
together let's Elevate brain health to the
02:11:34
people who say
02:11:41
us why is that emotion so raw for you but just thinking of what happened one
02:11:49
of my close friends lost his hope and then he went to work and did a
02:11:55
consult for me I'm just blown away by him but you know we're so close to the
02:12:04
sadness of what happened and I have a clinic that we had
02:12:10
to evacuate and I have doctors that they had to evacuate the
02:12:16
group trauma is so high
02:12:22
and yet the people who care for us were not doing a good job of caring
02:12:29
for them and I think I have parted the
02:12:37
answer and and I just wish I could do more incredibly kind of you to offer to
02:12:44
scan 105 fighter brains yeah and hopefully as our foundation you know can
02:12:51
raise money we can do thousands of them how does one go about supporting your
02:12:57
foundation where where do we go to support it so changey your brain. org
02:13:03
changey yourb brain. org yeah we have a closing tradition as you know where the last guest leaves a question for the
02:13:09
next and the question left for you is what advice would you give a
02:13:15
couple who want to start a family I love that question so much
02:13:23
uh is if you want to start a family you have to get your bodies ready
02:13:32
so she was born with all the eggs she'll ever have and you want to give them time like
02:13:42
a year or more of good nutrition and the child no no the mom
02:13:50
okay so my so my partner I'm someone that wants to start a family so you want to
02:13:56
go what I'm eating what I'm thinking the stress I'm under is going
02:14:03
to impact the Next Generation what are the right brain and
02:14:10
body habits that we both can do to get our bodies in the best shape
02:14:22
is this good for my brain and body or is it bad for it and really focus on good
02:14:29
you know a lot of people who are drinking they actually stop drinking when they find out they're pregnant
02:14:35
remember the brain develops a day 21 you may not even know you're pregnant at day
02:14:41
21 just let that roll around your head a little bit so I love this question is oh
02:14:47
I can start to get my brain and my ovaries and my sperm
02:14:53
ready to connect to be healthy so I think that's the
02:14:59
advice I would give them Dr Daniel lman thank you so much
02:15:05
once again for your time and thank you for the wisdom and value you've given to my audience over the years like as I was
02:15:10
saying before we started filming I get stopped all the time everywhere I go people telling me about you I told you I stopped yesterday well I was having a
02:15:17
spa treatment I won't say what it is cuz people will roast me but I was having a first first first of of its kind for me
02:15:23
Spar treatment and the lady turned to me 20 minutes in and was like by the way thank you so much for having Dan Dr Daniel Aon on because he helped me
02:15:30
understand my ADHD etc etc so and I see that absolute love and admiration for you in the comment section every time
02:15:36
where people recount stories from decades ago where their kid came to see
02:15:42
you and how you've transformed their life I actually think the top comment on our last episode was someone who I think
02:15:47
they they came to see you 15 years ago and they said that you changed their son's life and that is just over and
02:15:53
over and over and over again in the comments so the life you've lived is such an important one and it's added so much value and um hope and so many it's
02:16:02
turned on the lights for so many people in so many ways so on behalf of all those people and behalf of the tens of millions of people who've tuned into our
02:16:08
conversations thank you so much I really appreciate it well Stephen thank you the last time I was on we got calls from all
02:16:15
over the world I mean obviously you're doing amazing purposeful
02:16:21
work thank you isn't this cool every single conversation I have here on the
02:16:27
Dio at the very end of it you'll know I asked the guest to leave a question in
02:16:32
the Diary of a CEO and what we've done is we've turned every single question written in the Diary of a CEO into these
02:16:40
conversation cards that you can play at home so you've got every guest we've
02:16:45
ever had their question and on the back of it if you scan that QR code you get
02:16:51
to watch the person who answered that question we're finally revealing all of
02:16:57
the questions and the people that answered the question the brand new
02:17:02
version two updated conversation cards are out right now at the conversation
02:17:07
cards.com they' sold out twice instantaneously so if you are interested in getting hold of some limited edition
02:17:13
conversation cards I really really recommend acting quickly this has always blown my mind a little bit 53% of you
02:17:20
that listen to the show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show so could I ask you for a favor before we
02:17:25
start if you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the Subscribe
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02:17:36
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02:17:43
to do what we do thank you so much [Music]
02:17:51
a [Music]
